Post-socialist acceleration: Fantasy time in a multinational bank

This article describes the transformations of work-discipline and time in a large Romanian state bank privatized to a European bank in the early 2000s. Building on ethnographies of skilled service workers' experience of time, I describe the sudden process of disciplining the post-socialist workforce and the instilling of a new sense of daily routine. Based on data collected from middle managers, human resources personnel and socialist-era employees, I describe the post-privatization transformations of time and work. These include a sharper separation of work and life, greater standardization of time-keeping, individualization of work space, colonization of personal time by organizational time, and the dumping of personal plans into an indefinite future. The mixture of perpetual, high-paced present and a diffuse "long-term" future where meaningful plans and self-promises are located might be called "fantasy time."