The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work - Softcover

Hochschild, Arlie Russell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805066438 ISBN 13: 9780805066432

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

In the early 1990s Arlie Hochschild exposed The Second Shift, revealing the housework and childcare inequities of working couples. In this book Hochschild exposes the disturbing time bind of American families: parents are putting more hours in at work to support their families, which creates more stress at home, which pushes parents into seeking more work time to escape the tension at home. The result of this time crunch is the unsettling development of the "third shift"--the time parents spend repairing the damage left in the wake of their compulsion to work. Hochschild's solution? Parents of America unite! The final chapters discuss how parents can start a "Time Movement," liberating themselves from work-driven tyranny.

From the Publisher:

Scholarly Audio brings this work by one of this nation's of leading scholars to you in an audiobook format that is easily accessible, time-conserving, and cost-effective. This audiobook provides a productive use of your time while you are commuting, traveling across country, exercising, gardening, or engaging in other activities that permit you to "read through your ears."

About this edition

• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0805066438
• ISBN 13: 9780805066432
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344