Sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent three years studying Gwen’s corporation, which she calls “Amerco,” in an effort to answer these questions. Her groundbreaking analysis, The Time Bind (316 pages. Metropolitan. $22.50), will be in bookstores next month. Important, provocative and a little scary, “The Time Bind” is sure to get working parents buzzing. (Many are still buzzing about Hochschild’s last book, “The Second Shift,” about why employed mothers come home to a domestic work shift that fathers rarely share equally.) “In recent years at Amerco it has been possible to detect a change in the ways its workers view the proper use of their time,” she writes. “Family time, for them, has taken on an “industrial tone’… succumbing to a cult of efficiency previously associated with the workplace.” Dinner has to take 15 minutes or there’s no time to eat before soccer; Jimmy has to bond with Mom and Dad in the half hour before bed, or he’s wasting their time.
The office, by contrast, is where Amerco employees get to socialize, feel competent and relax on breaks. Gwen lets her workday lengthen for the simple reason that she enjoys it. If home used to be a refuge from the cold, impersonal world of work, the two have changed places. Now work is where the heart is.
Hochschild sees the problem developing as women flooded into the work force over the past few decades. Once in a man’s world, women readily adopted its values. “Women discovered men’s secret,” she says. “They discovered the appeal of work.” Not all women get with the program, of course–the Amerco employees who do seek family-friendly schedules are almost invariably female–but the notion of balancing work and family was always going to be foreign to corporate culture. Amerco continues to worship face time. “The top managers believe family-friendly policies are the right thing to do,” a woman in human resources told Hochschild. “But none of them pack their own suitcases, so they don’t know what mornings are like for most of us.”
Hochschild found that women employees now had a third shift: the “emotional work” of dealing with their guilt and making up for the assembly-line nature of their kids’ lives. “Women were trying to do damage control,” she says. “They were engaged in a whole bargain with their kids about what time meant. How much time means how much love?” Among men she found a different way of rationalizing choices. High-level managers simply congratulate themselves for showing up at every Little League game or piano recital–“the part of childhood that comes closest to being a career,” Hochschild writes. “Like a business meeting, each concert or soccer game is a slot in time scheduled in advance by someone else.” Few of these fathers are around for the ordinary hours of their kids’ lives, “those times when [kids are] offstage, unable to get started on something, discouraged, or confused.”
Hochschild’s most unsettling charge is one that will ring true to many professionals who cherish their work. Parents today, she writes, “emotionally downsize life”–convincing themselves that spouses and kids just don’t need all that much attention. Ten-year-olds left alone in the afternoon are wonderfully self-sufficient; birthday parties organized by professionals are more fun for the kids; a Hallmark card (“Sorry I can’t be there to tuck you in”) is as good as a kiss. Although her book ends with a call for a “time movement” in which workers would press for hard-hitting reforms in corporate life, she knows change must start closer to home. “We need to look at the effect of the time bind on our lives and our kids’ lives,” she says. “Let’s look in the mirror. We’re complicit. Then let’s get on to solutions.”
