Jonathan Gershuny Centre for Time Use Research

Cross-national Comparisons of change in the Structure of Everyday Life: Evidence from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS)

• Jonathan Gershuny

• Centre for Time Use Research

• Department of Sociology,

• University of Oxford

Centre for Time Use Research

• Activities:
• Research
• Information and Resources:
• Access to time use data
• Produce MTUS
• Maintain AHTUS
• www.timeuse.org

Introduction

• Academic motivation
• Running out of time?
• Women’s dual burden?
• A harried leisure class?
• Introduction to the MTUS
• Time diary studies
• International comparisons
• Work/life imbalance?
• Time, interests, social structure
• Time-use Keynesianism
• The new “badge of honour”

Academic motivation 1

• Veblen 1908 “the leisure class”

• Dumazadier 1960 “the leisure society”

• Linder 1970 “harried leisure class”

• Vanek 1974, “counterintuitive technology”

• Meissner et al 1975, “dual burden”

• Schor 1990 “overworked American”

• Robinson and Godbey 1999 “not overworked”.

Academic motivation 1

• Marx 1866: exploitation rate=time dominance

• Veblen 1908 “the leisure class”

• Dumazadier 1960 “the leisure society”

• Linder 1970 “harried leisure class”

• Vanek 1974, “counterintuitive technology”

• Meissner et al 1975, “dual burden”

• Schor 1990 “overworked American”

• Robinson and Godbey 1999 “not overworked”.

Academic motivation 2

• Jacobs and Gerson 2004 “Time Divide”:

• Changing balance of paid, unpaid work, leisure:
•  gendered differences in human capital
•  work-rich time-poor / time-rich work-poor
• life-course effects eg fertility strikes

• Esping Andersen 1999 “Social Foundations”

• Post-industrial welfare, childcare, etc. regimes:
• Outcomes reflect choices within households
• Household choices reflect regime provisions

CTUR investigations:

• More inclusive national accounts, of production in and out of “the economy”.

• Modelling diverse interests: Who does what? Who gets what?

• Cross-national and historical differences and similarities in activity patterns.

• Explanations of these in terms of history, culture, technology and public regulation.

CTUR investigations:

• More inclusive national accounts, of production in and out of “the economy”

• Modelling diverse interests: Who does what? Who gets what?

• Cross-national and historical differences and similarities in activity patterns.

• Explanations of these in terms of history, culture, technology and public regulation.

A Time-use Diary (HETUS)

Large scale time diary collections

• Strumilin 1921

• Sorokin and Berger 1937

• BBC Audience Research 1938—1975

• Szalai Multinational Study 1965

• Harmonised European Time Use Study 1998-2003 (“HETUS”)

• American Time Use Study 2003– (CPS)

• Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS)

Multinational Time Use Study

Evolution of MTUS

• WORLD5.0 (2000)

• Represents populations aged 20-60
• 40 aggregated time-use activity categories
• 15 socio-demographic classifiers

• WORLD5.5 (2007)

• Represents full age range (above 10)
• 40 aggregated time-use activity categories
• 30 socio-demographic classifiers

• WORLD6.0 (now under discussion)

• Revised (more detailed) activity classification
• full activity sequence data

The importance of gender d.o.l.

• Gendered work specialisation within households not inherently inequitable if:

• Consumption fairly shared within households
• Household membership persists throughout life-course.

• But human capital formation uniquely associated with participation in paid work.

• Hence growing family instability must be associated with reduction in gendering of unpaid work.

Veblen: Theory of the Leisure Class

• Leisure as the “badge of honour”

• “Conspicuous leisure” denoting superordinate social status.
• “imperative…the requirement of abstention from productive work.” (p36)

• The principle of emulation:

• Each rank of society seeks to emulate the pattern of life of that rank immediately above it in terms of prestige.

• Empirical implication:

• positive leisure/status gradient

The superordinate working class

• The centrality of knowledge in post-industrial society (Daniel Bell 1975)

• “knowledge elites” and the “technocracy”
• Post-materialism…. or Gordon Gecko?

• Economic primacy of human capital

• Population ageing  hum cap formation as key means of intergenerational status transmission
• Income from human capital during working life, from wealth in retirement.
• Highest incomes from work not wealth.

•  work as the new “badge of honour”

The Leisure Paradox.

• Staffan Linder harrying the leisured:

• Rational to equalise marginal returns on different sorts of time, but this implies that…
• …productivity growth must be matched by growth in intensity of consumption.

• Time-use Keynesianism:

• Need to redistribute time available for consumption, since…
• more leisure (for some) means more work (for others).

Time, Interests, Social Structure

• New conflicts of interest:

• Between men and women.
• Between young and old.
• Between human capital-rich and human capital-poor (meritocracy vs citizenship).

• Fought out in the arena of the society’s Great Day, the 24 hours that represent the one irresolvable social scarcity.

Some time-use references.

• A Szalai The Use of Time, The Hague: Mouton 1974.

• J Vanek ‘Housework still takes time’ Scientific American, 231, 1974 pp. 116–120.

• M Meissner, EW Humpreys, SM Meis and WJ Scheu, ‘No Exit for Wives: sexual division of labour and the cumulation of household demands’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 12, 1975, pp 424-39.

• J Schor, The Overworked American: the unexpected decline of leisure, New York: Basic Books.

• J Robinson and J Godbey Time for Life: the surprising ways Americans use time 1999

• J Gershuny, Changing Times: work and leisure in post-industrial society, Oxford University Press 2000.

• J Jacobs and K Gerson 2004 The Time Divide: work, family and gender inequality. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.