The project brought together researchers from 9 EU-Countries and resulted in a number of actions, in particular the following: (a) There is an urgent need of defining the concept of flexible working hours, since it has been used in many different and even counterintuitive ways; the most obvious distinction is where the influence over the working hours lies, that is between the "company-based flexibility" and the "individual-oriented flexibility"; (b) The review of the Legislation in force in the 15 European countries shows that the regulation of working times is quite extensive and covers (Council Directive 93/104/EC) almost all the various arrangements of working hours (i.e., part-time, overtime, shift, and night work), but fails to provide for flexibility; (c) According to the data of the Third EU Survey on Working Conditions, longer and "irregular" working hours are in general linked to lower levels of health and well-being; moreover, low (individual) flexibility and high variability of working hours (i.e., company-based flexibility) were consistently associated with poor health and well-being, while low variability combined with high autonomy showed positive effects; (d) Six substudies from different countries demonstrated that flexible working hours vary according to country, economic sector, social status, and gender; overtime is the most frequent form of company-based flexibility but has negative effects on stress, sleep, and social and mental health; individual flexibility alleviates the negative effects of the company-based flexibility on subjective health, safety, and social well-being; (e) The literature review was able to list more than 1,000 references, but it was striking that most of these documents were mainly argumentative with very little empirical data. Thus, one may conclude that there is a large-scale intervention ongoing in our society with almost completely unknown and uncontrolled effects. Consequently, there is a strong need for systematic research and well-controlled actions in order to examine in detail what flexible working hours are considered, what and where are their positive effects, in particular, as concerns autonomy, and what regulation seem most reasonable.

The article provides a framework and analytical tool for discussing the political and organizational context of design and participation and for identifying some of its central characteristics. Three arenas for participation are distinguished: designing work and systems; designing organizational frameworks for action; and designing the industrial relations context. Drawing upon material from 2 case studies in Germany and Austria, we focus on the evolving network of actors and intermediaries who in various ways contribute to work and systems design, the influence of the political culture and the legal framework on how legitimate agenda are created, and the relations between systems design and other agendas (e.g., organizational development and collective bargaining).We propose to use actor-network theory not just as a sociological exercise but as a tool. It helps to position actors within a larger context and reflect on their specific 'mediating' roles and to formulate appropriate practices of intermediation. Furthermore, the case studies point at the limitations to parJohannes Gartner is a computer scientist interested in participatory systems design and com uter support for planning in facilitated working groups. He is a member of d' e computer-su ported coo erative work research group at P Vienna Technical University. L a Wagner a current research focuses on a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the desi and use of computer systems in hospital work, architectural design, a n y t h e theater. She is a Professor at Vienna Technical University and head of a computer-supported cooperative work research group.

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The min-SHIFT DESIGN problem (ÅË ) is an important scheduling problem that needs to be solved in many industrial contexts. The issue is to find a minimum number of shifts and the number of employees to be assigned to these shifts in order to minimize the deviation from workforce requirements.Our research considers both theoretical and practical aspects of the min-SHIFT DESIGN problem. This problem is closely related to the minimum edge-cost flow problem (Å ), a network flow variant that has many applications beyond shift scheduling. We show that ÅË reduces to a special case of Å and, exploiting this reduction, we prove a logarithmic hardness of approximation lower bound for ÅË . On the basis of these results, we propose a hybrid heuristic for the problem which relies on a greedy heuristic with a min-cost max-flow subroutine based on the network flow analogy followed by a local search algorithm that makes use of multiple neighborhood relations. An experimental analysis on structured random instances shows that the hybrid heuristic clearly outperforms our previous commercial implementation and highlights the respective merits of the composing heuristics for different performance parameters.