Content area
Full text
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997.
Finding Time: How Corporations, Individuals, and Families Can Benefit from New Work Practices, by Leslie Perlow. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Reviewed by Carrie R. Leana, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
What if the workplace really resembled the ideal of organizational development consultants? What if every manager was a patron of Douglas McGregor's Theory Y, rather than Theory X? What if jobs were truly enriched so that they could fulfill the higher-order needs described by Abraham Maslow and Clay Aldefer? And what if the workplace was democratized so that even the lowest-level production worker could participate in team decision making?
Arlie Hochschild has come close to discovering such an ideal workplace in the Amerco company located in the small town of Spotted Deer. At Amerco managers were charged not just with efficiency and productivity but also with creating a supportive environment for workers. Employees were "empowered" and spent their work days using both their heads and their hands. Values and culture were deliberately planned to assist employees in fulfilling the company's mission of "delighting" both their customers and their workforce. Work-family balance was achieved through such benefits as flextime and job sharing, as well as through the services of a state-of-the-art, on-site child care center. Through such initiatives the company promoted a culture of commitment to work, and employees reported feeling lucky to be included in that culture. Such a workplace was attractive, indeed seductive, to employees as they turned over a large portion of their time to Amerco.
The problem, as Hochschild so vividly describes in The Time Bind, is the cost of such seduction to employees' lives outside of work. Despite the company's work-family balance initiatives, a comfortable equilibrium between work and family was beyond the reach of many employees, regardless of job or organizational level. Amerco employees worked long hours and persistently reported feeling trapped in a "time bind," where they were not able to juggle the demands of work and home: in family after family Hochschild observed the negative effects of "time-starved" children, disgruntled spouses, and highly stressed employees.
More surprising than these detrimental effects of work-focused lives, however, were the...