The Time Bind
When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The national bestseller that put "work/family balance" in the headlines and on the White House agenda, with a new introduction by the author.
When The Time Bind was first published in 1997, it was hailed as the decade's most influential study of our work/family crisis. In the short time since, the crisis has only become more acute.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, bestselling author of The Second Shift, spent three summers at a Fortune 500 company interviewing top executives, secretaries, factory hands, and others. What she found was startling: Though every mother and nearly every father said "family comes first," few of these working parents questioned their long hours or took the company up on chances for flextime, paternity leave, or other "family friendly" policies. Why not? It seems the roles of home and work had reversed: work was offering stimulation, guidance, and a sense of belonging, while home had become the place in which there was too much to do in too little time.
Today Hochschild's findings are more relevant than ever. As she shows in her new introduction, the borders between family and work have become even more permeable. With the Internet extending working hours at home and offices offering domestic enticements -- free snacks, soft music -- to keep employees later at their jobs, The Time Bind stands as an increasingly important warning about the way we live and work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this important study, Hochschild (The Second Shift) unearths the damages families harvest when both parents till the soils of business and home. She takes as her subject the pseudonymous Fortune 500 company Amerco, cited by the Family and Work Institute and Working Mother magazine as "one of the ten most `family-friendly' companies in America," ostensibly with the funds and policies to help employees balance their lives. She interviewed workers and managers alike for three years, finding that Amerco's "Work-Life Balance Program" failed its employees and their children for a jumble of reasons. First, Hochschild noticed, the "powerful men" at the top did not vigorously enforce implementation, while department supervisors were often "overtly hostile" to a work-home balance. The author also learned that many parents did not avail themselves of the family-friendly policies. One main reason, she notes, is that employees were "responding to a powerful process that is devaluing... the essence of family life"; for many, there was just more satisfaction at work than at home. Hochschild's thorough and enlightening study will again trigger the consternation of the hard-working, guilt-ridden parents of this nation and perhaps incite them further on their quest for a work-family balance. 50,000 first printing; author tour.
