Book review on “Time Bind” – when work becomes home and home becomes work

By Arlie Russell Hochschild
Call No:HQ536 H685

After “second shift”, where Hochschild observed the working mother had her first shift at work, second shift at home, she conducted an intensive research on one of Fortune 500 companies, Amerco, a highly profitable, innovative company with reputation of “family friendly”, on its “work and life” balance programme.

The “work/life balance” polices the company offered were rather standard:

Flexible work hour arrangement
Flexible place
Part time
Share job
Maternity leave and Father’s maternity leave

Her research results were surprising. Though it was appeared that all the right policies were in place, top management also full hearted supported the scheme, there were not many people to make use of these polices. The program of work/life balance did not achieve its goal to balance their employees'work and life.

For various reasons:

1. One factor contributed the failure of program could be the company hierarchy: Top management, who had power and authority to engineer a new family-friendly work culture, may not have deep interest in doing so, in any way, it is not the chief interest of a company; the middle management who were advocated of family friendly polices, have strong interest but little power to implement; Even if the workers who could have benefited from such programs had demanded them, the resistance from their supervisors and head of department would still have stymied their efforts.
2. What about the working parents, did they fight for their “right?”

• 1) For men, there were only two father had ever applied and been granted to father’s maternity leave. The traditional mindset was rooted. One worker even complained that “why those are polices only open to working mothers, we, from traditional family, without additional income, will be prejudiced.”


• 2) For women, Part time job was the most utilized polices for minority mothers with young children.


• 3) For many women, however, they prefer work to home; “women’s uneasy love affair with capitalism; They fear losing their places at work, and having such a place has become a source of security, pride and a powerful sense of being valued


• 4) The intensified competition with globalization made people unsecured for their job. The benefits of these polices erode by the fear of demotion and loss of job.

3. These polices were not flexible to be applied, especially when child sick or other families related emergencies occurred.

The conclusion:

“People generally have the urge to spend more time on what they value most and on what they are most valued for. This tendency may help explain the historic decline in time devoted to private social relations, a decline that has taken on a distinctive cultural form at Amerco. The valued realm of work is registering its gains in part by incorporating the best aspects of home. The devalued realm, the home, is meanwhile taking on what were once considered the most alienating attributes of work. However one explains the failure of Amerco to create a good program of work-family balance, though, the fact is that in a cultural contest between work and home, working parents are voting with their feet, and the working place is winning.”

The consequences when “work becomes home and home becomes work”
1. Time bind, the evading of work to home, that leads to more families break down,
2. Children left alone, suffer from emotional asceticism. A study of nearly five thousand eighth-graders and their parents found that children who were home alone for eleven or more hours a week were three times more likely than other children to abuse alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana. This was as true for upper-class as for working – class children . Research on adults who had been left home alone as children suggested that they run a far high risk a “developing substantial fear responses- recurring nightmares, fear of noises, fear of dark, fear for personal safety.”


After reading the book, we can see, the corporate world, including global economic environment has become a powerful time sucking apparatus sucking every family, every parent’s time away from home, from their children and loved one.

Can work and life balance really exist? If the fundamental economic superstructure does not change, can any individual, any company, and any nation escape from this “time sucking apparatus”? I doubt so, the individual parent will say, I need money to give my children better living condition, better education; the company will say, we need making profit to stay competitive in order to survive, so that we can be countable to shareholders; the nation will say, we need extra economic active workforce to keep our nation GDP growing so that we can provide more benefits to the people.

The reality behind all these economic excuses is that there is an unintended consequence with every stage of economic advancement, which is of great social cost, It will be too painful for family, too costly for company and too great for a nation to pay. It is always to easier to prevent than to heal. The action needed is NOW by every conscious parent, every social responsible corporate and every long term vision the nation. If not, when these social disasters transfer into economic disasters, it will be too later.