This is not to suggest that the power of capital does not bias things in the direction of increasing output over reducing work time. As the political philosopher G. A. Cohen argues, capitalist agencies do, in efect, encourage a preference for output over free time. Cohen makes the reasonable point that under capitalism, there are no advertising campaigns promoting the desirability of more free time as an alternative to more income. As a thought experiment, he comes up with an amusing example of what an ad in such a campaign might look like (all caps are Cohen’s): “WHEN YOUR UNION NEGOTIATES, MAKE IT GO FOR SHORTER HOURS, NOT MORE PAY. ELECTRIC CARVING KNIVES ARE FINE, BUT NOTHING BEATS FREE-DOM” (G. A. Cohen 2000, p. 318). Cohen’s argument is that the aggregate efect of advertising might be to distort people’s preferences. But influencing preferences is, of course, not the same thing as brute economic coercion.
Another explanation for the changing attitude to work time suggested by Costa’s data, one drawn from the perspective of developments at the very end of the twentieth century, might be along the lines of the account given by Arlie Hochschild (1997), in her ethnographic study of attitudes to work time, The Time Bind. Hochschild found that willingness to spend long hours at work among the professional employees she studied was connected to the increasingly fraught and work-like character of family life, in conjunction with more emotionally engaging work. Work, in efect, had become, at least for the professional classes, a welcome retreat from the stress experienced in the domestic sphere. Hochschild’s findings are intriguing, but her sample is small and composed of employees working for a Fortune 500 company and, therefore, perhaps not representative of the general population. But if the part of Hochschild’s account that focuses on attitudes to family life can be generalized, then the shift in preferences toward earning more income and away from free time might well reflect an underlying change in the relative satisfactions of work versus home life. As the discontents of domestic life increased, so the aversion to spending time at work decreased.29
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Time for Things