The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work | Arlie Russell Hochschild

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work | Arlie Russell Hochschild | I do not really know what I was supposed to get out of it.

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The Time Bind: Whe...

	The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work Arlie Russell Hochschild Holt Paperbacks, 2001 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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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.

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Fresh and Provocative

Initially I approached this book thinking that it told the familiar (and not particularly interesting) tale of how the endless demands of the workplace are slowly eating way at the little time that we have to spend with our families or just ourselves. Well, this is NOT that tale. Rather, Professor Hochschild explores and succinctly describes how the workplace has become the dynamic community in our lives, to the exclusion of all else and at a price. The reasons have little to do with "work becoming unmanageable;" rather, it is "work becoming community." I find her ideas provocative, eye-opening and remarkably non- ideological, as it is simply reporting what is happening in our Country and to some extent throughout the world. Anyone who runs around 24/7 with a cell phone, beeper, blackberry, etc. knows what I am talking about. Highly recommended.

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I do not really know what I was supposed to get out of it.

After all the hype, I finally got around to reading Time Bind this year. I thought that it was interesting, and not too terribly written, but I have to confess that I do not see the point. Her central thesis about work being too much like home has largely been exploded during the economic downturn-- lots of the perks and benefits cited in Time Bind are no longer features in the new cost-conscious companies.

I think the book would have been much more satisfying to readers if it had been presented as what it is-- the study of a single company. In my opinion, Hochschild does not earn the wider conclusions that she attempts to draw from the study and there is not sufficient underpinning to make broad generalizations about either family-friendly policies or increased working hours.

Truthfully, I probably would have rated this book as less than three stars if I were only judging the reading experience. However, I think that Hochschild deserves credit for the work that she did studying her one company sample and for asking some tough questions which we really do need to be asking.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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