by Arlie Russell Hochschild
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| List Price: | $16.00 |
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| Lowest New Price: | $6.55 |
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Product 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.
Amazon.com
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.
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Average Customer Review:
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 Fresh and Provocative, 2006-03-08
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.
3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
 tedious and dry, 2005-08-31
While it is commendable that the author avoids the verbal fakery, jargon and obfuscation so common amongst academic authors, it is hard to imagine a flatter, duller narrative. The evidence on offer here is anecdotal and therefore of limited value, and since the anecdotes are so mundane, there seems little reason to read the book. Most adults can furnish their own supply of similar stories, have already come to some of the same conclusions, and won't find the insights very insightful. Sociology remains thin stuff.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
 I do not really know what I was supposed to get out of it., 2005-06-05
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.
3 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Some good insights but nothing real original., 2003-11-17
The basis of this book is great and the author has a terrific way with words but she loses the reader after about page 55, where she goes off into all sorts of liberal and unproven theories about modern family life. Her research was limited to one major American company and does not illuminate why there are so many problems in balancing work and family life.
4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
good first 40 pages, 2003-07-06
This book was good for the first 40 pages but that's it. Hochschild gets across the interesting truth that some Americans work and don't spend time with their families because work is a reprieve from the stress of home and family life. This is really the crux of the book; the rest is mainly filler. Hochschild doesn't provide much more insight or scientific rigor and support to these observations. I agree with the above reviewer that the writing is quite poor: convoluted; however, I wouldn't even give the writing the compliment of being novel-like. The writing is trite and character placements a headache.
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