I’ve just been to a couple of interesting events, linked to two new publications. One was a debate, held at the RSA, to consider the recent New Economics Foundation (NEF) report 21 Hours (which has been the subject of some comment). The protagonists, Anna Coote, NEF’s head of social policy, and Andrew Simms, NEF’s policy director and head of climate change and energy, reckon Britain would benefit in all manner of ways if available work was shared around. They argue that a gradual shift toward a legal cap of 21 hours on the working week would be good for the planet, help reduce unemployment and enable us to make a better fist of bringing up the next generation. Their opponents, me and Mark Littlewood, director of the market-oriented think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, weren’t so sure.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not the kind of economist who thinks we should work all the hours God sends. It just that shorter hours have to be earned. As countries get richer people can enjoy the same standard of living from fewer hours of work. Although it’s fashionable to talk of the UK’s “long-hours culture” this is very misleading. Even prior to the recession – which has seen a slump in the amount of work being done – as a society we were on average putting in fewer hours to meet our needs and desires than ever before in our industrial history. However, the view that we would be able to enjoy even more leisure at the wave of a legislative wand is wrong headed. The result would be a lower standard of living and higher, not lower, unemployment. To be fair to the NEF, it admits it would be happy with increased frugality – a zero growth, low-consumption economy is central to its brand of green economics. But I doubt if most people will sign up to a return to the Stone Age, even though there is a widespread consensus in favour of what might be called “green growth” based on lower carbon production and lifestyles.

More generally, the central premise of 21 Hour Society overlooks the fact that what should really concern us is not the number of hours we work but the control we have over our working time. In contrast to curbs on working time, flexible working both helps boost our living standards by aiding organisational performance and makes people happier. Indeed, our happiest workers are self-employed people – a group that tend to work much longer hours but also have more say over how they allocate their time (or “time sovereignty”, to use the analytical jargon).

Significantly, the importance of workers having greater control over their working time featured heavily at the second of the events I attended, this time organised by The Smith Institute think tank to launch a new book, The Good Work Guide, published by Earthscan. The book’s author, Nick Isles, is a former colleague of mine and well known from his time at both the CIPD and The Work Foundation. But though a friend, I’m being objective when I say that he has produced a good piece of work that deserves a wide readership, especially among those who genuinely want to combine improvements in organisational effectiveness with a better quality of working life than most people currently enjoy.

The power of Isles’s book lies not so much in the way it tries to offer practical steps by which organisations might move toward building good workplaces – important though that is – but rather in the way he nests his proposals within a powerful critique of current conventional economic and management wisdom. As a result, The Good Work Guide takes the reader well beyond the familiar comfort zone of HR pieties and guru speak. However many hours you work this week, I recommend you make time to read it.