Abstract
Over the last two decades, American workers have increasingly divided into a majority who work too many hours and a minority with no work at all. This split hurts families at both extremes, but I focus here on the growing scarcity of time among the long-hours majority. For many of them, a speed-up at the office and factory has marginalised life at home, so that the very term ‘work—family balance’ seems to them a bland slogan with little bearing on real life. In this chapter, I describe the speed-up and review a range of cultural responses to it, including ‘family-friendly reforms’ such as flextime, job sharing, part time work and parental leave. Why, I ask, do people not resist the speed-up more than they do? When offered these reforms, why don’t more take advantage of them? Drawing upon my on-going research in an American Fortune 500 company, I argue that a company’s ‘family-friendly’ policy goes only as deep as the ‘emotional geography’ of the workplace and home, the drawn and redrawn boundaries between the sacred and the profane. I show how ways of talking about time (for example, separating ‘quality’ from ‘quantity’ time) become code words to describe that emotional geography.
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© 1996 British Sociological Association
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Hochschild, A.R. (1996). The Emotional Geography of Work and Family Life. In: Morris, L., Lyon, E.S. (eds) Gender Relations in Public and Private. Explorations in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24543-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24543-7_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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