Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

The profound ambivalence that people feel is all the more understandable given the fundamental transformation that we are witnessing in the nature of capitalism, work, and the labor market. Sociologists like Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have written extensively about the accelerated pace of social change in late modern societies. They emphasize the sharp decline in both the power and legitimacy of authoritative norms and institutions and the increasing uncertainty of all social arrangements. Both connect the sea change in how employees understand themselves and their work to these developments. However, it is Richard Sennett who most compellingly portrays the “short-term” temporal horizons that are the hallmark of the contemporary work experience.

In The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Sennett argues that the loss of the “long term” in the new capitalism is producing a crisis of character.45 In the old industrial economy, the possibility of sustained, predictable, usually lifetime engagement with a workplace was the bedrock of people’s identities—their “character.” Work provided status, dignity, and the opportunity for selfdevelopment. With its principle of “no long term,” however, the new, flexible capitalism has torn away the basis for the formation of sustaining identities, resulting in a growing malaise as people search in vain for a place to anchor a meaning for their lives. Modern work is fragmented, insecure, stressful, and unpredictable. Without the guarantees of lifetime employment and a steady-state career trajectory, workers have little incentive to be loyal to or trusting of their bosses, coworkers and corporate employers. Sennett diagnoses an increasingly lost workforce, unable to build the social relationships that lie at the heart of a fully developed, sustaining social identity.

Although this linear, predominantly male biography was never as standard as Sennett claims, it is true that the old contract between work and time has broken down.46 The historical trend of salaried work and socialized production has stalled. Occupations that extend over the whole of a work life are rare, and job tenure is shorter than it was a generation ago. Sennett’s account resonates strongly with those employed in professional and managerial jobs who have seen secure bureaucratic careers erode and the shift of market risks and responsibilities onto individuals themselves. Emblematic of this truncation of time spans is the spread of performance management systems, which audit individuals on current performance, without regard to a person’s history of efort. Such seismic shifts in the wider culture inform our overall sense that time is telescoping.

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This chapter has focused on how information and communication technologies afect time while people are at work. However, one of the main claims about the impact of ICTs is their propensity to extend work into times and spaces traditionally work-free. The Pew survey shows that networked workers use digital devices across social domains, including home, to accomplish work.47 I will examine this claim, the so-called blurring of personal and work time, in detail in chapter 6. But first I want to consider the impact of technology on domestic work. If the time deficit is as much to do with the combined demands of work and family life as it is to do with technological change, then the time spent in housework is a critical factor in people’s experience of harriedness.

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Chapter Five Doing Domestic Time

The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet has.

H a-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism

Advances in technology have transformed the work that goes on in the household. Indeed, it is not too much to claim that an industrial revolution occurred in the home, that “the change from the laundry tub to the washing machine is no less profound than the change from the hand loom to the power loom.”1 As in other spheres, considerable optimism has attached to the possibility that technology may provide the solution to time-consuming drudgery.

Many economists and sociologists have argued that it is precisely the time-saving properties of domestic technologies that freed women to enter the labor force. For example, Ha-Joon Chang argues that household appliances, such as the washing machine, have been revolutionary in that they liberated women from doing tedious housework and led to the demise of the domestic servant.2 While such arguments can tend toward technological determinism, they are refreshing in attributing significance to what are generally regarded as mundane household artifacts.

This chapter will explore the relationship between domestic technology and the time households allocate to domestic work (leaving ICTs largely to the next chapter). In particular, I will grapple with the conundrum that devices allegedly designed to save labor time fail to do so, and in some cases actually increase the time needed for the task.

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Household technology has largely been invisible in academic discourse about the acceleration society, and this is not unrelated to the invisibility of housework. Yet, as we saw in chapter 3, a principal reason for the perception that life has become more rushed is the rise of dual-earner households, with work time squeezing the time available for housework and caring activities. Any discussion of household labor is always at the same time a discussion of gender roles and relationships. So gender diferences in perceptions of time and time pressure will be a theme throughout this chapter.

I begin by providing some historical background to the mechanization of housework, and then consider contemporary arguments about the impact of technological innovation on the ways in which households assign time to housework. I will examine the reasons why “time-saving” domestic technologies, such as washing machines and microwaves, have been more successful in time shifting than they have been in reducing the amount of time spent in domestic work. Changed cultural expectations about parenting, as we have already noted, point to the peripheral efect of technology. Here, however, my focus is on the related issue of how domestic activities and artifacts themselves are intertwined with gender identities. The way in which men and women divide their time in the home, and the type of housework they do, impacts upon their differing feelings of harriedness. Finally, I examine the cultural imaginaries around the digital home of the future, showing how they reflect the mindset of their designers.

The Industrialization of the Home

What was the relationship between the technological developments in the economy and those in the home? To what extent did new technologies “industrialize” the home and transform domestic labor? Why, despite massive technological changes in the home—such as running water, gas and electric cookers, central heating, washing machines, and refrigerators—do studies show that household work in the industrialized countries still accounts for approximately half of the total working time?3

The conventional wisdom is that the forces of technological change and the growth of the market economy have progressively absorbed much of the household’s role in production. The classic formulation of this position is to be found in Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales’s functionalist sociology of the family.4 They argue that industrialization removed many functions from the family system until all that remains is consumption. For Parsons and Bales, the wife-mother function is the primary socialization of children and the stabilization of the adult personality; it thus becomes mainly expressive or psychological, compared with the instrumental male world of “real” work. More generally, modern technology is seen as having either eliminated or made less arduous almost all women’s former household work, thus freeing women to enter the labor force. To most commentators, the history of housework is the story of its elimination.

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Although it is true that industrialization transformed households, the major changes in the pattern of household work during this period were not those that the traditional model predicts. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in her celebrated study of the development of household technology between 1860 and 1960, argues exactly that.5 For her, the view that the household has passed from being a unit of production to a unit of consumption, with the attendant assumption that women have nothing left to do at home, is grossly misleading. Rather, the processes by which the American home became industrialized were much more complex and heterogeneous than this.

Cowan provides the following explanations for the failure of the “industrial revolution in the home” to eliminate household tasks. Mechanization gave rise to a whole range of new tasks which, although not as physically demanding, were as time-consuming as the jobs they had replaced. The loss of servants meant that even middle-class housewives had to do all the housework themselves. Further, although domestic technology did raise the productivity of housework, it was accompanied by rising expectations of the housewife’s role, which generated more domestic work for women. Finally, mechanization has only had a limited efect on housework because it has taken place within the context of the privatized, single-family household.

It is important to distinguish between diferent phases of industrialization that involved diferent technologies. Cowan characterizes twentieth-century technology as consisting of eight interlocking systems: food, clothing, health care, transportation, water, gas, electricity, and petroleum products. While some technological systems do fit the model of a shift from production to consumption, others do not.

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Food, clothing, and health care systems do fit the “production to consumption” model. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the purchasing of processed foods and readymade clothes instead of home production was becoming common. Somewhat later, the health care system also moved into centralized institutions, and these trends continued with increasing momentum during the first half of the last century.

The transportation system and its relation to changing consumption patterns, however, exemplified the shift in the other direction. During the nineteenth century, household goods were often delivered, mailorder catalogs were widespread, and most people did not spend much time buying goods. With the advent of the motor car after the First World War, all this began to change. By 1930, the automobile had become the prime mode of transportation in the United States. Delivery services of all kinds began to disappear and the burden of providing transportation shifted from the seller to the buyer.6 Meanwhile, women gradually replaced men as the drivers of transport, more and more business converted to the “self-service” concept, and households became increasingly dependent on housewives to provide the service. The time spent on shopping tasks expanded until today the average time spent is eight hours per week, the equivalent to an entire working day.7

In this way, households moved from the net consumption to the net production of transportation services, and housewives became the transporters of purchased goods rather than the receivers of them. The purchasing of goods provides a classic example of a task that is generally either ignored altogether or considered as ‘not work’, in spite of the time, energy and skill required, and its essential role in the national economy.

The last four technological systems—water, gas, electricity, and petroleum—also reorganized housework, yet their impact was ambiguous. On the one hand, they radically increased the productivity of housewives. “Modern technology enabled the American housewife of 1950 to produce singlehandedly what her counterpart of 1850 needed a staf of three or four to produce; a middle-class standard of health and cleanliness.”8 On the other hand, while eliminating much drudgery, modern labor-saving devices did not reduce the necessity for time-consuming labor. Thus there is no simple cause-and-efect relation between the mechanization of homes and changes in the volume and nature of household work.

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Indeed, the disappearance of paid and unpaid servants (unmarried daughters, maiden aunts, grandparents, and children fall into the latter category) as household workers, and the imposition of the entire job on the housewife herself, was arguably the most significant change. The proportion of servants to households in America dropped from one servant to every fifteen households in 1900 to one to forty-two in 1950.9 Most of this shrinkage took place during the 1920s. The disappearance of domestic servants stimulated the mechanization of homes, which in turn may have hastened the disappearance of servants.

This change in the structure of the household labor force was accompanied by a remodeled ideology of housewifery. In the early years of the twentieth century, the domestic science movement, the germ theory of disease and the idea of “scientific motherhood” led to new exacting standards of housework and child care.10 As standards of personal and household cleanliness rose, the introduction of washing machines, for example, increased laundering to meet higher expectations of cleanliness. There was a major change in the importance attached to child rearing and mother’s role. The average family had fewer children, but modern child-centered approaches to parenting involved spending much more time and efort.

Housework began to be represented as an expression of the housewife’s afection for her family. The split between public and private meant that the home was expected to provide a haven from the alienated, stressful, technological order of the workplace and was expected to provide entertainment, emotional support, and sexual gratification. The burden of satisfying these needs fell on the housewife.

With home and housework acquiring heightened emotional significance, it became impossible to rationalize household production along the lines of industrial production. Rather than following Fordist principles of large-scale production systems and a cooperative application of labor, the dominance of single-family residences and the private ownership of correspondingly small-scale amenities is, as Cowan aptly puts it, a completely irrational use of technology and labor time within the home:

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Several million American women cook supper each night in several million separate homes over several million separate stoves—a specter which should be suficient to drive any rational technocrat into the loony bin.  .  .  . Out there in the land of household work there are small industrial plants which sit idle for the better part of every working day; there are expensive pieces of highly mechanized equipment which only get used once or twice a month; there are consumption units which weekly trundle out to their markets to buy 8 ounces of this nonperishable product and 12 ounces of that one.11

This was not inevitable. There were many examples of alternatives, such as British and American experiments in social housing in the 1930s, with communal restaurants and laundries.12 However, these initiatives foundered and, consequently, domestic technology has been designed for use in privatized single-family households, requiring individuals to have a multiplicity of skills.

The relationship between domestic technology and the time spent on household work provides a good illustration of the general problem of technological determinism, where technology in itself is said to have resulted in social changes. The demise of domestic servants, changing standards of hygiene and child care, the ideology of the housewife’s role, and the symbolic importance of the home reflect social as much as technological developments. Indeed, it is impossible to separate out changing housework practices from concurrent technological innovations.

Gender Specialization of Household Work

Domestic technology, then, has not directly reduced the time spent on housework. However, the way that men and women relate to technology may be a significant factor in determining how they spend time at home. This section will consider whether domestic innovations have had any efect on the gender specialization of household labor.

As I have already noted, a key factor fueling time pressure is the growth of the dual-earner family. Although this has been accompanied by a widespread belief in the value of sharing domestic duties in modern marriages, in reality, women are particularly harried because of their disproportionate load. Although men’s contributions have increased substantially, women’s labor still accounts for over two-thirds of the total time devoted to unpaid work.13 While the sheer volume of work is bound to influence feelings of time pressure, so too will the kind of work performed. Here, therefore, I want to look at diferent types of housework that men and women undertake and what this means for their experience of time.

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There has been a gradual convergence in gender patterns of domestic work between the 1960s and the 2000s. This emerges clearly from an extensive review of cross-national trends covering over twenty countries by Man Yee Kan, Oriel Sullivan, and Jonathan Gershuny.14 They distinguish between diferent categories of domestic work as follows: routine housework (including daily routine types of housework such as cleaning, doing the laundry, and cooking), caring for family members (including care for children and adults), and nonroutine types of household work (such as shopping, gardening, and household repairs). Their main conclusion is that gender segregation between the diferent types of domestic work remains remarkably resilient.

While men are increasing their contribution in all categories of domestic work, they still spend comparatively little time overall on routine housework and much less time on child care. Men mainly do the less routine types of chores, such as DIY projects and shopping. Women still undertake the bulk of each type of domestic work, focusing particularly on routine housework (with cleaning, cooking, and laundry exhibiting the highest level of female specialization) and caring for others. Shopping and domestic travel times show a rising trend for both sexes and are less unequally divided, though women still do the largest part of these activities.

This traditional gendered specialization of household tasks is itself a major barrier to the equalizing of time use. Its persistence over the past forty years, despite women’s increasing labor force participation, points to the continuing hold that gender-appropriate use of time has for feminine and masculine identities. Caring activities and routine cooking, cleaning, and laundry are strongly marked as female, whereas nonroutine chores such as DIY projects and outside work are male activities. Perhaps surprisingly, the authors note that these gender divisions do not seem very susceptible to change even in countries where gender ideologies are considered relatively nontraditional (such as the Scandinavian countries).15

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