British Summer Time begins tomorrow, with clocks moving forward by one hour.

Cue grumbles about having an hour less in bed, and about the hassle of resetting the time on everything in the house from the microwave to the burglar alarm.

However, apart from these murmurs of complaint, the change of seasons is something we all accept. The transition from winter to spring, then to summer and autumn, and then back to winter, has always been part of nature's pattern. It's less easy for many people to come to terms with the changes that are now becoming a pattern in the world of work.

In Seven, in this weekend's Post, June Burrough, the founder of Bristol's Pierian Centre, talks about how her social enterprise company has been enjoying success at a time when many other businesses have been hit by the recession. She also speaks of how people need to accept that change has become a fact of modern working life.

After decades in which jobs often began with an apprenticeship and ended about 40 years later with a gold clock and a good pension, the employment market has become alarmingly unstable.

Recent years have seen the dot com boom and bust, the property boom and bust, the banking boom and bust – plus the demise of manufacturing, and the decline of retailing – but it never gets any easier to witness people losing their jobs. By coincidence, it was 25 years ago this month that Arthur Scargill led members of the National Union of Mineworkers out on strike over planned pit closures.

Now, like the miners in the Eighties, many people are finding they have skills that are of no use in a changing world. And like the miners, it seems the biggest problem many face is not the loss of their present jobs, but the difficulty in gaining new employment. Even Norman Tebbit, who was trade secretary at the time of the miners' strike, recently observed: "Many of these (mining) communities were completely devastated, with people out of work turning to drugs and no real man's work because all the jobs had gone.

"There is no doubt that this led to a breakdown in these communities with families breaking up and youths going out of control. The scale of the closures went too far."

At a time when businesses are having to make difficult decisions to ensure their survival, the long-term damage caused to the mining communities shows the vital need for better government support for people made redundant, to ensure they can obtain other skills and gain new work. And there must surely also be a need to question the widely accepted practice of judging the success of businesses purely according to profits.

Of course, there's something rather grotesque about over-staffed publicly funded organisations where some staff seem to think money comes out of a magic pot, whether they are council quangos or obscure BBC departments.

Yet there seems to be something flawed in the way companies with shares effectively have their value determined by sharp-suited City boys more interested in the size of their bonuses than in the value some businesses bring to their communities.

Social enterprise companies such as the Pierian Centre don't have to worry about the vagaries of the stock exchange. Their shares cannot be bought one day and then sold the next, but have to be retained for a number of years.

With two million people now unemployed, and many companies struggling to survive, perhaps it's time to consider whether some business would be better served by becoming social enterprises, and being able to focus on stability as well as growth, and on sustainability as well as profits.

For decades, many of us have been like rabbits hypnotised by snakes when it comes to the world of business, and the complexities of stocks and shares.

And what a bunch of snakes they've turned out to be, those bankers who made money using techniques such as short-selling to reduce the value of companies' shares.

Presumably the thoughts of share traders are already turning to identifying the next boom businesses, following the demise of sectors such as dot com and financial services.

How nice if one of the growth sectors turned out to be social enterprise, and that instead of all businesses being driven by the need to make a profit for shareholders, a growing number could choose to use their profits to make a social contribution.

The best part would be that the main beneficiaries of the success of such businesses would be ordinary people, and the communities they live in – not hedge-fund managers and their bonuses.