Work and Life, where is harmony?

Arlie Hochschild, a lady sociologist with extraordinary sensitivity and ability to grasp the essence from ordinary lives, has never failed to amaze me with her "sociological imagination" (you have to ask Prof Shirley Sun to explain why she did so)

She was the first who conceptualized the women's ordinary ordeal of "second shift" in struggling balance of work and home, then she fatefully announced that there is contemporary "time bind" in modern post-industrial families where work place is like home and home is like work; now, (not so recent though), she indicted the "care deficit" is omnipresent, originated in the first world countries, through global polarization and migrant workers from third world countries to ease the care deficit in the first world countries, the new care deficit arise in third world countries too.

Work and life balance sounds more “a bland slogan” than any realistic solution. In her article “The emotional geography of work and family life”, she poses the question of why, despite of existence many so called “family friendly corporate policies”, many employees are “shying away” from taking up any.

She suggests the following possibilities:

• They cannot afford to earn less
• They are afraid to be laid off in a period of economic downturn
• Their seniority and advancement in career will be marginalized
• Their managers responsible for implementing family friendly policies may be openly or covertly undermining them
• This one could be very subtle, the company in response of global competition has to ask the employees to work longer and more in order to reduce “cost”

However, none of these directly answers why employees weren’t trying to actively resist it?

According to Anthony Giddens, structuration is the dynamic process whereby structures come into being, for structure to change, there must be changes in what people do. Hochschild suggests that we need to look at family and work place with an emotional cultural understanding. A change in structure requires a change in emotional culture.

An emotional culture is a set of rituals, beliefs about feelings an d rules governing feeling which induce emotional focus, a sense of the “sacred”. A family’s activities can be categorized into the “sacred” core activities and periphery activities. It is emotional culture essentially shapes the experience of family life.

Time becomes central issue in the context of speed up modern family life. There isn’t enough time for one to do what shall be done and wish to be done. Therefore, the “quality time” has since arisen. In reality, “quality time” refers to time of no distraction to devote core family activities one thinks. That also means one may have to choose to give up periphery activities in order to not to “waster time”. What are less important, periphery activities, you can name it, bonding with distant relatives; household chores etc.

Although theoretically family in modern society is separated from the workplace, its emotional cultural boundary is very blur and often closely intertwined. The gender pattern of modern family is clear, according to Hochschild, more and more women have to join into workplace outside home, they have less and less time to perform family rituals, at the same time, men are not doing any much more. That leads a net loss in ritual life at home. What does it mean? It means family, as source of emotional support, will be less functioning comparing to workplace.

In her research, Hochschild had documented many who feel “home is no longer a place of haven, many who are more loyal to company than to their family, and many who prefer to be at workplace….at workplace one can be better appreciated for his/her skills and labours, while home labour is least valued."

This overall cultural shift may account for why many workers are going along with the speed up of work-family life and not to resist against it.

Hochschild observes that at least three trends may exacerbate this reversal of family and work cultures; trends in the family, trends at work, and a cultural consumerism which reinforces trends in the family and work.

First, half of marriages in American end in divorce- the highest in the world;
Second, many corporations have emotionally engineered for top and upper middle managers a world of friendly ritual and positive reinforcement. New corporate cultures tend to foster intense relation at work. By contrast, there are fewer “award ceremonies” and little helpful feedback at home.
Third, the gender desegregation at workplace offers wider choice of mate selection in workplace, that again reinforces the emotional attachment in workplace. Forces pulling workers out of families life and into the workplace are set into perpetual consumerism.

Consumerism acts as a mechanism which maintains the emotional reversal of work and family, the more needs to consume poses the more need to earn money which means the more time away from home. The vicious circle goes on.

A little boy asks his mother, “Mother, why are you working so hard?”
“So we can have better life” relies his mother
"but when can we have better life>? asks the boy
....

When the workplace is more like home, where is “better life” to be for this mother and her little boy?

Hochschild points out that capitalist competition is not simply a matter of market expansion around the global, but of local geographies of emotion at home. It was driven force at previous era for father left home to earn a living for the better family lives, now the same also drives mothers away from home, home is the place of……

The only things left are unattended children, unsolved quarrels, uninviting atmosphere for working parents…. That maybe triggered Home Bound movement started in early 80s, when a small group of Americans head to suburb to away from corporate life, to back home. Will these save family? Is family matter any more?