On the Edge of the Time Bind: Time and Market Culture

That Busyness Which is Not Business: Nervousness and Character
at the Turn of the Last Century

A Right to be Lazy? Busyness in Retrospective
Gary Cross

I recall an old man selling Paul Lafargue’s Right to be Lazy (1883, 1989) on a busy street in the Latin Quarter in the 1980s.  At the time, I was writing then my first book on the history of work time and leisure and felt by seeing this strange and grumpy man so energetically promoting the nearly forgotten work of Marx’s son-in-law somehow vindicated in my efforts. Paul Lafargue’s pamphlet makes an interesting assumption:  The “natural” state of human being was relaxation and that only a century or so of propaganda convinced the naïve worker and labor movement to embrace the doctrine of the “right” to work. The industrial revolution had produced the craziness of workers’ overproduction and legions of savants and servants for the small utterly unbusy rich.  Once freed from the illusion of the right to work, machines, Lafargue insisted, would liberate us all from the drudgery of labor and let us live as the ancient Greek philosophers had dreamed—but without the dependence upon slaves.  Lafargue’s view was hardly unique for its day.  Many in the late nineteenth century believed that overwork caused production gluts and the irrational excesses of the rich.  Busyness was a false doctrine of modern capitalism that was devoted to endlessly extending and intensifying work. Before and after him, many fought to win freedom from busyness with the reduction of worktime. But Lafargue’s dream that mechanical progress would liberate humanity from labor hardly happened.  Instead, the “overproduction” that ceaseless toil created was “absorbed” by mass consumption.  Even the “wastefulness” of the rich and their minions came to be seen merely as indifferent contributions to the Gross Domestic Product.  So what happened?

On the Edge of the Time Bind: Time and Market Culture
Arlie Russell Hochschild

In The Great Transformation Karl Polyani argues that we have transitioned from being a society with islands of market life to a market with islands of society. As the market has grown, so too, I would argue, has market culture. In this essay, I argue that the modern family is itself one such “society” within the market, and that it is under pressure to incorporate aspects of market culture. It responds to this pressure by resisting, capitulating to or simply playing with it through an ongoing process of symbolization and re-symbolization. The degree to which families resist or welcome market culture depends, I think, on the fit between individuals’ embrace of market culture and their orientation to time. Temporal strategies preferred by employees at the top of the corporate ladders pose market culture’s first port of entry into the home. Or to put it another way, market culture slips into the family through a crack on the edge of the time bind.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of six books, including The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (1997) and The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life and Other Essays (2003), as well as numerous articles. Her current research projects are animated by the triumph of the market over so much else in life.

Back To Top

Geography of Busyness
Robert V. Levine

If you casually greet Americans with the question “How are you?” they’re liable to respond about how busy their life is, perhaps scrunching up their faces and bodies to show how anxious and stressed they feel.  The odd thing about this is that both parties understand the response may be a type of bragging, as in “Look how important I am.”  This would seem exceedingly curious to visitors from many other cultures--like bragging that you’re having a nervous breakdown.  It is readily accepted, however, in a culture which assumes that time is money and that every moment not doing something is a wasted one.  To be busy, is to be a worthwhile person.  Compare this to a student from Eastern Africa whom I once interviewed about the meaning of wasted time.  “How can a person waste time?” he asked.  “If you’re not doing one thing, you’re doing something else” (Levine, 1997).   J.T. Fraser, the founder of the International Society for the Study of Time, wrote, “Tell me what to think of time, and I shall know what to think of you.”  The temporal norms of a culture—how people conceive, measure and use time--provide an exceedingly informative window on what the people of that culture value; and no temporal values divide cultures more than those related to busyness.  How much and often should people work?  What is the appropriate balance between work and play?  Is speed a good thing?  Should it be work before play or the other way around?  Is there such a thing as doing nothing?  Can time be wasted?   I propose that the subjective experience of feeling busy has two main components: speed and activity.

Robert V. Levine is Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean of the College of Science and Mathematics at California State University, Fresno. His book, A Geography of Time (1997), was awarded the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award. Levine’s most recent book is The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold (2003).
Back To Top

That Busyness Which is not Business: Nervousness and Character
at the Turn of the Last Century
Michael O’Malley

From 1897 through about 1912, film producers would shoot their footage and then make a contact print of the entire film on a roll of photographic paper. Mailed to the Library of Congress, these rolls of paper established copyright.  The films document a very busy world indeed. They show people thronging streets, working, shopping; they show crowds shuffling through gates at Ellis Island or welcoming returning war heroes. More than just documentary, the films include satire ad commentary on the nature of life at the turn of the last century. In these early films, which almost never run much longer than two or three minutes, the camera almost never moves—no zooms, pans, or fast cuts or clever editing. But the screens are never still, full of action and movement. They document great disasters and everyday events, the dynamic world of the turn of the last century.   These very early films played almost entirely to a working class audience. Indeed, when middle class observers began noticing this new phenomenon, the “movies,” sweeping working class neighborhoods they saw it as both fast paced, as a “get thrills quick” medium that played magical games with time and space, and also as a dangerous soporific. They show a busy world, but they show confusion about what “busy” means.

Michael O’Malley, Associate Professor of History and Art History at George Mason University, is the author of Keeping Watch: A History of American Time. His research interests include the history of money and value, the history of music and recorded sound, and new media pedagogy.

Back To Top

Busyness as Usual
John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey

Books and articles about the acceleration of daily life are themselves accelerating. A theoretical basis for expecting the inevitability of these trends has been traced in the writings of major sociologists including Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Sorkin. As deTocqueville observed more than 150 years ago, “The American is always in a hurry.”  Economists have also weighed in on these issues of time compression, perhaps starting with Linder’s insightful (1970) treatise The Harried Leisure Class, predicting the frantic pace of modern life and leisure. As specialized work led to higher rates of productivity, accelerated consumption led to an acceleration of the pace of life and a harried leisure class.  Much of what Linder discussed in regard to time scarcity was perceived scarcity. Interestingly, his conclusions were not that people would work longer, but rather that they would attempt to increase the yield on a unit of time in all areas of life—minimizing activities such as singing or political debate, which could not easily have their yield on time spent increased.  The value of efficiency and increased productivity, carried to extremes, he argued, produced a kind of decadence in which the goal of economic growth is never questioned.  More recently, economists have played down the seriousness of concerns over a speeded up lifestyle, characterizing it in large part as “Yuppie Kvetch.”  Not that higher income couples are making irrational decisions, they are simply facing the inevitable constraints on their ability to enjoy their wealth.  This article reviews various of these philosophical issues in the context of US national survey data concerning trends in the time pressures and stress in the activities of Americans over the last 30+ years. It focuses both on the measurable amounts of free time Americans have and on the specific activities done in that free time. It also reviews survey data on Americans’ perceptions of and attitudes toward time and stress. It brings together data from different survey sources that often show conflicting trends and conclusions.

John Robinson is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Americans’ Use of Time Project at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently coauthoring a new book with Suzanne Bianchi and Melissa Milkie on the changing time use of parents, and is continuing his long-term interest in the mass media and social change.
Geoffrey Godbey is Professor of Leisure Studies at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent work is Leisure and Leisure Services in the 21st Century (rev. ed., 2005), and he has also coauthored Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Time (with Robinson, rev. ed., 1999).
Back To Top

Keeping Busy
Alan Ryan

Alan Ryan is Warden of New College, Oxford University and a member of the British Academy since 1986. He is the author of many articles and books including Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (1998), John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1997), and Russell: A Political Life (1995).

Back To Top

Busyness and Citizenship
William E. Scheuerman

How does the experience of busyness impact democratic political life? My hunch is that those reading this essay might very well offer the following answer: busyness means that we relegate political activities to the bottom of a long and sometimes tedious laundry list of “things to get done.” In fact, many of us no longer even bother to include the basic activities of citizenship –getting informed about the issues, deliberating with our peers about matters of common concern, attending a political meeting, or even voting —on the list in the first place. Like this author, many of you probably feel somewhat guilty about this as well, and thus try to compensate in some way or another… At worst, busyness generates political disinterest and apathy: many of our fellow citizens openly describe the most fundamental form of democratic participation, the vote, as “a waste of time.” At best, it seems to privilege an acceleration of political activity: we seek speedy and rapidly consummated types of involvement that do not unduly add to the enormous time pressures we already feel. Unfortunately, it remains unclear whether even such high-speed forms of citizen involvement are normatively satisfactory. Can liberal democracy flourish when a growing number of us avoid the responsibilities of citizenship altogether, while even those of us who try to remain politically involved insist that they be dealt with quickly and painlessly?              In this essay, I hope at the very least to deepen our understanding of this quagmire. If I am not mistaken, it provides a useful starting point for examining one of the core challenges of contemporary political life: how can we make sure that busyness and citizenship coexist in a potentially fruitful, though by no means necessarily harmonious, relationship?

William E. Scheuerman will be joining the political science faculty of Indiana University at the end of the year. He is author of Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (2004), Carl Schmitt: The
End of Law (1999), and Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (1994). He is presently working on a study of Hans Morgenthau.

Back To Top

Business Is Busyness, or the Work Ethic
Alexander Welsh

“Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas,” we read of one of Chaucer’s pilgrims, “And yet he semed bisier than he was.”  And yet?  The logic of these lines seems more than a little mischievous.  Nowhere could there be found a man as busy as this, and yet this man seemed busier than he was.  If both of those statements are strictly true, most men are not as busy as they seem, and diligence is largely a matter of show.   It seems that professional, as that word is used to distinguish the worker from mere amateurs, was indeed a creation of the nineteenth century; and there are a host of reasons—not least, the industrial revolution—for tracing many of our modern convictions about work to that era. As a student captivated by the prose of the so-called Victorian prophets, Carlyle, Ruskin, and their followers, I began to conclude that their most frequently quoted passage from all the Bible was this: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). In truth, much preachment of hard work tends to affectation, if not downright self-contradiction.

Alexander Welsh Emily Sanford Professor of English at Yale University, is author of Freud’s Wishful Dream Book (1994) and, most recently, Hamlet in his Modern Guises (2001). His current project is a literary
and philosophical study of honor.

Back To Top