Arlie Russell Hochschild is a contemporary feminist sociologist 
famous for her work on well, Work. When I saw her book The Time Bind at the library on the shelf marked “Non-fiction Reads you may have missed” I knew I had to pick it up. Part of this work was extracted in a compilation I had just finished reading, and I was curious what more than the single summarized survey I read could be within the book. Hochschild was born in 1940, which places her contemporaneously with the Feminine Mystique generation. She’s also categorized as a symbolic interactionist, which, I’d forgotten, means “people act toward things based on the meaning those things have for them; and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through interpretation.”
Her ethnographic, or field study, research, is conducted with numerous employees at company referred to as Amerco. Amerco houses both production facilities employing blue collar workers, as well as design and engineering white collar workers. Hochschild interviews men, women, hourly and salary workers over the course of 3 years to find out why they don’t take advantage of the much touted Family Friendly policies available at Amerco. These include flextime, parttime, job sharing, and flexplace.
Ultimately she finds numerous factors at play in order to answer her question. Her conclusions include: people are stimulated in a work environment that values them ostensibly and voluminously with rewards, unlike unrecognized home contributions. She finds that there are unspoken rules about “team players” being present in increasingly longer hours (60 or more). Additionally, work has become what the family is no longer, a sanctuary often without unending conflict and fewer ‘divorces’. Each person she interviews says they have difficulty with “work-family” balance; instead they construct elaborate ideal selves where they will have time for family projects such as, camping, treehouse building, attending games and performances of the children. Always, in the future. Yet, inconspicuously, the structure of the workplace has created it so that there will not ever be time. As she notes in the introduction, there are “contexts in which we make our decisions.” Ultimately what Hochschild’s book documents is the motion from what Mills would term personal troubles, into a study of social milieux.
Beyond her own conclusions, there are several implicit assumptions that I believe that the workers at Amerco make that Hochschild documents. Perhaps these assumptions extend over into the general American society as well.
1. Children are small adults. Though the Victorians, and previous generations have been scorned for treating children like “small adults;” dressing them in miniature adult costumes, “seeing but not hearing” them, our generation does the same thing in slightly different ways. Childhood is increasingly moderated into “jobs” at day care, summer camps, and school. Although parents manage the time of their children (like a boss), ultimately the child performs as a small worker, with little distinction in schedule between the seasons and ages of their life. (This is perhaps also a rural/urban divide too.)
2. The only valuable work is paid work. As Simmel noted in Philosophy of Money, we have become like the parents who tell their children that an object is worth something because money has been paid for it, not because it performs a function. Food is not valuable as energy, but because money has been spent on it. Hochschild documents time-saving tactics which many people use (frozen foods, babysitters, maids, tutors) in order to manage their children and homes, but these things become worth something once again because money is spent on them. Yes, it’s women’s work, but perhaps the crucial thing about them in this day and age is that it’s also unpaid women’s work. (I think, perhaps erroneously, that the two things, “unpaid” and “women’s work” are not synonymous). Once the items have been paid for, they achieve value again, even at the expense of guilt on the part of parents.
3. You can’t view favors you’ve stored up. This is an example of status at play. Watching another’s children, cooking meals, and having family time are favors which people perform. And these do accrue value, albeit relationally. The word “relationally” is key, since the premise remains that Money is the only valuable standard of measure. Relational savings and favors cannot be viewed, cannot be bartered with other people outside the group, and cannot be stored indefinitely outside of fantasy novels. Since this is a global economy, they have little value outside of the accepted currency of dollars.
From this symbolic interactionist, I’m turning to the father of the movement, George Herbert Mead, and his book, Mind Self and Society. In tandem, I will be reading the previously posted book, Sociological Theory, it’s bits and pieces of crucial classic sociology works providing me with more definition and clarity into sociological ideas.
The Sociology Project 