Facsimile messages, electronic mail, other forms of digital data, Internet - broke not only physical barriers but also temporal ones. Today, virtual offices are not only spatially virtual - but also temporally so. This means that workers can collaborate not only across continents but also across time zones. They can leave their work for someone else to continue in an electronic mailbox, for instance.

These technological advances precipitated transmutation of very concepts of "work" and "workplace". The three Aristotelian dramatic unities no longer applied. Work could be performed in different places, not simultaneously, by workers who worked part time whenever it suited them best.

Flextime and work from home replaced commuting (much more so in Anglo-Saxon countries, but they have always been harbingers of change). This fitted squarely into social fragmentation which characterizes today's world: disintegration of previously cohesive social structures, such as nuclear (not to mention extended) family.

All this was neatly wrapped in ideology of individualism, presented as a private case of capitalism and liberalism. People were encouraged to feel and behave as distinct, autonomous units. The perception of individuals as islands replaced former perception of humans as cells in an organism.

This trend was coupled with - and enhanced by - unprecedented successive multi-annual rises in productivity and increases in world trade. New management techniques, improved production technologies, innovative inventory control methods, automatization, robotization, plant modernization, telecommunications (which facilitates more efficient transfers of information), even new design concepts - all helped bring this about.

But productivity gains made humans redundant. No amount of retraining could cope with incredible rate of technological change. The more technologically advanced country - higher its structural unemployment (i.e., level of unemployment attributable to changes in very structure of market).

In Western Europe, it shot up from 5-6% of workforce to 9% in one decade. One way to manage this flood of ejected humans was to cut workweek. Another was to support a large population of unemployed. The third, more tacit, way was to legitimize leisure time. Whereas Jewish and Protestant work ethics condemned idleness in past - current ethos encouraged people to contribute to economy through "self realization", to pursue their hobbies and non-work related interests, and to express entire range of their personality and potential.

This served to blur historical differences between work and leisure. They are both commended now. Work, like leisure, became less and less structured and rigid. It is often pursued from home. The territorial separation between "work-place" and "home turf" was essentially eliminated.

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Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

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We can use Game Theory methods to analyse both these situations. Wherever we have economic players bargaining for allocation of scarce resources in order to attain their utility functions, to secure outcomes and consequences (the value, preference, that player attaches to his outcomes) which are right for them – we can use Game Theory (GT).

A short recap of basic tenets of theory might be in order.

GT deals with interactions between agents, whether conscious and intelligent – or Dennettic. A Dennettic Agent (DA) is an agent that acts so as to influence future allocation of resources, but does not need to be either conscious or deliberative to do so. A Game is set of acts committed by 1 to n rational DA and one a-rational (not irrational but devoid of rationality) DA (nature, a random mechanism). At least 1 DA in a Game must control result of set of acts and DAs must be (at least potentially) at conflict, whole or partial. This is not to say that all DAs aspire to same things. They have different priorities and preferences. They rank likely outcomes of their acts differently. They engage Strategies to obtain their highest ranked outcome. A Strategy is a vector, which details acts, with which DA will react in response to all (possible) acts by other DAs. An agent is said to be rational if his Strategy does guarantee attainment of his most preferred goal. Nature is involved by assigning probabilities to outcomes. An outcome, therefore, is an allocation of resources resulting from acts of agents. An agent is said to control situation if its acts matter to others to extent that at least one of them is forced to alter at least one vector (Strategy). The Consequence to agent is value of a function that assigns real numbers to each of outcomes. The consequence represents a list of outcomes, prioritized, ranked. It is also known as an ordinal utility function. If function includes relative numerical importance measures (not only real numbers) – we call it a Cardinal Utility Function.

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Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com