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Title: The Time Bind : When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work by Arlie Russell Hochschild ISBN: 0-8050-6643-8 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.11 (9 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Some good insights but nothing real original.
Comment: The basis of this book is great and the author has a terrific way with words but she loses the reader after about page 55, where she goes off into all sorts of liberal and unproven theories about modern family life. Her research was limited to one major American company and does not illuminate why there are so many problems in balancing work and family life.
Rating: 2
Summary: good first 40 pages
Comment: This book was good for the first 40 pages but that's it. Hochschild gets across the interesting truth that some Americans work and don't spend time with their families because work is a reprieve from the stress of home and family life. This is really the crux of the book; the rest is mainly filler. Hochschild doesn't provide much more insight or scientific rigor and support to these observations. I agree with the above reviewer that the writing is quite poor: convoluted; however, I wouldn't even give the writing the compliment of being novel-like. The writing is trite and character placements a headache.
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent - though follow up research doesn't confirm
Comment: Summary:
The book is essentially a report of the findings of a 3-year qualitative study by the author, Arlie Hochschild, of a Fortune 500 company's 'family-friendly' practices. The author interviewed people in all tiers of the organization, conducted surveys, followed employees, and did participant observations to try to understand how the company's family-friendly policies were being implemented.
The result is The Time Bind. Though the company wants to give the impression that it is family-friendly, certain factors are working against the company actually living up to its policies. One is that for many of the managers at the company 'face time' or actually being at work is more important than actually doing anything at work. If your understanding of 'family-friendly' includes the possibility of working fewer hours, this is going to work against anyone that wants to participate in an hour reduction program.
Another thing that the author posits that is working against family friendliness is that companies are turning the work environment into a safe and comforting environment (though doing this actually covers up the temporariness inherent in companies) and in essence are replacing the home environment or turning the home environment into something more akin to what work environments have traditionally been seen as being (e.g. scheduling time for kids and spouses, running from one thing to the next, not being able to rest, etc.). The result is that many people actually want to spend more time at work then they do at home because they feel more relaxed at work then they do at home. (Read the book to understand this argument more fully.)
My Comments:
I think the book is great. Admittedly one could claim that the author is biased - perhaps she is a social democrat that hates capitalism and sees her efforts as a way of attacking capitalism. I guess that is a possibility. And it does lead to the one criticism I see in the book: Arlie Hochschild never openly states the perspective she brings to the table in exploring the ramifications of The Time Bind. At one point she does posit that children that are left home alone have a higher rate of drug and alcohol abuse than do kids that are not left home alone. So, I guess her bias does seep out through comments like that. But, for individuals that share her bias (which is probably most people), I think this book does a great job of illustrating that capitalism really does have some problems - one being the deemphasizing of the family and the focus on work instead. In this sense, I can't help but comment that perhaps Emile Durkheim, in claiming that the eventual dissolution of religious authority that lent solidarity to society would be replaced by the workplace, seems to find a home in The Time Bind.
Overall, the book is very well-written and engaging. The findings are presented using specific people and their stories which makes the book more like a morally laden collection of stories. But the scholarship does not appear to be influenced by the plight of the individuals. And, the author does not write this book at a scholarly level and fill it with sociological jargon. The book should be readable by anyone. I would highly recommend it.
Caveat:
There has been some follow up research done on Hocschild's theories about how the workplace has become more like home and vice versa. Most of the research says this isn't necessarily accurate. Though there could be some truth to this, the more likely cause of increased time spent working is due to managerial demands and more women working full time rather than people just wanting to be at work.
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Title: The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Anne Machung ISBN: 0142002925 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Commercialization of Intimate Life : Notes from Home and Work by Arlie Russell Hochschild ISBN: 0520214889 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms With America's Changing Families by Stephanie Coontz ISBN: 0465090923 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Why Work?: Motivating the New Workforce by Michael Maccoby ISBN: 0917917057 Publisher: Miles River Press Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz ISBN: 0465090974 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.50 |
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