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title: "Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism"
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# Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

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How, then, have parents preserved their time with children? A common explanation is that much housework has been mechanized. We will consider this argument in chapter 5. Sufice it to say here is that, despite dramatic improvements in domestic technology, the amount of time spent on household tasks has not actually shown any corresponding dramatic decline. However, there has been a marked shift in the composition of time away from routine domestic work (cooking and cleaning) and toward child care but also shopping and odd jobs. But the total time in unpaid domestic labor of all kinds held constant over the twentieth century.

The major change has come from working women themselves, who reduce their time in unpaid labor at home as they move into the workforce. However, they do not remotely reduce their housework hour-for-hour for time spent in paid labor. And while their male partners increase their own time in housework, this is not nearly as much as working wives reduce theirs. The upshot is that rather less unpaid household labor gets done overall in the dual-earner household—but women’s total combined time in paid and unpaid household labor is substantially greater than is the typical nonemployed woman’s in domestic labor alone. Working mothers’ combined time in paid and unpaid household labor typically exceeds fathers’ by five hours a week and nonemployed mothers’ by nineteen hours a week.22 The working woman is much busier than either her male colleagues or her housewife counterpart.

Moreover, it is also primarily women who adjust their working hours in relation to the number and ages of their children. The decrease in women’s employment comes with the birth of the first child, and they continue to curtail their hours after they have children. Fathers, if anything, tend to increase hours of employment after the birth of a child. Men and women thus make diferent decisions in allocating their time, based in part on choice and in part on institutional forces and cultural pressures. These diferences have diminished in recent years, but mothers continue to adjust their schedules more than fathers do. As a result, there is still a pay penalty associated with motherhood, whereby mothers’ wages lag behind fathers’ in virtually all developed countries.23

Chapter three

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That women fit themselves to their family shows up in their time strain; married women want more time to themselves because they have adjusted to being there for their children. Cultural expectations about what mothers and fathers should do remains strong, with mothers feeling more of a need to put children and family first as they sacrifice their own need. Overall, it appears that parents are giving themselves over to rearing children to the extent possible given other demands on their time and limited resources in some families. Yet they feel as if their eforts are not enough.

As noted above, these feelings of time pressure are largely the result of normative changes in expectations about good parenting.24 Among both working-class and middle-class mothers, good mothering is defined in terms of devoting unlimited time and resources to their children. As family size becomes smaller, children become a central focus and are seen to require extraordinarily labor-intensive parenting. Intensive mothering is a cultural ideal to which women are expected to sacrifice careers, leisure time, and whatever else is necessary to ensure that their children thrive.

Fathers are expected to be equally involved in care giving. The last half-century has witnessed dramatic changes in men’s attitudes toward parenting and in conceptions of masculinity more broadly. However, the shared belief in egalitarian family relationships has not yet been matched by men’s behavior. For example, the substantial increase in the time fathers spend with children is three times larger on weekends than workdays, with the result that routine child care responsibilities are left to their spouses on days when they must work.25 And, rather than fathers replacing mothers’ time, mothers are present for most of the time that fathers are caring for their children (see chapter 5). While this family time spent together may well be the most cherished, it does result in a gender gap in leisure, as I argue below.

Finally, women’s role as household manager also adds to their feeling of always feeling rushed. Being responsible for managing something as complex as children’s lives and a home, even when away from home, “may also account for the large gender discrepancy between fathers’ and mothers’ feelings about needing more time for oneself, feeling rushed, and feeling like they do more than one thing at a time.”26 Mothers’ greater subjective sense of time pressures may derive from their being the one who continues to orchestrate family life—a reality that is dificult to capture in linear time-diary data.

The Time-Pressure Paradox

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Such arguments involve moving beyond quantifying the volume of (paid and unpaid) hours worked in order to broach the more subtle, qualitative aspects of the meaning and experience of time. They suggest the need to explore the ways in which time is ordered and practiced as well as the density or intensity of the lived experience of time. It is clear that time pressure is complex and multidimensional. Below I will outline a schema that delineates three diferent mechanisms that cause time scarcity. But first let us turn more broadly to the cultural connotations of being busy.

Cultural Acceleration: Busy Lives

So far we have examined a range of economic and demographic factors that contribute to time pressure, such as changes in the labor market, working hours, and the composition of households. We have also considered how contemporary discourses of hyperparenting heighten perceptions of time scarcity. But there are another set of explanations that primarily focus on consumption. These explanations are related in that the dramatic shift in women’s employment coincided with the “overwork culture,” turning workers into “willing slaves” who are prepared to work ever-longer hours in a society that equates busyness with success and status.27

Such arguments see consumption in purely negative terms, as fueling long working hours because of our competitive consumerist culture. According to Schor, we are trapped in a “squirrel cage,” an insidious cycle of work and spend where we compete with our neighbors’ lifestyles and compensate for our lack of time with children by buying them things. Why, she asks, don’t afluent North Americans “downshift” and reduce both their hours of work and levels of consumption as a way out of the work-spend cycle?

If only things were so straightforward. There are deep-seated psychological reasons for apparently unnecessary consumption in a capitalist society in which people’s sense of self and sense of freedom come to be defined by money and possessions. For a long time social scientists have talked about the complex relationship between shopping and individual identity formation and the extent to which purchasing goods is a social practice oriented to others.28 The requirement for individuals to narrate their own identity through styles of consumption brings with it the demands of trying new and varied experiences, and this leads individuals toward the insatiable pursuit of more cultural practices. In short, being busy has become a necessary condition of a fulfilling lifestyle.

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Perhaps cultural discourses that value action-packed lives, coupled with high levels of consumption, are to blame for upward-spiraling perceptions of feeling rushed. Indeed, busyness may result not only in stress but, for some, in feelings of increased happiness or life satisfaction arising from the positive energy connected to states of arousal.29 Such an approach reformulates the discussion about the socioeconomic correlates of time pressure into a debate around the manifestations and consequences of busyness. “Whereas the concept of ‘time pressure’ is negative in its connotations, ‘busyness’ is at worst neutral, and may indeed carry with it the positive connotations of ‘busyness’ as an antonym to ‘idleness.’”30

So has the notion of busyness acquired a new positive meaning in our culture? Is busyness a status symbol for those with higher social capital? In an intriguing argument, Jonathan Gershuny claims that whereas a century ago those in the upper income bracket were defined by their leisure, in a reversal of Thorstein Veblen’s classic Theory of the Leisure Class, nowadays prestige accords to those who work long hours and are busiest at work.31

To this point I have described how the increase in dual-job households in conjunction with shifting norms of parenting contribute to time pressure. Entirely consistent with this explanation, however, are two further arguments. One is to do with the density of leisure itself, created by the desire for ever more intensive consumption of goods and services.32 The second involves not so much a change in behavior but a change in the way feelings of “busyness” are constructed out of these: “the growth in busy feelings may in part reflect an increasingly positive view of ‘busyness’ that results from its association with the increasingly busy lifestyle of the most privileged groups in developed societies.”33 Today, it is conspicuous devotion to time-intensive work activities rather than the conspicuous consumption of leisure that is the signifier of high social status.

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“Busyness” is a subjective state that results from the individual’s assessment of his or her recent or expected activity patterns in the light of current norms and expectations. However, for busyness to be an externally observable behavior, it would need to be reflected in long hours of paid work and in the density of work and leisure, that is, the frequency and variety of activities undertaken. (It would also be evident in the multiplicity of simultaneous activities, a topic not covered here but which, I will argue in subsequent chapters, is key in the digital age.)

Gershuny finds little evidence for such objective behavioral changes in busyness. While higher-skilled groups did increase their paid work time relative to lower-skilled groups, paid work overall declined for both men and women. Significantly, there was no increase in the intensity of activities (on either a workday or a nonwork day). Although this empirical evidence cannot prove that there has been a change in the social construction of busyness, Gershuny concludes that it is consistent with his argument. If there has been no behavioral change, then the explanation must lie in the changed cultural meaning of busyness. One part of the resolution of the time-pressure paradox, then, is that busyness, and not leisure, is the “badge of honor.”

According to this view, then, busyness is largely a cultural orientation. Certainly, the argument resonates with the representation of some groups, such as financial traders and corporate executives, who are invested in high-pressure, burnout careers and whose status derives from their workaholism. However, the parallel with Veblen’s leisure class, while striking, exaggerates the freedom of this new superordinate class whose work pressures are largely the result of managerial performance measures. They may embrace the high-speed work culture, but it is important to emphasize that it is not entirely of their choosing.

This is particularly pertinent given the extent to which, over the last decade or so, firms have sought to convert many high-wage and fullbenefit workers to contingent and contract workers. The managers and professionals who have survived work longer hours to ensure their job security and increase their chances of promotion. Long hours are the principal means of demonstrating commitment and ambition to employers. A concurrent trend in the economy has been the expansion of work schedules into evenings and weekends. The profound influence of mobile technologies on working time is the subject of subsequent chapters. At the very least, discussions about the symbolic status of busyness should take into account changed employment conditions and concerns about job security.

Chapter three

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Moreover, the culture of ostentatious work performance is one in which men can more easily immerse themselves than can women. While there has been a convergence in women’s and men’s aspirations for highpowered managerial or professional careers, my own research on corporate managers reveals that the domestic circumstances of women difer from those of men.34 While a significant number of male senior managers have partners who are not in paid employment, women managers generally live in dual-career households. Women are therefore more likely to experience intense friction between the demands of career and family life. By overlooking this issue, Gershuny leaves us with the impression that the new world of work is gender neutral. The changing norms of busyness are a vital element in resolving the time-pressure paradox, but we must be wary of the implication that it is equally seductive to all.

If busyness in paid work can be a form of status distinction, so too can busyness in leisure. Reexamining Gershuny’s argument, Oriel Sullivan points to the often overlooked importance of the density of leisure. It turns out that those who work long hours in employment also have a greater leisure density.35 In other words, they ceaselessly pack more and more activities into the same time period. Otherwise, how can incomerich, time-poor households in afluent Western economies both work more and consume more? Her answer identifies two temporal strategies of consumption: leisure consumption can happen faster and goods may be continuously replaced with more expensive alternatives. These are both strategies for maximizing the “time yield” in time-pressured modern societies.

There is a vast literature on the nature of consumption and the cultural tastes of modern consumers. However, little is known about the pace or busyness of leisure participation. To measure the “voraciousness” of leisure consumption, Sullivan analyzed the frequency of five out-ofhome leisure activities: going to the cinema/concert/theater; eating/ drinking out in a restaurant, café, or pub; playing sports/keeping fit/ walking; watching live sports; and attending leisure activity groups.36 The logic of this list is that these activities take both time and money to engage in and require a degree of temporal planning and coordination. Indeed, she found that high-status, dual-earner couples with dependent children use both temporal strategies of consumption the most. They have the highest level of participation in these leisure activities and they continuously upgrade their consumer goods (without the time to use them).

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Once more, gender and social status reinforce each other so that the greatest diferential in voraciousness is between men with high social status and women with the lowest. Embracing a busy, diverse pattern of cultural consumption practices has thus become a mark of distinction among high status groups.

To date, most literature on time pressure has focused on the impact of working practices, both in the sphere of employment and in the domestic sphere. In modern, time-pressured societies, the pace of leisure is also of signal importance. I will return to this topic below, and later I will be looking specifically at how ICTs intensify leisure. But first, such arguments about the busyness of work and leisure time point to the dificulty and complexity of measuring the temporal rhythms of daily life. Not all activities have the same tempo. Time as measured by the ticking of the clock cannot remotely capture our quotidian experience of multiple and overlapping temporalities. If we feel short of time, it can be for a variety of reasons and take a variety of forms. Indeed, it may even be the case that some of us have more time, but not time of the right kind or when we need it.

The Temporal Disorganization of Daily Life

It is for this reason that I turn to the work of Dale Southerton and Mark Tomlinson, who argue that the experience of harriedness is multifaceted, depending on which aspect of temporality is being “squeezed.”37 They distinguish three mechanisms that generate diferent senses of feeling pressed for time. First, the volume or duration of time required to complete sets of work and consumption tasks is the basis for the substantive sense of being harried; second, temporal disorganization is the outcome of the dificulties of coordinating social practices with others; and third, temporal density accounts for experiences of time that can be described as juggling and multitasking, that is, the allocation of certain practices within temporal rhythms that create a sense of intensity in the conduct of those practices. This attempt to delineate diferent aspects of time pressure captures well the idea that harriedness is a multidimensional experience.

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Up to this point, we have focused on the first dimension, pressures derived from the volume of (clock) time available or the substantive sense of being overloaded. The most comprehensive account of this, as we have seen, is provided by time-diary studies that record and measure the number of minutes devoted to diferent activities. Diaries can be employed to account for patterns of convergence and divergence of time use across diferent countries, social classes, and gender, and to explore the domestic division of labor.38 However, the duration of activities remains the primary focus of analysis. They are much less fit for the purpose of analyzing qualitative dimensions of time, such as the tempo or intensity of activities, and the rhythms and sequences in which activities are conducted.

Here I want to consider the second mechanism listed above, temporal disorganization, which highlights the importance of looking at the rhythms or organization of life. This sense of harriedness is less conspicuous than the substantive form, because it accounts for experiences that are not obviously connected with an absolute shortage of time. It is particularly apposite, however, given the extent to which collective social practices, derived from institutionally stable temporal rhythms, have been eroded.

We live in a society in which the standard working week, where work was synchronized for a substantial proportion of the population, is no longer the norm. Flexible working hours, 24/7 working time, and contract work create coordination problems, as working times and locations are increasingly deregulated and scattered. The growth of nonstandard evening and weekend work hours is also associated with increased time pressures, in part because they decrease individuals’ abilities to mesh work schedules with the social activities of friends and family as well as to find adequate time to sleep. While higher socioeconomic groups may be able to utilize flexibilization to gain greater control over their time, lower status groups sufer from temporal fragmentation caused by working irregular hours.

Nevertheless, socializing is made more dificult for both groups because of the weakening of the shared sociotemporal order and a corresponding fragmenting of activity. As Southerton elaborates, whereas the middle classes tend to meet more by prearrangement, the working classes use public spaces to meet where there is a strong likelihood of meeting network members by chance.39 In both cases, however, coordination becomes increasingly problematic. It means that by “turning up” in public spaces, one is less likely to meet friends and acquaintances because they might work at diferent times of the day. (No wonder mobile phones have become essential aids to the personalization of scheduling—a matter we leave for discussion later.) Various consumption practices also involve interaction within social networks that require coordination. In sum, the problem of coordination is collective—it requires the alignment of practices across the schedules of social networks. In this sense, harriedness is a consequence of the dificulty of coordinating practices in time and space.

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A good example of this is provided by the emergence of convenience food. The widespread use of partially and totally prepared food reflects the desire to save time, as those with most money and least time buy more of it. Such consumer products are widely seen as solutions to the problem of cooking and eating in the context of a busy, time-pressured lifestyle. However, Alan Warde argues that they are as much a response to the reordering of the time-space relations of everyday life as a modern search for the reduction of toil.40 While family meals retain their symbolic significance as important forms of sociality, they now pose considerable scheduling problems in getting people together in the same place at the same time. The cook has to be in the right place for long enough, but so do those for whom she cooks. The erosion of institutionally fixed routines and the fragmentation of daily activities mean that more negotiations, more decisions, and more efort are required to perform the necessities of daily life. For a significant proportion of people, planning to meet people becomes a major preoccupation.

According to these arguments, underpinning much of the feeling of haste is the dificulty of synchronizing time-space paths: “the problem of timing supersedes the problem of shortage of time.”41 People may have more time, but more important than the hours worked is their dispersal through the week. While acknowledging that the increase in women working does contribute to time pressure, the emphasis here is on the intransigent problems of scheduling in a deroutinized society. Discussions of harriedness have not paid suficient attention to the aspect of space and the need for interpersonal conjunction.

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While this exposition of temporal disorganization adds a great deal to our understanding of time pressure, the focus has again shifted somewhat from households toward individuals. We have already seen that dual-earner families are the most time pressured, and it is precisely at the level of households where most of the coordination problems arise. The issue of coordination among spouses is a crucial underpinning of the demand for flexible start and finish times at work. When both partners participate in the labor force, the family’s day becomes more complex as work schedules may not overlap or, in other words, may be desynchronized. Everyday family life is diferent when work schedules are desynchronized, as couples tend to spend less time together but share domestic and parental work more equally.

The incidence of, and reasons for, of scheduling among dual-earner couples (that is, partners’ timing their work schedule so that one is not working when the other one is) are therefore directly related to time pressure. And, indeed, there is strong evidence that of scheduling is both widespread and growing. Based on a study of French time-use surveys, Laurent Lesnard found that families in which both partners work standard workdays (of approximately eight hours) represent less than half of total family workdays.42 About 70 percent of the work time of these couples is simultaneous (synchronous). For the rest, atypical family workdays are the result of long hours, shift work, part-time work, and short or irregular work hours. This pattern is consistent with findings for the United States and many other modern economies.

But is this trend the result of couples freely choosing to reschedule their work, trading time together for parental eficiency? In the study, the few couples who have control over their timing overwhelmingly favor family workdays, suggesting a strong general preference among couples for synchronized work schedules. However, most couples do not have temporal autonomy over their work hours. Atypical work schedules and of scheduling are highly correlated with employment sector, occupation, and position on the social ladder. When husbands’ positions are at the management level, standard workdays are much more common than for factory-worker families. Those who have no power over their work schedules have strikingly higher chances of having desynchronized family workdays. In other words, very few couples are free to fix the timing of their work hours. Dual-earner couples’ of scheduling is thus a consequence of employers’ economic behavior rather than employees’ preferences.

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