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CONTRIBUTIONS TO RESEARCH ON THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF TIME
Why do Americans work such long hours on the job and what are the implications for their family lives? Arlie Hochschild’s book, The Time Bind (published in paperback, with a new preface, in 2001), helped bring this issue to national and increasingly international attention (with German and Danish translations, and another new preface, published in 2002). Research on the dynamics of overwork and patterns of engagement with paid work and family life continues to accumulate, with more nuanced attention to both sides of the "work/family" divide and the building of innovative conceptual bridges.
Several of our Working Papers analyze the dynamics of overwork in particular types and sites of paid work. Johanna Shih, a CWF post-doc, analyzed the multiple "time systems" experienced by workers in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley whose work lives were framed by deadline-pressed "project time" which interrupted "biographical time" (meeting bodily needs), "interaction time" with friends and family, and "biographical time" (status passages such as marriage and having children). In a complementary study of high tech professionals, sociology graduate student, Alesia Montgomery, analyzed the organizational dimensions of paid jobs (including pressures of project time) that led workers to seek informal, backstage help from family and friends in order to get the job done. Ofer Sharone, also a sociology graduate student, interviewed software engineers in a high tech firm. He coined the term, "competitive self-management," to describe a mode of work organization that encourages long hours. This structure combines two management requirements: that employees actively participate in their own management, and that managers rank employees’ performance relative to other engineers. Insecurity about relative job performance intensifies work effort. Looking at a different terrain of paid work, post-doc Lora Bartlett interviewed high school teachers whose schools were involved in extensive reform, upping the time requirements of their jobs. She found that teachers who embraced an expanded role tried to sustain it even in the absence of organizational support, resulting in overwork. Bartlett notes that careworkers, like teachers, are especially prone to this kind of job exploitation.
In her new trade press book, Married to the Job, Center for Working Families Affiliated Scholar, Ilene Philipson examines an extreme form of emotional dependence on work, which she discovered through her psychotherapy practice with workers who sought help after experiencing what they felt was devastating betrayal on the job. These workers, who had few family or community involvements, turned to the workplace for a sense of deep emotional connection. Paid work, Philipson argues, is increasingly "colonizing" our emotional lives. Natasha Schull, a pre-doc in anthropology, also researched emotional experiences of work and family in an ethnographic study of women video poker addicts in Las Vegas. She found that their addiction to gambling was, in part, an escape from what they experienced as an excess of relational demands at home and at work.
Other Pages Under Contributions: