The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work

Abstract

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. Arlie Russell Hochschild. New York: Metropolitan Books. 1997. 310 pp. ISBN 0-8050-4470-1. $22.50 cloth. Time for Life: The Surprising Way Americans Use Their Time. John P. Robinson & Geoffrey Godbey. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 1997. 367 pp. ISBN 0271-01652-3. $24.95 cloth. As evidenced by number of recent publications (Daly, 1997; Pipher, 1996) and two new books by prominent family sociologists, family time as topic of scholarly interest has moved from background to foreground of family studies. Arlie Hochschild has gift for using images and metaphors in her prose to portray complexity and occasional irony of modern family life. But in The Time Bind her constant use of business, industry, and economic language to describe modern family life goes beyond use of metaphor to enliven her prose; she asks reader to consider possibility that metaphor has become reality for many people. Her provocative theme is that is becoming more like home and home is becoming more like for many parents today. We are caught in time bind: The more time we work, more hectic home becomes, and more we want to escape back to work. In short, many parents-men and womenare fleeing the `inner city' of home for `suburbs' of work (p. 247). In her rich, ethnographic study of large corporation with progressive array of familyfriendly policies, Hochschild identifies this reversal theme as dominant in one fifth of employees and as present in some form in half of them. She began her study by trying to understand why well-meaning family-friendly policies that allowed employees to shorter and more flexible hours were seldom used. Her conclusion is unsettling. For many parents today, is often pleasant and controlled environment with significant social and financial rewards; home is where taxing and messy of rearing children and maintaining family takes place, type of that is increasingly devalued in our present culture. This reversal pattern took on different forms for men and women and from top to bottom in organization, but it was discernible everywhere she looked. Hochschild's plea is for parents to start grassroots time movement. They need to challenge economic and social system that invites long hours at work. They need to invest less in time and more in family time. If they do not, next generation will be left with temporal debt from their parents that dwarfs fiscal debt they will inherit from their government. Our attempt to manage family time by out-sourcing so many parental functions fits well demands of culture that values economic above all, but it falls short of what children need. The nature of family time allows only limited technological and managerial intervention. Like hubris we display toward Mother Nature when we build expensive houses on unstable, flood-and-fire-hazard hillsides in Southern California, we appear to be trying to cheat Father Time when it comes to caring for our families by importing an industrial model of efficiency from to home. Hochschild's book will be controversial, perhaps making it even more effective in classroom. It contradicts other good research that describes more benign or positive work-family interface, and book would be improved by direct discussion of those contradictions. Certainly, extent and nature of home-and-work reversal still needs to be documented. And reversal may be less than her in-depth study indicates, although she supplements this ethnographic study with modest support from survey data. Regardless, it is possible trend that she is concerned with and invites us to consider. Hochschild wants to stimulate a natural dialogue on most difficult and frightening aspect of our time bind: need for `emotional investment' in family life in an era of familial disvestiture and deregulation (p. …