Time in America

1
Time in America

• Readings from Goldsmith, Robinson Goobey,
  Hochschild

2
Goldsmith Time as a cultural concept

• E.T. Hall The Silent Language
• Linear separable
• Economic time an investment today pays off
  tomorrow.
• Long-term planning normal (long time horizons)
• Past, present, future separable entities
• Stories are told in chronological order
• Speed of preparation valued time-saving
  products.
• Time measured with clocks, calendars.
• Appointments are made at specific times.
• Future brings better things

3
Goldsmith Time as a cultural concept

• E.T. Hall The Silent Language
• Circular-traditional
• Repetitive nature of time
• Today will be like yesterday and tomorrow etc.
• No discrete units of past, present, and future
• Associated with poverty because little may change
  from day to day.
• Agriculture may be born, live, raise their
  families and die on the same land.

4
Goldsmith Time as a cultural concept

• E.T. Hall The Silent Language
• Procedural-traditional
• Actual steps, events or procedure more important
  than the time spent in the activity.
• Being prompt is not as critical as things done
  correctly or when the time is right.
• American Indians and Alaskan Eskimo nations
  sometimes ascribe to procedural time
• Staying with a task until it gets done no matter
  how much time it takes.
• People who quilt, craftsman may see time this
  way.

5
Idea of a 24-7 world

• Internet (with on-line banking)
• Global trading of stocks and bonds
• Grocery stores, gas stations, hospitals,
  military, factories, police, fire departments
• There are some exceptions schools, child care,
  dentists, physicians.

6
Two concepts to dealing with the 24/7

• Adapt
• Make daily things to do lists
• Say no to requests for time that prevents you
  from accomplishing other obligations
• Use computer and telephone whenever possible
• Delegate
• Ask is this the best use of my time at this
  moment
• Lessen interactions that disrupt.
• Multi-task and dovetail

7
Disruptions to the day (cont. adaptations)

• The average U.S. worker receives 201 messages a
  day
• 50 telephone
• 35 email
• 22 voice mail
• Postal, interoffice mail, pagers, cell phones,
  express mail, faxes, etc. etc. etc.!!!

8
Another option just dont go there.

• Dont choose the 60 hour job
• Dont buy a lot of material goods (Simple Living)
• Do fewer things well
• Dont volunteer, dont parent, dont commute,
  dont marry.

9
Time Motion Studies

• Taylor 1911 (The REAL Cheaper by the dozen)
• Organized the key board by most often used
  letters.
• Efficiency in factories
• Measuring time at each task to minimize bottle
  necks, maximum production.
• Maximize utility (Note this concept we are coming
  back to it!)
• First MEASURE time (time diaries)

10
Robinson Goobey

• How long is the work week and how do we measure
  it?
• 40 hours a week is 8 a.m. 5 p.m. with an hour
  left for lunch (will you take an hour for lunch
  many professionals report eating at their desk)
• 50 hours a week is 5, 10 hour days. Or 40
  hours a week plus 5 on each weekend day.
• 60 hours a week is 6, 10 hour days or 5, 12
  hour days or 40 hour week plus 10 hours on each
  of the weekends
• 80 hours a week is 5, 14 hour days 7 a.m. 9
  p.m. or 8 a.m. 10 p.m.

11
Robinson Goobey

• In work hours do you.
• Include commuting, substantial for some people
• Include time socializing at work
• Include time after work socializing
• Include lunch
• Include ?

12
Sources for time data

• Work establishments (time cards)
• Workweek estimates
• Time diary data
• International studies (guess who works the
  longest hours??)

13
How long are people working?

• Clusters around 40 hours a week.
• Women work less hours than men (more part-time
  work)
• Idea of GAPestimate of time actual work
• Women over 35 hours a week over estimate their
  time more often

14
Time Diary Data

• Only rare individuals put in more than a 55 60
  hour work week.
• From 1965 1985 there appears to be a decline in
  the hours women work. (30.8 hours)
• From 1965 1985 a 7 hour decline for men. (39.7
  hours)

15
Time Diary data for Family Care

• Women 30.9 hours/week
• Men 15.9 hours/week
• Look at Table 3 in your readings and notice that
  employed women put in almost double the hours of
  core housework that employed men do.

16
Hochschild The Time Bind

• The Waving Window
• Corporate child care
• Long, long child care hours 730 545, 5 days
  a week 51.25 hours a week! A full 12 hours over
  the average work week for men.

17
Women (and therefore children)

• May be having to prove their professionalism by
  working long hours
• 1990 study 57 of fathers and 55 of mothers
  report feeling guilty.

18
Which comes first?

• I work to live, I dont live to work.
• Haven in a heartless world
• Family is haven from the cruel world of work
• Getting pink slips at home work may become the
  rock.
• In this new model of family and work life, a
  tired parent flees a world of unresolved quarrels
  and unwashed laundry for the reliable
  orderliness, harmony and managed cheer of work.

19
Exact timing careful coordination

• A day getting the hay in
• A day business meetings, professional
  appointments, piano lessons, hairdresser, auto
  repair.
• Ancestors of women would have divided time into
  workweeks and Sundays but not into a work week
  with a specific number of vacation days.

20
Kei M. Nomaguchi1 and Suzanne M. Bianchi2 2004
JMF

• Using data from a supplement to the 1995 National
  Health Interview Survey, this article examines
  the relationship among three major work and
  family roles marriage, parenthood, and employment
  and time spent on exercise among American men and
  women ages 18 to 64 (N  13,496). As the time
  availability perspective suggests, work and
  family roles curtail time for exercise. Married
  adults spend less time on exercising than
  unmarried adults. Although the number of children
  is not related to time spent on exercising,
  having children under age 5 is negatively
  associated with exercising. Long hours of
  employment are also related to less time spent on
  exercising, although the effect is small. Across
  the board, women spend less time on exercising
  than men, but the negative association of work
  and family roles, especially the role of spouse,
  with time for exercise is greater for men than
  for women.

21
Liana C. SayerAnne H. GauthierFrank F.
Furstenberg, Jr. 2004 JMF

• We analyze time diary data from 24,546 married
  mothers and married fathers in Canada, Germany,
  Italy, and Norway to determine whether the effect
  of education on child-care time varies
  cross-nationally. Our results indicate that more
  educated mothers spend more time with children
  than less educated mothers in each country,
  despite substantial cross-national variation in
  levels of economic support and services for
  families. This suggests that better educated
  mothers may have different parental values and
  behaviors than less educated mothers. Among
  fathers, however, education has no effect on
  child-care time in Norway, and only weak effects
  in Germany. This suggests that family policies
  that provide economic support to families may
  reduce time constraints on fathers, thus
  ameliorating educational effects.

22
K. Jill Kiecolt1 2004 JMF

• Hochschild (1997) argued that in recent decades
  the rewards of work have increased relative to
  those of family life and that this cultural
  reversal has aggravated the time bind that
  families face by increasing working hours. To the
  contrary, pooled data from the 1973 1994 General
  Social Surveys indicate that in working families,
  women have shifted away from finding work more
  satisfying than home toward finding home a haven.
  Moreover, were it not for women's growing labor
  force participation and the changing distribution
  of marital status, the shift would have been even
  larger. Men's relative work home satisfaction has
  been stable. Finally, finding work a haven is
  unrelated to weekly working hours, and it has not
  contributed to any increases in working hours
  over time.

23
Bureau of Labor Statistics

• April 2002 http//www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/04/art
  4full.pdf (page 4)