sdbecque 's review for:

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work by Arlie Russell Hochschild

4.0

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It's crazy that this book was published in 1997, detailing life from the early 1990s, before the crazy rise of crack-berries, iphones, and ipads and written before the recession and the exodus of even more American jobs, it feels in some ways like a time capsule. Some of her concerns about outsourcing parental responsibilities seem almost quaint.

Still the book is incredibly compelling, using individual worker's stories painted in lush detail to tell of the dire nature of "work/family balance." Hochschild uses the metaphor of shelter to describe the worker's time away from work, some are about to build lush time-palaces, while others are forced to live in time pup-tents that they move from location to location in the weekly schedule. Parents rigorously schedule an hour of "quality time" with their children, but then get upset when the child doesn't use the quality time appropriately.

"They pack one activity close to the next and disregard the 'framing' around each of them, those moments of looking forward to or looking back on an experience which heightens its emotional impact.They ignore the contribution that a leisurely pace can make to fulfillment, so that a rapid dinner, followed by a speedy bath and bedtime story for a child - if part of 'quality time' - is counted 'worth the same' as a slower version of the same events. As time becomes something to 'save' at home as much as or even more than at work, domestic life becomes quite literally a second shift; a cult of efficiency, once centered in the workplace, is allowed to set up shop and make itself comfortable at home. Efficiency has become both a means to an end - more home time - and a way of life, an end in itself."