Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

The rapid rise of family time over the last decades indicates that being together is of increasing importance for the contemporary family. However, less temporal complementarity between parents is negatively correlated with partners’ time together and with children. The prevalence of of scheduling therefore adversely impacts on family solidarity. It points to the dificulties parents face as they seek to balance market work and family. As Lesnard notes, the UK’s flexible working time law (in place since 2003) was one of the first that obliges employers to consider employees’ requests for more family-friendly work schedules. Such policies, and those that limit long working hours, might begin to address the problem of time pressure. I will be exploring the wider politics of working time in my last chapter.

Temporal Density

Let us finally turn to the third mechanism that generates feelings of time scarcity, temporal density. This notion accounts for experiences of time that can be described as juggling or multitasking, that is, the allocation of certain practices within a given period of time. Allocation refers to certain practices being located within temporal rhythms that create a sense of intensity in the conduct of those practices. It is directly related to temporal disorganization, but here the emphasis is not so much on sequencing, but rather highlights the simultaneity of diferent activities or multitasking. Allocation is also linked to a notion of boundaries that separate practices. The allocation of practices, which no longer have clearly defined boundaries, into particular parts of the day can generate senses of being harried, irrespective of whether the bulk of that day is experienced as being “pressed for time.”

Southerton and Tomlinson illustrate this point by drawing on qualitative interviews with twenty British suburban households. For example, although Chloe said she did not feel “generally pressed for time” in the survey, she said she felt busy “some of the time but not others”:

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Some mornings are chaos, after getting them of to school I’ll have a cup of tea and a sit down, then I’ll try and get all the housework done so that I can get of to work for 12.00 and that’s as busy as getting the kids of, you know, start the washing, do some ironing, make the beds, then the washing finishes, so I stop what I’m doing and peg it out . . . . Work is easy, the most relaxing part of the day because I only have to do one thing.43

Here we see the harried experience of temporal disorganization, as Chloe rushes to meet the institutionally fixed school meeting times, as well as that caused by the temporal density of housework. Such examples proliferate in the feminist literature about how women in dual-earner families constantly juggle their work and households tasks.44 The fear has been that working women will simply add a “second shift” of paid employment to their existing responsibilities for housework and child care. This lies behind the suggestion that women are sufering from time poverty. There is now talk of a gender gap in leisure.

We began this chapter by making a case for regarding discretionary time as an important measure of freedom and equality. Indeed, Nancy Fraser has argued that gender equity needs to be reconceptualized as a “complex notion comprising a plurality of distinct normative principles.”45 One of the seven principles that she proposes as crucial to gender equity concerns the distribution of leisure time. This issue is more complex than it first appears. Taking into account temporal density leads to a reformulation of the gender gap in leisure. The crucial issue is not only that women may have less leisure time, but that women’s leisure time may be qualitatively “less leisurely” than men’s.

So do women, as is commonly claimed, have comparatively less leisure time than men? In the United States, employed mothers’ combined time in paid and unpaid work exceeds that of fathers, as noted earlier. Surprisingly, however, this diference is not substantial. Analyzing time-use data from ten countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, we found that, when taking paid and unpaid work together, there is little diference in the number of minutes men and women spend in “work.”46 Unpaid work (housework, child care, and shopping) continues to be highly gender specialized in that women’s share is approximately three-quarters. But despite this, the quantity (the number of hours) of leisure time that men and women have is remarkably similar.

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How can we reconcile the apparent gender equity in the objective quantity of leisure with the subjective impression of increased time pressure among women? In my view, the answer lies in considering the density or quality of leisure time available, and not simply the quantity. For example, the tendency to perform multiple and overlapping tasks simultaneously creates a distinctive experience of leisure. It would be seen as a form of work intensification that increases productivity if it were paid. Such evidence as we have suggests that multitasking has greatly increased over the last quarter of the twentieth century.47 This could be taken as an objective measure of the acceleration of the pace of life.

We must therefore distinguish between degrees of leisure. In popular discourse, leisure is conceived of as free time, time at one’s disposal, or pure leisure. Such leisure with no distracting accompanying activities to constrain it is diferent from a leisure activity that is accompanied by a constraining activity. Using detailed Australian time-diary evidence, I was able to measure and compare periods of pure leisure, when the primary activity reported is a free time activity with no secondary activity, with periods of interrupted leisure contaminated by a simultaneous secondary activity.48

This aspect of the lived experience of leisure is at the heart of feminist commentary on the gendered nature of leisure. Analyses of multitasking have usually focused on combinations of domestic labor tasks, such as ironing while watching television. I also analyzed the combination of parental leisure time spent together with children (that is, free time with children). The significant growth in this kind of leisure is one of the main ways that parents have managed to spend more time with their children.49 But what are the consequences of this for the character of leisure?

One could argue that the best leisure is achieved when playing with one’s own children. However it is my contention that this may involve a trade-of when it comes to the quality of that leisure time. The enjoyment of leisure that is combined with other activities might be lower for the parent or the child or for both. The fact that parents derive considerable pleasure from attending to their children’s needs does not detract from the argument that they may, at the same time, be experiencing an adult leisure deficit.

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The results of my study reveal that men have many more hours of pure leisure, undiluted by unpaid work. More than 60 percent of men’s leisure is enjoyed with no accompanying activity. By comparison, little more than half of women’s leisure is pure leisure. In addition, men’s leisure is less likely to be interrupted than women’s. Women’s leisure, by contrast, tends to be conducted more in the presence of children and subject to punctuation by activities of unpaid work.50 The average maximum duration of episodes (blocks of time) of pure leisure is also longer for men. Women’s leisure is significantly more harried than men’s in that it is more fragmented into periods of shorter duration. In sum, men do have more high-quality leisure time than women.

Overall, this research suggests that there continues to be a gender gap in leisure.51 The fragmentary character of women’s leisure changes its quality. Interrupted leisure, snatched between work and self-care activities, is less restorative than unbroken leisure. It is likely that this leisure will be experienced as more harried and therefore increase self-reported stress. Indeed, it may well be that the contemporary view of increased “time pressure” has more to do with this fragmentation that with any measurable reduction in primary leisure time. The key role of mobile technologies in causing interruptions, with the incessant pinging of phone, text and e-mail messages, will be taken up in subsequent chapters.

This argument is particularly important as a corrective to the focus on the intensification of paid work that has preoccupied industrial relations and sociology of work scholars. Housework is unpaid and never done, resulting in highly gendered time frames that do not coincide with the standardized time of paid labor. Caring labor does not straightforwardly operate according to clock time and cannot be accelerated. “Clearly, the direct activities parents engage in with children consume far less time than the responsibility for overseeing them.”52 While some aspects of care can be commodified and outsourced, the character of intimate personal relationships and emotional labor demand quality time. Indeed, time-use data suggest that working parents who make use of nonparental child care do not reduce their parental child care time on an hour-for-hour basis.53 Instead, parents, mainly mothers, compress their domestic labor time, squeeze their personal care time, and reschedule the times when they are together with their children so as to preserve their time with children. Perhaps we should be giving as much attention to the intensification of parenting as to the intensification of work.

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Conclusion

This chapter has considered a range of arguments about the nature and causes of time pressure, an issue made all the more important by the centrality of time sovereignty to equality and social justice. We have seen that time is multidimensional and is experienced diferently by diverse groups of people in modern societies. Extensive analysis of time-use research does not reveal straightforward patterns or causal connections. Rather, it shows that to fully account for the time-pressure paradox, a complex interplay of demographic and economic factors needs to be considered. Key to this are the major repercussions that women’s entry into the labor market and the rise of dual-earner families have had for how households are organizing their time.

Acceleration as a phenomenon, then, cannot be understood as a uniform experience of the shortage of time. The many people who are highly time stressed have combinations of characteristics—they have full-time hours of market work, they have family responsibilities, and they are women. Time pressure tends to be especially acute for women whose time is disproportionately constrained by domestic responsibilities. And this is in a context where more and more value is placed on “quality time” with children. Mothers cope by combining leisure time with looking after children, making women’s leisure time less leisurely than men’s.

Such multitasking, or intensive use of time, exposes the limits of conceptualizing time pressure solely in terms of the volume or duration of (clock) time available. That is why I have emphasized the character of time by looking at issues of temporal disorganization and temporal density. Time scarcity may result not so much from a shortage of time but because of the increasing complexity of scheduling personal, domestic, and work activities. Taking this approach reveals that the experience of harriedness is not uniform, but takes a variety of forms. Time pressure may be experienced by employed lone mothers, by two-job parent families who work shifts, and by dual-career managerial or professional couples, but the sense of time squeeze and the mechanisms causing it difer. The extent to which money can be deployed to alleviate time pressure also difers between these groups.

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This is not to discount the cultural significance of our current orientation to, and valorization of, the fast-paced, full life as the good life. The tone of the debate on time pressure has been largely negative, concerned with problems such as balancing work and family life. However, the allure of metropolitan speed is indissolubly linked to the dominant ideals of modernity. Cultural acceleration, doing the most with the time one has and realizing as many options as possible from the vast possibilities that the world has to ofer, is the secular version of human happiness.54 Cultural discourses that value action-packed lives with high levels of consumption lead people to pursue busy lives that are at once both stressful and afirming. The increasing salience of consumption for modern identity formation fuels the demand for faster, hyper consumption. For those within high-status groups, prestige attaches to those who work long hours and are busiest at work. Moreover, these same busy people also have the most voracious pattern of leisure consumption.

The studies I have considered take the important step of bringing cultural norms about time to bear on the paradox of harriedness. However, they run the risk of implying that people are utterly seduced by the celebratory culture of speed in every aspect of their lives. In fact, there is as much organizational constraint as individual choice involved in lengthening working hours, for example, itself a cause of stress. Moreover, a wholesale condemnation of consumer culture, as expressed by Zygmunt Bauman’s sentiment that “the ‘consumerist syndrome’ is all about speed, excess and waste” both exaggerates the place of consumption in modern culture and fails to acknowledge the satisfaction that can be derived from it.55 Understanding the prevalence of time pressure requires a careful examination of the objective circumstances that cause harriedness, as well as an appreciation of changing cultural norms of busyness.

However, our interaction with the proliferating technologies of acceleration is also fundamental to the contemporary experience of speed. A notable omission from much of the literature on the time squeeze is the role played by information and communication technologies. Modern existence presupposes a technologically replete, multimodal world of ubiquitous connectivity. Electronic communication and new media systems increasingly constitute the fabric of our everyday lives. While there is research on multitasking with children, the study of multitasking with digital technology is only emerging. Yet the concept of the acceleration society outlined earlier presumes a direct link between technological acceleration and the growing scarcity of time. It is to this theme that I turn for the remainder of the book. The next chapter explores these issues in the context of paid work.

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Chapter Four

Working with Constant Connectivity

To be doing something, to move, to change—this is what enjoys prestige, as against stability, which is often regarded as synonymous with inaction.

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chia pello, The New Spirit of Capitalism

We know surprisingly little about whether and how information and communication technologies influence the experience of work in the twenty-first century, the subject of this chapter. Yet, the idea that ICTs are intrinsically technologies of acceleration is particularly compelling in relation to paid employment. Both the popular press and the academic literature trumpet their potential to save time, speed up work, and allow people to work anywhere at any time. Techno-enthusiasts encourage us to think about work and organizations in new ways and imagine “virtual organizations,” “flat worlds,” and the ability for work patterns to “follow the sun” and “span the globe.” Exactly how this will occur is less often discussed, but all agree that these technologies overcome the traditional temporal and spatial constraints of work. Perversely, in this new world of work, the more rushed we feel, the more we turn to digital devices to relieve the time pressure.

So how can we begin to unravel the relationship between the two essential dimensions of work: time and technology? Work is done in time; it is a temporal act. At its most basic, the employment contract represents the exchange of pay for the capacity to work over a specified period of time. However, as the activities of work become more complex

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