My historical analysis focuses on the United States. At the same time, I often refer to advanced capitalist society in general, especially during its postwar Golden Age era, as my unit of analysis. As noted in Chapter 2, the general puzzling pattern of work time, productivity, and consumption is present to varying degrees in every afluent capitalist society. Given its focus on the United States, I certainly would not want to claim that the evidence examined in the book provides strong inductive support for the theory across all advanced industrial capitalist societies. The aim of the book is better understood as abductive rather than inductive. That is, my objective is to construct a hypothesis, one that seems suficiently plausible to be worth exploring in other contexts.10 The analysis of patterns in US history, in addition to providing some empirical support for the argument, also serves as a heuristic for the development and exposition of the general theory.
The largely abductive aim of this book shapes the structure of the argument. It begins by drawing attention to a state of afairs that has struck many as surprising and, therefore, as standing in need of explanation. I then set out a theory of the relationship between wage-labor exchange and consumption under capitalism from which, if true, the surprising state of afairs would follow as a matter of course. I give some historical grounding to the theory, focusing on the United States, which I take to be a good case to illustrate the more general puzzle. My strategy is to show how the theory illuminates a wide range of phenomena related to work and mass consumption under capitalism. Considering the degree to which capitalism encompasses every dimension of social, cultural, and economic life, going for breadth of empirical analysis seems well advised.
The point of the empirical work is to substantiate the theory to the degree that it takes on some prima facie plausibility—providing grounds for thinking that this particular abduction might be worthy of further investigation, perhaps in delimited contexts, which might be more amenable to inductive testing. If readers conclude that the theory seems convincing in the case of US capitalism, they may go on to ponder how much light it might shed on other capitalist contexts. The empirical analysis of the United States serves as a guide to what sorts of institutions and practices to look at in ascertaining whether a similar dynamic might be at work in other places in which mass consumer capitalism developed. In other settings, there are, of course, bound to be mediating factors that complicate the picture.
8
Time for Things