Changing Times Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society

by Gershuny, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780199261895
• ISBN10: 019926189X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-05-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Time allocation, whether considered at the level of the individual or of the society, is a major focus of public concern. Are our lives more congested with work than they used to be? Is society polarizing into groups which, on one side, have too much work and too little leisure time to spendtheir money in, and on the other have no paid work, and hence no money to pay for the goods and services they might wish to use during their leisure? Has the recent convergence in men's and women's labour market roles led to an unfair distribution of the totals of paid plus unpaid work? Theseissues, and others similar, once the preserve of a few specialist sociologists and economists, now appear daily and prominently across the news and entertainment media.Yet there is surprisingly little substantive evidence of how individuals and societies spend their time, and of how this has changed in the developed world over the recent past. This book brings together, for the first time, data gathered in some forty national scale 'time-diary' studies, fromtwenty countries, and covering the last third of the twentieth century. It examines the newly emerging political economy of time, in the light of new estimates of how time is actually spent, and of how this has changed, in the developed world.

Author Biography

Jonathan Gershuny is Professor of Economic Sociology, and Director, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex

Table of Contents

An Introduction, and a First Summary	1	(16)
Accounting for change in social and economic structure	1	(3)
The three convergences	4	(4)
Why the regularities?	8	(3)
Time-use theory and time-use evidence	11	(2)
A cross-national comparative time-use dataset	13	(3)
Work and Leisure: Historical Change in the Conditions of Life	16	(30)
Bloomsday: the extraordinary significance of the mundane	16	(3)
Time and development	19	(2)
The interdependence of production and consumption time	21	(7)
The logic of progress	28	(5)
High-and low-value services, production, and consumption	33	(13)
Are We Running Out of Time?	46	(30)
Two views of leisure and development	46	(4)
A current thesis: the end of leisure	50	(8)
Antithesis: growth and leisure	58	(11)
Synthesis: a changing class distribution of leisure time?	69	(7)
The Individual's and the Society's Day: Micro- and Macro-Theories of Time Use	76	(29)
Preliminary remarks	76	(8)
Determining daily events: microsequential theory	84	(9)
Allocating time: micro-aggregate theory	93	(4)
Balancing time: macro-theory	97	(3)
A summary	100	(5)
The History and Future of Time Use: Empirical Evidence	105	(32)
A multinational longitudinal time-diary data collection	105	(5)
Economic development and change in work and leisure time	110	(7)
Behavioural vs. structural change	117	(14)
The work-leisure balance	131	(6)
Explaining Time Use	137	(23)
National differences and historical change	137	(4)
The elements of the models	141	(9)
Decomposing variance	150	(7)
Conclusions	157	(3)
A Concise Atlas of Time Use: Twenty Countries, Thirty-three Years' Change	160	(62)
The principle of the conservation of the day	160	(11)
Four sorts of time use	171	(48)
A whole-world summary: the virtuous triangle revisited	219	(3)
Time-Use Models of Economic Development	222	(20)
Three final models	222	(1)
An empirical estimation	223	(6)
Welfare and change in time allocation: the UK case	229	(2)
Time use and welfare: the nature of social improvement	231	(5)
Technological innovation and change in a society's time budget: a two-class, two-good demonstration	236	(6)
Humane Modernization	242	(7)
Time use and 'progress'	242	(1)
Public policy for humane modernization	243	(4)
Liberty, equality---or fraternity	247	(2)
Appendix 1. Telling the Time: Some Reflections on Time-Diary Methodology	249	(21)
1. Estimating time use: two experiments	249	(4)
2. Narratives: telling the day	253	(2)
3. Constructing the diary	255	(15)
Appendix 2. A Longitudinal, Multinational Collection of Time-Use Data---the MTUS	270	(19)
Jonathan Gershuny
Kimberly Fisher
Anne Gauthier
Sally Jones
Patrick Baert
1. The MTUS project	270	(2)
2. Methodological choices in time-budget research	272	(15)
3. A summary codebook for WORLD 5.5	287	(2)
References	289	(6)
Index	295