Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

The dominant characteristic of routine housework is that it is never complete. It is both less satisfying and more tiring than nonroutine household tasks. For women the home represents a sphere of work; for men it is a site of leisure, an escape from the world of paid work. Furthermore, a major problem with the research referred to above is that it does not recognize that the essence of housework is to combine many things, usually concurrently. This has a profound bearing on the interpretation of time spent in child care and the apparent growth of leisure. As I outlined in chapter 3, shopping accompanied by children lends leisure time a diferent quality than consumption as an individual leisure activity. While both male and female parents are devoting more time to child care, mothers typically remain much more emotionally and practically involved with their children than fathers. Moreover, they tend to have the management of—and responsibility for—the main elements of family life. Child care is perhaps the activity least amenable to technological solutions as time spent caring for others has a unique quality, a topic I will return to below.

Is Technology the Solution?

In the absence of a radical redistribution of the domestic workload within families, modern machinery holds out the promise of at least solving the problem of the routine types of housework, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry. But what is the impact of so-called time-saving appliances, such as the microwave and dishwasher?

This question is harder to resolve than it may at first seem. Most researchers rely on the passage of the years as a proxy for ownership of appliances, since a higher proportion of contemporary households now own domestic appliances. In general, however, they do not have direct data about which households actually own or do not own particular domestic appliances. Nor do they provide information about the relationship between the appliances and time spent in the specific task for which they are designed. The Australian Time Use Survey is rare in providing such detailed information. Analyzing this data, I found that household technologies rarely reduce women’s unpaid working time and even, paradoxically, produce some increases in domestic labor.16

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Consistent with the cross-national findings above, Australian women are predominantly responsible for the routine housework of food preparation, cleaning, and laundry. Men spend more time on home, car and lawn maintenance, and outdoor jobs than on laundry and cleaning put together. Domestic appliances thus enter a domain heavily signified in terms of traditional sex roles.

Owning appliances makes little diference. Despite the microwave’s capacity to cook food in a fraction of the time needed by conventional stoves, owning a microwave has no significant efect on the time-use patterns of women, even when the number of meals out is held constant. Nor does the deep freezer’s ability to harvest economies of scale in meal production significantly reduce the average time that women devote either to meal preparation or to housework overall. Even dishwashers appear to have no efect on either the time women spend in food preparation and cleanup or in the daily hours they devote to housework. Owning a clothes dryer actually increased the time women spend doing laundry. However, some kitchen appliances, such as dishwashers and deep freezers, lead to reductions in men’s housework time. Only a lawn mower or edge-trimmer increases the time men devote to the traditionally male tasks of lawn care.

These paradoxical efects, whereby inventions deliberately designed to save labor fail to do so, or even do the opposite, take some explaining.

We saw how, in the first half of the twentieth century, technological innovations spurred radical changes in the ways that people behaved. As appliances became widely difused and accepted as necessary and normal, they altered the patterns and practices of life within households. Key here is the idea of rising standards in domestic production. The concept of rising standards implies a greater quantity or quality of domestic production—for example, more or better meals, cleaner clothes, and more attractive lawns. In other words, it may be that appliances are being used to increase output rather than to reduce the time spent on housework.

An indication of this is that one-third of all UK energy is now consumed in homes. The electricity consumption of domestic appliances has increased by 144 percent since 1970, largely due to the use of fridges and freezers, dishwashers, tumble dryers, washing machines, and other consumer electronics.17 Energy use associated with cooking in the home is the only form of domestic energy consumption to have declined since 1970—a consequence of more people eating out. Water consumption within the home has increased by 70 percent over the last thirty years, and around 29 percent of domestic energy is used for heating water. Indeed, in 2010, domestic consumption was 32 percent of total UK final energy consumption, an increase of 31 percent since 1970. Kitchens and bathrooms in particular have become hot spots of resource consumption, reflecting changes in the way people wash, prepare meals, clean dishes and socialize.

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Expectations of comfort, cleanliness, and convenience have altered radically over the past few generations, but these dramatic changes have largely gone unnoticed. Elizabeth Shove demonstrates this by taking three dimensions of “ordinary” life—the comfort of air-conditioning, the personal cleanliness of bathing and showering, and the convenience of contemporary domestic laundering—as probes into major changes in the fabric of daily life and social being over the last few decades. As these new domestic tools for living become a normal part of consumption, they escalate standards of comfort, shifting conventions, practices, and routines of consumption.

Let’s take her example of bathing. Although “the technologies involved—the bath and the shower—have changed hardly at all over hundreds of years . . . patterns and logics of use are continually on the move.”18 How do we explain the increasing popularity of the shower, especially the power shower (which pumps out water at a higher rate), and the decline of traditional British bathing habits? Power showers far exceed the water and energy consumption of a twice- or thrice-weekly bath, however long the bather spends in the tub. In both the UK and the United States, the seven- to eight-minute daily shower is taken for granted as the norm for those who regularly shower.19 This drive for personal cleanliness has intensified in a context where the shift from industrial to white collar service work and decreased air pollution has reduced the need for washing.

The constant availability of hot water and the heightened value of hygiene are prerequisites for the increasing frequency with which people wash. However, a key diference between bathing and showering is that the latter is associated with speed, immediacy, and convenience. The shower is not inherently quicker than a bath, but its potential to be used in this way fits our current preoccupation with saving time. The issue is not a literal lack of time itself. As I have argued, the experience of rushing is as much the result of the temporal disorganization of daily life. The proliferation of time-demanding social practices makes the achievement of collective routines harder to achieve. Even the once-weekly routine of a Sunday bath demands a form of temporal and sequential scheduling not required of privatized, fragmented episodes of washing. By contrast, showering can be slotted into narrow time frames—like those between waking in the morning and leaving for work—from which bathing is excluded. It is in this context that the ability to take a rapid shower acquires its appeal.

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As such, the shower belongs to a set of domestic devices whose popularity has grown precisely because they promise to help people cope with the temporal challenges of modern life. For Shove, the new habit of showering can be understood only in relation to concerns about a time squeeze and its qualities as a technology of “convenience.” The idea here is that appliances facilitate complex scheduling, delayed tasks as well as simultaneous activities. Washing machines, for example, allow clothes to be washed while you do other things, and with freezers, frozen food can be bought and used at a later time. As I noted in chapter 3, convenience food can be seen in these terms, as a hypermodern form of convenience that is directed toward time shifting rather than time compression.20

This time-shifting property of convenience technologies is harnessed during periods of intense busyness in order to generate and protect pockets of quality time.21 Certain times of the day, for example, mornings and meal times, are more frantic than others. This is when the density of activity takes place and when time pressure is most acute. Domestic devices are used to preserve and manage distinctions between “rush” and “calm.” However, according to Shove, convenience devices enter a feedback loop whereby they paradoxically increase problems of scheduling, exacerbating the sense of harriedness: “more gadgets generate more rush.”22 While the idea of convenience as legitimating and sustaining specific forms of consumption is illuminating, in my view it understates the myriad processes through which users interpret and appropriate machines. People are extremely adept at deploying suitable devices in their endeavor to make time for valued interactions. This is not only the case for domestic appliances but, as we shall see in the next chapter, also applies to ICTs.

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Household Appliances: An Afterthought?

Thus far I have emphasized how new tools for living escalate standards and transform domestic practices. However, we rarely reflect on the material form of the household equipment that has become available to us, and why it is so. I have argued that the predominance of the single-family household has profoundly structured the design and configuration of our appliances. Little attention has been given to the innovation, development, and difusion processes of specific technologies themselves.

Yet if there is one lesson that an STS perspective teaches us, it is that domestic artifacts, like other technologies, are both socially constructed and society shaping. Rather than speeding up existing activities, often as not they change the very nature and meaning of tasks and introduce novel practices. Given that much domestic technology has its origins in very diferent spheres, rather than being specifically designed to save time in the household, it is not surprising that its impact on domestic labor has been mixed. Indeed, the temporal landscape of the factory that informs the design of these technologies necessarily carries over into the home. Technologies that emerge as “transfers” from the production process in the formal economy to those in the informal domestic economy are unlikely to be attuned to the complex timescapes of the home.

Typically, new products are initially too expensive for application to household activities; they are employed on a large scale by industry only, until continued innovation and economies of scale allow substantial reduction in costs or adaptation of technologies to household circumstances. Many domestic appliances were initially developed for commercial, industrial, and even military purposes and only later, as manufacturers sought to expand their markets, were they adapted for home use. Gas and electricity were available for industrial purposes and municipal lighting long before they were adapted for domestic use. The automatic washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, and the refrigerator had wide commercial application before being scaled down for use in the home.

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Electric ranges were used in naval and commercial ships before being introduced to the domestic market. Microwave ovens are a direct descendant of military radar technology and were developed for food preparation in submarines by the US Navy. They were first introduced to airlines, institutions, and commercial premises before manufacturers turned their eyes to the domestic realm.

Despite the lucrative market that it represents, the household is not usually the first area of application that is considered when new technologies are being developed. For this reason, domestic appliances are not always appropriate to the household work that they are supposed to perform. Nor are they necessarily the implements that would have been developed if the main user had been considered first or, indeed, if she had had control of the processes of innovation.

It is no accident that most domestic technology originates from the commercial sector, nor that much of the equipment that ends up in the home is somewhat inefectual. As an industrial designer I interviewed put it, “Why invest heavily in the design of domestic technology when there is no measure of productivity for housework as there is for industrial work?” Commercial kitchens, for example, are simple and functional in design, much less cluttered with complicated gadgets and elaborate fittings than most home kitchens. Reliability is at a premium for commercial purchasers, who are concerned to minimize their running costs both in terms of breakdowns and labor time. Given that labor in the home is unpaid, the same economic considerations do not operate. Therefore, when producing for the home market, manufacturers concentrated on cutting the costs of manufacturing techniques to enable them to sell reasonably cheap products. Much of the design efort is put into making appliances look attractive or impressively high-tech in the showroom—for example, giving them an ornamental array of buttons and flashing lights. Far from being designed to accomplish a specific task, some appliances are designed expressly for sale as moderately priced gifts from husband to wife and in fact are rarely used.

Let us look in more detail at the microwave, as it is widely regarded as an iconic time-saving device. As we have just noted, microwave ovens were initially developed for use in submarines. When manufacturers first turned their eyes to the domestic market, they conceived of the microwave as a device to reheat prepared food for use by men, especially single men. As a result, microwaves were marketed as “brown goods” and sold next to hi-fi equipment, televisions, and video recorders—goods for leisure and entertainment. Even their color signified a gendered conception of household functions and consequently a gendered conception of potential purchasers. As it transpired, this attempt to frame demand was unsuccessful and subsequently the product was reconstituted as a simple and serviceable “white good” for use by housewives to cook.

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In fact, women users appropriated this device in ways that were not foreseen by the engineers who designed it. Mapping the evolution of the microwave oven, Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod demonstrate how consumers can modify the meanings and values of technologies in the practices of everyday life. These cultural meanings, in turn, enter the design and production of goods themselves. Indeed, the authors conceive of technologies as in a continuous process of negotiation, as we “domesticate” or make new technologies our own. The finished form of the microwave, which redefined the gendered character of the user, meant that the microwave literally shifted its place in the department store. It now sits alongside washing machines, fridges, and freezers as a humdrum domestic appliance.

The making of the microwave, then, is as much a story about the transformation of a quintessentially human activity, cooking, as it is about a technical invention that saves time. It is perhaps the perfect hypermodern convenience device as it solves problems of meal coordination and synchronization. However, in order to grasp its full significance, we need to move beyond the focus on a single device.

Domestic technologies are adopted as part of larger organizational and technical infrastructures. Microwaves, for example, rely on freezers and are largely used as a defrosting machine. They also depend on a complex food supply chain involving an international workforce largely invisible to the purchaser. Convenience meals still require shopping in a context where car dependency and urban growth means traversing long distances to the supermarket. While the market for convenience foods has increased exponentially, so too has the practice of eating out, even though it requires temporal and spatial coordination. Today, about half of the money used to buy food in the United States is spent in restaurants.23 Fast foods restaurants, such as McDonald’s, are the main beneficiaries of this trend, and it is notable that they market themselves as “fast.” The fast food industry exemplifies the way in which the capacity of more afluent households to buy time through utilizing consumer services is made possible by the supply of cheap, often migrant, labor.

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Is Outsourcing the Solution?

The limits of even hypermodern technologies of convenience to compress time is reflected in the massive shift in the balance between privatized household work and the provision of market-based domestic services. The contracting out of housework is a growing trend in afluent societies, especially among middle-class households. The feminization of the labor force has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform, such as cleaning, cooking, and child care. Indeed, there is a direct link between married women’s earnings and the time they spend performing routine household chores (cooking, washing the dishes, house cleaning, and laundry). As women who are employed full time earn more, they reduce the time they spend performing routine housework, “defray[ing] their housework time by using their earnings to purchase market substitutes, or services, for domestic labor.”24

This phenomenon has received relatively little attention, largely because sociological research on housework has concentrated on the sexual division of domestic tasks. Feminist researchers have had to confront inequalities between women and address the contradictory interests that women have as employers and employees. After all, it is largely women who hire and fire other women to do housework and substitute mothering, as paid domestic servicing usually involves labor substitution for men in the household.

While the rich have always hired domestic servants, there is today a mass importation of caring labor from the third world. Many immigrant women leave their own children in order to work as nannies, cooks, and cleaners for families in the first world. From Hong Kong to the United States, for example, Filipina domestic workers are employed for low pay and long hours. Indeed, countries such as the Philippines have become economically dependent on the remittances women domestic workers send home. What is distinctive about this form of labor is that it straddles the boundaries of public and private and of free and unfree labor. In the case of live-in domestics, for example, what the employer is buying is not just the worker’s labor power but their personhood.25 This increasingly internationalized trade in emotional labor, “the global care chain” is based on intersecting hierarchies of sex, class, age, race, and nation.

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Many domestic workers are employed not because people do not have the time to do their own domestic work but because they want to avoid doing the chores themselves and therefore gain the time for extra leisure. In other words, the cash-rich, time-rich—and not just the cashrich, time-poor—also employ domestic workers. Those who do the work are often poor women with heavy child care responsibilities, hardly “time rich” themselves.

While hiring domestic labor to perform routine household tasks raises normative issues about the boundaries of self-maintenance, the outsourcing of care for family members (whether for children and adults) is far more controversial. Time may be squeezed, but both men and women have increased their participation in child care in recent decades (see chapter 3). Unlike routine housework, which goes down as paid work hours go up, mothers retain their child care time by cutting back on their own leisure, personal care, and sleep. This suggests that employed mothers are unwilling to delegate their child care duties. For example, highly educated women, who have more financial resources, average more child care time than do less educated women, and this also holds for highly educated men.26 It seems that middle-class parents both feel compelled and are able to do more than do working-class families, as they subscribe more whole-heartedly to current parenting advice to “concertedly cultivate” their children.27 While class diferences in parenting style are discernible, compared with past times, parents are involved in more aspects of their children’s lives, such as their education and friendships, and are less likely to let them play unsupervised.

Contemporary expectations about what constitutes proper parenting have thus intensified. Here I want to look in more detail at which child care activities parents perform and the distinctive temporality they involve. This will lead into a more general discussion about how to conceptualize the slow time of caring. It is precisely this special quality of caring time that sets limits to the automation of caring, the subject for the final section of this chapter.

Looking at time-use data from Australia, Denmark, France, and Italy, Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan set out to explore how routine housework is divided from nonroutine housework, and whether couples care for children in the presence of their spouse (copresence) or on their own (solo).28 Child care was divided into two categories by activity type: (1) talk-based care, defined as face-to-face parent-child interaction that includes talking, listening, teaching, helping children learn, reading, telling stories, and playing games; and (2) routine, physical care and accompanying a child, defined as face-to-face parent-child interaction that includes feeding, bathing, dressing, putting children to sleep, carrying, hugging, soothing, transportation to school, visits, sports training, music and ballet lessons, school nights, meeting trains and buses, ensuring their safety, and handing them over to substitute caregivers.

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National variations make a diference, so that, for example, average total parental child care time is highest in Australia and lowest in France because of the greater use and social acceptability of universal, statefunded early childhood education. Cultural attitudes about masculinity and fatherhood also matter, such that Danish men do slightly more routine care than fathers elsewhere, and Danish women do less child care solo. However, across all countries and household types, mothers do a significantly higher overall proportion of child care than do fathers.

Of particular interest here is the rare, quantitative data on the composition of activities. It turns out that fathers do only certain types of child care activity. “The widest gender gaps are in tasks that must be done regularly to a timetable, are less flexible, and, arguable, are less enjoyable than the talking, listening, reading, and play activities that constitute non-routine care.”29 Fathers’ care time is spent in talk-based, educational, and recreational activities rather than routine physical and logistical tasks. Even more pronounced is the gender gap in the amount of care performed solo. Most of fathers’ care time is done when the mother is also present. Laurent Lesnard, for example, reports that French fathers’ time alone with their children is limited to a few minutes here and there, and largely consists of TV watching.30 Conversely, much more of mothers’ care time is done solo, making child care a more intensive activity for women, especially when children are young. It also means that fathers are not substituting for mothers’ time, freeing them for other pursuits.

Caring time thus encompasses a wide range of activities and involves a complex set of emotions. The study above suggests that the quality of time may vary significantly with diferent kinds of child care. Talk-based care requires focused attention. It is less easy to combine with other activities than, say, routine tasks. In everyday life, however, the dividing line between domestic chores and parental responsibilities is nonexistent, as is the line separating family time, housework, and leisure. Leisure time on one’s own has a diferent character than leisure in the presence of children precisely because the latter is a form of care. Negotiating overlapping and incompatible temporalities is therefore common as multiple activities are undertaken simultaneously. We are usually not aware of the coincidence of these diferent temporalities, so accustomed are we to integrating them.

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