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Families and time: coordinating daily busyness in middle class families
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Families and time: coordinating daily busyness in middle class families
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Content
FAMILIES AND TIME
Coordinating Daily Busyness in Middle Class Families
A Dissertation
Presented in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
Edson Rodriguez Cruz
University of Southern California
August 2015
1
ABSTRACT
Sociologists decry the unequal distribution of time-dilemmas in society. Families lament
the busyness of everyday life. How do people cope with this reality of experience? Despite a
vibrant literature that explores the everyday busyness of American families, we still have much
to learn about how families construe and carry out the practical work of managing time on a
moment-by-moment basis. In Families and Time I analyze the time-management techniques of
white middle-class families using qualitative data from over 900 hours of participant-observation
in the lives of busy families and 45 semi-structured interviews with the members of said families.
I argue that by focusing on the coordination of schedules we can recognize daily busyness not as
a matter of greater or lesser amounts of time, but rather, as a matter of meaningfully performing
the practical administration of activities in plural ways.
The common-sense notion that ‘there is a time and place for everything’ remains relevant
in our contemporary world, but the times and places for everything keep shifting. As the
institutions of family and work become increasingly porous and loose, our efforts to secure
stable footing for our everyday actions, emotions, and identities are increasingly complicated.
The cultural processes that families engage in to deal with this condition are the topic of my
dissertation. Families and Time offers an interpretive intervention for the ways that we currently
understand daily busyness and parents’ strategies for coping with that busyness. The theoretical
concept of “time-use cultures” is introduced here to overcome several limitations of current
approaches used in the sociology of families and time. A time-use culture of achievement
prescribes getting things done as an appropriate use of time; a time-use culture of balance
presents establishing harmony as the right way to spend one’s time; and a time-use culture of
commitment posits nurturing relationships as a worthwhile form of time-use. Middle-class
2
families draw from these time-use cultures to interpret, execute, and evaluate their time-
management efforts, bringing form and meaning to qualitatively different experiences of
busyness.
The meaning- and movement-sensitive coordination framework that I present here carries
implications for current efforts intended to address family health and well-being by facilitating
work-life balance and reducing time-pressure. This research also has implications for cultural
sociology. The concept of time-use cultures and the coordination framework that envelops it
pave one direction for future research to take on the topic of action, culture, and institutions.
Overall, the work presented here applies a cultural analysis to the topic of daily busyness: it
offers a nuanced description of strategies through which contemporary parents cope with
busyness and it connects these to the broader context of flexibility and short-term commitments
in a 21
st
century reality.
3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: Busyness in a Contemporary World ................... 4
CHAPTER 1: Families and Busyness ................................................. 24
CHAPTER 2: A Spatiotemporal Coordination Framework ................ 58
CHAPTER 3: Studying Busyness in Families ..................................... 79
CHAPTER 4: Cultures of Time-Use .................................................... 97
CHAPTER 5: Cultures of Time-Use and Efficiency .......................... 128
CHAPTER 6: Cultures of Time-Use and Time-Use Evaluation......... 160
CHAPTER 7: Negotiating Busyness with Coordination Work ........... 205
CONCLUSION: Busyness as a Social Problem................................... 226
APPENDIX: Interview Schedule.......................................................... 248
WORKS CITED ................................................................................... 253
4
INTRODUCTION
Busyness in a Contemporary World
5
COORDINATING BUSYNESS
It is Tuesday 2:30pm in the afternoon. Mrs. F, a curly-haired, athletic mother of two
teenagers, walks slowly toward her van. The VCR in the classroom was not working properly
and she struggled all day to show a movie. Her class was rowdy and disrespectful. Her eyes,
usually sparkling with energy, are drooping. The usual spring in her step is heavy and measured.
She is tired of substitute teaching. “I don’t know what’s going to happen from one day to the
next,” she acknowledges regretfully. Earlier this morning, she confirmed an interview for a full-
time teaching position at a nearby elementary school. Although she would prefer to teach high
school, she’ll be happy with a stable position anywhere, “That way I’ll know where I’m going
every day, and then I can plan my life a little bit.” As she drives to the grocery store, Mrs. F
questions her current life pursuits, noting that two of her central time-commitments are at odds
with one another. “I don’t even know if I want to be working,” she mutters under her breath,
partly to me and partly to herself, keeping her eyes steadily on the road. “What have I gotten
myself into? I can’t work; I’m supposed to be training for the marathon right now!”
Mrs. F finds a spot in the grocery store parking lot and parks her van. Annoyed, she
picks up her personal cell phone and decides to figure out who has been calling her all day; it is a
number that she doesn’t recognize. “Who is this?” she asks when she dials the number. It is the
shirt company. She has ordered shirts for her running club – a part-time business venture that
she started this year. Mrs. F was expecting them to call on her work phone, not this one; that’s
why she didn’t recognize the number. “I’ll call you back,” she tells them, “I still need to get a
count. When will they arrive if I order them now?”
Once inside the grocery store, Mrs. F takes her time walking from one isle to the next,
pushing the cart in front of her, thinking and planning: “Cereal for Frances [daughter]. She’ll
6
only eat that for breakfast, so I need to get it for her.... Oh, and Snickers for Fabian.” An
attentive mother, Mrs. F knows what her children prefer, and she considers their individual tastes
when shopping for groceries. She buys Doritos for herself. Just before going to the cashier line,
Mrs. F comes up with a resolution to the time-dilemma that has preoccupied her for the last half
hour. “Frank [her husband] makes a delicious shrimp soup,” she explains to me. “I’m gonna see
if he can do the shrimp tomorrow. I won’t have time because of the interview; otherwise the
kids are going to have to figure it out on their own.”
Mrs. F arrives home at 3:54pm. She has only two hours to prepare dinner, take care of
the daily chores around the house, eat, and prepare for her runner’s club training session, which
begins at 6:00pm. Her daughter, a 10
th
-grader, is arriving home at this same time. Mrs. F asks
her to put away the groceries and pick up last night’s dishes that are still in the sink. Meanwhile,
Mrs. F uses this as an opportunity to call her mother. “I haven’t called my parents in 3 days!”
she exclaims as she uses the landline to dial their home number. Ten minutes later, Mrs. F hangs
up the phone and laughs. She finds it funny that her mother talked to her about being
“constipated, but she went now, so she’s fine.” Her laughter, however, is short lived, for Mrs. F
sees that Frances only put away the groceries but did not pick up the dishes. She is watching
television in the living room, instead. Mrs. F insists that she help out. Frances retaliates: “But
Fabian doesn’t have to do his chores!” Mrs. F: “Did you do your chores? You haven’t.”
Frances: “I don’t want to pick up dishes today; tomorrow, yes!” To avoid a larger confrontation,
Mrs. F goes outside into the backyard to pick up the dog droppings.
At 4:12 Mrs. F begins preparing dinner. As she slices onions and chops meat, she and
Frances, now picking up the dishes, talk about Samantha, a cousin, who recently ran her first
half-marathon. Mrs. F: “Samantha says her right leg is sore.” Frances: “I have an idea, mother; I
7
have an idea. Drink lots of water.” Mrs. F: “How’s that gonna help?” At that moment, Fabian
arrives from school. He was given a ride by a neighbor whose son also goes to that school.
Excitedly, he tells his mom about his blister, which has gotten worse since last week. Mrs. F:
“Be careful; it could get mixed.” Fabian: “Look.” Mrs. F: “That’s no good.” Fabian: “I’ll put
the second skin on.” He scurries to his room to get a callous protection patch. Mrs. F shares
with Frances: “I have an interview tomorrow.”
At 4:47 Mrs. F has finished preparing dinner, cleaning the kitchen utensils, and wiping
the counters. The stew is on the stove and Mrs. F is in her room changing into her work-out
clothes. When she returns she sits with her son and daughter – each one on their respective seats
– in the living room. She takes the remote control from Frances and changes it to the news
channel. Mrs. F drags her feet across the living room carpet and reaches the couch. She turns,
faces the television set, and falls onto the couch, slumping. Her hands off to her sides, facing up,
weighed by exhaustion and hunger. With great effort she reaches with her left hand for the bag
of Doritos which Fabian has already opened. With her right hand she reaches for a cup of coffee
on the lamp table. Finally, Mrs. F has a few minutes to relax and catch up on the news. She
starts thinking about a running competition scheduled for next month; she is happy for the
members of her running club who have signed up.
But this brief change of pace is short-lived. At 4:54 the stove timer rings. Dinner is
ready. She will eat now but not too much because she must go train with her running club in half
an hour. Mrs. F reflects upon her busyness: “Time is flying and flying and flying and then I
finally get to start winding down and then I have a little bit of slow time and then it’s like,
boom!.... I don’t know; I wish I could be more relaxed, but it’s just not going to happen.... And I
enjoy it; it’s not, like, work for me. It’s not like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to do this!’ No, I want to
8
go to work; I want to teach; I want to interact with the kids.... I don’t know how I do it. My
husband doesn’t know how I do it, either. I just figure it out.”
Mrs. F is one of the over 14 million American parents with dependent children in a dual-
earner family (US Census Bureau 2014). Dual-earner families now make up over 40% of two-
parent families with children under the age of 18 (Bianchi et al. 2006). These and the rest of the
almost 25 million spouses with under-age children in United States society all contend with a
shared dilemma: how to piece together the collage of work demands, family commitments, and
leisure pursuits in an everyday context of dispersion and flux that is hostile to this value-laden
endeavor. My dissertation explores the ways that white, middle-class parents in southern
California take on this challenge of contemporary living.
Massive political, economic and cultural transformations in the second half of the last
century brought about a painful divide between what American families want to do with their
time and what they actually do with it (Jacobs and Gerson 2004). Identified as the work-family
conflict, the challenge of work-life balance, the time-bind, the time-squeeze, the speed-up, or the
busyness of American family life, this reality of contemporary society bears grave consequences
for the health and well-being of parents, children, and their communities (Bianchi et al. 2005).
An extensive literature in the sociology of families, gender, and time-use explains these
consequences and the social dynamics that lead to them. But what this literature has yet to do is
carefully examine the culturally-infused micro-processes of practical action whereby family
members manage time, coordinate schedules, and pragmatically cope with the reality of busyness
in everyday life. My dissertation nudges the family and time-use literature in this direction by
focusing on the practical work of situated coordination of mundane activities. This analytic
focus yields insight on actors’ own plural and shifting interpretations of their actions, which is
9
valuable for a greater understanding of how families contend with daily busyness, but also for a
clearer view of broader processes of cultural persistence and patterns of social reproduction.
These implications receive further elaboration below.
MEANINGFUL RHYTHMS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Like the other parents in this study, Mrs. F expressed ambivalence about her time-
pressured life. On the one hand, she mourned the flight of time as it vanished before her very
eyes; on the other hand, she rejoiced over the pleasure derived from her multiple involvements.
Also like the other parents in this study, Mrs. F acknowledged a rhythm to her day which gave
her an opportunity to slow down and relax, but she was simultaneously unaware of her own
involvement in the production of that daily pace. During her Tuesday trek from work to home to
work, Mrs. F coordinated a mix of fixed commitments with an array of emergent events to
design an afternoon and evening schedule that included a little mother-daughter chit-chat and at
least a few minutes of Doritos, coffee, and the news.
Weaving this tapestry of actions are certain understandings regarding the proper use of
time. In the 2 hours and 24 minutes between the end of her first shift at work and the stove’s
announcement that dinner was ready, Mrs. F explicitly invoked considerations about time, on
average, once every 14 minutes to guide the way that she experienced that afternoon. Ranging
from concerns about the precise timing of a purchase order, to evaluations of how long is too
long to go without calling one’s parents, to lamenting that marathon training and working cannot
occur simultaneously, these were the seams with which she stitched together her trajectory from
one location to another. Mrs. F’s thoughts about tomorrow’s schedule even shaped her present
conversation with her daughter and influenced her protein purchase at the store. Noticing an
10
overlap of mutually-exclusive activities for tomorrow’s afternoon, she planned – today – to call
upon her husband’s cooking contribution to the household – tomorrow. Overall, a stream of
proper time-use understandings flowed through Mrs. F’s efforts to control how her work, family,
and leisure involvements related to one another given the unstable present life conditions that
made it difficult for her to even “know where [she’s] going every day.”
The presence of these time-use understandings in Mrs. F’s time-management efforts is no
coincidence. In this dissertation I develop the concept of time-use cultures to explore the ways
that such time-use understandings relate to one another and simultaneously facilitate some time-
management efforts while hindering others. Using evidence from 4 months of extensive
ethnographic observation of the everyday lives of 8 busy middle-class families (approximately
900 hours of shadowing mothers and fathers), and 45 interviews with parents and children, I
argue that s structure parents’ time-management efforts as well as their evaluation of those
efforts. Parents deploy an ethic of achievement when aspiring for the completion of tasks, an
ethic of balance when attempting to establish personal harmony, and an ethic of commitment
when seeking the cultivation of close relationships. s do not determine parents’ actions; rather,
they structure the terms by which parents coordinate each other’s schedules and those of their
children. As structuring structured structures, time-use cultures frame parents’ efforts to arrange
in meaningful ways the bodies of family members dispersed through space-time and they frame
parents’ construal of those coordination efforts.
The relatively-autonomous power of these cultures to enable and constrain both action
and interpretation parallels that of other cultural resources, such as gender and childrearing
ideologies, that parents utilize in everyday life. But unlike these readily-recognized and
previously-identified cultures, time-use cultures pertain to a different realm of action. While
11
cultures of gender and childrearing help parents manage long-term life-trajectories such as
marriages and childhoods, and while these cultures demand long-term allegiance and invoke
persistent lifestyle attachments on behalf of the persons who deploy them, time-use cultures
apply to the real-time affairs of pragmatically managing the daily logistics of coordinating pick-
ups, drop-offs, hand-overs, meal-preparations, coffee-breaks, naps, and other quotidian
occurrences that link the domains of work for pay, unpaid care for kin, and individual pursuits
for the self. As tools for the work of quotidian coordination, time-use cultures shape the
scheduling of everyday life and configure the management of daily busyness – organizing
parents’ efforts to untangle the time-bind of work and family demands, relieve the time-pressure
of deadlines to commitments, and control the time-acceleration of contemporary activities. My
dissertation proposes time-use cultures as cultural resources that structure chains of action in this
micro-level, moment-by-moment, practical-pragmatic dimension of everyday life –
complementing the other types of cultural structures like gender ideologies that orient the more
long-term life-course strategies for coping with busyness like sequencing careers, scaling back,
or opting out of the workforce.
A search for stability, an effort to control, the task of coordination, and using
understandings about time – these are themes that resonate with all of the families in this study
as they managed time-dilemmas and negotiated time-pressures. Dual-earner, middle-class
married parents spend an average of almost 80 joint hours of their week in paid employment and
over 50 joint hours in unpaid work, totaling on average over 130 weekly hours dedicated, as a
couple, to paid and unpaid work combined (Bianchi et al. 2006). With so much of their time
spent working, it is no surprise that over 65% of mothers and 70% of fathers report at least some
conflict balancing work life, family life, and personal life (Jacobs and Gerson 2004). Despite
12
such busyness in everyday life, middle-class parents add to their already full schedules by
enrolling their children in an array of scheduled extracurricular activities (Friedman 2013,
Lareau 2003, Rosenfeld and Wise 2000). If middle-class parents in the United States are so
miserable with harried rhythms and crowded schedules, why don’t they slow down, work fewer
hours, and sign up for less after-school commitments? If their precious resource of time is
stretched so thin, why don’t they instead stock up on empty hours at home and improvised pick-
up games with children from the neighborhood? Why don’t they cope with busyness in that
way?
Different explanations have been offered for the persistence of busyness among middle-
class families in United States society. These range from the friction of work and family
institutions at odds with one another (Blair-Loy 2003, Coser 1974) to the presence of
uncooperative workplace policies (Williams and Boushey 2010), from concerns over “declining
fortunes” (Newman 1993) to “work-to-spend” cycles (Schor 1991); from reversed perceptions of
work and family worlds (Lasch 1977, Hochschild 1997) to reproductive parenting dispositions of
competition and cultivation (Friedman 2013, Kohn 1977, Lareau 2003). My dissertation
proposes another explanation for this persistence: the repertoire of available s that render daily
busyness meaningful, pleasurable, and even desirable.
The busy rhythms that constitute everyday life (Bianchi et al. 2006) are not random
action-sequences. They are the collective product of negotiated strategies strung together in
pursuit of meaningful life trajectories (LaRossa 1983, Zerubavel 1981). Although people’s time-
use is constrained by external factors such as employer demands and kinship obligations, they
are not just passive recipients of such constraints, reacting to the greater or lesser quantities of
time that are demanded from them; rather, people are also active agents with greater or lesser
13
degrees of freedom to control the shape that their daily rhythms take (Daly 1996b). The families
in this study benefited from middle-class jobs with flexible work-hours that granted them
substantial control over their schedules. My dissertation highlights this coproduction dynamic of
everyday rhythms as well as the cultural resources that middle class families use to make sense
of and bring shape to their rhythms of busyness.
Popular opinion and academic research agree: United States families enter the 21
st
century at full speed; running, harried, busy. The frenetic pace of everyday life alarms parents
and scholars alike. Concerns about the commercialization of intimate life (Hochschild 2003),
anxiety over insufficient time (Epstein and Kelleberg 2004), laments over feelings of rush
(Mattingly and Sayer 2006), and pity for the overscheduled child (Robbins 2006, Rosenfeld and
Wise 2000) all attest to the centrality of busy rhythms in our society’s contemporary topics of
distress. With busyness at the forefront of our collective conscience, it is imperative that
sociology make a serious effort to explore what it means to be busy – what people think they are
doing when they are busy. I offer my dissertation as an initial step in that direction.
STUDYING BUSY FAMILIES
Due mostly to declining male breadwinner wages and increasing rates of women’s labor
force participation, today over 70% of married couples and over 40% of families with children
are dual-earners (Bianchi, Casper, and Berkowitz-King 2005; Casper and Bianchi 2002). In this
newly-widespread family arrangement, three jobs – two breadwinners and one homemaker –
must be shared among two adults, amplifying time-allocation dilemmas and transforming the
landscape of childcare and housework issues. Given the increase in busyness that dual-earner
families face on a daily basis and the substantial increase in the proportion of families who fit
14
this dual-earner pattern, this dissertation explores how the process of time-management plays out
in this family type.
I engaged in 4 months of intensive participant-observation with 16 white middle-class
parents, shadowing each parent for one full week, continuously tracking their busy rhythms from
Monday to Sunday, and interacting with those who intersected their daily paths, including
children, neighbors, co-workers, and extended kin. I spent time in their cars, their living rooms,
their workplaces, and their various sites of leisure such as pools, shooting ranges, and parks,
taking extensive field notes on how they dealt with the daily hassles of coordinating, designing,
and negotiating schedules with the people around them. Overall, I spent approximately 900
hours as a participant-observer in the daily lives of these families.
Before the participant-observation portion of this study I conducted semi-structured
interviews with all of these parents and their children. I asked them about their time-use
concerns and feelings, listening closely as they described to me their strategies for dealing with
busy lives and coordinating work, family, and leisure realms. I interviewed two additional
families who were not part of the participant-observation subsample due to time and resource
limitations. Overall, I interviewed 10 couples – 10 mothers and their 10 husbands – and 25
children, for a total of 45 interviews. Each interview was conducted separately and ranged from
30 minutes for the younger children to over 2 hours for some of the mothers.
Although I initially interviewed and observed only dual-earner families with different
forms of dual-earning – families where both parents worked full time and families where one
parent worked full time and the other worked part time – I eventually incorporated employment
status variation into my sample. I interviewed 2 single-earner families where one parent worked
full-time and the other was a stay-at-home parent. Representative of most single-earner, two-
15
parent families (Casper and Bianchi 2002), the stay-at-home parent in both of these families was
the mother. One of these families participated in the participant-observation portion of the study.
Finally, since parenting status, race, and class variation may introduce additional factors
that affect the organization of time-use (Bianchi et al. 2006, Jacobs and Gerson 2004, Lareau
2003, Robinson and Godbey 1997, Roy et al. 2004), I sought to keep these axes constant.
Consequently, the sample in this study consisted of only white middle-class families with at least
one child below the driving age of 16. All of the participating families lived in suburban
neighborhoods throughout southern California. Pseudonyms for names of people and places are
used in this dissertation to maintain confidentiality.
ORGANIZATION OF THE DISSERTATION
Drawing on this qualitative research, I analyze the work that families perform to
coordinate daily schedules, thereby participating in the time-management practices that help
them negotiate contemporary busyness and delineate work, family, and leisure domains.
Combined, the chapters in this dissertation introduce a more meaning- and movement-sensitive
theoretical approach than what is currently utilized by sociologists to understand the time-
management practices of busy families.
Chapter 1 is a review of the family literatures that rely on a time-deficit model of
everyday experience. The time-deficit model posits that busyness (a) arises from time-scarcity,
(b) presents a hassle for parents, and (c) is confronted by way of rationalization. This chapter
also delves into an alternative model of everyday experience, which I call a spatiotemporal
coordination framework. According to this model, busyness is re-framed as the plural cultural
performances of coordinated interactions between family members. I contend that a
16
spatiotemporal coordination framework of daily busyness permits us to make the conceptual link
between the daily time-dilemmas of busy parents and the broader temporal-instability that
confronts them in everyday life.
Chapter 2 addresses the cultural underpinnings of this dissertation and offers the concept
of time-use cultures as a foundational pillar for the spatiotemporal coordination framework. In
this chapter I discuss the theoretical foundations of time-use cultures as cultural structures with
the relatively autonomous power to enable and constrain everyday interaction. The cultures of
time featured in this dissertation are akin to cultural structures that are known as “vocabularies of
motive” (Wuthnow 1991). As such, these cultures orient the meaning of parents’ time-use as
well as their own accounts of their actions and their evaluation those actions. Providing a
theoretical intervention, time-use cultures permit us to better comprehend the processes by which
parents manage time. This chapter also describes how, unlike analytic approaches that stem
from a time-deficit model, the cultural approach developed in this study grants parents power to
deal with everyday time-constraints while also recognizing the structured nature of the meanings
and means for doing so.
Chapter 3 is where I discuss the methodological approach used in this study. Like
previous studies of family busyness (Darrah et al. 2007, Hochschild 1997, Lareau 2003), I
focused on a small sample of participating families and I relied on qualitative data to obtain a
detailed picture of their daily life concerns, rhythms, and strategies for piecing together coherent
schedules. This chapter describes in great detail the sample characteristics of the ten
participating families.
Here I also describe the snowball method for recruiting participants through which I
secured the 45 participants in this intensive qualitative study. Participant-observation is a useful
17
tool for exploring what people do with their routine activities and how they circulate meanings in
everyday contexts (Lichterman 2002). This data-collection method allowed me to see how
parents imbued with meaning their busyness, as well as how they dealt with the practical issues
of coordination as they arose on a moment-by-moment basis.
This chapter also covers the two sampling methods that guided recruitment efforts and
yielded participants from both dual-earner and single-earner families. A case-study logic is
useful when asking ‘how’ questions about processes unknown before the start of a study, which
was the case with this research (Small 2009). Through this method, each case offered an
increasingly accurate understanding of the time-management coordination processes that parents
performed in everyday life. For its part, the extended-case method permits researchers to
interpret a particular case in relation to the broader social forces shaping it – extending micro-
processes to macro-forces (Burawoy 1998, Tavory and Timmermans 2009). This method relies
on a series of unique cases to identify and fill gaps in existing interpretations – extending theory.
The extended-case logic enabled me to uncover interactive mechanisms and trace cultural
processes of time-management regardless of a small sample size. Through this method I could
relate the conditions of busyness in a few families to the broader cultural forces shaping these
families’ choices for action.
This methodological chapter is also where I describe the constant-comparative method of
analysis through which I derived the grounded concept of time-use cultures (Glaser and Strauss
1967). Time-use cultures emerged from my qualitative data through the cyclical analytic process
of coding, hypothesis-testing, and pattern-seeking. Finally, chapter 3 reviews the features and
challenges posed by the intensive nature of my field work research in middle-class families. I
18
compare my experiences with those presented in other studies of middle-class family life (Lareau
2003, Friedman 2013) and I discuss my own strategies for managing the researcher role.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are the empirical chapters of this dissertation. Each chapter
elaborates upon the component elements of time-use cultures, highlights aspects of this concept
which build upon the activity-coordination model of family busyness, and reveals contributions
that this concept offers for studying families and time-use. Combined, these three chapters
demonstrate that a repertoire of cultural guidelines for proper time-use shapes in different ways
family members’ negotiation of busy schedules regardless of institutional demands and time
scarcities or abundances.
This dissertation does not intend to make claims about which time-use culture is more
prevalent in our society, or which one is most used by which gender, or if any one of them maps
onto any particular social position or location. These are empirical questions best suited for
future research. Instead, this dissertation is meant to emphasize the existence of these
inductively-discovered cultural structures and their role in coordination work and busyness-
management.
Chapter 4 introduces the concept of time-use cultures as cultures that orient time-
management tactics in everyday life. This chapter describes the three time-use cultures that I
discovered among the middle-class families in my study. These are the time-use culture of
accomplishment (which prescribes getting things done), the time-use culture of balance (which
prescribes ensuring harmony), and the time-use culture of commitment (which prescribes caring
for relationships). Each one of these presents a specific form of busyness as meaningful,
valuable, and desirable. This chapter presents the two component dimensions – the concerns that
are stipulated as proper (time-use concerns) and the type of activities that are prescribed as
19
appropriate (time-use density) – which give form to these cultures; and it presents the particular
conceptualizations of time-management strategies which are patterned by these same cultures.
In chapter 4 I argue that time-use cultures are cultural tools that parents deploy to make sense of
their efforts to deal with the moment-by-moment dilemmas of coordinating busyness in everyday
life.
Chapter 5 takes issue with the widespread understanding that a logic of efficiency
provides both the means and meaning of busy parents’ time-management techniques. In this
chapter I argue that the efficient management of daily activities means different things and that it
is reached through different routes, not just through the rational-instrumental allocation of time.
I show that the temporal cultures of achievement, balance, and commitment prove to be more
useful analytic tools than a logic of ‘efficiency’ for understanding the time-management efforts
of contemporary busy parents. This chapter more closely depicts the relatively-autonomous
power of time-use cultures to structure particular chains of action in everyday life.
Chapter 6 directly tackles a central paradox in the family and time-use literature. On the
one hand, studies note that families have less time to care, bond, and socialize than they did in
past eras. On the other hand, research also indicates a proliferation of temporal choice and
flexibility among families, especially those belonging to a professional-managerial middle-class.
This chapter highlights how cultures of time-use, neglected in previous research, help shape
whether families see their daily involvements as time-pressured arrangements or self-
empowering opportunities to organize their daily lives. I use this chapter to make the case that
the power of time-use cultures also extends into the particular interpretation that parents give to
their busyness. I argue that time-use cultures set the terms for time-use assessment, serving as
platforms for judging the worthwhileness of parents’ own time-management efforts. Chapter 6
20
overcomes contradictory positions stipulated in current family-and-time-use literature by
demonstrating that parents evaluate their busy time-use as both enriching and degrading the
quality of their everyday life, but at different times and under different circumstances.
Chapter 7 summarizes the empirical evidence presented in the previous three chapters
and explains how the separate claims discussed in each of these relate to the dominant model of
time-deficit present in the current literature on family busyness. The time-use cultures featured
in this dissertation (a) enable and constrain particular understandings of time-management (as
achieving, balancing, or committing); (b) facilitate and hinder particular pathways for time-
management (getting things done, ensuring harmony, or nurturing relationships); (c) permit and
impede particular evaluations of time-management (as successful or failed attempts to
accomplish, balance, or care); and (d) are themselves endowed and restrained by particular
constitutive relationships of interrelated strands of meanings (of compatible time-use concerns
and time-use densities). These cultures shape time-management variation in meaning, means,
and valuation despite similar time-constraints and resource availabilities. I argue that the
acknowledgement of time-use cultures paves the way for an understanding of daily busyness that
does not consider it an a-priori hassle addressed mainly through efficiency techniques that arises
from time-scarcity. Together, the three chapters illustrate a spatiotemporal coordination
framework of daily busyness and represent a contribution to the family and time-use literature by
importing a meaning- and movement-sensitive cultural analysis to the study of everyday
busyness.
In the conclusion I step back and discuss the implications of this research for American
families and the public issues of work-life balance. In particular, this study demonstrates the
need to take a closer look at current policy efforts that promote work-life flexibility. Flexibility
21
of and control over work schedules offers effective relief from daily time-pressure, but we must
be careful that such resources do not add to the dispersion and flux that contemporary families
already face in a liquid 21
st
century reality. The important topic of unequal access to these
temporal resources is also addressed in this conclusion.
My research has important theoretical implications for cultural sociology, as well. The
relationship between time-use cultures and everyday rhythms that is highlighted in this study
offers valuable insight into the manner in which culture and action play out in everyday life. In
particular, my dissertation demonstrates the value of taking seriously the up-close level of real-
time coordination that persons perform in everyday life. I focus on how this subject of study
reveals processes of daily busyness that otherwise remain overlooked by approaches that instead
take a wider glance at other aspects of social life such as class reproduction (Lareau 2003),
gender inequality (Bianchi et al. 2006), and rationalization (Hochschild 1997, 2003).
Alternative approaches such as these fail to empirically grasp persons’ plural and shifting
interpretations of their actions when they perform busyness and while they contend with it.
Simply put, these alternative approaches to the study of daily life in families cannot detect
variation – for the same person, often across daily situations – in what ‘cramming activities’ or
‘speeding up’ means to them. These alternative approaches also cannot detect important
variation in the means for apparently identical actions such as ‘cramming activities’ or ‘speeding
up.’
As I discuss at length in the conclusion, this matters for the development of effective
policy efforts meant to relieve families from time-pressure. But this also matters for more
general reasons. It is important for sociologists – weather they be concerned with the topic of
daily busyness or not – to take seriously the everyday level of coordination that I offer with this
22
dissertation because this empirical detection of intra-personal cross-contextual variation in the
meaning and means of situated interactions offers a clear view of processes of cultural
reproduction and persistence in everyday life (Patternson 2010). “It is unfortunate that an
understanding of the most fundamental feature of culture – that it is the prime source of the
predictability and stability without which human society is impossible – is now largely left to
other disciplines” (Patterson 2010: 139). Well, focusing on everyday, moment-by-moment, on-
site coordination – as I do in this dissertation – brings this feature of culture into focus and gives
sociologists an opportunity to examine how cultural persistence relates to social reproduction
without having to revert to outdated notions of culture, action, and social structures (Bourdieu
1973).
Social reproduction – or the persistence of patterns of differentiation and organization
(Hall et al. 2003) – is a topic of great interest to many family sociologists (Gerson 2009), cultural
sociologists (Lamont and Small 2008), organizational sociologists (Jepperson 1991) and
sociologists in general throughout the discipline (Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014). Focusing on
everyday practical micro-coordinations shows how cultural patterns persist and link up with
social patterns of differentiation. This is the case with topics like “stalling the gender revolution”
and “creating family time” which reproduce gender (Hochschild 1989) and class (Lareau 2003)
patterns of differentiation, respectively. Current sociological literature provides a limited view
of how patterns of interaction become reproduced in everyday life. If we can see how actors
reproduce such patterns in everyday moments across situations, then we can more easily address
them to not reproduce them, if we should be inclined to do so. As I show in the conclusion of
this dissertation, empirically detecting variation in the meaning and means of situated action via
23
a focus on this up-close level of daily coordination offers precisely such an empowering view of
these patterns of cultural and social reproduction.
Overall, the work presented here forefronts the qualitative nature of busyness and illustrates
how a qualitative distinction of time-use enriches the analysis of how busyness is managed in
everyday life among United States families.
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CHAPTER 1
Families and Busyness
25
BUSYNESS
Widespread social, cultural, demographic, and technological transformations of United
States society – as well as policy deficiencies – from the end of the 20th and beginning of the
21st centuries have brought forth an unprecedented maelstrom of busyness for contemporary
families with children (Bianchi and Milkie 2010). Symbolic representations of this busyness are
familiar to us all in widespread images of frenetic families – multi-tasking super-moms juggling
briefcases and diapers, breadwinning involved-fathers in Little League baseball dugouts, and
computer-savvy over-scheduled children texting on smart phones and fidgeting with i-pads –
relying on smart phones, rollover minutes, and family plans to stay connected as they rush with
urgency to and fro from one activity to another. Sociological literature that explores the
experience of this busyness in the everyday life of families identifies it through different terms
which describe its different aspects (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Bianchi, Casper, and
King 2005; Casper and Bianchi 2002; Daly 1996; Darrah, Freeman, and English-Lueck 2007;
Epstein and Kalleberg 2004; Jacobs and Gerson 2004; Robinson and Godbey 1997; Schneider
and Waite 2005). Whether it is called the ‘conflict of competing work and family demands,’ the
‘challenge of work-life balance,’ the ‘time-squeeze,’ the ‘time-crunch,’ the ‘time-bind,’ the
‘speed-up,’ ‘time-pressure,’ ‘frenetic life,’ or ‘harried rhythms’ (to list only some of the terms),
sociological literature agrees that this condition – manifested in the dense schedules, perennial
rush, and constant motion of family members – matters for the health and well-being of parents,
children, and communities.
Descriptions of daily busyness among contemporary United States families cohere into
three sets of sensations that get framed as ‘time-dilemmas’ in sociological literature. First and
foremost is the difficulty that parents face in meeting demands from the institutions of paid-work
26
and family. This is the problem of work-family balance (Bianchi et al. 2006, Glass 2005).
Second are the laments that people have about not having enough time to do the things that they
want to do (Mattingly and Sayer 2006). This is the problem of time-pressure. Third, and least
explored, is the seemingly uncontrollable urge to execute activities at an accelerated pace
(Robinson and Godbey 1997). This is the problem of speed-up.
The sources, or agents, of daily busyness that have been identified by the relevant
literature (Bianchi et al. 2012; Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006;
Bianchi, Casper, and King 2005; Casper and Bianchi 2002; Daly 2001a, 1996; Darrah, Freeman,
and English-Lueck 2007; Epstein and Kalleberg 2004; Jacobs and Gerson 2004; Robinson and
Godbey 1997; Schneider and Waite 2005) fall into three basic categories: an intensification of
work life, an intensification of family life, and a workforce-workplace mismatch. Each of these
sources of busyness is itself constituted by four categories of changes: demographic changes,
cultural changes, economic changes, and technological changes. The dominant narrative that
emerges from these current accounts of the nature and source of daily busyness in contemporary
families is that the time-dilemmas of busyness manifest in hyperactivity, rush, constant motion,
and dense schedules.
The workforce-workplace mismatch, a time-intensive family life, and a time-intensive
work life all contribute to feelings of time pressure (the problem of time-pressure), a sense of
being harried (the problem of speed-up), and the perception of having a tough time juggling
work and family realms (the problem of work-family balance). Presumably, meeting time-
intensive work demands and organizing daily schedules around ensuring children’s enrichment
deprives family members of time together and leads parents to accelerate the pace of their lives
in order to rescue at least some time to be together and cultivate meaningful bonds of intimacy
27
with each other and their children. But, ironically, doing things faster in order to overcome
family-time deprivation and rescue intimate, emotion-laden, priceless ties with family members
reinforces the fast-paced life of rush and urgency – the on-the-go, in-a-hurry, freneticism – which
they tried to escape in the first place.
Hochschild (2005) provides an elegant imagery of this process: Busyness seeps into
everyday life through a “crack” in the time-bind; in other words, families’ strategies for dealing
with the time-dilemmas of busyness constitute a “port of entry” for more busyness. Busy
families thus become “centrifugal families” on a dizzying “carousel” of busyness (Daly 1996).
Centrifugal families are caught in an endless cycle of generating speed, working
to overcome the effects of that speed by pulling themselves toward the center,
only to find themselves back on the outside creating the very centrifugal forces
that they will seek to overcome (Daly 1996: 206).
Busyness breeds more busyness, trapping families in a maelstrom of busyness.
Trapped in this whirlpool, what hope is there for managing – let alone escaping – the
busyness of everyday life? Research on family busyness does identify many coping strategies of
busy families. These will be discussed shortly. But first, implicit in this dominant narrative of
everyday busyness are a set of assumptions which together constitute what I call “the time-deficit
interpretive model of contemporary busyness.” The following section presents this interpretive
model and discusses some limitations inherent in it. These limitations frame the research
question for my dissertation.
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A TIME-DEFICIT MODEL OF BUSYNESS
The narrative that emerges from current research on daily busyness in United States
families stipulates that societal changes over the past half-decade have created a situation of
time-deficit that complicates everyday rituals of togetherness (Daly 1996; Shore 2005).
Busyness, in these terms, describes a difficulty that parents feel as they navigate through daily
life, spending different amounts of time in the institutions of work, family, and leisure,
attempting to strike an optimal balance (Bianchi and Raley 2005; Bianchi et al. 2006, 2005;
Blair-Loy 2003; Crouter and McHale 2005; Daly 2001a, 2001b, 1996; Glass 2005; Hochschild
2005, 2003, 1997, 1989; Jacobs and Gerson 2004; Mattingly and Sayer 2006; Presser 2005;
Schneider and Waite 2005; Shore 2005).
Underlying this interpretation of busyness are three interrelated assumptions which
together make up a “time-deficit interpretive model.” These are: (a) an assumption that a deficit
in available time is the main source of time-dilemmas; (b) an assumption that busyness presents
a problematic hassle for parents; and (c) an assumption that modern techniques of efficiency and
rationalization provide the means for dealing with busyness.
INSUFFICIENT TIME AMOUNTS
The time-deficit model of daily busyness depicts parents who fervently attempt to create
time to form meaningful emotional connections with each other and their children, “weaving”
daily schedules that intend to do just that (Garey 1999). But this implicit understanding of the
time-deficit model relies on a linear, “clock-time” view of time (Adam 2004). This view of time
sees it as a measureable, abstract, and finite resource which parents spend in a zero-sum trade-
off between different activities, where every minute spent on one activity is a minute that cannot
29
be spent on another (Bianchi et al. 2006). Even though “time-deepening” (Robinson and Godbey
1997) via “multitasking” (Offer and Schneider 2011) takes busyness beyond zero-sum
calculations, this view of time as a resource that is spent continues to frame the experience of
busyness as an outcome of ‘too little time’ left for other activities such as bonding with family
members (Daly 2001c). The time-dilemmas of speed-up, time-pressure, and difficulty with
work-family balance are all predicated on the sensation of not having enough of this precious
resource: time.
Nevertheless, time is also a socially-constructed category (Gillis 1996) and a socio-
structural rhythm (Zerubavel 1979). Focusing on the scarcity of time as a resource for action
yields important information about how people allocate their time and what challenges they face
while distributing these allocations within a context of busyness. But in order to obtain an
accurate view of the techniques that people use to organize the distribution of these allocations –
in other words, of their time-management strategies – in everyday life, it is necessary to also
consider these other views of time.
The middle-class parents in my study did very little with their daily recognitions of
insufficient time. Recognizing the continuous diminution of time quantities did not really help
them to piece together schedules which protected familial bonds and strengthened emotions of
care and commitment. Other recognitions proved to be more relevant in helping them craft such
schedules. The alternative interpretive framework that I present in the following chapter
incorporates an expanded understanding of time and thereby permits one to see persons engaging
with time in ways other than spending its limited quantities.
Furthermore, the middle-class parents in my study often expressed sensations of busyness
despite having plenty of time free from the realms of paid and unpaid work which presumably
30
render it scarce. How can we interpret busyness in moments such as those – when free time is in
abundance? Flexible work-family arrangements presented the parents in my study with many of
these moments, and yet they continued to speed up, feel time-pressure, and recognize constraints
in the way they allotted their time.
Moreover, I did observe moments when the parents in these families sped-up in order to
generate time to be together and forge bonds of intimacy with each other and their children. But
there were also many instances when family members bypassed such opportunities, apparently
moving frenetically to evade moments of “quality time” with each other. How can such a rushed
and hurried dispersal be interpreted as an attempt to create time during which to be physically
together and bond emotionally, if by rushing away family members flee bond-building intimacy?
The alternative framework that I present in the following chapter allows one to
incorporate such ubiquitous contradictory moments of everyday life in a revised
conceptualization of busyness while still describing the difficulty that persons face in juggling
daily obligations (their temporal allocations), the lamentations about not having enough time to
do desired things (their temporal perceptions), and the experience of a faster pace in daily life
(their temporal rhythms).
PROBLEMATIC INCONVENIENCE
Implicit in the dominant narrative of daily busyness among United States families is the
assumption that busyness means “something that must be dealt with,” “an inconvenience,” “a
hassle,” “a problem” to those who experience it. Presumably, being busy is construed as
problematic by those who experience it. The narrative of family busyness is that a busy life – to
31
the family members who experience it – represents something unwanted, a problem to be dealt
with, a hassle.
In depicting busyness thus, the time-deficit model glosses over a ‘positive’ dimension of
busyness. As will be further discussed in the following chapter, busyness is not just a destructive
force that threatens personal health and family well-being; it is also a ‘productive’ agent with the
power to bring people together – certainly as physically intersecting schedules throughout the
day, but also as communities of similarly busy-ed people.
Abundant in the literature are descriptions of parents who attach positive meaning to
busyness. Rather than interpreting their busy life as solely a problematic and inconvenient
hassle, these parents – mostly mothers – re-invent themselves as persons who thrive in such a
fast-paced and overflowing context, basically construing busyness as a virtuous experience
essential for their busy notion of self, and toward which they feel a strong sense of allegiance and
devotion (Blair-Loy 2003; Garey 1999; Gerson 2009). These parents do not just rush busily;
they do so with gusto, for they see speeding up as a pleasant accomplishment, and themselves as
persons fully capable of accomplishing the meaningful feat of handling busyness.
This positive meaning of daily busyness is present in the studies of Arlie Hochschild
(1989, 1997, 2003, 2005). Hochschild introduces us to working mothers who – while dealing
with second shifts, time binds, and the emotional labor of dealing with time-deficits – self-
identify as “on-the-go” (1989: 203) persons comfortably and competently experiencing
busyness:
The busy bee located meaning right where it always was supposed to be – in the
daily activities of home life, but condensed them so that they fit into smaller time
32
slots. She did not renounce or postpone fun or meaning. She enjoyed it now, but
in a busy, fast-paced way. She took pride in being efficient, effective, Type A. In
essence, she absorbed the time bind into her personal identity. She absorbed
rationalization of time into her self. It fit her and she fit it. She was a busy, fast-
paced-type of person. She identified with it. Furthermore, hurry was fun. What
the endurers and deferrers saw as a hassle the busy bee saw as a challenge. She
was energized by pressure. Working under pressure was, many workers told me,
like a strenuous hike – good for you, hard, and something you’re glad you did
afterward. She brought her image of family life close to the reality of it by saying,
in effect, “we like it this way.” Often, she also persuaded other members of her
family including her children that hurry was fun for them too. (“Come on kids.
Let’s see who’ll get there first!”) (Hochschild 2005, 348-349).
Many working parents took a sporting “have fun” attitude toward their hurried
lives: “Let’s see how fast we can do this! Come on, kids, let’s go!” They brought
their image of the family closer to the reality of it by saying, in effect, “We like it
this way.” They saw hassle as challenge. In other families, parents seemed to
encourage children to develop schedules parallel to and as hectic as their own….
One Amerco mother… talked about her schedule as she might have talked about a
strenuous hike. She was having fun roughing it with multitasking and chopped-up
time (Hochschild 2003: 146-147).
33
These mothers see themselves as empowered and able to keep busyness under control, while also
enjoying it. For them, busyness is not mainly the constraining force deterring their enjoyment of
time to bond or inconveniencing them with an accelerated pace; rather, busyness is for the most
part the context that liberates their thrill for speed and invokes in them a sense of
accomplishment.
Although descriptions of this positive identification with, and definition of, busyness
abound in the literature, a time-deficit model assigns associations of busyness with
accomplishment, valued selves, and pleasure a background role in the dominant discourse that
predominates in the literature. Instead of these associations, the time-deficit model emphasizes
loss, affliction, and irresolvable conflict when describing everyday busyness.
It is true that daily busyness brings about problematic conditions for the health and well-
being of individuals, families, and communities (Bianchi et al. 2005), but in order to give proper
weight to the spectrum of meanings associated with busyness, an alternative model is required –
one that does not neglect the creative power of busyness. The interpretive framework that I
present in the next chapter is one such model, incorporating the devotion to busyness that many
parents express throughout our society.
COPING EFFICIENTLY
The final component of a time-deficit model is the assumption that modern techniques of
efficiency and rationalization provide the means for dealing with busyness. Whether exploring
low-income or middle-class family life, studies that describe parents’ efforts to control their
maelstrom of busyness and to overcome their time-dilemmas consistently claim that parents turn
to the world of paid-work for inspiration, ideas, and management practices that may help them to
34
slow-down speed-ups, loosen time-pressures, and overcome difficulties balancing work and
family obligations (Arendell 2001;Becker and Moen 1999; Darrah et al. 2007; Forsberg 2009;
Hochschild 1997; Roy et al. 2004; Wallace 2010).
I discovered a number of managers who said that they brought home management
tips that helped them smoothly run their homes. And sometimes people described
themselves using work imagery....The roles and relationships of the office became
benchmarks for those at home (Hochschild 2003: 42-43).
Claims that parents’ time-management techniques for coping with busy lives are tactics imported
from the market world pervade the dominant narrative of daily busyness among United States
families, which describes parents as following principles of efficiency to schedule their activities
in a prudent manner that maximizes scarce time.
As exemplary descriptions of such coping strategies illustrate, it appears as though “a cult
of efficiency” has become both “a means to an end” and “a way of life” for contemporary
parents:
Family time… has taken on an “industrial” tone…. Family time is succumbing to
a cult of efficiency previously associated with the workplace (46)…. This creates
a certain anxiety about being “on time,” because it is uncomfortable… when one
is late, and precious time is squandered if one is early (50)… Many working
parents try to go faster if for no other reason than to clear off some space in which
to go slowly. They do two or three things at once. They plan ahead. They
35
delegate…. They pack one activity closer to the next…. Time becomes something
to “save” at home as much as or even more than at work…. A cult of
efficiency… is allowed to set up shop and make itself comfortable at home.
Efficiency has become both a means to an end – more home time – and a way of
life, an end in itself (Hochschild 1997: 212).
While the power of “efficiency” to permeate many aspects of our contemporary life is widely
recognized in the field of sociology – reaching as far back as Weber’s consideration of the “iron
cage” of rationality (Weber 1958) – the time-deficit model tends to detach ‘efficient’ practices
for coping with busyness from their moral foundations in the broader cultural processes of
rationalistic and capitalistic encroachments of private life (Bellah et al. 1985; Hareven 1983;
Swidler 2001; Zelizer 2005).
In actuality, when parents cope with busyness through time-management techniques, they
do not just maintain an instrumental, means-ends relation to this task. These management
techniques are not absent of meaning; they do not focus solely on overcoming time-deficit or
minimizing institutional friction (clashing demands from and competing devotions to ‘work’ and
‘family’). Rather, coping with busyness through time-management tactics is a meaningful
enterprise tied to cultural notions of the good self and the good life. These means for managing
busyness – weather they are efficient or not – only make sense, and they are only imaginable and
desirable, within a system of meanings that defines them as valuable and worthy.
The research of some scholars provides glimpses of this important and consequential
notion that strategies for managing busyness are situated within meaning-systems. Hochschild
(1997, 2003, 2005), for instance, notes that parents’ “orientations toward time” are drawn from
36
capitalist “market culture.” According to her, “a market way of seeing time” is manifest in the
“spillover of the cult of efficiency from office to home” (2005: 344). Parenting “in a market
kind of way” – efficiently creating memories and “adding value” to family life by participating
in “high-leverage” activities with children – embodies the cultural premises of bureaucratic
scientism, rational calculation, an emotional detachment. Parenting efficiently is not just an
instrumental response to the problem of time-deficit; it is a cluster of behaviors tied to
meaningful ways of seeing and treating people – borrowed from the realm of work (2005: 340).
Hochschild’s research indicates that these efficient techniques make sense to executives and
other busy parents. They are meaningful behaviors; techniques inspired by meaning systems
with a life of their own – not empty, meaningless reactions to lack of time.
The morality of efficient means for managing time is something that the historian E. P.
Thompson also brings to the fore. Thompson (1967) linked “the inward notation of time” that
characterizes a society’s “time-sense” to that society’s “technological conditioning.” He notes
that as England moved from a peasant-based society to one based on industrial-capitalism, the
labor context that persons encountered imposed a time-discipline that sustained a sense of time
as scarce, abstract, linear, standard, divisible, and anxiety-provoking; this differed from the
“task-oriented” notion of time as cyclical, tied to tasks, passed (not spent), and quite
uninteresting as a thing in itself which was sustained by a pre-capitalist labor context. Thompson
(1967) explains that by the third generation of factory workers, being “time-thrift” and putting
time to productive use had become accepted as appropriate ideals by which to live. As his
research indicates, “the zealous husbandry of time” (393) – first on the factory floor and then in
other life contexts – became a meaningful enterprise. In due time, factory workers had
internalized the new ‘time-discipline’ and the notion that ‘time is money.’ They understood their
37
employers’ “moral critique of idleness” and moral exaltation of productivity: being productive
was the right way to be – not just a response to bells, monetary incentives, and suppressions of
fairs. Eventually, industrial labor habits became morally-desirable behaviors; time-saving
techniques supported by meaning systems with a life of their own – not empty, meaningless
responses to employers’ supervision and admonishment.
The time-deficit model overlooks the culturally-informed status of the busyness-
management techniques that are deployed in everyday life. As highlighted in the next chapter,
the alternative interpretive framework that I develop does recognize these techniques as suffused
with meaning, for they entail allegiances to cultural ideals. Doing so broadens the horizon of
coping mechanisms beyond the “cult of efficiency.” We can see how parents cope with busyness
in ways that are not accurately captured by the paradigm of ‘instrumental-efficient tactic.’
COORDINATION WORK
The time-deficit model has one additional limitation: by positing time-poverty as the
essential element of contemporary families’ busyness, this model dismisses the work of
coordination as ancillary, assigning it the status of epiphenomenon –a mere response to time-
deficit. To the extent that parents coordinate, they do so to deal with time-deficit. But this
construal of coordination fails to recognize the central role that it plays in the constitution of
busyness. Coordination is not the grunt work that parents accept passively, kneeling to what
institutions make them do; rather, through coordination work, parents are perpetuators of their
own institutional arrangements.
38
DISMISSING COORDINATION WORK IN CONCERTED CHILDREARING
Qualitative studies of family life provide detailed accounts of the daily lives of busy
families, but largely because these studies rely on a time-deficit model, they end up dismissing
the central role that coordination plays in the experience of daily busyness. What the dominant
narrative draws from these accounts is the structured, child-centered, exhausting, frenetic pace at
which parents operate. What the narrative does not incorporate is the coordination work that
makes possible this frenetic pace and also brings into it the possibility for enjoyment of play,
rest, and family. Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau’s (2003) now classic book about
childrearing patterns among middle- and working-class parents offers the perfect example of a
qualitative description of daily busyness which interprets it according to the parameters of a
time-deficit model.
The book introduces us to Mr. and Ms. Tallinger, busy parents who race from activity to
activity concertedly cultivating their children’s talents and abilities:
Mr. and Ms. Tallinger often have limited time between work and the start of an
activity. They rush home, rifle through the mail, prepare snacks, change out of
their work clothes, make sure the children are appropriately dressed and have the
proper equipment for the upcoming activity , find their car keys, put the dog
outside, load the children and equipment into the car, lock the door, and drive off.
This pattern repeats itself, with slight variations, day after day (42).
The Tallinger parents don’t just rush; they also adjust their family life to accommodate these
skill-building activities:
39
Because there were so many children’s activities, and because they were accorded
so much importance, children’s activities determined the schedule for the entire
family…. Adults’ leisure time was absorbed by children’s activities…. In the
organization of daily life, children’s interests and activities were treated as matters
of consequence (35)…. In the Tallinger family, the older children’s schedules set
the pace of life for all family members…. Garrett has the most activities. Thus, it
is his schedule, in particular, that determines where the adults must be and when
they must be there, sets the timing and type of meals for everyone… and even
shapes the family’s vacation plans (42).
And the Tallingers tolerate this intense busyness despite the exhaustion and tension that it brings
into their lives:
The sheer number of activities increases the potential for overlapping events and
last-minute conflicts (44)…. Children’s activities create substantial work for their
parents. Parents fill out enrollment forms, write checks, call to arrange car pools,
wash uniforms, drive children to events, and make refreshments…. Simply getting
ready for an activity – collecting the equipment, organizing the children, loading
the car – can be exhausting. For adults, in addition to the labor of preparing, there
is the labor of watching (47)…. The Tallinger’s commitments to concerted
cultivation creates additional labor for them when, as happens every few days,
activities conflict (58).
40
Lareau uses these descriptions of everyday life to present a narrative of daily busyness that is
consistent with a time-deficit model:
Month after month, children are busy participating in sports, music, scouts, and
play groups. And, before and after going to work, their parents are busy getting
them to and from these activities. At times, middle-class houses seem to be little
more than holding places for the occupants during the brief periods when they are
between activities (Laureau 2003: 63-64).
But there is much more to the Tallingers’ daily busyness than these deficits – of time at home,
time in unstructured activities, time to rest before and after work, and time free from children.
Lareau does describe a dizzying month packed with organized activities, out-of-state
travel, and red-eyed child-centeredness for the Tallinger family, but she also describes
coordination techniques that foster and fuel their particular child-centered busyness: Allowing
their children to ride their bikes to swim practice (43), take the bus home after school (45), be at
play-dates (45), and carpool with teammates to soccer practices (48) and games (58) are ways
that Mr. and Ms. Tallinger coordinate their children’s activities with their own work trips (44),
family gatherings (58), and personal commitments (43) throughout the month.
It is the coordination of family members’ activities that permits the Tallinger children to
“make themselves a snack, and watch television for about an hour until their parents get home,”
to “also play outdoors informally,” to “run around the yard playing baseball (with a tennis ball)”
with each other “before and after scheduled events,” and for their parents to “sometimes… join
41
them for backyard ball games” (45). These coordinated moments of unscheduled play, leisure,
rest, and family-time happen in conjunction with the frenetic pace of their concerted-cultivation
parenting strategy. Coordination makes this possible.
But rather than exalting this coordination work to its rightful place in the center of the
Tallinger family’s busy life, Lareau draws from the time-deficit model of daily busyness to
dismiss it as less important than a style of childrearing. Coordination thus becomes simply what
Mr. and Mrs. Tallinger do to stay on schedule – how they get Garrett on time to soccer practice
given an insufficient amount of time to do so because of their own work schedules or the
activities of their other children (Lareau 2003: 49). Essentially, Lareau chains coordination
work to a time-deficit model and reduces it the mere management of scheduling conflicts. As
will be discussed shortly, however, coordination work merits conceptual autonomy and deserves
a framework that places it at the center of the Tallinger’s busyness.
DISMISSING COORDINATION WORK IN PROFESSIONALIZED MOTHERHOOD
Another qualitative study that offers a prime example of the time-deficit model’s
dismissal of coordination work is Opting Out, Pamela Stone’s (2007) study of stay-at-home
professional-class mothers who have “opted out” of the labor force and have instead
“professionalized” motherhood. Simultaneously isolated in, and harried by, their child-centered
busyness, these professional-class mothers coordinate a life of balance for themselves and their
families.
Stone (2007) introduces us to Maeve (164), Trudy (165), Kate (169), Lynn (170), Jessie
(173), Stephanie (174), and Nancy (187) – professional-class mothers who deal with the
isolation, fast-pace, time-pressures, fatigue, and lack of time for self that accompany devoting
42
their time to mothering and housekeeping by participating in fitness classes, play groups,
volunteer activities, and focusing on the “instrumental tasks” (169) of mothering and
volunteering – planning, choreographing, and administrating the many activities of themselves,
their household, and their children. Dealing with busyness in this manner is “a lifesaver” (165)
because for it allows them to implement their professional skills and training, to become
integrated into support networks of women in similar situations, and to carve out personal time.
In short, it allows them to feel enriched and fulfilled:
I really wanted to keep up, keep my hands in something in the community and be
involved, and not sort of lose sight of what’s going on in the world, and what other
issues people are passionate about, and be able to work on it (173) – Jessie
Beckman
[I sought out volunteer activities] needing somehow to round out my life. I mean,
again, I just could not [groping for words], I was not completely fulfilled with just
being home with my children…. [I] tried to choose things in the coming year that
will not only feel fulfilling from my own concern about giving back to the world,
but will also enrich myself – enrich my own life as well as that of my kids (173-
174) – Stephanie Spano
These middle-class mothers successfully coordinate intense, professionalized motherhood “with
many things – taking time for self, friends, support groups, volunteering, and the like” (169).
43
Coordination work is the “lifesaver” that allows them to weave “professionalized” domesticity
with personally enriching and fulfilling activities throughout their days.
But Stone (2007) stone draws from the time-deficit model of daily busyness to provide a
narrative which overlooks the importance of this coordination work and instead focuses on the
time-intense unpaid-work of child-care that simultaneously isolates and time-pressures these
mothers, resulting in deficits of time for self and friends:
Lynn Hamilton’s life was fairly typical…. With her husband working very long
hours and constantly on call, she did all the rest: “Taking care of the kids, helping
out with school, and taking care of the home front, and doing a fair amount of
volunteer work, although less than I did when I first stopped working.” For Lynn,
as for virtually all these women, “taking care of the kids” involved a heavy menu of
activities that started when the children were quite young…. This was a typical
week: “Well, let’s see. Lauren takes piano and violin, so two instruments to
practice every day. Piano, she has a lesson once a week, at home; violin, she’s in
an orchestra and has a group lesson at school, so those are two different days; and
then, has a private teacher. And what I really have to oversee is the rehearsal and
practice. And Allison takes piano this year, so she practices every day. But
typically, they have a structured activity, each of them, three or four times a week.
Lauren does a fair amount of drama. She did a drama class on Monday afternoons.
It was really fun. And they just had their last class. I think she’s not going to do
the next section. I think she’s going to do a painting class at the fine arts center.
44
She does Girl Scouts, she’s in the school musical, we’re going there tonight. But
they’re having it again tomorrow. She takes calligraphy” (Stone 2007: 169-170).
Stone offers a narrative that concentrates on the intense domestic duties that time-pressure Lynn
Hamilton, and she reduces this mother’s coordination work to the “instrumental tasks of
mothering” (Stone 2007: 170).
An alternative framework which gives coordination work its due place in the narrative
would recognize the central role that it plays in generating the busy co-existence of a variety of
child-care and me-time activities – PTA committees, Brownie troops, soccer teams, Bible study
groups, fitness classes, and time-with-friends – in the busy life of Lynn Hamilton. In the
following chapter I introduce such a framework. With it, coordination work is more than what
middle-class parents do when pressed for time or confronted with scheduling dilemmas; it is the
powerful engine that drives their feeling of simultaneous child-centered-ness and personal-
enrichment.
TOWARD A COORDINATION FRAMEWORK
The dominant narrative of daily busyness in United States families describes the
phenomena of raising children (Lareau 2003), caring for family members (Hochschild 1989),
mothering (Hays 1996), fathering (Townsend 1996), and doing paid and unpaid work (Bianchi et
al. 2006). This narrative emphasizes time-deficit as the common analytic thread that ties all of
these phenomena together. Largely neglected by this narrative, however, is a phenomenon that
actually does instrumentally tie all of these together: coordination-work!
45
Descriptions of busyness in the literature do hint that ‘coordination’ constitutes a separate
and important set of activities that is central to the life of contemporary families. For parents,
especially, coordination is intense work. Long hours of paid work, intense norms of proper
childrearing, a competitive global economy, the proliferation of communication technology –
these and other agents of busyness complicate co-presence (Beck-Gernsheim 2002; DeVault
1991; Presser 2003; Shore 2005). Regardless of time-deficit or abundance (or available material
resources), daily life in families is most definitely an achievement, for the texture of
contemporary living does not guarantee coordinated interaction between family members.
Parents face more than just the quandary of time-deficit throughout the day – they also must
contend with the work of coordinating multiple family members who are dispersed through
space-time in separate locations.
Beck-Gernsheim (2002), in observing the contours of “the post-familial family,”
highlights the “divergence of tempos” and the need to coordinate schedules that characterizes
contemporary life among families:
Most men are in employment outside the home and so are an increasing number
of women. The children go to school and spend more and more of their leisure in
organized activities outside the home…. Family life no longer happens in one
place but is scattered between several different locations, neither a fortiori is there
a common temporal rhythm, for the family’s life is structured by different social
institutions: the timetable of kindergarten, school and youth organization, the
working hours of the husband and the wife, the opening hours of shops, the
schedule of public transport and so on. Most important of all, the flexibilization
46
of working hours directly intrudes upon family life, as it produces irregular and
fluctuating tempos that do not correspond to such requirements of living together
as continuity, stability and co-ordination…. The lives of individual family
members, with their different rhythms, locations, and demands, only rarely fit
together naturally (91).
Likewise, Helen Jarvis (2005), whose work looks at how the “material infrastructure of everyday
life” enables and constrains individual time-use, also underscores the centrality of “household
coordination” in contemporary living:
Most of us spend much of each day orchestrating continual movement in relation
to others. Whether this involves long journeys or local interaction, knowledge of
where, when, and how activities and relations are to be conducted is essential
(137).
A few recent studies of busyness have acknowledged that tasks associated with coordinating
daily life are a separate and important set of activities implicated in the busyness of
contemporary families (Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Darrah, Freeman, and English-Lueck 2007,
Jarvis 2005; Shore 2005). Most notable among these is Faster Than Ever, a book by Darrah and
colleagues (2007) about busy dual-earner families in northern California. Darrah and colleagues
identify the work of coordination as one of the most intense “drivers of busyness” experienced
by the families in their sample. They find that families negotiate lifestyles to match their vision
of themselves – the “planning Flahertys” spend much of their time planning and reviewing their
47
schedules; the “volunteering Carlsbergs” volunteer when no one else does; the “simplifying
Mendoza/Jones” live beneath their means and scrutinize every purchase that enters their home;
the “child-centered Hopkins/Johnsons” maintain stable routines for their son at the cost of
substantial additional work for themselves; and so on. All of these families design their busy
daily lives to be consistent with their visions of the type of families they want to be. Darrah and
colleagues argue that coordination work makes this possible.
As revealed by several studies within the purview of sociological research, the
coordination work of planning, deciding, juggling, researching, scheduling, and transporting
deserves recognition as a central component of daily busyness. Furthermore, the busy middle-
class parents whom I studied certainly did take seriously their coordination of schedules and the
movement of bodies from one location to another. Mrs. W, a part-time public-relations manager
for a cat adoption agency, demonstrates this point beautifully. In the following quote, she
described to me precisely how complex, meaningful, and salient coordination work was for her
throughout her daily life.
I signed my son and daughter up for tennis, which is a 40-minute group lesson
with other kids their age. One of the families that have the same dynamic, the
daughter is in the 3 o’clock class with my daughter, and so the mom has to bring
her son. So her son and my son just play in the playground while the first class
goes on and then they switch. You have to plan it that way with calling other
moms. Other moms call you and say, “Hey, I’m signing up Johnny for tennis on
Mondays, do you want to do it with me?” I have to think, how will this work for
everybody included? Does that happen during Collin’s nap? Will I be able to
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manage holding him while alternating Jack and Jill?.... We’re going to try to
carpool, but it hasn’t worked out yet. The carpooling issue is [takes a deep
breath], okay, ready? It’s complicated: Sarah gets out of school at 2:30. Jack gets
out of school at 3:00. Generally, I would just, whenever there are siblings that
have a sibling that gets out at 3:00, they offer an after-school story time from the
German teacher; so she does the story time in German. So those kids that have a
sibling that gets out at 3:00 sit in the after-school story time from 2:30, when they
would get out, until 3:00; so that way the mom comes at 3:00 to pick up both of
them, or everybody. So that’s what I do, but this Monday I had to come early. I
had to call the school and say, I’m going to come at 2:50, and pick them both up,
to take them both to tennis. But when the carpool works out, one mom will pick up
just the early class girls and take them to the 3 o’clock class, and then the next
mom will pick up all the boys that get out at 3:00 to bring them to the 3:40 class.
And then hopefully whoever the first mom is doesn’t have to take everybody home
because the other mom comes. [ME: So the mom of the other girl is going to end
up bringing your daughter home before you bring your son home?] No, because
then there would be nobody here at the house! She can’t bring my daughter home
when I’m still down there. [Me: So...] I would grab my daughter…. [When your
son finishes?] No, see, that’s what we haven’t worked out yet [laughs]; we’re still
figuring it out! – Mrs. W.
Mrs. W’s quote illustrates the centrality of coordination work in the life of contemporary parents.
This work, however, goes largely unrecognized by the dominant narrative of family busyness.
49
The framework that I introduce in the following chapter corrects this limitation and positions
coordination work as the fulcrum of analysis for busyness research. Doing so permits a more
comprehensive sociological understanding of the ways that parents like Mrs. W attempt to
manage their busyness and in the process dialectically further nourish its elements throughout
their days.
The current literature on family busyness documents multiple categories of parental
strategies for coping with busy lives; but, as I will discuss in the next section, a failure to
consider the enormous importance of coordination work has rendered the sociological inquiry of
busyness unable to adequately analyze, let alone explain, how contemporary families negotiate
busyness at the level of real-time, moment-by-moment, locally-situated micro-interactions. As
Mrs. W’s negotiation-of-busyness-via-carpooling demonstrates, coordination work takes place
precisely at that level of interaction. Neglecting to consider this work and the daily, micro-level
“time-management” strategies that it engenders has important implications for the effectiveness
of public programs meant to address family health and well-being. On the flip side of this,
analytically capturing the micro-processes by which families negotiate everyday busyness
generates important theoretical interventions that can provide valuable insight which helps such
public policy efforts.
NEGOTIATING BUSYNESS
Three categories of strategies through which contemporary families negotiate busyness in
their lives emerge in the sociological literature that analyzes the busyness of such families.
These categories are not explicitly defined by the relevant literature, but they nevertheless do
exist as distinct sets of techniques deployed by busy families. In the sense that they are ways to
50
juggle commitments to distinct life domains, these behaviors are negotiation strategies; and in
the sense that they are ways to control schedules of activities, they are management strategies.
These strategies are discussed with greater detail in the empirical chapters that follow. Here, I
simply provide a brief overview of them in order to explain the research question that guides the
research presented in this dissertation. These coping strategies are summarized in Table 1 below.
Table 1.1 Typology of Strategies For Coping With Busyness
COPING
STRATEGIES
OBDURATE-ENDURING
... life-stage pursuits
INSTANTIATED-RECURRING
... daily-life pursuits
PRACTICAL
WORK
arranging...
Work-Life Balance
opting out,
downshifting, sequencing,
scaling back, outsourcing,
changing jobs,
working part-time
Activity Administration
saving time, maximizing time,
controlling time:
scheduling, multitasking, crowding
tasks, staggering obligations, decreasing
obligations, foregoing activities,
CULTURAL
WORK
construing...
Ideological Modification
redefining career, redefining
domesticity, redefining emotional
needs, developing potential
selves, developing family myths
Activity Signification
efficient
achievement, balance, commitment
fun, annoying, boring, challenging, etc.
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
The busyness literature offers extensive discussions about two sets of long-term strategies
which parents deploy in the long-term sense of shifting things as part of life-course stages,
transitions, or pursuits. I term one set of these strategies “work-life-balance” strategies because
they constitute broad shifts in the arrangements of “work” and “family” institutions. Scaling
back work hours over long periods of time is one example of this category of strategies (Becker
and Moen 1999). I term the second set of strategies “ideological-modification” strategies
because what they shift are the perceptions about different aspects of “work” and “family”
institutions. Redefining the emotional needs of children over the course of several years is one
51
example of this category of strategies (Blair-Loy 2003). The third set of coping strategies that
the busyness literature presents are fleeting-recurring strategies which parents deploy in the
short-term sense of doing things repeatedly one day after another, sometimes even from one
moment to the next. I term this set of strategies “activity-administration” strategies because they
involve arranging daily activities in relation to one another in particular ways. Multitasking is
one example of this category of strategies (Offer and Schneider 2011).
Although differing in their temporal scopes, work-life balance strategies and activity
administration strategies are both practical work in the sense that they involve instrumentally
arranging things – either institutions in the long-term sense of life-course stages, or activities in
the short-term sense of everyday life. By contrast, ideological modification strategies are
cultural work in the sense that they involve construing things for the long-term – and those
things pertain to aspects of institutions. While ideological modification and work-family balance
address through long-term means the long-term challenge of a busy life (having an enduring
sense of time-pressure, feeling an overall acceleration, confronting an obdurate work-family
arrangement that makes it difficult to meet demands to both domains), activity administration
actually addresses the short-term challenge of everyday busyness (having a recurring sense of
time-pressure from one moment to the next, feeling a speed-up in a string of specific activities,
experiencing daily schedules that instantiate the difficulty of meeting plural commitments).
Despite addressing the daily affronts to well-being which are brought about by busyness, activity
administration has received the least analysis in, and exploration by, the busyness literature. It
is this literature’s general disregard for coordination work which accounts for the presence of so
few studies that offer direct, close-up examinations of the practical-instrumental strategies that
family members rely upon to address their predicament of managing time bound, pressured, and
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accelerated activities in everyday life. As already mentioned, coordination work deals with this
level of activity and micro-interaction. The disregard for this type of work which families
perform is tied to the disregard for studying the instantiated-recurring strategies that help
families cope with busyness.
RESEARCH QUESTION
The research that I present in this dissertation directly addresses this gap in the literature.
Armed with an analytic sensitivity to and sensibility for coordination work, I explore this
empirical black-box and ask, What activity-administration strategies do parents rely on to
negotiate everyday busyness? How do parents coordinate busy schedules? Which time-
management techniques help parents cope with a busy existence at a busy time in a busy world?
Mrs. B, one of the mothers in my study, has this to say about her means for managing
busyness:
This is my strategy [she shows me a color-coded calendar personalized with
family pictures]. So the red is me; the pink is me – work. The green is Brian [son]
and the purple is Britany [daughter]. The brown is Bruce [husband]. And the
pencil is my mom. We started adding my mom this year. Why I like it is I’m very
visually oriented and I’m able to see, “Oh, what am I doing?” or if Britany asks
me, “When is my Pinocchio show?” I can see purple right away. When someone
asks me, “Can you do this that day?” I’m like, “Oh, no, I can see something on
that day, but I’m not sure what it is.” So, yeah, that’s my crazy system that keeps
things somewhat sane. Bruce puts everything in outlook and then it syncs to his
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blackberry. He doesn’t do it this detailed. He’ll put things like Britany’s play or
Brian’s backpacking. He’ll probably put something like that on the weekend
[but] he won’t put field trips and things like that. I have not gone electronic
because I don’t always have my computer and I don’t have an i-phone. I just keep
it on the wall, and then my mom can see this, too. It makes it a little challenging.
But what I’ve heard about time-management is that it’s better not to have two
systems; like, to have only one calendar. So in order for me to do that I would
need to have an i-phone and be able to transfer this (Mrs. B).
Like Mr. and Mrs. B, the parents whom I researched constantly coordinated schedules through
meaningful tactics. But these meaningful tactics of coordination work extended beyond the use
of personalized color-coded calendars to keep track of synchronized activities. Their
coordination work also involved actions like putting a backpacking trip onto a Blackberry
calendar while not putting a school field-trip onto the same calendar. The coordination work of
the parents in my study encompassed a broader spectrum of action than any of its peripheral
considerations in the literature would have suggested. Hanging a calendar on a wall for others to
see it, as does Mrs. B, and selectively including children’s activities in calendars are two of the
many time-management tactics for negotiating busyness that fall under the analytic radar of the
current busyness literature precisely because this literature does not give due attention to the
work of coordination.
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SO WHAT?
By empirically shedding light onto the black-box of parents’ activity-administration
strategies, this research brings to the fore the central role that coordination work plays in the
efforts of families to manage everyday life. Featuring coordination work in daily life, for its
part, brings with it a reconceptualization of the busyness that envelops our day-to-day existence
in contemporary society. This dissertation provides a theoretical intervention of busyness
literature by way of an empirical exploration of a gap in that literature.
In the chapters that follow, I offer a discussion of parents’ activity-administration
strategies, emphasizing aspects of coordination that typically go undetected by current busyness
research. Placing this emphasis on coordination work and the various processes to which it
pertains carries with it several implications for the study of contemporary busyness. These
implications will be discussed in detail in chapter 7 and the conclusion. For now, I will simply
mention that exploring activity-administration techniques with an analytic emphasis on
coordination work reveals a fourth set of strategies that parents rely on the cope with busyness in
their lives. I call this fourth set of strategies “activity-signification” strategies.
Like ideological modification, activity signification describes a set of strategies which
involve construing things, although unlike ideological modification, what this set of strategies
construe are quotidian activities. Like activity-administration, activity signification describes
strategies which operate at the micro-level of recurring, short-term interactions as opposed to the
macro-level of obdurate, long-term institutional arrangements; but unlike activity administration,
activity-signification strategies do not involve the practical work of instrumentally arranging
activities. As instantiated-recurring strategies for coping with busyness, activity signification
describes the cultural work of interpreting everyday activities in meaningful ways which render
55
them manageable and administer-able in different ways. As the empirical chapters illustrate,
activities which parents interpret as achievements, for instance, become incorporated into those
parents’ schedules in ways different than the activities which they interpret as commitments. By
paying close attention to parents’ activity-administration strategies, I uncovered a related but
different set of strategies intimately implicated in the way that parents negotiate daily busyness.
I incorporate this finding into the theoretical framework that emerged from my research. Mainly
in chapter 7 but also throughout the empirical chapters, I consider the importance of recognizing
and better understanding patterns in these activity-signification means for coping with busyness.
Doing so may prove helpful for policy efforts that intend to offer parents relief from the sense of
time-pressure.
Additionally, this study demonstrates the value of taking an up-close look at the real-time
coordinations that persons perform in everyday life. Doing so allows us to empirically detect
persons’ plural and shifting interpretations of their own actions, which alternative approaches
that also study daily life in families fail to grasp (Bianchi et al. 2006; Hochschild 1997, 2003;
Lareau 2003). This level of observation of daily practical coordination captures variation in the
means and meanings of coordinated action. How a person interprets ‘cramming activities’ or
‘speeding up’ varies across daily situations. The practical view of everyday life that I use here
permits me to notice this. The glimpse offered by this view also matters for sociologists in
general – whether or not they study daily busyness.
Empirically detecting intra-personal cross-contextual variation in the meaning and means
of situated interactions offers a way to see patterns of cultural reproduction. Focusing on
everyday, moment-by-moment, on-site coordination brings processes of cultural persistence to
the fore without having to rely on outdated notions of culture, action, and social structures
56
(Bourdieu 1973). This equips contemporary sociologists with a way to see how social actors
reproduce cultural processes in everyday life and link these processes to patterns of social
differentiation and organization, such as gender and class divisions. The topics of cultural
persistence and social reproduction pertain to sociology in general, not just studies of busyness.
FINDINGS AND THEORY
The chapters that follow present some of the activity-administration strategies that I
found in use among the parents whom I studied. These strategies make sense to these parents
because of a specific set of cultural structures which render them meaningful and desirable. It is
through the process of coordination work that these cultural structures enable some activity-
administration strategies and hinder others. Coordination work in this sense constitutes a
meaningful mechanism that is structured – in this case, by the cultural structures that are featured
in chapter 4 and the contexts of coordination that are highlighted in chapter 6 – and causal
(Lichterman and Reed 2014; Reed 2011). Coordination-work-as-mechanism is the hinge that
holds together the theoretical framework of this dissertation. It and its elements are the topic of
chapter 2, the theory chapter.
For their part, the powerful cultural structures that orient the strategies of activity-
administration form the fulcrum of organization for the three empirical chapters. I accomplish
three things by organizing the empirical chapters in reference to these cultural structures: (a) I
describe this set of cultural structures, (b) I describe and explain the performance of coordination
work whereby these structures influence parents’ techniques for coping with busyness, and (c) I
describe those techniques which were most commonly used by the parents in my study.
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Together, these empirical chapters describe the theoretical framework that emerges from this
research and extends our understanding of busyness among contemporary families.
In chapter 4 I describe the components of the cultural structures – the meanings that
structure them and the logics that hold them together. In chapter 5 I describe one power of these
cultural structures – their influence to shape activity-administration strategies. In chapter 6 I
describe a second power of these cultural structures – their influence to shape parents’ own
evaluations of their particular activity-administration strategies. First, though, in the next chapter
I present the theoretical framework that cloaks these empirical chapters.
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CHAPTER 2
A Spatiotemporal Coordination Framework
59
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The spatiotemporal coordination framework that I introduce with this dissertation is
comprised of three central concepts: coordination work, coordination contexts, and time-use
cultures.
COORDINATION WORK
Cooordination work has already been introduced above. It is the practical labor required
to assemble a spatiotemporal matrix, or schedule, of activities. This labor is akin to what often
gets identified as the tacit time-management practices of planning, anticipating, simplifying,
gathering information, etc. that people undertake “to coordinate, manage, and otherwise fit
together the complex sequences of activities that [fill] the day” (Darrah et al. 2007: 81). But the
framework that I propose with this dissertation treats this work as more than mere instrumental-
practical labor. Rather, I conceptualize coordination work as a cultural endeavor – meaningful,
patterned, and shared. For this, I draw from cultural sociology’s brand of performance theory.
This branch of a dramaturgical approach to daily life maintains that actors (a) coordinate
interaction on site in real time (b) by deploying shared meanings (c) that provide a definition of
the situation (Cicourel 1973; Goffman [1974] 1986; Mead 1934). To coordinate interaction in
everyday settings, people need to make sense of the situation, defining “what is going on here” at
that moment. But “people never start generating meaning from scratch in interaction – meanings
are never simply generated from the ground up, never just in the course of interaction” (Eliasoph
and Lo 2012: 764). Instead, people rely on shared meanings that come from outside of the
immediate interaction to determine “what this is a case of” given that particular context. These
external meanings present a shared understanding of the situation, which allows persons to act in
60
relation to that situation and coordinate interaction with others who are either physically or
virtually present. In this way, actors connect broad cultural structures to everyday practical
actions.
Recent developments within this line of research take these foundational insights and
note that some of the shared external meanings which constitute broad cultural structures that
define the situation and which are mobilized by actors to coordinate interaction come in the form
of durable and predictable patterns of pragmatic action (termed styles or customs) which
constitute appropriate participation in a setting (Armstrong 2002; Becker 1999; Eliasoph 2011;
Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003; Lichterman 2005; Mische 2008). These studies present the
settings of coordinated interaction (termed scenes) to be distinct from the locations of interaction
(Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014). When shared understandings of the situation change, scenes
change, even if the physical locations wherein performances take place remain the same. In
other words, when actors deploy a different understanding of “what is going on here” to orient
their coordinated interaction with others, they are in effect changing the setting of that
coordination.
These recent developments in our understanding of local, meaningful performances
within cultural sociology offer useful insights when interpreting the work of coordinating
schedules and managing time in everyday life. Coordination work is a cultural performance of
the sort described by this branch of cultural sociology. Family members who (a) “fit together”
schedules to pragmatically manage time in real time (b) do so by mobilizing widespread, cross-
situational meanings (c) that pattern their understandings of situations and thereby orient their
actions with actual or virtual others in that meaningful setting. Throughout the ensuing chapters,
I emphasize this cultural performance of coordination work.
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As mentioned in the previous chapter, few recent studies do attribute analytic importance
to coordination work. In contrast to these few studies, however, my spatiotemporal coordination
framework draws from the aforementioned cultural sociological insights about dramaturgy in
everyday settings of coordinated action to conceptualize this practical labor as more than simply
a category of actions that take up time (Arendell 2001) or an axis of actions upon which families
pivot self-identities (Darahh et al. 2007). Instead, it is the meaningful performance that animates
their strategies for coping with busyness. Coordination work is parents’ practical-yet-meaning-
infused patterns of interaction whereby they attempt to control their everyday lives, and as a
recursive endeavor it becomes the performed articulation of institutional linkages, which itself
sediments into a matrix of work, family, and leisure institutions. These institutions, as presented
throughout this dissertation, constitute the taken-for-granted domains of experience which are
commonly identified by sociologists within the busyness literature as pertinent to people’s
everyday lives (Bianchi et al. 2006; Jacobs and Gerson 2004).
COORDINATION CONTEXTS
Coordination contexts, the second pillar of my spatiotemporal coordination framework,
are the logistical circumstances that impinge upon the inclusion of activities in someone’s
schedule. Consistent with cultural sociology’s insights about cultural performances, I
conceptualize coordination contexts as the scenes upon which the performance of coordination
work takes place. These scenes are the settings of coordinated interaction and they are distinct
from the physical locations of that interaction. In contrast to the scenes of cultural sociology’s
dramaturgical approach, however, the coordination contexts wherein parents perform
coordination work are not dependent upon actors’ definitions of the situation. When actors’
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understandings of “what is going on here” change, the context of coordination does not
necessarily change. Unlike scenes wherein styles are enacted, coordination contexts wherein
coordination work is performed have a more material basis – they do not just evanesce when
they are not identified.
Elements of coordination contexts include the persons (physically present or not) with
whom interaction is coordinated; accoutrements which are used as stage props to facilitate the
performance, and a concatenation of pre-existing activities with which a particular activity must
become coordinated. Although actors do summon coordination contexts by defining them – like
the scenes of cultural performances – actors themselves cannot switch contexts at will by
mobilizing a different understanding of “what is going on here.” In light of this, it is more
analytically and empirically precise to talk about coordination contexts as being recognized by
actors rather than being summoned or defined by them.
Another way to think about coordination contexts is as the set of factors that parents
recognize as needing to be considered when incorporating (or not incorporating) something into
a daily schedule: the who, what, where, when, and how of coordination work. When actors
recognize a particular set of factors as relevant for coordination work, they effectively identify a
coordination context. Coordination contexts are widely-recognized and finite – like styles of
coordinated interaction (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003) – but unlike these tools for cultural
performance, contexts are not patterns of interaction, nor do they pertain to appropriate
participation in a setting. Rather, these are the material (although not locational) settings for
patterned coordinations to take place.
Two coordination contexts were particularly salient in the everyday lives of participants
in my study: fixed contexts and flexible contexts. A fixed coordination context refers to the set
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of persons, objects, and chains of events that get recognized as being locked into place – pre-
planned, as it were. This set of “locked” material factors which require consideration when
“fitting” an activity into a schedule constituted one setting for performing the practical-
meaningful work of coordination. It was widely recognized by the parents in my study. By
contrast, a flexible coordination context refers to the set of persons, objects, and sequence of
events that parents recognized as being “not yet secure” – basically, up for grabs to various
degrees. This set of “irresolute” factors impinging upon the inclusion of an activity into a
schedule constituted the second widely-recognized setting for performing coordination work.
Some parents felt more comfortable with a fixed coordination context and other parents
preferred a flexible one, but the members of all of the families in my study recognized, defined,
and encountered both of them in everyday life. Likewise, I noticed that some parents – typically
fathers – tended to perform coordination work in fixed coordination contexts, and other parents –
typically mothers – tended to perform coordination work in flexible coordination contexts, but
the particular distribution of coordination contexts among actors – whether looking at gendered,
classed, raced, or any other axes of distribution – is a matter of empirical investigation for future
research. The particular role that coordination contexts play in actually structuring parents’
evaluation of their busyness-coping strategies is the purview of chapter 6.
TIME-USE CULTURES
The third foundational concept of my spatiotemporal coordination framework is time-use
cultures, the central empirical discovery that constitutes the topic of chapters 4, 5, and 6. Time-
use cultures are widespread, intersubjective systems of interrelated meanings about time-use that
orient time-use. Consistent with basic insights from cultural sociology (Sewell 1992, Smith
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1998), time-use cultures are trans-situational, relatively-autonomous, and locally-mobilized
meaning-bundles which render particular uses of time worthwhile and desirable.
Different strands within cultural sociology identify vocabularies, logics, myths,
justifications, customs, styles, repertoires, and other cultural structures that people deploy to
think about, explain, and evaluate things, actions, and situations (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006;
Eliasoph 2011; Eliasoph and Licherman 2003; Eliasoph and Lo 2012; Friedland and Alford
1991; Hallett and Ventresca 2006; Lichterman 2005; Swidler 1986). This work argues that
these cultural forms are larger than situated interactions, although such interactions are precisely
what sustain them. Embedded in elements of the broader environment and with historical
trajectories of their own, these are widely-held, supra-group “bundles of moral meaning” upon
which group members converge during activity patterns in everyday life. Time-use cultures
belong to this family of cultural structures: they are enacted in daily life and simultaneously
make daily life possible.
Time-use cultures most closely resemble what are known in cultural sociology as
“vocabularies of motive” (Wuthnow 1991). Consistent with insights about culture concepts
since the cultural turn in sociology (Jacobs and Spillman 2005), vocabularies of motive are forms
of culture that have long histories – they are not just made up on the spot in real time – and are
not particular to individual groups. Vocabularies of motive influence what persons can say
meaningfully, they shape persons’ understandings about the moral good, and they make persons’
actions into narrative accounts that others can apprehend and find compelling (Bellah et al. 1985,
Swidler 2001).
Returning to insights about cultural performances, the durable, shared, external meanings
which actors mobilize to define the situation and coordinate interaction may also come in the
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form of such cultural vocabularies (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003). Like vocabularies, time-use
cultures are durable meanings external to the situation but mobilized within it to make
coordination possible. Also like vocabularies, persons use time-use cultures to talk meaningfully
about their actions and to orient their coordinated interaction during cultural performances. In
this way they are widespread forms of culture which parents bring into the practical and local
work of coordination. Chapter 4 introduces the three specific time-use cultures that I
discovered in wide use among the families in my study.
Time-use cultures and their component principles are cultural categories grounded in
interviews and participant-observation field work. These conceptual tools emerged inductively
from the patterned accounts that parents gave me of their busy days and their tactics for
managing such busyness. Similar to other research that has identified cultural models by
studying families in a “naturalistic fashion” (Lareau 2003), I too grounded time-use cultures in
my day-to-day observation of, and participation in, family members’ routine behavior, as well as
in their real-time explanations and thoughts that they shared with me.
Actors mobilized time-use cultures when executing, construing, and evaluating actions.
As platforms for evaluation, time-use cultures provided the parameters with which to assess the
appropriateness of time-use. As guidelines for action, time-use cultures provided the procedures
for time-use. And as providers of meaning, time-use cultures rendered time-use meaningful. A
plurality of these time-use cultures was present in the repertoire of cultural tools that parents
mobilized when performing coordination work. They mobilized different time-use cultures at
different times – sometimes briefly and intermittently, sometimes consistently over long episodes
– coordinating activities in different ways throughout their days. While some tended to rely on
one time-use culture more than the others, all of them carried them in their “cultural repertoires”
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(Swidler 1986). Likewise, although the members each family did not necessarily mobilize the
same ethic to coordinate a shared activity – which often resulted in tension and disagreement –
all family members did recognize the availability of the various options ensconced within their
cultural repertoires.
Although each time-use culture was equally-legitimate, which one got mobilized by
persons depended on several factors, including the coordination context, personal preference, or
their relative availability. When the time-use culture that an actor mobilized was compatible
with the coordination context, that action, or use of time, was assessed as qualitatively sound –
worthwhile given that context – and time was deemed well-managed, schedules were deemed
successfully coordinated, busyness was deemed coped with. Relief ensued. However, when the
mobilized time-use culture was incompatible with the context, that got recognized as
qualitatively faulty – given the context, not worthwhile – and time was deemed ill-managed,
schedules uncoordinated, and busyness out of control. Time-pressure was felt.
It is sensible to suspect the existence of time-cultures such as time-use cultures in the
cultural repertoires of persons; and it is sensible to suspect that persons use those time-cultures to
manage time and coordinate schedules. Anthropologists have for many years identified diverse
patterns of meanings that constitute notions of time for entire societies (Evans-Pritchard 1939;
Geertz 1973; Gell 1992; Malinowski 1927) and they have complemented this with descriptions
of large-scale meaningful structures that shape people’s time-use behavior, such as the notions of
punctuality and evaluations of social interactions that underlie polychronic and monochronic
scheduling practices (Hall 1960).
Sociology, too, has a long history of pointing out time cultures in society. From Weber’s
(1992 [1930]) discovery of a utilitarian spirit of modern capitalistic acquisition to Thompson’s
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(1967) identification of task-oriented and clock-oriented notions of time-use to Snyder’s (2013)
proposition of a medieval culture of vigilance that pre-dates clock-time, sociological explorations
of people’s time-habits suggest that stable, widely-available configurations of time-use meanings
do actually influence persons’ time-use interpretations and time-use behavior.
Social research even notes that conceptualizations of ‘busyness’ have changed
considerably in U.S. society over the years – from distractibility and degeneracy in the late 19th
century (O’Malley 2005) to a symbol of high-status and success in the early 21st century
(Gershuny 2005) – all the while orienting people’s work and leisure activities through the
decades. Also, while Hay and Usunier (1993) propose that culturally-specific views of time have
a relatively-autonomous impact on the way that businesses operate, Bergadaa (2007) suggests
that different temporal frameworks “intervene” in the cultural attitudes of people and in the
meanings that they assign to museums and theaters.
Most recently, Snyder (2013) detaches clock-time from capitalist power relations, situates
its origin in an epoch that pre-dates modern industrial capitalism, and highlights its moral role in
facilitating meaningful action. Similar to clock-time’s status as a “moral institution” (244) that is
“relatively autonomous from economic institutions” (26), the cultural frames uncovered by this
study offer relatively-autonomous guidelines for persons’ use of time. Unlike clock-time,
however, the time-use cultures that I uncovered weree much more everyday-action-centered,
enabling and constraining parents’ actual time-management and scheduling procedures.
Furthermore, the time-use cultures of achievement, balance, and commitment are more
ensconced in our contemporary reality of accelerated pace, fragile ties, and “loose connections”
(Wuthnow 1998). With its foundations in a past, less “porous” era, the moral institution of
clock-time is less useful for contemporary parents as they grope for cultural resources to use in
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their everyday struggles to negotiate busyness. Given the fast-paced, porous world of today, the
gumption and relevance of the three time-use cultures discussed here is greater than that of
clock-time.
THEORETICAL INTERVENTION
Together, these elements of a spatiotemporal coordination framework – coordination
work, coordination contexts, and time-use cultures – more accurately capture the real-time
practical time-management strategies of everyday life than do alternative cultural frameworks
that are currently used to study daily busyness.
IDIOCULTURES
As discussed in the previous chapter, Darrah and colleagues (2007) explored the
externally-imposed and self-created “drivers of busyness” that families encounter on a daily
basis. They found that families negotiated lifestyles to match their vision of themselves. The
finding that families coordinated activities congruent to their group identities indicates a cultural
dimension to coordination work. The families in my study did not coordinate their daily life
around overarching visions of themselves, as did Darrah at al.’s (2007) families. Rather, they
designed their coordinated efforts according to those visions of what constituted a worthwhile
form of time-use, according to the available time-use cultures. Plural cultures of appropriate
time-use propelled these families’ coordination work.
The difference between Darrah et al.’s (2007) finding and my discovery of time-use
cultures lies in the type of “culture” that we identify. The cultural lifestyles of Darrah et al.’s
(2007) families are akin to “idiocultures” (Fine 1979) shared by members of an interaction
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group; in this case, the families. An idioculture refers to “a system of knowledge, beliefs,
behaviors, and customs shared by members of an interacting group to which members can refer
and employ as the basis of further interaction” (Fine 1979 : 734). Idiocultures pertain to social
interactions within small groups, as are nuclear families, and they describe group-specific
meanings. Accordingly, Darrah et al. (2007) describes each family’s particular style of busyness
as specific to that family and generated by that group.
By contrast, the time-use cultures mobilized by the families in my study were shared
across families. As “drivers” (Darrah et al. 2007) of particular forms of busyness, time-use
cultures do reside in family interactions, but they do not derive from there. Instead, the
knowledge systems and behavior patterns that constitute time-use cultures are extra-local in
nature. These cultures of time-use are widespread ethics with a life of their own, not
idiosyncratic styles specific to a single family group.
SCHEMAS OF DEVOTION
One well-received and highly-insightful cultural analysis of contemporary family busyness relies
on the concept of “cultural schemas of devotion” (Blair-Loy 2003). This analysis interprets
work-family conflict as rooted in competing cultural models of a worthwhile life. While a
family devotion schema defines a meaningful life to be one spent caring for husband and
children, a work devotion schema defines a meaningful life to to be one spent dedicated to career
advancement and breadwinning. Defined as “particularly gripping cultural models that orient us
toward where we devote our time, energy, and passion” (176), these models for cognition,
morality, and emotion clash with each other by ordaining contradictory actions. It is this cultural
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clash that feeds the experience of conflict between the institutions of work and family, with
parents’ identities, emotions, time, and allegiance being torn between the two.
In terms of explaining the management of daily busyness, however, devotion schemas
offer little assistance. Mrs. W, the mother who has yet to work out the details of her children’s
school-to- tennis carpool arrangement, for instance, certainly does feel work-family conflict in
her life. She does express a family-devotion schema: “In my mind,” she states, “my job is to be
the mom.” And, as a part-time public relations manager for a cat adoption agency, her time-use
and allegiance is also influenced by the work-devotion schema: “It’s a small non-profit where
you really have lots of other little jobs that don’t fit into your title... you have to do the
glamorous stuff and the dirty stuff.” Mrs. W does recognize a clash between her devotion to
mothering and her devotion to work, which generates a sense of work-family conflict:
I don’t think there’s enough time in a normal scheduled day to appreciate the
finer things in life, which are nature and relationships and the people that you
love. I just don’t think you have enough time to take a step back and appreciate
those things.
These schemas of devotion are useful tools for interpreting how Mrs. W reduces work-family
conflict in her life through her revision of some of the elements of those schemas. Similar to
other busy mothers described in the literature (Blair-Loy 2013, Hochschild 1997), Mrs. W
reinvents the role of mother and redefines the needs of children in order to periodically outsource
childcare, thereby fulfilling the mandates of family devotion while also accommodating those of
devotion to work:
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At the beginning of the semester I had to decide, ‘Am I going to sign my kids up
just for school, and then all of their after-school activities just kind of on me, or
do I incorporate some of their after-school stuff with school, ‘cause the school
offers after-school activities.... I had a Friday when I had a last-minute
presentation to make in a corporation in Beach City, and it went a little long, so
the kids stayed and did cooking class, and when I got there they basically said,
‘We want to do this every Friday from now on!’ which I don’t let them do because
I want to have them home one day a week.
But do these schemas help us understand how Mrs. W will work out the details of her carpool
arrangement? They don’t. Mrs. W does not use them in this way. Mrs. W does refashion them
to reduce the sense of institutional friction which they generate, but this is an enduring strategy
which reconfigures the way that work, family, and leisure are arranged throughout her life-
course: at this point in her life, Mrs. W devotes herself to work and family in the particular
manner which she does. But her meaningful devotion to these realms tells us nothing about
why she aims to have one mother pick up the girls at 2:30pm and the other mother to pick up the
boys half an hour later; nor do they tell us anything about how she actually executes these
coordinated pick-ups; nor do they tell why she hopes that “the first mom... doesn’t have to take
everybody home.” The cultural tools that pertain to these coordination pursuits at the level of
everyday life are not cultural schemas of devotion.
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GENDER STRATEGIES
Another highly-influential cultural analysis of contemporary family busyness relies on
the concepts of “gender strategies” and “gender ideologies” (Hochschild 1989). A gender
strategy is “a plan of action through which a person tries to solve problems at hand, given the
cultural notions of gender at play” (Hochschild 1989: 15). These cultural notions of manhood
and womanhood – gender ideologies – influence which sphere (home or work) parents want to
identify with. Supermoms, involved fathers, parents who scale back on housework time or paid
work time all outline courses of action which are based on particular attachments to gender
ideologies. Traditional gender ideologies associate women with dependence and men with
power; these ideologies orient husbands to spend time at work and wives to spend time at home.
By contrast, egalitarian ideologies present men and women as equally powerful and equally
capable of performing in both spheres; these ideologies orient husbands and wives to dedicate
similar amounts of time to the same sphere, whether they are jointly oriented to home-life,
jointly oriented to work-life, or jointly oriented to a balance between the two. Finally,
transitional ideologies construct men and women as capable of performing in both spheres but
ultimately belonging more to one than the other; these ideologies orient both spouses to spend
time in both spheres but wives more time in the home and husbands more time at work. The
concept of gender strategies explains many of the life-course strategies pursued by busy families
such as working part-time, sequencing careers, or altogether opting out.
Pertinent research literature describes many parents who confront time-dilemmas with
gender strategies such as these, pursuing decisions consistent with their gender ideologies and
thereby arriving at particular arrangements between work, family, and leisure institutions that
reduce the friction between them and create less time-pressure. Mrs. W and her husband are
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guided by their transitional gender ideologies to configure their life as a dual-earner couple with
a full-time breadwinning father and a mother who works part-time for pay, although this gender
ideology sometimes clashes with a more traditional ideology that Mrs. W brings with her from
her past:
He doesn’t have a standard job where he just goes to the job, does his job, and
then comes home. He’s a business owner, like, if he slacks off and the business
fails, we suffer.... So I understand his need to be sure that everything is solid by
working so hard.... I have a father that went to a job, left at like 8:00, 8:30, and
then he worked until like 5:00 and was home around 6:00, every day, 35 years.
Was very standard, ‘50’s style employment, and that’s what I expected [from] my
husband when I met my husband.... It’s been a learning experience for me to have
to wrap our family around this kind of work environment that I’m not familiar
with. When you’re raised in a certain family, certain parental roles, you mimic,
or you’re expected to mimic those same roles. As much as you don’t want to be
your mom and you don’t want to be your dad, you still have a knowledge of the
way it was that you kind of foresee yourself in that role (Mrs. W).
Although the concepts of gender strategies and gender ideologies explain enduring
reconfigurations of institutions, they do not offer much assistance when considering the more
fleeting and recurring task of coordinating daily schedules. Mrs. W deploys gender ideologies
to make sense of the tensions that permeate throughout her busy life. Although a transitional
gender ideology orients her into part-time paid-work and her husband into full-time involvement
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in the work sphere, a traditional ideology filters her interpretation of the time that her husband
has available to spend at home and feeds her sense of work-family conflict, time-pressure, and
busyness in everyday life.
But how do her gender ideologies or her gender strategy help us to interpret the difficulty
she encounters when working out the details of the carpool arrangement? How do these
concepts help us interpret that strategy for managing time and coping with the busyness of her
afternoons? They don’t. Mrs. W does not use gender strategies or gender ideologies at this
practical level of recursive time-management. Gender strategies do help her cope with her busy
life by assembling institutions in a particular manner and gender ideologies do help her cope
with her busy life by helping her make sense of these assemblages. But these tell us nothing
about why “it’s complicated” for her to pick up her two children who go to the same school
despite being available during those after-school hours precisely for such pick-up duties; and
why “it’s complicated” for her to take them to tennis lessons at the same location despite such
lessons being 40 minutes apart; and why “it’s complicated” for her to figure out how and when
to bring the both of them home from those lessons despite the fact that all of them live in the
same house. Neither gender strategies nor their concomitant gender ideologies are cultural tools
that pertain to these more micro, fleeting, and practical coordination issues of a busy life.
HABITUS
The final alternative cultural analysis of contemporary family busyness that I discuss here
relies on the powerful concept of “habitus” (Bourdieu 1984). This line of research focuses on
the parenting practices that crowd family life with trips between competitive structured extra-
curricular activities, adding to the already frenetic pace and full schedules of busy parents
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(Friedman 2013, Lareau 2003). “Habitus” refers to a system of dispositions that are internalized
from one’s environment, manifesting in different forms of taste. The literature on family
busyness offers an internalized taste for winning (Friedman 2013) and a taste for concertedly
cultivating skills in children during their leisure time (Lareau 2003) as cultural drivers of daily
busyness, especially among middle-class parents. Mrs. W does seem to possess these habitus
which contribute to busyness. She does enroll her children in an array of structured activities
meant to enrich their childhoods and cultivate skills in them which will serve them well as
adults:
On Mondays my kids have tennis after school, both of them, and then on Tuesdays
they’re going to have gymnastics.... Wednesdays they both have an after-school
program. My daughter has ‘Adventure Guides To Being An Environmentalist,’
an after school program that teaches environmentalism and replanting the earth
and things like that. My son has ‘Mythological Creatures,’ a Greek mythology
class. Thursdays my daughter has guitar and ballet; my son has guitar and
acting class. So 4 days a week my kids have something different.
And her children seem to be acquiring this taste for a particular kind of overcrowded schedule,
too:
My kids really like it. They like the guitar, they like the mythological creatures
class. When I go to pick them up at school at 4, early, they don’t want to leave.
They want to be there. They want to be enriched in that aspect.
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The concept of habitus helps us to understand why Mrs. W packs in so many after-school
activities into her and her children’s after-school hours, but it doesn’t really help us understand
why she and the other mother are still trying to figure out how to coordinate the trips that will
take their children to those activities. How does the cultural concept of a parenting “habitus”
help us decipher her “complicated” strategy for managing the drop-offs and pick-ups of her busy
afternoons? It doesn’t. A habitus is taken-for-granted and embodied; it isn’t really used by
persons to make sense of the world; instead, it uses persons to embody a particular organization
of the world that seems natural. Mrs. W does rely on her parenting habitus to experience four
days in a row of after-school activities as something natural and appropriate, and the concept
does reveal to us her preference for that weekly schedule. But it reveals nothing about her
preference for incorporating another mother into the execution of that schedule. It tells us
nothing about her preference for considering “how will this work for everybody included?” A
parenting habitus is a cultural structure that does not pertain to Mrs. W’s work of coordinating
her children’s after-school tennis lessons.
THEORETICAL RECONCEPTUALIZATION
Family idiocultures, parenting habitus, gender ideologies, and devotion schemas are
concepts derived from cultural analyses of daily busyness in American families. These concepts
yield useful insights into parents’ time-pressures, their frenetic schedules, and their long-term
arrangements between paid and unpaid work. But these concepts, the cultural frameworks from
which they stem, and other cultural approaches and concepts that are applied to the study of
family busyness cannot and do not explain the real-time, practical time-management strategies
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that parents carry out in everyday life in order to coordinate schedules, cope with busyness, and
arrange the domains of work, family, and leisure. To capture this dimension of everyday life and
to explain these coping strategies, a different, more movement-sensitive, action-centered cultural
framework is required. The spatiotemporal coordination framework presented here and utilized
throughout this study is such a framework.
Overall, a meaning- and movement-sensitive spatiotemporal coordination framework
links trans-situational, intersubjective systems of meaning to local situations within which
coordinated interaction takes place by (a) presenting these meaning systems as proximate causes
of local action, and by (b) presenting local action as recursive performance of extra-local
meaning systems. In doing so, this framework fits squarely within a general pragmatic cultural
sociology; after all, the “bedrock” of current cultural inquiry “is an epistemological commitment
to hermeneutic consideration of meanings in relation to action, interaction, and (institutionalized)
social organization” (Hall 2014).
BUSYNESS IS PLURAL
The time-deficit model depicts busyness as a quantified, unitary experience that frames
time-management strategies: the greater the busyness, the more it requires complex time-
management strategies to manage it. Viewed through a spatiotemporal coordination framework,
however, busyness becomes transformed from a subjective experience of time-deficit into plural
intersubjective performances of coordination work recognized by others across settings.
My spatiotemporal coordination framework clarifies an important point about the nature
of busyness: although it can be and should be measured quantitatively, it is not a quantitative
phenomenon. One is not more or less busy; one is busy in different ways. Viewed through the
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prism of coordination work, busyness becomes reformulated as a cultural performance. In this
light, it makes more sense to speak of busyness in the plural instead of the singular – different
forms of busyness (“busynesses”) rather than simply “busyness.” Darrah and colleagues (2007)
explain this point quite well:
Busyness [is] not so much a unitary, brute fact of life as something that [has]
distinct rhythms or textures in different families and among different
individuals.... We are never busy in general, only in particular ways, with
particular consequences (44).
The spatiotemporal coordination framework that I describe in this chapter outlines the theoretical
parameters of the analyses presented in the ensuing empirical chapters. The constitutive
concepts of this framework offer more resilient interpretive tools for analyzing the micro-level,
real-time, practical-instrumental strategies for negotiating everyday busyness among
contemporary busy middle-class families than do the concepts available in the existing literature
on the topic of family busyness, which remain bound to a time-deficit model of daily busyness.
As will be discussed in the concluding chapter of this dissertation, differentiating and
recognizing between qualitatively distinct forms of busyness provides a valuable corrective to
efforts that intend to improve family well-being by reducing the time-dilemmas of busy families.
The following chapter discusses the methodological and sample considerations for this
study; and the three empirical chapters after that describe the different elements of the
spatiotemporal coordination framework in action.
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CHAPTER 3
Studying Busyness in Families
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INTRODUCTION
Data collection for this study replicated the qualitative methods – interview and
participant-observation – used by leading scholars who study daily life in families (Arendell
2001; Becker and Moen 1999; Blair-Loy 2003; Coltrane 1996; Daly 1996, 2001; Darrah et al.
2007; Hays 1996; Hochschild 2003; Lareau 2003; Schneider and Waite 2005). In particular,
family and time scholars have called for ethnographic research on the way that families organize
time (Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Ochs, Graesch, Mittmann, Bradbury, and Repetti 2006; Winston,
Angel, Burton, Chase Lansdale, Cherlin, Moffitt, and Wilson 1999). This study answers that
call.
SAMPLE
A total of 10 southern California middle-class suburban families were recruited through a
snowball sampling technique to participate in this study. Each family consisted of two white
married heterosexual parents with at least 2 children, at least one of whom was between 5 and 16
years of age. Table 2 below provides a summary of the sample characteristics.
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Table 3.1 Sample Characteristics
Number of Respondents
n
Mothers 10
Fathers 10
Girls 14
Boys 11
Education
High School Grad 1
Some College 2
College Graduate 14
Graduate/Professional 3
Occupation
Full-Time 14
Part-Time 4
At-Home 2
Employment
Self-Employed 5
Two-Job 3
At-Home 2
Household
Average Age of Parents 45.6
Average Age of Children 10.8
Average Children per Family 1.5
Race/Ethnicity white
Teachers, Real Estate Agents, Managers, Executive
Directors, Lawyer, Salesman, Retailer, Bank Teller, Fireman
N = 45
The mean number of children per family in this sample was 1.5, and the mean age of
these children was 10.84 years. I did not collect data on the income figure for the parents in this
study, but most of them had at least some college experience – 14 parents were college graduates
and 3 of them had a post-graduate degree. The mean age of parents was 45.6 years, and they
worked in a wide range of professional occupations, including teachers, salesman, real estate
agents, shop owners, managers, lawyers, and executive directors. The amount of parents who
identified as full-time employees was 14, and 4 of them identified as part-time workers. My
sample included 5 self-employed parents, 3 of them described themselves as working two jobs,
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and 2 of them self-identified as stay-at-home parents. Both of the stay-at-home parents in this
study were mothers.
Other studies doing this kind of intensive observation of private life have similarly
focused on relatively few families (Arendell 2001; Becker and Moen 1999; Darrah et al. 2007;
Hochschild 1997; Lareau 2003). This is due in large part to the limited resources – time,
funding, and personnel – available for conducting such studies. The payoff from data in this type
of qualitative research does not come in terms of the frequency of behaviors, thoughts, or
feelings, but in terms of the conceptual clarity offered by the data to explain specific processes or
phenomena (Burawoy et al. 1991, Lichterman 2002, Small 2009). The small non-random
sample of families recruited for this study was intended to include the types of families most
likely immersed in a context of busyness, loosely defined not only in terms of time demanded
from work and family spheres, but also in terms of perceived time-pressure and difficulty
coordinating daily activities.
FACTORS OF BUSYNESS
While keeping class and race constant so as to not introduce those important but
complicated extra dimensions of variation (Lareau 2003), I drew my sample of respondents from
a white middle class stratum; recruiting parents from a range of managerial-professional careers
that spanned the high and low ends of the common-sense “middle class” category. Much of the
popular outcry about the practical coordination work that parents perform to orchestrate daily
activities stems from concerns by and about middle-class families (Belluck 2000; Schulte 2014).
Sociological literature corroborates these concerns, indicated that the most highly educated and
remunerated professionals and managers are the workers most likely to feel overworked and to
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yearn for shorter paid workweeks (Jacobs and Gerson 2004). Although working class parents
also face severe demands for their time, often juggling two jobs to make ends meet (Presser
2003), this study focused on middle class families in order to more closely analyze the culture
work involved in schedule coordination. The need for poor and working-class parents to
accommodate numerous structural and financial constraints (Williams and Boushey 2010) would
unnecessarily complicate and obscure this cultural process beyond what is required by an initial
exploratory study such as this.
In like manner, this study included families with multiple children, at least one of whom
was between 5 and 16 years of age. Sociological studies that consider time-use issues in family
life have looked at families with children of all ages, ranging from toddlers to late teens (Blair-
Loy 2003; Coltrane 1996; Garey 1999; Gerson 1985; Hays 1996; Hochschild 1989, 1997; Lareau
2003). Caring for pre-schoolers, infants, and toddlers is an extremely time-intensive endeavor;
the needs of such young children must be constantly accommodated, and family life can be very
child-centered during these stages in the life-course (LaRossa 1983; Walzer 1998). Families
with children of these ages also face the daily challenges of coordinating non-familial institutions
such as day-care facilities and health-care providers (Hofferth and Sandberg 2001). But these
children’s involvements with non-familial activities are mostly determined by their parents. Like
other studies on frenetic family life (Lareau 2003), I preferred to include children who were old
enough to have some autonomy in choosing their activities yet young enough for their parents to
remain actively involved in managing their lives. As children age, their interests tend to conflict
with those of their parents, making the task of coordinating each other’s activities more
problematic. This potential for such coordination conflict made it suitable for my sample of
respondents to include families with somewhat older children.
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This study sought to examine how family members negotiate conflicting leisure and work
activities with each other, linking them into webs of meaningful schedules. Studying families
with school-age children, more than studying families with pre-schoolers, toddlers, and infants,
maximizes these types of micro-conflicts in everyday life. As children age, they spend less time
with parents and more time interacting with friends and other institutions like school and
organized sports (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Hofferth and Sandberg 2001). Getting
children to and picking them up from various extracurricular activities constitutes much of the
chauffeuring, carpooling, and activity management duties that render afternoons frenetic for
contemporary parents. Ensuring children’s participation in extracurricular activities complicates
parents’ attempts to balance work and family life and results in the tag-team, child-centered
parenting style that characterizes many middle-class families of today (Belluck 2000, Kluger
2001; Rosenfeld & Wise 2000). This study sought to offer a better understanding of the practical
time-management strategies of such a dispersed form of busyness. Examining this category of
time-crunched and harried families provided such an opportunity.
Due mostly to declining male breadwinner wages and increasing rates of women’s labor
force participation in the second half of the 20th century, the rise of dual-earner families is a
demographic trend that has transformed the landscape of 21
st
century work-life issues. Today,
over 70% of married couples and over 40% of families with children are dual-earners (Bianchi,
Casper, and Berkowitz-King 2005; Casper and Bianchi 2002). In this newly-widespread family
arrangement, three jobs – two breadwinners and one homemaker – must be shared among two
adults, complicating issues of childcare and housework, and increasing busyness. Given the
time-allocation dilemmas that dual-earner families confront on a daily basis, and the substantial
increase in the proportion of families who fit this dual-earner pattern, this represented a suitable
CHAPTER 3
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family type to focus on for this study.
Although I initially interviewed and observed only dual-earner families with different
forms of dual-earning – families where both parents worked full time and families where one
parent worked full time and the other worked part time – I eventually incorporated single-earner
families into the sample, where one parent worked full-time and the other was a stay-at-home
parent. Including such variation in family employment status was consistent with a case-study
sampling logic (Small 2009). A case-study logic is effective when asking ‘how’ questions about
processes unknown before the start of a study, which was the situation in this study. With this
technique, each case provides an increasingly accurate understanding of the research topic. The
first few families yielded a set of findings and questions that informed my selection of
subsequent families. I selected subsequent families on the basis of similarities with prior
families – to determine whether the same mechanisms were in play – and on the basis of
differences with prior families – to determine whether expected differences were present. I
proceeded from dual-earner to single-earner families in this manner.
INTERVIEWS
For the interview portion of this study I interviewed each family member – including
children – from each of the participating families. In total, I interviewed 10 couples – 10
mothers and their 10 husbands – and 25 children. Each interview was conducted separately and
ranged from 30 minutes for the younger children to over 2 hours for some of the mothers. I
asked them questions about their daily lives – their schedule of activities, their concerns, their
feelings – and I listened closely as they described to me their strategies for dealing with their
busy lives. Pugh (2013) notes that multiple levels of meaning-systems and their influence over
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action are accessible through careful analysis of “what a person’s story means to that person, as
embodied and enacted and not just announced” (54). Following her lead, I went “beyond what
people say to how they say it” (54) and I identified the particular cultural frames through which
respondents viewed their time-management efforts.
PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
The participant-observation portion of this study took place with a selected sub-set of the
families whom I interviewed. I conducted field work with 16 parents – 7 pairs of spouses, 1
mother whose husband was not able to participate, and 1 father whose wife was not able to
participate. With the exception of the two parents whose spouses were unable to participate, I
shadowed the father in a family for one week and the mother in that same family for a second
week immediately following the first. I shadowed parents from Monday to Sunday and overall I
was a participant-observer of middle-class families for a total of 16 weeks, or 112 days. I spent
about 8 hours per day with each family, which made approximately 900 hours of total participant
observation.
Within these 900 hours of actual field work I participated in and observed over 250
“location transitions” – episodes where parents and children travelled (and coordinated their
travel) from one location to another. It was during these meaningful, patterned moments that
family members devised time-management tactics and carried out their particular schedule
configurations for the day. Location transitions constitute the data source for the empirical
analysis presented in most sections of this dissertation. Like other ethnographic studies that
research parents and their children, selected respondents were asked to participate in this part of
the study after they had been interviewed (Hochschild 1989; Lareau 1989, 2003; Roy, Tubbs,
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and Burton 2004; Schneider and Waite 2005).
Participant-observation is a useful data collection technique for exploring what people do
with their routine activities and how they circulate meanings in everyday contexts (Lichterman
2002). This method permitted me to explore how persons imbued with meaning their busyness
of daily life, as well as how they dealt with the practical issues of coordination as they arose on a
day-to-day basis. Similar to other ethnographic studies that have researched families, parents
and children were observed as they interacted with each other in their homes (Forsberg 2009;
Hochschild 1989; Lareau 1989, 2003; Ochs et al. 2006).
Image 1 below is a collage of “coordination spaces” in the homes of the families whom I
shadowed. All of the families had calendars, but they used them in different ways. Some were
hidden in a workstation where only one parent, mainly the mother, could see it and thereby
manage the schedules of all family members. Others were placed in a central location, mainly
the kitchen, where all family members could track the movements of each other and coordinate
each other’s schedules. All of the families arranged schedules, but they did so in different,
patterned ways. Tiny calendars, large calendars, empty calendars, full calendars, color-coded
calendars, crossed-out calendars, calendars with messages of encouragement, calendars with
post-it notes tagged on. The calendars and spaces where these calendars were placed revealed
traces of these families’ busyness, and of their means and tactics for negotiating that busyness in
everyday life.
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Image 3.1 Traces of Busyness in Formal Coordination Spaces
Spending time with the families in their homes gave me access to coordination spaces
within the home wherein coordination work formally took place. But the coordination work that
parents performed did not take place exclusively in those spaces. I also observed inter-family
dynamics as I accompanied parents during their daily routines to and from work, as they
chauffeured their children to and from school and their multiple leisure activities, as they ran
errands, and, in general, as they spent time in work and leisure activities.
ANALYSIS
Participant-observation field work permitted me to track the coordination work of
families throughout coordination spaces as they negotiating busyness via coordinated
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spatiotemporal terrains. To make sense of these spaces of coordination work, I followed a
modified version of the constant-comparative method for data analysis (Glaser and Strauss 1967;
Strauss 1987; Strauss and Corbin 1991).
The analytic category of ‘time-use cultures’ featured in this dissertation emerged from the
cyclical process of coding and pattern-seeking. Time-use cultures is a conceptual tool grounded
in data from interviews and participant-observation. Based on prior research, interview codes,
and field observations, I generated hypotheses and tested them while making my observations
during field visits. I did not wait until completing my field visits to code and analyze data;
rather, data-collection and data-analysis were recursive components of the research process
(Glaser and Strauss 1967). The hypotheses I generated throughout this process influenced the
observations I made while in the field, which in turn shaped new hypotheses. Generating, testing,
discarding, and verifying hypotheses in this manner eventually led me to time-use cultures as the
appropriate theoretical tools for explaining the data. Through theoretical sampling (Glaser and
Strauss 1967) I searched for a variety of contexts in the field to determine the parameters of this
emergent concept’s explanatory power. I reached theoretical saturation when the concept of
time-use cultures kept working as an interpretive tool where and when I expected it to work.
An extended-case method draws from a small number of unique cases to identify and fill
gaps in existing interpretations, thereby extending theory (Burawoy 1998, Tavory and
Timmermans 2009). The theory that I started off with during my initial entrance into the field
was the “time-deficit” model that I have already discussed in chapter 1. As already explained,
this model maintains that busyness springs from time-deficits, that busyness is an inconvenient
nuisance, and that parents address busyness through rational techniques of efficiency. Once I
entered the field, it did not take me long to identify the empirical limitations of this theory. As
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demonstrated in chapters 5 and 6, parents often construed their situations as ‘busy’ regardless of
how much time they did or didn’t have, parents often expressed satisfaction over their time-use
despite dealing with the time-dilemmas of busyness, and parents often managed busyness in
ways that they themselves did not label as efficient.
Early on, I faced an empirical contradiction in the field that consequently sensitized me to
this model’s interpretive limitations. While the parents that I was observing lamented the pace of
their lives, they nevertheless expressed satisfaction with their daily involvement in many
activities. As a whole, they seemed to dislike being busy; but as they were experiencing their
busyness, they seemed to appreciate it. Trying to make sense of what appeared to me to be their
contradictory assessments, I realized that according to them, they sometimes felt their busyness
was an enriching experience and sometimes they felt it was not, depending on what else they had
going on at the moment. Although this was an apparently common-sense revelation, I realized
that the time-deficit model could not grant me sufficiently close access to these parents’ local
definitions of situations.
From a distance, it appeared as if their degrees of busyness and their levels of
exasperation and their time-management efforts fluctuated with actual time-amounts. But from
up-close – as I saw them coordinate schedules when things came up throughout the day – it
became more obvious that they were mobilizing extra-local meanings to orient their local
actions, and that these meanings carried enough power to pattern their management of busyness
across situations and to pattern their evaluations of that busyness. The time-deficit model proved
unable to accommodate these meaningful patterns. It became necessary for me to address this
analytic blind spot and to “extend” the time-deficit model so that it would be possible to
accommodate the dynamic whereby powerful extra-local meanings were being mobilized on site
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to shape evaluations of time-pressure, patterns of activity-administration, and definitions of the
situation – irrespective of time-amounts. The spatiotemporal coordination framework that I
presented in the previous chapter and use for the remainder of this dissertation is my “extension”
of the time-deficit model in order to explain these empirical observations.
Time-use cultures – the extra-local meanings that I stumbled upon when trying to resolve
the abovementioned contradiction in the field – are guidelines that assure appropriate actions and
guarantee worthwhile busyness. As such, these cultural constructs were also identifiable in the
narratives of persons’ attempts to be good time-managers as well as in their actual coordination
patterns. Throughout the three empirical chapters, I focus on detailed interview and
ethnographic accounts of different parents deploying these cultural resources to coordinate their
schedules and administer their daily activities.
What I do in the first empirical chapter is use interview data to describe the grounded
concept of time-use cultures and its multiple component categories. Due to space limitations, I
use this chapter to simply describe them and their dimensions, presenting them as relatively-
autonomous cultural “things” with a life of their own. In thee second empirical chapter I
describe how parents actually put these cultural frames into action; how they deploy them to
coordinate schedules. This second empirical chapter only features this cultural work in three
parents’ scheduling episode. I do not describe different ethics being deployed by the same parent
at different moments throughout the day. Instead, I offer detailed descriptions of three parents’
child-chauffeuring episodes that look more or less the same logistically but actually mean very
different things to the parents carrying them out. I do this in order to emphasize and clarify the
differences in meaning and technique that arise from parents’ deployment of these three cultural
frames. It is important to keep in mind that each time-use culture is one that I found in use by
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the other participating families, too. Finally, in the third empirical chapter I also rely on few
excerpts of coordination work, this time in order to illustrate the power of temporal structures to
shape evaluations of time-use quality. This carries great significance with regard to efforts for
ameliorating the sense of time-pressure and speed-up felt by many contemporary parents.
THE WORK OF RESEARCHING
Conducting an ethnographic study of family life was challenging work. Like other
ethnographic studies, it was challenging because of the intensity of the nature of a participant-
observation data-collection technique. I always had to be alert and attentive, jotting down notes,
making observations, listening carefully. But conducting this research was especially
challenging because I conducted these participant-observations for many continuous hours a day
for 14 continuous days for each family. Furthermore, similar to other researchers who have
studied family life in such an up-close-and-personal manner, I also encountered substantial
difficulties in (a) recruiting research participants, and (b) negotiating my own research role
within the lives of these families.
I offer here a brief discussion of these sets of challenges – work-rhythm challenges,
participant-recruitment challenges, and researcher-role challenges – before turning to the
empirical chapters of the dissertation. These are challenges which must receive due attention by
researchers intending to conduct similarly-insightful ethnographic studies of family life.
WORKING AND SLEEPING
I would leave my home before sunrise and arrive late at night because I participated in
and observed the lives of these families as they prepared to go to work and school and as they
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returned from work, reconvened, and prepared for bedtime. Because of the constant-
comparative method of hypothesis-testing, I needed to complete writing field notes and
analyzing them at night, after I returned home from the field site. I had to generate questions and
formulate hypotheses to then “test” them the very next day. This intense daily work schedule
resulted in lack of sleep. I averaged about 4 hours of sleep per night before having to wake up
and travel to the field site once again. Keeping up this research rhythm for two continuous
weeks per family was difficult.
Furthermore, this research format really did immerse me into the busy lives of these
families. I really did live their lives for the extent of my field work with them. I because
similarly exhausted as they did while operating at their rapid pace. But then, while they slept
and recovered from their frenetic life, I still had to work – attempting to make sense of the day’s
data. Doing this for sixteen weeks throughout the course of one year was, to say the least,
insanely challenging; especially given the fact that to “maximize” their busyness I had to conduct
field work during the school months – to ensure that they contend with children’s school and
extracurricular obligations. This automatically eliminated the summer months and left me only
with 8 months of the year within which to schedule my field work. Overall, the participant-
observation data-collection methodology used for this study was extremely exhausting work on
multiple levels.
RECRUITING FAMILIES
Before these field work challenges, though, I had to recruit the participants for this
research study. Throughout the course of 1 year I relied on three strategies for recruiting
participants for this study. The first, which involves recruiting from a public location (Friedman
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2013), I call a “Parks and Recreation” strategy. But being a long-haired, young, Latino male in
public spaces with large amounts of white boys and girls presented recruitment difficulties that
other researchers within this literature have not experienced. I was presented with difficulties
approaching families and initiating conversations with them. I quickly realized that I would have
to use a different recruitment strategy.
The second recruitment strategy that I attempted was what I call, “The Office” approach.
I cut my hair conventionally short, I dressed conventionally business-casual, and I emphasized
my “professional” identity over my other identities while I went into public spaces to recruit
participants. This approach yielded me with more access to families. Unlike my previous
strategy, I was able to at least tell them about my study. I was able to initiate lengthy
conversations with them about the topic of my study. This recruitment approach yielded two
participating families for my study – one of these became a family whom I shadowed.
The third strategy for recruiting participants was what I call the “Modern Family”
approach. I relied on my own social network to call upon recruitment assistance from others. I
told the students in my class about my study and I asked them to help me recruit participants.
Students were not offered extra credit. This was purely voluntary. Students were invited to tell
their parents to tell their acquaintances (defined as non-kin relations such as friends and co-
workers) about my study and to ask those acquaintances to contact me, the researcher, if they
wished to participate. This strategy yielded the other 8 participating families in my study.
Overall, I recruited participants for 12 months throughout the course of an entire calendar
year. I contacted over 100 families and was able to secure 10 of these as participants in my
study.
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STUDYING FAMILIES
Similar to other ethnographies of family life (Darrah et al. 2007; Friedman 2013;
Hochschild 1997; Lareau 2003), I was sometimes “as unobtrusive as a family dog” (Hochschild
1989), and sometimes I was a more involved participant, like when I would wash dishes or help
set the table. Like in these other studies, “the interplay of participation and observation was
extremely fine-grained” (Darrah et al. 2007: 9) and the issue of “reciprocity” added to the
complexity of my research role in their lives. Studying children resulted in difficulties also
encountered by previous similar research (Friedman 2013; Lareau 2003; Pugh 2009).
Unlike these other studies, however, I was in many ways very different from my
participants – in age, marital-parental status, ethnic background, and physical appearance. These
differences were assets for my role as a detached, “scientific” observer of their lives. I could not
relate to them on some aspects of their lives – like what it’s like to worry about the physical
safety of a child. Although sometimes this brought complications – like when a mother yelled at
me for jeopardizing her children’s safety by playing with them on a slippery surface – for the
most part these differences rendered many aspects of their lives new and interesting to me and
worthy of description, interpretation, and explanation.
The members of these families and the neighbors of these families were all familiar with
the sight and experience of having Latino adults entering and leaving their homes – gardeners,
housekeepers, nannies, handy men. In this sense, especially for the children, I fit into a
recognizable role as one of other adults who had access to their private lives. I also offered to
help these families with tutoring service for their children during the duration of the study. This
too positioned me in a recognizable role as one of the many ethnic-minority service-workers in
the lives of these white, suburban, middle-class southern California families.
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But these differences presented complications with regard to my role as a co-participant
in their everyday lives. As a young Latino male accompanying middle-aged white mothers and
fathers in suburban spaces of southern California, I encountered issues which previous
researchers within the family busyness literature did not. One family even refused to participate
in the ethnographic portion of this study because, as the wife explained to me, her husband was
not comfortable with me spending long periods of the day alone with her.
Most of the time, however, these issues were not so much with the participants in my
study, per se, as they were with the others in their lives whom we encountered throughout their
spatiotemporal terrain. Was I a personal assistant? A friend? An intern? Why was I there? The
participants and I had to come up with different “covers” for me. Most of the spaces that we
traversed were racially homogeneous and this often made me ‘the elephant in the room’ that
needed to be explained. But, as it was pointed out to me by one of the parents whom I
shadowed, I have a tendency to be “like a chameleon,” so they found it easy to not have to
explain me to others.
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CHAPTER 4
Cultures of Time-Use
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INTRODUCTION
Widespread socio-cultural and demographic transformations of United States society
during the second half of the 20th century have led to increased busyness among families with
children. The maelstrom of busyness that confronts contemporary parents complicates their
effort to balance work and family lives, assaults their quality time alone and with family
members, and endangers their physical and psychological health (Bianchi, Casper, and King
2005; Casper and Bianchi 2002; King et al. 2012). In response to this deleterious busyness,
parents have restructured their time-allocations and work-family arrangements through long-
term, durable work-life balance strategies, which were mentioned in chapter 1. Mothers have
decreased their time in housework and personal care, fathers now spend more time in childcare,
and spouses increasingly decide to sequence their careers at different points of their life or they
decide for one of them, namely the wife, to work part-time or altogether opt-out of the labor
force (Becker and Moen 1999; Blair-Loy 2003; Garey 1999; Gerson 2009; Stone 2007).
Besides changing time-use patterns and institutional arrangements, parents also cope with
their busyness through ideological-modification strategies, also introduced in chapter 1. They
use cultural models to formulate durable narratives of balance for themselves and their families
(Blair-Loy 2003; Gillis 1996; Hochschild 1997). Such lasting-enduring coping strategies
attenuate guilt or tensions that arise from difficulties balancing commitments to both work and
family. Whereas work-life balance strategies are long-term practical strategies, ideological
modifications are durable cultural strategies for coping with the busyness of everyday life.
But what about the more immediate, micro-level practical work of activity-administration
that parents must perform to arrange these time-pressed obligations into well-coordinated family
schedules? Do they engage in everyday ideological modification and use these same cultural
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models to deal with the practical predicaments of synchronizing schedules and completing ‘to-
do’ lists? Or do parents instead use different sets of cultural tools to cope with these logistic
aspects of the “time-crunch”? While the busyness literature benefits from wide coverage of
parents’ long-term, lasting-enduring, life-course strategies for coping with busyness, very few
studies have sought to actually delve into the more microscopic, day-to-day, instrumental
coordination work that parents perform when scheduling and arranging their many institutional
commitments.
As already explained in the previous chapters, this dissertation builds upon those few
studies which do explore such recurring activity-administration strategies of everyday life and
offers interpretive correctives to how such strategies are understood by busyness research. The
practical activity-administration strategies found among the parents in this study – such as
carpooling, multitasking, and tag-teaming (where one parent drops off a child and the other
parent picks up that same child) – reveal an implicit, previously-unidentified cultural process
whereby parents deploy distinct cultures of time-use to coordinate their and their children’s daily
schedules. This process (described in chapter 2 as coordination work) of deploying cultures of
time-use (described in chapter 2 as time-use cultures) indicates a fourth category of strategies
(described in chapter 2 as the first two elements of coordination work and described in chapter 1
as activity-signification) for contending with the busyness of everyday life. Patterns of temporal-
ethic-deployment enable parents to consistently administer activities in predictable ways – like
the mom (discussed in the next chapter) for whom consistent deployment of a time-use culture of
balance during afternoon-child-chauffeuring duty renders it sensible for her to multi-task
childcare with personal leisure as a way to buffer the busyness at home from the busyness at
work.
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But these deployment patterns, or activity-signification strategies, do not offer practical-
instrumental relief from daily busyness, as do activity-management strategies. Rather, the
activity-signification component of coordination work meaningfully grounds parents’ construal
of their time-use and guides their time-management efforts along “lines of action” (Swidler
1986) which make sense to them and which provide them with security that their coordination
efforts are appropriate and worthwhile. Chapter 7 delves into the significance of considering
activity-signification as a separate category of strategies. In this chapter I only discuss this
cultural process as it relates to parents’ activity-administration efforts, rendering them
meaningful courses of action.
While the parents in my research certainly relied on gender ideologies to guide the
division of their labor (work-life balance), and while they certainly used cultural constructs about
the family, work, and the boundary between these two social realms to formulate harmonious
narratives of balanced temporal availabilities and stable institutional devotions (ideological
modification), when it came to negotiating daily deficits of time and coordinating everyday
schedules (activity-administration), the parents in this study drew from an alternate repertoire of
cultural resources. Rather than using the ideological modifications identified by past research to
make sense of their busyness, parents instead used the time-use cultures of achievement,
balance, and commitment to guide the way they arranged daily activities and coordinated
family members’ schedules. Time-use cultures provided them with sets of guidelines that
stipulate proper forms of time-use and render meaningful specific ways of carrying out the tasks
of daily coordination.
Unified into coherent systems by internal logics regarding proper time-use, the meanings
that make up time-use cultures pertain to appropriate activities and appropriate concerns. The
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internal structures of time-use cultures, then, consist of principles about time-use concerns and
principles about time-use density, held together by different logics.
Table 1 below summarizes the time-use cultures that were most salient and prevalent
among the families in this study. The columns describe the different time-use cultures. There
are three of them. The bottom two rows describe their component principles. The top row
describes their logics, which organizes these principles into a stable system
Table 4.1 Time-Use Cultures and Their Component Dimensions
TIME-USE
CULTURE
Principles prescribing
how to use one’s time,
corresponding to a
logic of…
ACHIEVEMENT
Getting Things Done
obtaining outcomes
that must be reached
BALANCE
Balancing Life
ensuring a
harmonious state of
being
COMMITMENT
Caring For Others
nurturing
relationships with
those around us
TIME-USE
CONCERNS
should be…
Logistic
it is imperative to
consider how long
activities take when,
where, and with whom
Curatic
it is imperative to
consider how
activities promote
personal health and
comfort
Connectic
it is imperative to
consider how
activities connect
one to others
TIME-USE
DENSITY
should be…
Impositive
daily schedules should
be arranged with
activities that are
imposed by inanimate
forces beyond one’s
control
Divertive
daily schedules
should be arranged
with activities that
are different and
enjoyable
Reciprocative
daily schedules
should be arranged
with activities that
fulfill obligations
and reciprocate
responsibilities to
others
The time-use culture of achievement is composed of principles that promote logistic
concerns and impositive activities, and these are held together by a logic of getting things done.
This ethic sustains the notion that one should include in daily schedules activities whose
completion is required by external rules and circumstances and that one should concern one’s
self with calculations about how long they take, when, where, and with whom in order to secure
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that completion. This constellation of meanings prescribes completing tasks as culturally
appropriate, links outcomes to logistics, promises abidance of terms set by abstract forces, and
urges activities that monitor, cultivate, and fulfill plans.
The time-use culture of balance is composed of principles that promote curatic concerns
and divertive activities, and these are held together by a logic of balancing personal life. This
ethic sustains the notion that one’s daily schedule should promote equilibrium, harmony, and
variation, and that one should concern one’s self with monitoring one’s health and balancing
work with health and relaxation. This constellation of meanings prescribes mediation as
culturally appropriate, links nature with personal health, locates fun opposite to duty, promises
inner communion with oneself, and urges activities that divert.
The time-use culture of commitment is composed of principles that promote connectic
concerns and reciprocative activities, and these are held together by a logic of nurturing caring
relationships. This ethic sustains the notion that one should participate in activities that fulfill
one’s obligations to those who are part of one’s daily existence and one should concern one’s
self with reinforcing one’s ties to them. This constellation of meanings prescribes caring for
significant others as culturally appropriate, links relationships to emotions, locates reciprocity in
webs of responsibilities, promises allegiance, and urges activities that adjoin one to others.
In this chapter I describe in great detail the interrelated meanings which constitute each
one of these time-use cultures and the internal logics which hold them together. But first, I
contextualize the existence of time-use cultures and highlight the significance of recognizing
them as a separate thing that matters in the repertoire of cultural resources that is available to
parents for dealing with busyness. I do this through a discussion of the ideological modifications
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which, according to the literature, guide parents in their efforts to manage schedules and deal
with the various time-dilemmas of busyness.
MODIFICATION OF IDEOLOGIES
The social, cultural, and demographic sources of contemporary parents’ busyness are
well-researched topics in sociology (Bianchi and Milkie 2010), as are the behavioral changes
through which parents cope with this time-crunch (Bianchi et al. 2012). Many studies also
document the cultural work that accompanies many of these behavioral changes (Blair-Loy
2003; Coltrane 1996; Daly 1996; Garey 1999; Gerson 2009; Gillis 1996; Hochschild 2005, 2003,
1997; Stone 2007; Townsend 2002). This cultural work – which can be described as ideological
modification – consists of altering perceptions of what it takes to reach institutional stability
between work and family. Doing so helps parents deal with a central aspect of busyness: the
difficulty in fulfilling temporal commitments required by particular institutional arrangements.
The busyness literature addresses three types of cultural constructs that parents rely on to carry
out this enduring culture work. These are myths about ‘family,’ schemas for ‘career’ and
‘domesticity,’ and notions of ‘needs.’
Confronted with a destabilizing context of urgency, exhaustion, and tension brought
about by time-insufficiency, parents find comfort and solace in multiple forms of family myths.
They imagine the kind of family they could be if only they had the time (Hochschild 2003,
1997), the family-time they could have if only their work-life were not so encroaching (Daly
2001c), and the potential selves they could become if only their work and family lives were
balanced (Hochschild 2005, 1997). Parents “live by” such family myths of slow pace,
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connection, mutual care, and emotional engagement to cope with the discrepant reality of the
families they “live with” (Gillis 1996).
The second set of symbolic adjustments is used when parents take the opposite approach
and instead match the families they “live by” with the families they “live with.” Parents embrace
new ideals of domesticity and career that accommodate present-day realities, redefining work
and family as complementary and harmonious realms (Coltrane 1996; Garey 1999; Townsend
2002). Some of these updated cultural schemas eschew housework (Bianchi, Robinson, and
Milkie 2006) and replace it with “professionalized” schedule-management (Stone 2007) as an
expression of care (Hochschild 2003, 1997). They also integrate parents’ dual-devotion to career
and family as an integral part of contemporary parenting, granting fathers and mothers the
opportunity to model for their children ways of straddling both spheres (Blair-Loy 2003; Gerson
2009; Messner 2011, 2009).
Finally, the third kind of cultural construct that parents use to perform ideological
modification consists of redesigned notions of needs. Parents draw from collective
representations of children as independent and resilient beings whose self-sufficiency precludes
the need for parents’ exclusive, constant, and total immersion in their day-to-day care and
nurturance (Blair-Loy 2003, Gerson 2009, Hochschild 1997). Likewise, a novel notion of
mothers as self-reliant maintains that meeting mothers’ needs of personal autonomy and
happiness is an essential prerequisite for children’s well-being (Blair-Loy 2003, Gerson 2009,
Hochschild 1997). With symbolic upgrades such as these, parents manage to ensure emotional
solidarity within their families despite a corrosive and exhausting reality of hurriedness.
In summary, a large number of work-and-family studies identify symbolic constructs of
‘family,’ ‘career,’ ‘domesticity,’ and ‘needs’ as the cultural resources that parents deploy to
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perform ideological modifications. Through this enduring culture work, parents formulate
coherent narratives of themselves and their families and envision stable work-family relations,
thereby coping with competing institutional devotions and conflicting time-demands in their
lives.
PRACTICAL ADMINISTRATION OF ACTIVITIES
Besides describing how parents negotiate long-term obligations to the greedy institutions
of work and family through behavioral and ideological adjustments, a much smaller number of
studies also look at a different aspect of busyness: the more immediate scheduling requirements
of daily living. These studies depict the practical ways in which parents actually piece together
their many activities into schedules despite a shortage of time for doing so. Such studies
implicitly recognize that the logistic predicaments of arranging daily schedules and completing
to-do lists require different coping strategies than the psycho-emotional toll generated from
temporal allegiances demanded by the institutions of work and family.
Planning, deciding, juggling, researching, scheduling, and transporting constitute an
altogether separate time-use category that permeates the life of contemporary parents.
Nevertheless, sociologists concerned with busyness have only recently turned to the logistic
work of schedule-coordination as an important focus of exploration. According to the scarce
available literature, some of the practical tactics that parents utilize to coordinate the activity-
packed schedules of family members include: planning ahead, keeping track of time, touching
base with each other, speeding up, multitasking, saving time, and simplifying their schedules by
eliminating some activities and outsourcing others (Arandell2001; Becker and Moen 1999; Daly
2001b; Darrah,Freeman, and English-Lueck 2007).
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Although the few studies that do describe parents’ practical techniques for coping with
busyness at the level of everyday life do not explicitly examine the cultural work of
interpretation that it takes to perform such strategies, they do note that parents consistently use
principles of “efficiency” in their attempts to synchronize the daily activities of family members
(Hochschild 1997). Beyond this insight, very little is known about the meanings that enable
parents to carry out the practical-instrumental logistics of daily life while dealing with busyness.
For the remainder of this chapter I describe the structure of time-use cultures in detail. These
were the systems of meanings that I witnessed being put to use by the parents in my study as
they performed the coordination work of activity-administration and time-management during
their busy lives.
TIME-USE CULTURES
Confronted with a varied array of activities and a fast-paced reality of day-to-day living,
the parents in this study relied on important cultural resources to manage and make sense of their
daily busyness. Present among these resources were gendered norms of time-use (Berk 1985;
DeVault 1991; Epstein and Kelleberg 2004; Hochschild 1989), parenting logics (Hays 1996;
Lareau 2003), and efficiency techniques (Becker and Moen 1999; Forsberg 2009; Hochschild
1997; Wallace 2010); but the cultural tools most salient in their daily efforts to piece together
schedules, negotiate demands, and meaningfully orient their actions were the sets of cultural
guidelines which I have termed time-use cultures. Time-use cultures stipulate the proper things
to do with one’s time and present specific uses of time as valuable and desirable means for
negotiating busyness. These are summarized in Table 2 of chapter 2. Each time-use culture is
structured by an underlying logic of appropriate time-use which holds together distinct
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assumptions about the “right” concerns to have during one’s time-use and the “right” activities to
participate in with one’s time-use.
ACHIEVEMENT
The most prominent time-use culture which was readily deployed by the parents in this
study in order to manage their time, administer their activities, and negotiate their daily busyness
was the time-use culture of achievement. This time-use culture presents “getting things done” as
the proper way to spend one’s time.
LOGISTIC TIME-USE CONCERNS
When parents drew from the time-use culture of achievement they concerned themselves
with how long activities took, when, where, and with whom they took place. According to this
ethic, such logistic calculations constitute an appropriate form of time-use.
Mrs. A, for instance, often used this dimension of achievement when keeping track of the
time:
There’s always a clock involved; I’m always watching the clock. Okay, it’s
running here and then I’m looking at my phone to see who’s calling or it’s just the
constant looking at the clock. It’s just always looking at a clock; looking at the
time; looking at the schedule.
Although Mrs. A regretted having to worry so much about the time, she recognized the cultural
righteousness of her logistic concerns – getting things done required them. Like Mrs. A, Mr. J
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described how these logistic concerns were the appropriate ones for him to have in order to
successfully transition from work to home to extracurricular activity:
I have to make sure that I get off [work] on time to pick them up early enough so
where I can pick them up, have them here to do their homework before practice so
they can go to practice.
Like Mrs. A and Mr. J, Mrs. E is a mother who very skillfully wove the ethic of achievement
throughout her days. Here she described her consideration for logistic matters in order to
accomplish “a little juggling” during one particular afternoon:
I have to go to the grocery store and the produce market, so I’ll do that…. I’ll
probably come back and try to get a jog in and hopefully with Evan [husband].
Ellen’s [oldest daughter] done [from school] at 3 o’clock and Erick’s [son] done
[from school] at 3 o’clock. But Erin [youngest daughter] has talent show dress
rehearsal. So she’ll still be at school. Evan will go to that. Evan will go there and
be there…. So I’ll go pick up Ellen from school and bring her home. So that’s a
little juggling.
These three quotes express one of the implicit understandings which constitute the ethic of
achievement – that concerning oneself with logistic matters, displayed through the monitoring of
clocks and schedules, is an appropriate use of time.
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Arranging carpool relationships with the parents of their children’s teammates,
classmates, and friends was an effective strategy that the parents in this study used to manage
their busy family schedules. This strategy, however, also brought with it additional tasks to
coordinate. As Mrs. E explained below, this “lovely” strategy helped parents get things done;
but to do so it required logistical negotiations between parents, which presented a source of
preoccupation while carrying out the actual carpooling activity:
I think carpools are hard when you have multiple activities because I don’t want
someone to be dependent on me if something goes haywire and I have to switch up
my schedule; that’s a lot of pressure. Sometimes getting Erick somewhere, I’m
coming straight from having gotten someone else, so it’s not even like I’m leaving
from home and can then go pick up kids and go…. The logistics of it, it’s a lovely
convenience when it works, but to me it’s more stressful – the different elements,
negotiations, logistics.
Other moments of the day when logistical matters became relevant topics of concern for parents
were when they picked up their children from extracurricular activities. At these times, parents
often waited for coaches or instructors to finalize the activity. For parents, waiting was
“annoying” because it kept them from getting things done. Below, Mrs. E described how logistic
concerns become salient for her during these moments of waiting:
I don’t like waiting, but I plan for waiting…. [Coaches] say, ‘Practice is over at
6:00,’ but practice is over at 6:30. And in the meantime I’ve had to be at 3
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different places between 6:00 and 6:30. It’s annoying when the coach is going
over something when they’ve already been there for 2 hours. When one of the kids’
things goes really late, that gets tedious ‘cause it feels a little bit like, they’ve
already been there, they need to leave, they need to be done and come home.
Worrying about times, locations, and getting someone from one point to another constituted
legitimate concerns when following an ethic of achievement. Although carpooling and waiting
may have themselves been “annoying” or “stressful,” considering logistic matters during these
activities was seen as an appropriate use of time. Such concerns offered pathways to overcome
the annoyance and stress that resulted from accommodating “haywire” schedules and waiting for
insensitive coaches.
Logistic concerns helped parents get things done. They are a culturally righteous form of
time-use constitutive of the time-use culture of achievement.
IMPOSITIVE TIME-USE DENSITY
The time-use culture of achievement also includes the taken-for-granted understanding
that participation in activities which are dictated by authoritative, often incomprehensible,
abstract forces of society constitutes an appropriate form of time-use.
When parents drew from this time-use culture they readily identified diffuse culprits that
imposed activities on them. Mr. A, for example, talked about one of these obscure and intangible
sources of his time-use – “corporate America”:
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Everybody is loaded up; Corporate America will continue to shovel more on your
back. The more you carry the more they’ll load on you…. In today’s world a lot of
people go home and stop working and then people pick back up in the evening and
start back up – just because there’s so much work you can’t ever get through it;
you just can’t get through it; it’s impossible!
According to Mr. A, “corporate America” forces everybody, including himself, to resume work
in the evenings because it “continue[s] to shovel more on your back.” But despite his frustration
with this faceless foe, Mr. A understood that “pick[ing] back up” with what “they’ll load on you”
is the only proper recourse, otherwise it would be “impossible” for him to “get through” so much
work – getting things done required using time in the manner imposed by “corporate America.”
Unlike Mr. A, Mr. C was not as frustrated by the particular use of time that his job loaded
on his back. But similar to Mr. A, he did note the power of outside forces to dictate the particular
shape and form that his schedule of activities took in order to “get everything done”:
At Christmas time we do 60% of our business in 2 weeks of the year. Those 2
weeks of the year it goes crazy and you work as hard as you can work, basically….
You’ve got to get everything done, and it’s just got to be done and you do it. You
work all night long if you have to! At that particular time of the year you just know
that you’re not going to be scheduling vacation.
Mr. A, Mr. C, and the other parents in this study did not only spend their time according to the
dictates of their employers or the rhythms of the market; but when they drew from the time-use
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culture of achievement to orient and interpret their actions, they did express the tacit
understanding that performing activities imposed by powerful forces beyond their control was a
culturally proper use of time: it was how things got done.
Other parents who did not feel the pressures of “corporate America” or the particular time
of year instead identified “the system” as the culprit for their and their children’s woes of
busyness. Here, Mr. C explained how a “system [that] has gotten all out of whack” pressured
him and other parents to densify schedules with many enrichment activities throughout the week:
I feel that the system, the way it’s working right now, is stressing the kids a lot
more academically than they ever had. If they choose to do a sport or take an
instrument and learn music, the rigors of those programs are much more than they
used to be…. If a kid shows no aptitude in athletics or doesn’t want to do music, a
lot of the parents around here get them signed up in other activities – art, acting,
whole other things, martial arts. So they’re still programmed, programmed,
everything is programmed! I just think the system has gotten all out of whack….
The system right now is, I think, skewed, definitely.
Mrs. W, too, expressed concern over the compact density of contemporary children’s schedules:
Thursdays my daughter has guitar and ballet; my son has guitar and acting class.
So 4 days a week my kids have something different. I’ve talked to other friends,
and I’ve said, ‘I never see my children.’ And they never are in our house and they
never run around the neighborhood, or go into the grass and play in our yard that
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we have accessible to them. So is this the way it should be? Or have we been sold
the idea that this is the way it should be by schools? How did this happen? Who
knows?
While Mr. C felt that a “skewed” “system” was the source of this extracurricular time-use, Mrs.
W wondered if “schools” were the ones who “sold the idea that this is the way it should be.” A
competitive society, a skewed system, schools. According to the parents in this study, these and
other abstract forces dictated the substance that densified their and their children’s daily
schedules. But despite questioning if “this is the way it should be” and complaining about the
rhythm of these schedules, parents nevertheless maintained that densifying days with such
activities was a worthwhile form of time-use because of the potential pay-offs, which include
very practical life skills. Mr. C explained:
Mostly just socialization and getting used to teamwork – that’s why I love him to
be on team sports; and baseball is a great team sport for them to learn how to
interact with people, and manage difficult situations. I think that’s hugely
important in life as you go through, and the sports, I think, give you that…. I think
all those kinds of skills; that investment, I think, from our standpoint, is
worthwhile.
And Mr. A elaborated:
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It’s not necessarily the activity as much as the interaction with the other people
that I think is positive for them…. Life is about having to interact with other
people. When you grow up, when you’re at work, when you have to go to the store,
you have to deal with other people. If you never learn to deal with other people
you’re going to have a much more difficult time.
Like the other parents in this study, Mr. C and Mr. A were more interested in what the activity
cultivated than on the specific activity, per se. The way that parents in this study talked about,
understood, and carried out their “concerted cultivation” (Lareau 2003) parenting strategies
revealed their use of the time-use culture of achievement to densify schedules with activities that
were imposed upon them by the larger society and which that same “system” – “skewed” or not
– defined as sound time-use investments.
BALANCE
The second time-use culture relevant to the coping strategies of the mothers and fathers in
this study was the time-use culture of balance. This time-use culture posits that balancing
personal schedules is a good way to spend one’s time.
CURATIC TIME-USE CONCERNS
Unlike getting things done, when parents drew from the time-use culture of balance they
concerned themselves with being comfortable and maintaining health. Curatic apprehensions
such as these constituted an appropriate use of time according to this particular ethic. Mrs. D
illustrated this tacit understanding of balance:
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Over-scheduling is a bit of a problem, so I would say moderation is a good
word…. This Spring there was, like, 2 or 3 days that we just kinda got to hang out
and just chill around the house. Year round sports for 4th and 5th graders? I think
there needs to be breaks for this age, just for their development of their bodies.
You know, a lot of kids get shin splints and injuries at a pretty young age. I would
say, breaks for growing little bodies – it’s a good thing. I think that activity is
good, but, once again, I think that the pace is a little bit frustrating; I don’t know
what the word is, but, yeah, it’s just a lot going on.
Like Mrs. D, the parents in this study struggled to find words that would accurately describe the
way they felt about having schedules packed with so many activities. But, also like Mrs. D,
when parents sought to harmonize their schedules they invoked personal health and comfort as
appropriate concerns. Mrs. D thought “it’s a good thing” to have “breaks for growing little
bodies” and she strove for “moderation,” “hang[ing] out,” and “chill[ing]” in order to prevent
“the pace” from becoming too “frustrating” for herself and for her daughters.
Mrs. D’s quote displays how monitoring physical and mental health constitute culturally
appropriate elements of the balance ethic that parents deployed throughout their days. This
preoccupation with curatic matters when it comes to balancing personal schedules was also
evident in her husband’s description of his relationship to “being super duper busy”:
I’m good about knowing how much, knowing my limitations and how much is
comfortable for me. I have my own pace and I know with what I’m comfortable; I
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try always to keep in my comfort zone. What makes things easy for me is kind of
working within your own limitations or your own comfort zone…. We don’t like
running around in circles, running from place to place, just being super duper
busy. So, we, it’s definitely manageable.
Mr. D echoed his wife’s emphasis on moderation and manageability as preventative measures
that kept him from being sucked into the vortex of over-scheduling. Working within his own
“limitations” and staying within his “comfort zone” when seeking a well-balanced schedule
“made things easy” for Mr. D and helped him to remain physically and mentally “comfortable.”
The curatic concerns expressed by Mr. and Mrs. D when orienting and construing their
time-use in accordance to the ethic of balance were identical to those displayed by the other
parents in this study when they too wanted to use time in a manner that balanced schedules and
promoted a harmonious state of being. Mr. F drove home this point with his claim about
eschewing achievement and opting to “sit around” and “regenerate” instead:
We try to have one day at least where you can sit around and not have to worry
about getting something done. I like to try to have at least one day a week where I
can just sit around and try to regenerate.
When he tried to have at least one day a week to “just sit around” and “regenerate,” Mr. F made
a deliberate effort to relax and promote personal health. Concomitant with the concerns
dimension of the ethic of balance, Mr. F identified his preoccupation with comfort, health,
equilibrium, harmony, and regeneration as a good form of time-use.
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DIVERTIVE TIME-USE DENSITY
The time-use culture of balance also includes the taken-for-granted understanding that
participation in activities which are fun and different and which equilibrate work with play
constitutes an appropriate form of time-use. When parents drew from this ethic they strove for
schedules to be divertive and they interpreted their time-use as such.
Mr. D demonstrated this other element of the balance ethic when he talked about his
“well-rounded approach” to schedule-design:
I kind of like a good balance. A lot of people are just gung-ho – ‘we’re gonna do
this’ – you know? I kind of, like, do a little piano, do a little swimming, do a little
soccer, do a little reading, do a little math, do a little just goofing off time; doing a
little bit of everything…. Some people just love tunneling, but I think for a lot of
people there is that burn out and what not. That’s just our philosophy – the more
well-rounded approach.
As he made clear, an ethic of balance positioned the time-use habits of “being gung-ho” and
“tunneling” as dangerous, for they may lead to “burn-out.” On the other hand, arranging
schedules that include “a little bit of everything” – including “goofing off time” – was presented
as “good” and “well-rounded.”
This dimension of divertive density from the balance ethic was also evident in Mr. I’s
explanation of his overall philosophy of time-use:
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I believe that everybody should value time and should not waste it and should have
some balance as far as working as far as enjoying as far as doing sports. Do not
mix it together, or mix it together but make sure they cover everything as far as
working, as far as sports, as far as having fun.
None of the parents in this study relied solely on one time-use culture to make sense of and
orient their use of time. But whenever they deployed the ethic of balance they aligned their
scheduling preferences to the precept stipulating that variety and fun are essential features of
appropriate time-use. That is why Mr. I told us that he strove for balance by keeping work and
leisure separate but also making sure to “cover everything.” According to him and the other
parents in this study, people “should not waste [time].” Balancing schedules with activities that
were divertive (diverse, fun, and equilibrative) was one way of ensuring that this calamity did
not take place.
COMMITMENT
The third time-use culture that permeated the daily lives of the parents in this study was
the time-use culture of commitment. This time-use culture presented nurturing relationships as a
good way to spend one’s time.
CONNECTIC TIME-USE CONCERNS
When parents drew from the time-use culture of commitment they concerned themselves
with matters that were very different from the issues that worried them if trying to balance or
achieve things. The precepts of this third ethic posit that maintaining relationships is a
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worthwhile use of time; accordingly, considering how activities link us to others is an
appropriate preoccupation to have about our time-use.
Mrs. H subscribed to this tenet of commitment often, especially when it came to her
children’s extra-curricular activities:
We’re going to juggle this soccer season with [crew] because we’re already
committed to the team for the Fall. If she stays with [crew] and stays strong with it
and likes it, then I think it’s something that takes more of a commitment than
soccer…. If she decides to do crew, she won’t play soccer for school. We’re just
going to finish our commitment to the club team that we’re on now.
Unlike Mrs. D, who drew from the ethic of balance to worry about the “moderation” of sport
seasons in her daughters’ schedules, Mrs. H relied on the commitment ethic to concern herself
with the completion of sport seasons, which she understood to be commitments that required
allegiance, not threats for “growing little bodies,” like Mrs. D. Mrs. H’s preoccupation with
‘finishing’ and ‘staying strong with’ one’s commitment to others was such that she even
expressed this when offering a life lesson to her daughter:
You know what? As an adult, you’re not going to always get to do what you want
to do…. This is part of juggling and balancing how you approach your life and
you can’t blow things off when you’re committed – it’s bigger than you. You’re
affecting many other people. You’ve got to be part of something bigger than
yourself – and that’s what being part of a team is.
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Whenever Mrs. H and the other parents in this study deployed the time-use culture of
commitment to interpret and orient their time-use they worried about the impact that their actions
had on others and about their obligation to follow through with their responsibilities. That is why
when Mrs. H offered her daughter advice on an appropriate way to “approach [her] life” she
reminded her that she was “part of something bigger,” cautioned her against ‘blowing things off,’
and instructed her to take into consideration “many other people.” Connectic concerns were
culturally righteous concerns.
In the quote below, Mr. F attempted to explain when it is that he expressed such concerns
over the way his time-use adjoined him to others.
When other people are counting on you, you have a responsibility to make sure it’s
done. What I’ve noticed about myself is, when I’m on my own and nobody is
counting on me, I’m pretty lazy. But when people are counting on me, I’ll bend
over backwards to make sure it’s done. If nobody’s counting on me, I probably
ain’t gonna do it… [but] when I have a lot of things to do I come up to the
occasion.
Mr. F tended to exhibit the connectic concerns of commitment “when people are counting on
me.” That is when his thoughts about “responsibility” became salient and that is when he
actually made an effort to “come up to the occasion.”
One period of the day during which all of the parents in this study concerned themselves
with responsibilities, connections, and proximate others was dinner time. They all construed the
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family meal as a time to strengthen parent-child relations and they all took measures to ensure
that dinners fostered this same sense of belonging and solidarity in their children. Mr. I
expressed his preoccupation with such connectic matters:
Family time is very important, kids should spend time with their family, see their
parents, should spend one meal with them in a day; like, we spend dinner together
so that they know they are related together, so that they are depended together.
Like the other quotes in this section, Mr. I expressed the connectic concerns that the parents in
this study exhibited when they deployed a time-use culture of commitment to make sense of and
orient their time-use during their activity-administration efforts. According to this ethic,
attachments to others – not logistical predicaments or health threats – are what qualifies concerns
as suitable sources of distress. For Mr. I it was “very important” that he and his wife spent at
least one meal with their children “so that they know they are related together.” For him, family
dinners were not just a time to catch up on the day’s activities; they were a time to be reminded
of the relations of dependence that they all had with one another. Worrying that his family
received a daily dose of this reminder was both worthwhile and culturally appropriate.
RECIPROCATIVE TIME-USE DENSITY
The time-use culture of commitment also involves the tacit understanding that fulfilling
obligations and reciprocating responsibilities to others is an appropriate use of time. When
parents drew from this ethic they sought activities that maintained and reinforced ties to those
around them. As she describes below, Mrs. F frequently relied on this element of commitment:
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I think it’s important that the kids see that if a family member outside our
immediate family, has something like a graduation or is getting married or
something that they need support in, that the kids could see that we’re gonna
support them, that we support our family in that manner; and that family is
important.
Mrs. F expressed the viewpoint that it is culturally appropriate to participate in activities that
reinforce the message that “family is important.” She sought to densify her days and the days of
her children with activities that nurtured relationships and reinforced responsibilities. As she
elaborates below, Mrs. F tried to “be a good role model for [her] kids” on a day-by-day basis by
demonstrating to them, through her actions, that “we support our family” – whether that involved
buying groceries or attending extended-family functions:
You need to be a good role model for your kids. Not only tell them, but also role-
model…. It’s either, I’m with some kids or I’m planning this, or grocery shopping,
or taking Dorothy somewhere, or I’m at school teaching, or I’m at school
learning. I’m always doing something. I always have something to do. Even if I’m
not doing it, I have it to do. And it’s always important, as far as I’m concerned.
It’s like, as soon as I get done with the student teaching or what people are
counting on me to do then I start thinking about, ‘Okay, what can I fit in now?’
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Mrs. F described her use of the commitment ethic to align and make sense of her daily schedules
with reciprocative activities. She was “always doing something,” but that “something” was
composed of things that “people are counting on me to do.” The reciprocative density dimension
of a commitment ethic presented the source of her busyness to be the people around her and their
expectations that she would meet her obligations to them.
Her quotes demonstrate the notion that daily activities should be contingent upon the
duties, obligations, and commitments that persons have to those around them. Importantly, these
obligations to proximates are ever present; because of our relation to these persons, those
activities are already there for us to do. “Even if I’m not doing it,” explained Mrs. F, “I have it
to do.” Consistent with the time-use culture of commitment as she understood it, the activities
that should densify her days were those which bound her to significant others in a web of
reciprocal responsibilities.
Mrs. G, too, expressed the reciprocative dimension of commitment in her “philosophy”
about chores for her children:
Nobody gets paid allowance. My theory is, you’re part of a family and as part of a
family you work together. I’m not going to pay you to clean some place that you
used.... I tell them, if they want allowance that’s fine, but then they can pay me to
make dinner; they can pay me to do things. They want allowance? They want to be
part of the family? Then it’s only fair that everyone gets paid to be part of the
family. So you’re either part of the family or you’re not. That’s my philosophy.
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While some parents in this study did provide their children a small allowance for doing chores
around the house in an effort to teach them work values and financial responsibility, other
parents, like Mrs. G, expected their children to do chores around the home without receiving an
allowance. These parents felt that chores provided their children an opportunity to learn about
family responsibilities and to contribute to the household as family members.
In the quote above, Mrs. G made the very clear distinction between being “part of the
family” and not: “as part of a family you work together;” financial payments for services to the
home are in order only if you’re not part of the family. She and the other parents who shared this
view saw the performance of chores as a time to reciprocate obligations. In accordance with the
time-use culture of commitment, these parents framed schedules densified with household chores
as “fair,” proper, and worthwhile.
Finally, parents also relied on this implicit rule of reciprocation to densify their own daily
schedules. As Mr. and Mrs. J state in their quotes below, a legitimate form of busyness stemmed
from being “dedicated” to significant others who “need to be taken care of”.
Mrs. J: I am a very busy person because I am married, with a job, and I have three
kids that need to be taken care of.
Mr. J: My entire day is dedicated to doing something. I have work, and kids, and a
wife that I have to worry about so I am always busy.
Like Mr. and Mrs. J, all of the parents in this study viewed the densification of their days with
reciprocative activities that reinforced their role obligations as spouses, employees, and parents
as an appropriate form of time-use. The time-use culture of commitment and its reciprocative
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dimension of proper schedule densification provided them with the cultural tools to understand,
talk about, and coordinate busy schedules throughout their days according to this meaningful
principle.
DISCUSSION
The empirical data presented in this chapter highlight the fact that the practical, day-to-
day coordination of schedules (activity administration) involves culturally-informed practices
(activity signification through the deployment of time-use cultures). As it turns out, there is
much more to the work of coordinating daily activities than responding to time-deficits or
negotiating gendered power-struggles. When parents coordinated their schedules, they did not
just maintain an instrumental-practical, means-ends relation to this task – absent of meaning,
focusing solely on overcoming time-deficit or minimizing institutional friction (clashing
demands and competing devotions from work and family). Rather, the task of coordinating daily
activities into intersecting schedules involved a cultural process that got to the very heart of how
they thought they should use our time. For these parents, adhering to the guidelines stipulated by
time-use cultures was not simply a matter of mechanical pragmatics. Rather, their coordination
strategies ultimately entailed allegiances to cultural ideals. They were the visible manifestation
of daily projects to use time appropriately.
While the family busyness literature emphasizes parents’ long-term cultural coping
strategies (ideological modifications) for dealing with busyness, much less is known about the
practical, day-to-day administration activities that parents engage in to deal with their and their
children’s various institutional commitments. With my interview and participant-observation
research of white, suburban, middle-class families and their everyday activity-administration
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strategies, I found that the ideological modifications identified by past research – which parents
use to formulate coherent narratives of stable lives with balanced institutional devotions – were
less central tools in parents’ efforts for dealing with the practical task of coordinating schedules.
In this chapter I have noted that the more salient and relevant cultural tools utilized by parents
for this purpose were time-use cultures, which parents deployed throughout the day as guidelines
for making sense of and orienting their activity-administration strategies.
Some of the more common activity-administration strategies that were presented here
were carpooling, keeping careful track of the time, expecting to wait for children at the sites of
their activities, delegating household chores, and seeking frequent family dinners. But beneath
these practical strategies lies the cultural work of activity signification, whereby these strategies
are rendered logical, possible, and desirable lines of action for dealing with the daily travails of
busyness. Time-use cultures were the cultural tools that provided the meaningful guidelines
which enabled those activity-administration strategies. Chapter 7 will discuss further the
significance of time-use cultures and the activity-signification process that implicates them. This
chapter was simply dedicated to describing the structure of these cultural tools and the logic of
their guidelines which oriented parents’ time-management efforts.
The power of gender regimes to pattern interaction in families is well documented
(Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Gerson 1985; Hochschild 1989; Messner 2009; Stone
2007), as are the logics of bargaining and utility-maximization (Becker [1981] 1991). Time-use
cultures are heretofore unacknowledged cultural tools that join the ranks of gender-ideologies
and rational-calculation as powerful forces that matter for how busy parents contend with their
daily busyness. My central point throughout this chapter has been that we are better equipped to
address parents’ management of busyness when we recognize that they perform one form of
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cultural work to ideologically accommodate the reality of their institutional requirements and
time-demands; and a fundamentally different form of cultural work to meet the practical
challenges of coordinating daily schedules of activities.
My identification of the three distinct time-use cultures – achievement, balance, and
commitment – which parents utilize to carry out this coordination work offers a complementary
understanding of the resources required to alleviate the time-crunch pressures that afflict parents
in their immediate scheduling requirements of daily living. Differentiating between these
different aspects of busyness and the cultural tools deployed to deal with them helps us to better
address families’ socio-temporal struggles in ways that target both the structural manner in
which institutions are linked and the interpersonal dynamics that take place in everyday life.
Analytical and theoretical contributions that stem from such an empirical intervention pertain to
multiple topics of interest for sociologists of family busyness. Paying close attention to the role
of time-use cultures in families’ daily task of schedule synchronization and activity coordination
is certainly a worthwhile step in the right direction toward alleviating the temporal struggles of
contemporary families. This contribution will be discussed in the conclusion of this dissertation.
Since this chapter was dedicated to describing the structure of time-use cultures and the
logics which hold them together, the next chapter is dedicated to describing these time-use
cultures in action. I show how parents deployed these three ethics to manage episodes of
busyness in a similar way – they used similar activity-administration strategies. But I also
demonstrate the power of these ethics in action. I show how time-use cultures shaped the form
and meaning taken by activity-administration strategies, thereby rendering them meaningfully
and practically distinct strategies.
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CHAPTER 5
Cultures of Time-Use and Efficiency
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INTRODUCTION
Sociologists document widespread social and cultural changes that have increased
busyness and complicated parents’ day to day rituals of togetherness (Daly 1996; Shore 2005).
Although scarce, some research on family busyness does exist which indicates that parents
practice practical techniques – such as multitasking, speeding up, and foregoing activities – to
pull off the daily feat of coordinating family members’ many activities (Arendell 2001, Becker
and Moen 1999; Darrah et al. 2007; Forsberg 2009; Hochschild 1997; Roy et al. 2004; Tubbs et
al. 2005; Wallace 2010). Such day to day logistic work, which was described in the previous
chapters as “activity administration,” helps parents manage the chronic dilemmas of daily
busyness and cope with the everyday predicaments of ‘having too much to do and too little time
to do it in.’ This category of strategies is summarized in Table 1 of chapter 1.
Available busyness research maintains that principles of efficiency provide both the
means to and the meaning of activity administration – how parents execute these techniques is
‘efficiently;’ and what executing these techniques means to them is ‘being efficient’ (Hochschild
2003). This claim is consistent with the widely-held thesis of market colonization, or rational-
capitalistic encroachment, whereby utilitarian-individualistic social relations and concomitant
rational-instrumental approaches to time-use have been intruding upon non-market spheres of
social life for the past two centuries and corroding relations of intimacy and commitment in
families (Bellah et al. 1985; Blair-Loy 2010; Blumberg 1991; Ciscel and Heath 2001; DeVries
2008; Fevre 2003; Hareven 1983; Hartmann 1981; Hays 1996; Heath et al. 1998; Hochschild
2013, 2005; Horn et al. 2010; Lasch 1977; Marx and Engels 1978; Polyani 2001 [1944]; Rapp et
al. 1979; Sahlins 1976; Snyder 2013; Swidler 2001; Thompson 1967; Tönnies 1957; Trebilcot
1983; Weber 1958; Zelizer 2005). Nevertheless, the proposition that efficiency constitutes ‘the
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what’ and ‘the how’ of activity administration remains to be adequately grounded by empirical
research. The research presented in this dissertation took on this task and focused on the logistic
techniques that parents utilized to pull off their daily feats of activity management and schedule
coordination.
My research reveals a cultural dynamic that is far more complex than what the market-
colonization thesis leads one to expect. First, I found that the parents in this study did rely on
principles of efficiency to coordinate schedules and administer activities, but they did so in
conjunction with a much broader repertoire of cultural tools than expected. While navigating a
busy daily context, these parents drew on three distinct modes of using time: They sought to get
things done; they sought to care for others; and they sought to balance obligations. These
guidelines for time-use guided how they carried out efficient time-management techniques – how
they organized schedules, how they saved time, how they multitasked, and how they got more
done in less time.
Second, ‘efficiency’ had very little practical meaning in the day-to-day undertakings of
these parents. Instead, their efforts to manage busyness were more aligned with time-use
cultures of achievement, balance, and care – these were their meaningful convictions, not
‘efficiency.’ But when they did seek efficiency, ‘efficiency’ meant different things. Their
coordinated efforts were not just attempts to ‘allocate time with diligence and frugality’ for the
sake of being efficient. They were efforts to allocate time with diligence and frugality in order
to ‘get things done,’ in order to ‘balance obligations,’ or in order to ‘care for others.’
Thus, my findings reveal a multiplicity and variation that remain unacknowledged by
current notions of parents’ techniques for activity administration: the efficiency of these
techniques (a) means different things and (b) is reached through different routes. Consequently,
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this research project builds on previous research by offering an interpretive intervention in our
understanding of how parents cope with busyness.
I have already introduced the concept of time-use cultures in the previous chapters. In
this chapter I emphasize the usefulness of this concept to help us interpret variations in the
meaning and the means of efficient activity-administration techniques. Providing guidelines that
define specific forms of time-use as valuable and desirable, time-use cultures helped parents
meaningfully administer activities and coordinate family members’ schedules in different ways.
This chapter shows time-use cultures in action. I describe parents deploying them – putting them
to use, as it were – and I describe time-use cultures shaping the form and meaning of the these
parents’ “efficient” activity administration techniques – rendering apparently identical “efficient”
strategies quite different – both in the manner that they get carried out and in the signification
that the parents attribute to them. Specifically, I describe three different parents using an
identical activity-administration technique (multitasking during child-chauffeuring duty), but this
technique is carried out differently and means something different because of the specific time-
use cultures which orient these three parents’ actions during those specific pick-up trips.
Being able to explain these variations is important for sociologists interested in parents’
practical strategies for managing daily busyness. What is efficient for some parents might not be
efficient for others. Furthermore, these multiplicities might partly explain the persistence of
busyness in families despite well-intentioned policies that try to maximize work-family balance
and minimize work-family conflict. Whether a particular procedure or policy is effective
depends in large part on what that maximization and minimization means to parents and how
they try to attain it. If the different means to and meanings of efficiency efforts are not taken into
account, many of the policies and programs meant to aid in these efforts might turn out to be
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ineffective for many of the intended beneficiaries. Chapter 7 and the conclusion discuss further
the significance of differentiating between apparently identical “efficient” activity-administration
techniques.
EFFICIENT ACTIVITY ADMINISTRATION
Given the powerful forces of busyness that scatter family members in different directions
at different times of the day and the continuing decline of stable roles, rules, and rituals in
contemporary society, the practical coordination of family members’ schedules from moment to
moment throughout the day has become one of the most important mechanisms for holding
families together and securing harmony and stability in such a hostile context (Becker and Moen
1999; Darrah et al. 2007; Hochschild 1997; Roy et al. 2004; Tubbs et al. 2005; Wallace 2010).
This constant logistic work, which serves as a means for dealing with the chronic hassles of
everyday busyness, can be described as activity administration. Despite its increased
importance, there remains a dearth of family studies that examine these practical strategies of
daily organization and time management.
The scarce data that is available tends to come from studies of low-income families,
where parents respond to structural constraints, few material supports, and limited financial
resources as much as – if not more than – they do to time demands and dilemmas (Edin and Lein
1997; Newman 1999). Nevertheless, such studies do provide valuable information about the
practical tactics that constitute activity administration. They teach us that low-income parents
accommodate to an inflexible public timetable of work hours, bus schedules, and institutional
appointments (Roy et al. 2004; Tubbs et al. 2005; Wallace 2010) by staggering obligations,
being late to appointments, decreasing commitments, forgoing activities, eating serial meals,
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capitalizing on unplanned moments, and shifting interaction with family members to less busy
times, such as late evenings, in order to establish consistency and predictability in their day-to-
day routines.
Plenty of studies of middle-class family life have examined the sources of parents’ and
children’s busyness (Bianchi et al. 2006; Lareau 2003), but few of these studies actually look at
the practices that family members undertake to fit together the many activities that fill their days.
Those few studies that do explore middle-class families’ logistic work (Arendell 2001;Becker
and Moen 1999; Darrah et al. 2007; Forsberg 2009; Hochschild 1997) describe parents who
actively deploy a myriad of practical techniques: they plan scripted days, gather and circulate
information (using multiple lists and calendars for different audiences, and keeping track of
people and obligations), organize activities (categorizing them, consolidating them, and breaking
them down into smaller chunks), make their days as dense as possible (hurrying through
domestic chores, packing events close together, and multitasking in different rooms of the
house), anticipate contingencies (reducing transit time and maintaining control of their own
transportation), respond to events as they arise, limit their number of work hours (refusing to put
in over time or work on the weekends, and protecting one day of the week to complete essential
tasks), and simplify their time outside of work (eliminating what is unnecessary, delegating, and
outsourcing).
Whether exploring low-income or middle-class family life, studies that describe parents’
practical time-management techniques consistently rely on an efficiency perspective. They note
that parents follow principles of efficiency to schedule their activities in a prudent manner that
maximizes limited available time, and they propose that parents interpret these actions as
instances of diligent control over time (Arendell 2001;Becker and Moen 1999; Darrah et al.
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2007; Forsberg 2009; Hochschild 1997; Roy et al. 2004; Wallace 2010). As exemplary
descriptions of such activity administration illustrate, it is as though “a cult of efficiency” has
become both “a means to an end” and “a way of life” for contemporary parents:
Family time… has taken on an “industrial” tone…. Family time is succumbing to
a cult of efficiency previously associated with the workplace (46)…. This creates
a certain anxiety about being “on time,” because it is uncomfortable… when one
is late, and precious time is squandered if one is early (50)… Many working
parents try to go faster if for no other reason than to clear off some space in
which to go slowly. They do two or three things at once. They plan ahead. They
delegate…. They pack one activity closer to the next…. Time becomes something
to “save” at home as much as or even more than at work…. A cult of efficiency…
is allowed to set up shop and make itself comfortable at home. Efficiency has
become both a means to an end – more home time – and a way of life, an end in
itself (Hochschild 1997: 212).
But this interpretation of the means to and the meaning of activity administration has been
tangential to these studies’ analyses. We have yet to adequately research how parents execute
the administration of activities and what this enterprise actually means to them. Is a logic of
efficiency the sole resource that parents rely on to guide the way they think about and carry out
time-management tactics? Or do parents also draw from other widely-available principles? Are
these strategies ever effective without being efficient? Such questions have yet to be addressed
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in a sociological study of family life, and they represent the driving force behind this dissertation
research.
TIME-USE CULTURES AS CULTURAL RESOURCES
Confronted with a varied array of activities and a fast-paced reality of day-to-day living,
the parents in this study relied on important cultural resources to manage and make sense of their
daily busyness. Present among these resources were gendered norms of time-use (Berk 1985;
DeVault 1991;Epstein 2004; Hochschild 1989), parenting logics (Hays 1996; Lareau 2003), and
efficiency techniques (Becker and Moen 1999; Forsberg 2009; Hochschild 1997; Wallace 2010);
but the cultural tools most salient in their daily efforts to piece together schedules, negotiate
demands, and meaningfully orient their actions were the sets of cultural guidelines that I have
termed time-use cultures. Time-use cultures present specific forms of busyness as valuable and
desirable, and stipulate the proper things to do with one’s time. According to these cultures, it is
good to spend one’s time accomplishing (getting things done), balancing (ensuring a harmonious
state of being), and caring (nurturing relationships).
Mothers and fathers consistently invoked these time-use culture’s logics of getting things
done, balancing the day, and caring for others as guides for carrying out their techniques of
efficiency throughout the day – multitasking, saving time, and scheduling. In the sections that
follow, I offer ethnographic excerpts that illustrate how parents put these ethics to use in their
day-to-day management of busyness. Throughout, I emphasize how the use of time-use cultures
explains variation in the meanings of and pathways to efficiency. Given space limitations, this
chapter does not describe different ethics being deployed by the same parent at different
moments throughout the day. Instead, I offer detailed descriptions of three parents’ child-
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chauffeuring episodes that look more or less the same logistically but actually mean very
different things to the parents carrying them out. I do this in order to emphasize and clarify the
differences in meaning and technique that arise from parents’ deployment of these three cultural
frames.
EXCERPT #1: RUNNING ERRANDS
Mrs. A is the operations manager for the local branch of a tile-manufacturing company
that is based in France. Along with a substantial amount of responsibility, this job also offers her
a great deal of flexibility. Mrs. A has enough control over her schedule that she can leave her
office to pick up her son or daughter from school in case they get sick, she can take her lunch
break at the time that she prefers and for as long as she wants, and she can leave her office at the
end of the work day as early or late as she needs to. On a particular Friday afternoon I witnessed
Mrs. A managing a time-dilemma that is typical for contemporary parents: she had to leave
work to pick up her children after school and take them home, administering activities in a
manner that would permit her to maneuver through an unremitting stream of time demands and
deficits in the process.
At precisely 2:28pm Mrs. A logged out of her computer, got her purse, stepped out of her
office, briskly walked out of the building, and got into her van, which was parked in the usual
spot – nearest the building entrance. Mrs. A was in a good mood – “I’m happy it’s Friday!” She
had just “survived” a tough week at work, but her Friday was not over yet. Mrs. A still had to
pick up her children from school at 3:00pm; and earlier that week she had ordered a refill of her
cat’s medicine, which she intended to pick up on her way to her children’s school. “It was
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running out earlier in the week and I’ve been meaning to stop by for the last three days,” Mrs. A
explained to me, “but I never had time. But now we’re completely out, so there’s no choice.”
At 2:47 Mrs. A walked into the pet pharmacy and sat down, waiting for the sole
cashier to finish attending a client. Mrs. A quickly realized, “Uh-oh, we have a problem.” The
client was obviously in no hurry to get her pet’s medicine; she and the cashier were chuckling
and talking. “Are you kidding me?” thought Mrs. A. “I have to go right now. I don’t have time
for this!” She recognized the cashier from previous visits to this store, and she knew that “That
lady talks forever. That lady will talk for 15 minutes if you let her!” So Mrs. A timed her move
carefully: as soon as the client paid, she got up from her seat and walked over to the counter.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she stated forcefully, “but I have to pick up my kids in 10 minutes; if I
don’t get it in, like, two minutes, I’ll have to leave without it. I know you’re in the middle of
her; so if you can’t, I’ll just have to come back.” The other client smiled compassionately – “I
know how it is,” she told Mrs. A – she too was a mother and she understood what it was like to
be in a hurry. In a matter of seconds, Mrs. A received her order and paid. The cashier
volunteered to cut off the bottle cap for her, but Mrs. A said, “No, I’m good; thank you,” and
briskly walked out of the building. Back in her van, at 2:53, Mrs. A was visibly shaken. “So,”
she told me, “We’re running late. I realize now it’s 10 ‘til and I should be driving there. I’m
very stressed.” She continued, “I don’t really have all day to listen to them talking; and I don’t
really care what their talking about. Ughhh!” Mrs. A groaned in frustration.
We reached the school at 3:01pm. Mrs. A was a few minutes late; the familiar gridlock
of SUVs lining the parking lot and overflowing into the street was growing by the second. “Uh,
now the dilemma for parking,” she lamented out loud. “And people getting off in the middle of
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the road? This guy just got out of his car and parked right there? Okay, that’s not going to
work! I’ll just park here.” She parked blocking the driveway of a home next to the school.
ANALYTIC PERPLEXITY: WHAT STRATEGY?
Running errands on her way to pick up her children from school was a practical strategy
that Mrs. A regularly used to administer the activities of her busy afternoons, during which she
faced competing devotions to both work and family. By configuring her schedule in a manner
that avoided an additional voyage down the same road, Mrs. A coordinated through space and
time the multiple labors of her inter-city Odyssey and relieved some burdensome time-pressure
from her busy week. According to the efficiency thesis, Mrs. A drew from a logic of efficiency
to perform this time-management technique. She certainly does appear to follow the tenets of
efficient time-use: planning ahead, packing activities close to each other; and she definitely
transitioned fast from one activity to the next.
However, when I asked Mrs. A about the time-saving strategy that she had just
employed, her response – accompanied by a blank stare – was, “What strategy?” I explained to
her that it seemed to me she had successfully completed two tasks with one single trip, making it
an efficient way to use her time on such a busy week. She insisted, “But I didn’t really have time
to do that; that’s the problem!” She felt pressed against the wall by external forces and was
simply dealing with that. Mrs. A did not recognize her efficient time-management technique as
an act of efficiency. Instead – according to her own assessment – Mrs. A dealt with “a problem”
that left her “no choice” but to simply get it done. Her 30-minute road trip, it turned out, was –
for her – something she had to do, not her attempt to save time or be efficient. Unfortunately,
the efficiency perspective is unable to register the meaning of Mrs. A’s activity-administrative
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action on that Friday afternoon. To adequately explain her own interpretation of her actions, the
conceptual corrective that I propose here are time-use cultures.
PRINCIPLES OF ACHIEVEMENT
Applying a time-use cultures framework to Mrs. A’s Friday afternoon, we can see that
she deployed the logic of achievement in order to administer the activities of medication pick-up
and children pick-up within her half-hour journey across the city. First, the guidelines of this
ethic prescribe as worthwhile the pursuit of activities that are imposed by outside inanimate
forces – such as circumstance, convention, or tradition. Inspired by this cultural guideline, Mrs.
A identified the medication pick-up as an imposed activity (“now we’re completely out, so
there’s no choice”) worthy of including in her afternoon voyage. She “didn’t really have time to
do that” on Friday nor on any of the prior days (“I’ve been meaning to stop by for the last three
days, but I never had time”), but unlike the other days – when her after-work voyage came at a
later time, after her children had already been picked up from school – Friday was when she had
something to do before arriving home (“We’re running late,” “I have to pick up my kids”).
Incorporating the medication pick-up between work-departure and children pick-up guaranteed
that that half-hour of her schedule remained consistent with her view of Friday’s after-work
voyage as a time to accomplish something.
Second, the achievement ethic’s time-use tenets prescribe attentiveness to logistic matters
as a worthwhile use of time. Accordingly, Mrs. A took careful notice of who did what where
when and how. She worried (“we have a problem,” “the dilemma for parking,” “that’s not going
to work”) about persons’ actions (she was waiting while the cashier and client were talking while
her children were about to get out of school), durations (“that lady will talk for 15 minutes,” she
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had “10 minutes” to pick up her kids, she had to get the medication “in, like, two minutes”),
locations (“I should be driving there,” “people getting off in the middle of the road,” “I’ll just
park here”), and the timing of what was going on (“I have to go right now,” “We’re running late;
I realize now it’s 10 ‘til”). Mrs. A did not worry about her ties to the cashier or about the
discomfort that could arise from her interruption (“I don’t really have all day to listen to them
talking; and I don’t really care what their talking about”) – as is prescribed by the time-use
cultures of balance and commitment. Instead, it was the logistic tenets of achievement that
guided the way she administered her afternoon schedule.
During this particular Friday afternoon trip, Mrs. A followed the guidelines of
achievement to administer her schedule of activities in a very specific manner. It was the time-
use tenets (of impositive density and logistic concerns) of this ethic that presented keeping track
of time, interrupting a conversation, demanding quick service, and committing a parking
violation as viable and worthwhile means to manage her time during that half hour. This time
culture also enabled ‘the practical accomplishment of something that needs to be done’ to be the
meaning that she attributed to her busyness-coping strategy on that afternoon. True, Mrs. A was
efficient in the way that she administered her activities – getting more done in less time within
prefabricated activity slots – but how she went faster and how she packed activities close to each
other and how she got two trips done at once was by following the edicts of achievement; and
what that particular administration of activities through space and time represented for her on
that particular afternoon was consistent with the edicts of the time-use culture of achievement.
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EXCERPT #2: BEING CONSIDERATE
Mr. B is the director of regional operations for the local branch of a state-wide non-profit
organization. His work hours are relatively fixed – beginning sometime between 8:00 and 8:30
in the morning, and ending sometime between 5:00 and 6:00 in the evening – although he is also
expected to perform work-related duties during non-work hours, such as scheduling meetings,
responding to emails, and attending fundraiser events. Mr. B has enough control over his
schedule that he can delegate certain duties to other employees, but the degree of authority and
responsibility that comes with his position requires his physical presence for most of the 9-to-5
work day – meeting with someone about something work-related either inside the office building
or at an off-site location. On the Tuesday that I spent with Mr. B, I witnessed him perform a
time-management maneuver that is typical for contemporary parents: he stopped by another
location to run an errand while on his way to pick up one of his children from an extra-curricular
activity. This was similar to Mrs. A’s Friday after-work commute; and like Mrs. A and the other
parents in this study, Mr. B navigated a difficult context of time-demands from work and home
by administering his activities through space and time in a meaningful and practical manner.
At 5:19pm, Mr. B logged off his computer, closed his office door, and jogged out of the
building and toward the parking lot, as was his usual custom. This had been a particularly tough
day for him on account of having five previously-scheduled meetings delayed due to computer
malfunctions throughout the entire office. “That threw off my schedule,” said Mr. B as he
slumped into his car and drove away. He did not intend to drive straight home. Instead, he
thought, “I’m probably going to get Jared [his 11 year-old son] on the way home, but I’m just
going to stop off first at the computer store.” His wife’s laptop had malfunctioned a month ago
and he had wanted to ask the computer technician how much it would cost to fix the issue, but he
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did not have the technician’s phone number. He finally saw an opportunity to squeeze this
errand in today – “It’s literally on my way” – and he headed toward the store.
As he drove there, Mr. B asked his car to call his home. His wife answered the phone
and Mr. B obtained the information that he desired: “Hi, hey, did Blake go to karate? He’s done
at 6? Okay, I can get him.” Mr. B knew his son’s karate schedule but he wanted to confirm this
because sometimes Blake missed his lesson. When I asked Mr. B about his detailed knowledge
of Blake’s karate schedule, he explained to me that because he did not want Blake to develop
“middle-child syndrome” he was particularly careful about his relationship with Blake:
“Basically, the middle child is neglected… I’m very aware of that… self-conscious that way.”
Happily, he announced that since it appeared he would arrive “a little early, I’ll be able to watch
a little bit.” Mr. B also had his wife in mind as he drove to pick up Blake from karate.
“Sometimes I do all that stuff,” he told me about his participation in the evening’s chauffeuring
duties, adding, “Rather than Beth [his wife] having to get in the car and load up Brittany [their
daughter].” Mr. B, I began to notice, was effectively defining his after-work journey on that
particular evening as a something that he needed to do in order to reinforce the ties that he had
with those around him.
During that same phone conversation with his wife, Mr. B shared with her that he was
stopping at the computer store first – “I’m stopping at the guy who fixed the computer…. To see
how much it costs to fix your laptop” – and she provided him with the specific name and number
of her computer. Before hanging up, Mrs. B shared with him her frustration regarding their 5
year-old daughter’s new dress, which she would have to alter tonight. “Oh, bummer,” said Mr.
B. Then he followed this with, “You want me to grab something? You want me to grab
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something to eat?” Mrs. B did not accept his offer, explaining that, “It’s not a huge deal,” they
would be eating Sloppy Joes that night, “but I’m just frustrated.”
At 5:39, just as their conversation was ending, Mr. B drove into a parking space in front
of the computer store. He parked the car and walked into the store. One minute later, Mr. B
jogged back into his car. The computer technician had just left, but the cashier provided Mr. B
with the technician’s phone number. After ten more minutes of driving, Mr. B parked in front of
the karate studio, briskly stepped into the studio, and watched as his son lay sprawled on the mat
with his head pinned to the ground while his flailing feet grasped for the other child’s torso. And
half an hour later, Mr. B and his sweaty son entered the car and headed home. “That went really
late,” said Blake. And then, with his eyes fixed on the road but his ears reaching toward the back
seat, Mr. B listened as his son shared information about the day’s lesson.
ANALYTIC PERPLEXITY: IT’S REALLY CLOSE
Running errands on his way to pick up one of his children from an extracurricular activity
was a practical strategy that Mr. B regularly used to administer the activities of his busy
afternoons, during which he had to juggle demands from both work and family. By configuring
his schedule in a manner that made use of a voyage down the same road, Mr. B coordinated
through space and time multiple commitments that he felt toward others but had been unable to
fulfill on previous occasions due to other, more time-sensitive obligations. According to the
efficiency thesis, Mr. B drew from a logic of efficiency to perform this time-management
technique. He did indeed squeeze activities between one another and he did multitask. During
that half-hour trip Mr. B definitely got more done in less time than if he had postponed going to
the computer store yet again.
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However, although Mr. B did congratulate himself with a proud grin for finally obtaining
the technician’s phone number, he did not see his enterprise as ‘a time problem’ that needed to
be ‘solved,’ like Mrs. A did in the previous excerpt. The meaning of his trip from work to store
to Blake’s karate lesson did not at all have ‘an industrial tone’ – for saving time was not the
salient virtue that guided his behavior. Rather, what seemed to prevail here was a tone of
consideration for others. Being early did not represent the squandering of time, but the
opportunity to be there for his son. And a ‘cult of efficiency’ did not dictate Mr. B’s
interpretation of his trip to that studio; for when he mentioned to me his plans to go there on that
evening, he minimized any time-saving aspirations that might be related to the trip and he
quickly mentioned that the studio was on his way home, so he was not exerting himself with any
particular efficiency-calculation or husbandry of time: “It’s on my way; the karate studio is really
close.” Instead, Mr. B viewed this trip as an opportunity to be a considerate husband who spared
his wife additional labor if it was possible to do so. Evidently, the efficiency perspective is
unable to register the meaning of Mr. B’s particular administration of activities during that
Tuesday evening. Again, it is the time-use cultures framework that offers a corrective to this
interpretive limitation, providing insight into what his activity-administrative techniques actually
meant to him, and also presenting us with information about how he actually executed these
“efficient” tactics.
PRINCIPLES OF COMMITMENT
Utilizing a time-use cultures perspective to interpret Mr. B’s evening drive, we can see
that he deployed the time-use culture of commitment in order to administer the activities of store
visit and child pick-up within his half-hour journey from one city to the next. First, this ethic
CHAPTER 5
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prescribes as worthwhile the aspiration to perform activities that fulfill role-obligations to others
– such as the duties of parent, spouse, and employee. Consistent with this cultural prescription,
Mr. B identified both activities as acts of dedication to relationships he has with others, worthy
of including in his afternoon voyage. Stopping by the store was something that he did for his
wife (“to see how much it costs to fix your laptop”); and picking up his son is something that he
did for both his wife (so she would not be unnecessarily burdened) and his son (so he would not
feel neglected). Mr. B viewed these as activities that reinforced his commitment as a husband
and a father (“sometimes I do all that stuff,” “I’m very aware of that”), strengthening his
reciprocal ties to both of these important persons in his life. Unlike Mrs. A, whose trip was a
time for her to accomplish specific tasks before arriving home, Mr. B construed his Tuesday trip
as a time for him to consider other persons, his relationship with them, and their needs. As such,
he even deemed an additional considerate activity a worthwhile improvisation to his schedule.
When his wife informed him that she was frustrated by the need to alter their daughter’s dress, he
listened attentively and recognized an opportunity to contribute to that evening’s unpaid work at
home by getting “something to eat.” Although incorporating this into his already-dense schedule
was not required, Mr. B’s offer was consistent with his view of this particular after-work voyage
as a time to be considerate of his obligations to others and available to meet their needs.
Second, the commitment ethic’s time-use guidelines prescribe attentiveness to the
commitments that tie one to others to be a worthwhile use of time. Accordingly, Mr. B took
careful notice of others’ needs and emotions and the possible ways he could accommodate them.
He worried (“Oh bummer,” “I’m probably going to get Blake,” “I’m very aware of that,”) about
other’s predicaments (Blake might feel “neglected,” his wife felt “frustrated”) and sought viable
solutions to these (“I’ll be able to watch a little bit,” “See how much it costs to fix your laptop,”
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“You want me to grab something?”) – all the while dealing with his own overarching time-
dilemma of leaving his stressful workday behind and getting home to the haven of a family
dinner accompanied by a doting wife and three loving children hungry for his attention.
Importantly, Mr. B did not concern himself with the logistics of who was doing what and when;
he did not worry about the timing of his actions – as did Mrs. A, who followed the time-use
culture of achievement during an equally efficient trip from work to home. Instead, it was the
connectic tenets of commitment that guided the way he administered his afternoon schedule. For
this reason, Mr. B’s mid-trip phone call to his wife at home was not – according to him – an act
of efficient time-saving multitasking. Mr. B did not call to determine if he was running late or
not. Rather, during that phone call Mr. B asked for confirmation – “Did Blake go to karate?
He’s done at 6?” – on information that would allow him to attend to his son’s need for attention.
What concerned him was being “able to watch a little bit” of his son’s lesson – not being able to
pick him up on time.
During this particular Tuesday evening work-to-home commute, Mr. B followed the
guidelines of commitment to administer his schedule of activities in a very specific manner. It
was the time-use tenets (of reciprocative density and connectic concerns) of this ethic that
presented listening to a spouse’s frustration, volunteering for an additional errand, and being
content with staying longer than expected as viable and worthwhile means to manage his time
during that home commute. This time culture also enabled ‘the attentive care of family
members’ to be the meaning that he attributed to own busyness-coping strategy on that evening.
True, Mr. B was efficient in the way that he administered his activities – doing multiple things
simultaneously, packing one activity close up against the next, getting more done in less time –
but how he multitasked and how he stopped by the store before the studio and how he combined
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the two trips in one was by following the edicts of commitment; and what that particular
administration of activities through space and time represented for him on that particular evening
was consistent with the edicts of the time-use culture of commitment.
EXCERPT #3: MENTALLY TRANSITIONING
Mrs. D is a high school history teacher at a local public high school. Her work hours are
fixed – with her first period class starting at 8:00am and her last period class ending at 2:55pm –
although she performs work-related duties during non-work hours (usually at night), such as
updating her classes’ websites and responding to emails. During the Tuesday that I shadowed
Mrs. D, I witnessed her perform a time-management maneuver that is typical for contemporary
parents: she was part of a carpool arrangement – dropping off her daughter and a teammate at
soccer practice – and since she planned to go to a different location after the drop-off, she took
with her the equipment that she needed for later, rather than returning home. This was similar to
the above episodes of Mr. B and Mrs. A – where they saved time by doing things on their way to
a location – and like them and the other parents in this study, Mrs. D administered her activities
through space and time in a meaningful and practical manner that allowed her to navigate a
context of challenging time-demands and deficits.
At 3:38pm, while the D parents and children were preparing to leave their home,
Danielle, the 12 year-old daughter, asked her mother, “Mom, do the dogs have to come with us?
I don’t want to take them.” “Well,” answered Mrs. D as she headed into her room to get her
shoes, “they’ve been in here all day.” “Well,” replied Danielle, as she went into the kitchen to
pack her soccer cleats in her bag, “I’ve been in school all day.” As she so craftily did on many
occasions, Danielle was trying to use her mother’s own logic against her to impose her will onto
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a situation that she did not find favorable. Steadfast in her decision, Mrs. D called out from the
hall, “I’m going to go play with them… They’ve been here all day long.” Her plan was to take
them in the van as she dropped off Danielle at soccer practice, then “kick around” a soccer ball
with them near a different field, where she would pick up Daisy, her 8 year-old daughter, from
her own soccer practice. In this way she would simultaneously take the dogs outside and also get
a chance to do some exercise herself before picking up her youngest daughter.
Two minutes later, Daisy, who was being dropped off at her practice field by Mr. D,
called out, “Daddy, it’s 3:40!” and half a second later, Danielle echoed, “Mom, we need to go!”
Mrs. D asked from the hall, “What time is it?” and Danielle replied, “3:40!” Mrs. D came
through the living room, collected both dogs, walked with urgency out the front door, into the
driveway, and put both dogs in the van. Clash! Cling! Clang! A loud burst of noise came from
the kitchen. A minute later, Danielle came out, with a mischievous grin on her face. “Sorry,”
she told her mom. “I broke a cup.” “Really?” replied Mrs. D, “That’s okay. Did it make a big
mess?” “No,” said Danielle, “I cleaned it up.” Finally, Mrs. D, Danielle, and the two dogs were
ready to leave. But instead of driving away, Mrs. D opened her door and stepped out of the van.
“What are you doing?” asked Danielle, with a concerned and anxious quiver in her voice. Mrs.
D announced as she walked toward the garage, “I got to get a soccer ball!” “Oh!” replied
Danielle, “Can you get the pump? I need to pump up my ball!” “Yeah!” answered Mrs. D from
amidst the edifice of boxes, bikes, and surfboards in the garage.
Five minutes later Mrs. D was driving on the main road, one dog fidgeting on the
passenger seat and another one moving around on the back seats next to Danielle. Suddenly,
Mrs. D’s eyes widened and she asked Danielle, “Your practice is where? Please tell me it’s not
on the peninsula!” Danielle: “Oh, I have no idea.” Mrs. D, now seriously concerned: “Call
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dad!” Danielle called her father through the car phone and he, while driving Daisy to her
practice, told them the practice location, which was not the peninsula. Relieved, Mrs. D said to
Danielle, “So lucky, Danielle.” Danielle: “Why? ‘Cause we would have been late?” Mrs. D:
“Not only that, but it takes me like half an hour to get down there and back!” Surprised, I
noticed that her qualm appeared to be less about being on time and more about the time that it
would take to make such a trip. This was a subtle but important distinction in frustrations;
driving to the peninsula would make this trip inefficient, but it could do so for different reasons,
and these reasons differed for both Mrs. D and her daughter.
This brief episode of panic ended as abruptly as it began. Both Mrs. D and Danielle
resumed to having a fun time with their playful dogs, listening to music, contorting their arms in
futile but enjoyable attempts to keep them seated, or at least still, and giggling and talking to the
dogs. Several pedestrians turned and looked as Mrs. D drove by. She screeched in satisfaction,
“See how my doggies make everyone smile! Look at those smiles! Everyone likes the sweet
little doggy! Look at that lady smiling!” Excited to be getting so much attention, the dogs
continued to run through the van and lick their owners’ faces.
At 3:53 Mrs. D arrived at Danielle’s teammates’ house and five minutes later she safely
delivered both girls to their practice field. From there, Mrs. D drove straight to Daisy’s soccer
practice. Once at the practice field, Mrs. D jogged a little, did a few soccer drills, conversed with
another dog-owner while their dogs played together, and then she and her dogs watched Daisy
scrimmage at the end of her practice.
At 5:03pm, with Daisy and the dogs securely inside the van, Mrs. D checked her phone
messages. A friend had texted her back sometime in the last hour, informing her that she would
not be able to attend their get-together next weekend on account of a funeral. “Are we going to
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leave?” asked Daisy, ready to go home. Mrs. D shook her head no. She was in the middle of
texting back this friend and checking the other messages on her phone. Two minutes later, Mrs.
D turned on the van and headed home as she announced, “My joints feel so much better after I
move them around and loosen them up!” She was thrilled to have been able to squeeze in some
exercise today. As she later explained to me, “Anything that comes in and changes up the
schedule is good,” and this had been a good trip because of that.
ANALYTIC PERPLEXITY: PUT THAT AS SELF-CARE
Squeezing exercise and dog-walking in-between dropping-off and picking-up her
daughters from their extracurricular activities was a practical strategy that Mrs. D regularly used
to administer her busy afternoons and effectively juggle the time-demands from her different
realms of daily life. By configuring her schedule in a manner that combined several destinations
in a single trip, Mrs. D coordinated through space and time the multiple activities that she wanted
to do but was limited in the amount of time that she had available to do them on account of her
chauffeuring duties. According to the efficiency thesis, Mrs. D drew from a logic of efficiency
to perform this time-management technique. She did plan ahead, she did delegate, she did
squeeze activities between others, she did do multiple things at once, she did save time; and
thereby, she did get a lot done in less time.
However, at times it seemed like her daughters were the ones who imported the ‘cult of
efficiency’ into the afternoon and provided their cross-city trip with an ‘industrial tone’ –
desiring to go faster (“Mom, we need to go!” “Are we going to leave?”) and feeling anxious
about being on time (‘Daddy, it’s 3:40!” “’Cause we would have been late?”). In fact, at one
point during the outing Mrs. D appeared to be downright inefficient, forgetting to gather all of the
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relevant information ahead of time and driving somewhere without really knowing where she
was going (“Your practice is where? Please tell me it’s not on the peninsula!”). Furthermore,
when I asked Mrs. D at the end of the day to share with me her thoughts about her hour-and-
fifteen-minutes excursion she did not exalt any of her time-saving techniques as virtuous goals
for that trip nor did she express any personal satisfaction in her timeliness or efficiency. Instead,
Mrs. D described it as “fun” because exercising and walking the dogs is something that she
“really enjoy[s].” She added, “You can put that as self-care!” As it turned out, Mrs. D viewed
that entire road trip to be an act of self-care. The efficiency perspective is unable to register this
meaning that she attributed to her specific administration of activities on that Tuesday afternoon.
But, as I have argued throughout this article, the time-use cultures perspective does offer insight
into what her time-management techniques actually mean to her and it also provides information
about how she actually carried out these efficient maneuvers.
PRINCIPLES OF BALANCE
Applying a time-use cultures framework to interpret Mrs. D’s Tuesday afternoon, we can
see that she deployed the time-use culture of balance during her multi-tasked journey in order to
administer the activities of dropping-off Danielle and her teammate, walking the dogs,
exercising, and picking-up Daisy. First, the time-use tenets of this ethic present it as worthwhile
to perform activities that are both enjoyable and different from the other activities in a given
schedule. Consistent with this cultural prescription, Mrs. D aspired to “hang out with the dogs”
and exercise outdoors while dropping-off and picking-up her daughters from their respective
soccer practices. She viewed playing with her dogs and kicking around a soccer ball as fun
activities (“I really enjoy it,” “That was fun”) that “[came] in and change[d] up the schedule”
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(both she and her dogs had “been in here all day,” she at work and they at home), making them
worthwhile inclusions to her afternoon agenda. This same time-use guideline permitted Mrs. D
to giggle – enjoying her dog’s antics – and people-watch – enjoying the scenery – throughout her
entire excursion away from home. Such activities were complementarily consistent with this
trip’s tone of personal pleasure and variety.
Second, the time-use culture of balance prescribes attentiveness to personal health and
comfort as a worthwhile use of time. Accordingly, Mrs. D took particular interest in ensuring
that her vehicular excursion away from home was both comfortable and conducive to her mental
and physical health. One activity that Mrs. D felt was vital for her survival of work life and
household responsibilities was texting and speaking to her close friends who shared “very similar
philosophies and schedules” and the “same fast-paced lifestyle” as “working moms that [have] to
drop and go.” As she views it, “I always kind of have to transition from being at home, being at
work, just all the different things that I do – whether it’s coaching, school, whatever…. I need,
just like, a mental transition that takes place.” And she regularly obtains that healthy “mental
transition” from her phone calls and text messages on her way to and from locations. On that
particular Tuesday trip Mrs. D not only welcomed, but also protected, such therapeutic
communication. When her daughter subtly asked to leave (“Are we going to leave?”), Mrs. D
nodded no and continued to “mentally transition” through her phone, securing a soothing peace-
of-mind in anticipation of subsequent household responsibilities. Mrs. D was similarly able to
secure her physical and mental health through the exercise session that she so resolutely planned
and so keenly incorporated into the pick-up portion of her trip (“My joints feel so much better
after I move them around and loosen them up!”). Finally, her concerns for personal health and
comfort were also present in the frustration that she exhibited with the arrival of a threat to her
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“self-care” plans of laughter, dog-time, and exercise. Relieved that she did not have to drive all
the way to the peninsula, Mrs. D revealed her great concern for the “half an hour” that it would
take her to “get down there and back” – which was problematic more for its interference with
her curative play-time than for its consequential tardiness of Danielle. After all, although she
only requires “little doses” of these moments – “just half an hour here or there” – “If [she’s]
exercising, an hour” is more sufficient. Consistent with the balance ethic’s time-use guidelines,
Mrs. D felt greater concern for how getting “down there and back” inconvenienced her, not her
daughter.
On this particular Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. D followed the guidelines of balance to
administer her own schedule of activities in a very specific manner. It was the time-use tenets
(of divertive density and curatic concerns) of this ethic that presented over-exaggerating
durations, people-watching, texting friends, making others wait, and combining self-care with
child-care as viable and worthwhile means to manage her time during that afternoon. This time
culture also enabled ‘the restorative self-care necessary to carry out subsequent household duties’
to be the meaning that she attributed to her just-a-little-over-one-hour busyness-coping strategy.
True, Mrs. D was efficient in the way that she administered her activities – delegating, squeezing
an activity between two others, narrowing the time-frame around them, doing multiple things at
once, getting more done in less time – but how she saved time and how she packed her activities
close together and how she merged dropping-off Laruen, exercising, dog-walking, and picking
up Daisy was by following the edicts of balance; and what that particular administration of
activities through space and time represented for her on that particular afternoon was consistent
with the edicts of the time-use culture of balance.
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Importantly, while windows of opportunity to invoke other time-use cultures did arise for
Mrs. D, she remained steadfast in her deployment of the balance ethic of time-use as the
appropriate cultural tool for administering that afternoon’s schedule. Mrs. D took the dogs in the
van despite Danielle’s preference to leave them home (“I don’t want to take them”). Instead of
accommodating her daughter’s particular desires regarding her canine companions, as prescribed
by the ethic of commitment, Mrs. D followed the dictates of balance and incorporated into her
busy afternoon an experience that she enjoyed, was fun, and “changed up the schedule.”
Similarly, when Mrs. D trotted into the garage right before driving to Danielle’s soccer practice
she was not concerning herself with possible ways to accommodate Danielle’s immediate needs,
as dictated by the ethic of commitment; rather, she was attentive to the equipment necessary to
accommodate her own health needs (a soccer ball for her upcoming exercise session), as required
by the ethic of balance. ‘I got to get a soccer ball. Do you need anything?’ would have echoed
Mr. A’s deployment of the ethic of commitment when he offered to “grab something” for dinner
during his own chauffeuring episode. Instead, it took Danielle’s ball pump request for Mrs. D’s
attention to turn to her daughter’s needs and the ways she could attend to them.
Just as Danielle introduced opportunities for Mrs. D to use the edicts of commitment to
guide the way that she administered her schedule of activities, Daisy proposed the time-use
culture of achievement as the more appropriate guide for linking the activities that constituted
her own schedule during that particular afternoon; nevertheless, Mrs. D continued to rely on her
preferred ethic of balance. When her parents were still getting ready to leave, Daisy became
concerned about the time and their continued presence at home (“Daddy, it’s 3:40!), prompting
her sister to also become attentive to the logistics of the situation (“Mom, we need to go!”). Mrs.
D did follow Daisy’s lead, invoking the logic of ‘getting things done’ to hurry along with her
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preparations (“What time is it?”), but once in the van she resumed her reliance on guidelines
from the ethic of balance to enjoy the antics of her playful dogs, point out the pedestrians on the
sidewalk, and concern herself with threats to her self-care. Had she continued to deploy the ethic
of achievement for the rest of her trip – like Mrs. A did when she stopped by the pet pharmacy –
she may have remained wary of the clock, shared Danielle’s anxiety of going to the peninsula
“’cause [they] would have been late,” and driven her van with a clearer sense of direction right
from the start. When Danielle broke a cup of water and delayed their departure, Mrs. D could
have mirrored Mrs. A’s deployment of the tenets of “achievement” and expressed impatience:
‘Really? We’re running late and I should be driving there. We don’t really have all day to clean
it up!’ Instead, she remained un-phased by the delay and concomitant prospect of tardiness:
“Really? That’s okay.” And when Daisy had finished her soccer practice, was seated in the van,
and urged her mom to mind the evening’s upcoming tasks (“Are we going to leave?”), Mrs. D
could have ‘gotten things done’ and rushed back home. Instead, she took her time, checked her
text-messages, cared for herself, and continued to equilibrate her afternoon schedule. On
multiple occasions Mrs. D could have pursued one of the two other ethics of time-use but instead
of ‘getting things done’ or ‘strengthening relationships,’ she insisted on ‘ensuring a harmonious
state of being’ by consistently invoking the time-use culture of balance.
DISCUSSION
What I presented in this chapter were exemplary ethnographic excerpts of three busy
parents juggling, or administering, their time-intense demands from work and family while
carrying out their child-chauffeuring duties. Mrs. A did this by going to a pet pharmacy on her
way to pick up her children from school; Mr. B did this by going to a computer store on the way
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to pick up his son from his karate lessons; and Mrs. D did this by going to a baseball field to
walk her dogs and exercise on her way to pick up her daughter from soccer practice. These
separate excursions all look the same when analyzed through the interpretive lens of an
efficiency perspective. All three parents stopped by a location on the way to pick their children
up from a different location. They all multitasked, squeezed activities, and packed their
experiences close together. They all rushed in and out of their SUVs. They all planned, to one
degree or another. They all saved time. The concept of time-use cultures, however, permits us
to go beyond a surface glimpse of these actions. Instead of a single logic of efficiency guiding
these parents’ coordination of activities, we can see that each schedule-arrangement enterprise
had a different internal logic that was structured by one of three time-use cultures. These busy
parents sought to get things done, care for others, and balance their days; but it took
recognition of time-use cultures to uncover these meaningful and practical differences in their
mechanisms for coping with daily busyness.
Time-use cultures pertain to studies that directly examine how parents administer
activities within their daily schedules and what meanings they attribute to such time-management
behavior. Family studies that touch upon parents’ practical time-management techniques
consistently depict the efficiency principles of saving and optimizing limited time as cultural
resources that colonize parents’ repertoire of tactics for dealing with a context of daily busyness
and competing institutional demands, presenting efficient procedures – like moving fast,
planning ahead, multitasking, squeezing activities between each other, segmenting them, and
packing them close together – as the means to administer activities effectively and offering
‘time-maximization’ and ‘time-saving’ as the meaning of those coping strategies (Arendell
2001;Becker and Moen 1999; Darrah et al. 2007; Forsberg 2009, Hochschild 1997; Roy et al.
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2004; Wallace 2010). The efficiency perspective is an insightful and valuable contribution to the
literature, and from it spring two types of solutions to the challenges that contemporary parents
face coping with the burden of daily busyness.
One solution extols parents’ efforts to manage their time efficiently – noting that they,
not their employers, are the ones best suited to identify their own time-needs – and offers
flexibility to arrange work schedules as the path to a healthier work-life balance that is more
conducive to individual and family well-being (Bianchi et al. 2005; Schneider and Waite 2005).
The other solution critiques parents’ efficient time-management techniques – noting that they go
hand-in-hand with the divestiture of care and emotion in families – and offers a cultural
restructuring of virtues (replacing speed and efficiency with love and gratitude, among others) as
the path to a less harried life where parents can enjoy the many benefits of work and family
experiences (Hochschild 1997, 2003).
Both proposed paths to work-life balance rely on the efficiency perspective’s description
of how busy parents administer their daily activities and what that enterprise actually means to
them. However, as the empirical data presented in this chapter has demonstrated, this
perspective is limited in its ability to explain parents’ use of alternative (non-efficiency)
principles to guide the way that they think about and carry out their quotidian time-management
practices. Acknowledging time-use cultures overcomes this limitation, extends the explanatory
power of the efficiency framework, and generates implications that are far-reaching and
significant.
It is problematic to think of parents’ coordination of activities as guided by a single logic
of efficiency. Despite the widespread prominence of this logic in contemporary society, many
studies note that competing logics remain quite relevant in people’s daily lives (Larrabee 1993;
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Walzer 1983). The impact that ethics of care (Hochschild 2003) and interdependence (Hays
2003) have on family life abound in sociological literature, but their influence on the practical
work of administering daily activities remains overlooked. The presence of these competing and
resistant logics must not go unnoticed in parents’ daily efforts to design family schedules.
Similarly, we cannot neglect the actual meaning that parents attribute to their practical
efforts of arranging activities and coordinating schedules throughout the day. After all, activities
that mean different things are basically different activities (Reed 2011; Snyder 2007). It is
limiting to assume that parents invariably define these as opportunities to be efficient, to exert
diligent control over time, and to judiciously determine the optimal amount of time to spend on
activities. Whether a particular strategy actually helps to cope with busyness depends in large
part on how parents construe their scheduling techniques. No matter how efficiently organized
may be the day’s activities, if parents see their efforts as onerous, reckless, or faulty, their sense
of being overwhelmed with busyness is likely to continue. If parents do not recognize the value
in their strategies and do not identify them as effective techniques, efficient schedules will do
little to relieve their sense of time-pressure. Identifying parents’ interpretation of the time-
management strategies made available and accessible to them by work-life policies can reveal
why many of these policies remain ineffective or un-used by so many parents (Cousins and Tang
2004; Hochschild 1997; Schieman et al. 2009; Van der Lippe 2007). Attempts to ameliorate
daily busyness with policies meant to maximize work-life balance and minimize work-life
conflict would do well to notice the way in which parents view their practical efforts to organize
daily activities and verify that the time-management techniques induced by these policies are
seen as worthwhile pursuits by their intended beneficiaries. This issue will be further addressed
in the conclusion of this dissertation.
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The previous chapter described the logic and structure of time-use cultures. This chapter
has described how these logics and structures actually shape the meaning and form of parents’
activity-administration strategies. The next chapter describes how time-use cultures influence
parents’ actual evaluation of those strategies – weather they work or not for negotiating daily
busyness.
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CHAPTER 6
Cultures of Time-Use and Time-Use Evaluation
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INTRODUCTION
Widespread cultural, social, and demographic transformations that have swept United
States society in the last half-century underlie significant changes in the way that parents use
their time (Bianchi et al. 2012; Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006;
Bianchi, Casper, and King 2005; Casper and Bianchi 2002; Daly 2001a, 1996; Darrah, Freeman,
and English-Lueck 2007; Epstein and Kalleberg 2004; Jacobs and Gerson 2004; Robinson and
Godbey 1997; Schneider and Waite 2005). Although the family literature agrees on the sources
of contemporary parents’ time-use patterns, there nevertheless remain divergent interpretations
regarding the impact that these patterns have on parents’ quality of life (Konigsberg 2011) and
how parents themselves interpret this impact. The available literature provides three
perspectives for identifying parents’ own assessments of the quality of their time-use. The first
perspective posits that parents evaluate the quality of their time-use on the basis of the amount of
time they spend on an activity; the second perspective posits that this instead depends on the
pace at which they perform the activity; and the third posits that parents’ interpretation of their
time-use quality depends on how they feel about the activity being performed.
In this chapter, I argue that despite offering valuable insights on the factors that influence
contemporary parents’ time-use quality, none of these perspectives adequately captures how
parents assess the quality of their time-use throughout the day. The temporal allocation,
temporal pace, and temporal affect perspectives all involve a priori evaluations of time-use
quality; they reduce parents’ interpretive work to a simple act of matching time-use variables to
pre-defined evaluations. Feeling positively or negatively about more or less time spent on an
activity at a faster or slower pace is already coded as a better or worse quality of experience. By
locating the quality of a particular form of time-use within the traits of or the emotions toward
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the activity that constitutes that time-use, these perspectives cannot account for different – often
opposing – evaluations of the same activity at different times of the day or week; they consider a
person’s interpretation of time-use quality to be fixed and are therefore unable to explain
variation across time in the same person’s evaluation of identical uses of time. They cannot
really account for situated evaluations of time-use quality. Rather, they propose a priori
assessments that vary based on fixed interpretations of emotions and time-use characteristics –
not changing, situated meanings.
Using empirical data from my field work with busy middle-class parents, I address these
limitations and show that parents’ evaluation of their time-use quality is instead contingent upon
the contextualized meaning that they attribute to their particular form of time-use – not its
duration, pace, or how they feel about it. By paying attention to time-use cultures and the
coordination contexts within which these cultures of time-use are deployed, this chapter
describes the power of a spatiotemporal coordination framework to provide a more thorough and
comprehensive understanding of parents’ own interpretation of the quality of their time-use than
the other available perspectives. As I demonstrate in this chapter, a cultural repertoire of time-
use cultures, in conjunction with contextual factors that facilitate or complicate the proper
deployment of those ethics, structures the way that parents perceive the quality of their time-use
at any given moment.
It is important for researchers to have an interpretive framework that permits them to
accurately capture parents’ own evaluations of their time-use. Knowing when parents need or
want time-management strategies, and knowing which strategies they deem to be effective means
for managing busyness, and knowing how these evaluations are patterned would be useful
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knowledge for efforts intended to help parents deal with their busy lives. This important public-
policy implication will be further discussed in the next chapter and in the conclusion.
For this chapter, the focus is on (a) explaining the role that time-use cultures play in
shaping parents’ evaluations of their efforts to negotiate busyness, and (b) demonstrating the
power of the spatiotemporal coordination framework to resolve a paradox in the family busyness
literature. By closely observing the cultural process of coordinating deployed time-use cultures
with the coordination contexts that situate action (i.e., by exploring activity-signification
strategies, or the intersubjective and subjective dimensions, or planes, of coordination work), one
obtains a better view of the quality of parents’ busyness. Whereas one camp of research
stipulates that the time-use patterns of contemporary busyness generates an impoverished quality
of life, another research camp sees these same time-use patterns as enriching daily life. What the
coordination framework presented here generates is the possibility to ask how the parents
themselves interpret the quality of their busy time-use patterns.
The answer that I found was simple: When parents’ (activity-administration) time-
management strategies were successful, they viewed their busyness as manageable and not too
onerous, as stipulated by one camp of literature (Biachi et al. 2006). When their strategies to
manage time failed, parents viewed their busyness as problematic and overwhelming, just as
stipulated by the other camp of the literature (Hochschild 2003). Of course, sometimes parents
viewed their busy quality of life as enriching and sometimes they viewed it as impoverished –
depending on the success or failure to manage, or negotiate, their daily busyness from one
moment to the next. Time-use cultures provided the platforms of evaluation through which
parents assessed the success or failure of their management attempts.
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COMPETING PERSPECTIVES
Although sociological research agrees on the source of parents’ current time-use patterns,
there nevertheless remain divergent interpretations regarding the implications that these time-use
patterns have for contemporary parents’ quality of life (Bianchi et al. 2012; Bianchi and Milkie
2010; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Bianchi, Casper, and King 2005; Casper and Bianchi
2002; Daly 2001a, 1996; Darrah, Freeman, and English-Lueck 2007; Epstein and Kalleberg
2004; Jacobs and Gerson 2004; Robinson and Godbey 1997; Schneider and Waite 2005). While
some research views these patterns as impoverishing the quality of parents’ daily life
(Hochschild 1997), other research indicates that these patterns represent an improvement in
parents’ time-use quality relative to previous generations (Bianchi et al. 2006). Perhaps a better
indication of the impact that these time-use patterns have on parents’ quality of life is parents’
own interpretations of their time-use quality. The family and time-use literature, however, also
includes divergent perspectives for identifying parents’ own time-use evaluations. The temporal
allocation perspective maintains that parents evaluate the quality of their time-use by considering
the amount of time they spend on activities; the temporal pace perspective claims that they
evaluate it by considering the pace at which they perform activities; and the temporal affect
perspective posits that parents evaluate their time-use quality by considering how they feel about
activities.
Sociological research on families indicates that parents as well as researchers interpret
contemporary patterns of gendered work, time with children, and discretionary activities on the
one hand as indications of stalled gender equality, rushed schedules, and corrosive work-life
stress but on the other hand as evidence of approaching gender egalitarianism, enriching
schedules, and beneficial work-life flexibility (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Blair-Loy
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2003; Coltrane 1996; DeVault 1991; Garey 1999; Gerson 2009; Hays 1996; Hochschild 2003,
1997, 1989; Lareau 2003; Sandberg and Hofferth 2001; Stone 2007; Townsend 2002). Taking a
temporal allocation perspective, parents presumably recognize that allocating long hours to paid
and unpaid work renders it more difficult for them to meet their daily obligations to both
employers and family members, leading to a sense of time-pressure and tension between the
institutions of work and family (Blair-Loy 2003; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006;
Hochschild 1997). By contrast, spending less time performing those activities relieves some of
that tension and allows them to spend more time in leisure and personal care, which they
consider to be desirable tradeoffs (Robinson and Godbey 1997). Thus, studies that rely on this
analytic perspective present parents who participate in a see-saw of temporal allocations, trying
to dedicate “balanced” amounts of time to different activities and interpreting days with
“balanced” temporal allocations as having a higher time-use quality than those with “skewed”
temporal allocations.
Conversely, when scholars rely on a temporal pace perspective they describe parents who
view fast rhythms as agents of a deteriorating quality of life and who perceive a slower-pace as
the bearer of a better quality of experience. Fathers and mothers presumably accommodate their
respective increases in paid and unpaid work hours by speeding up their execution of daily
activities but regret the loss of “quality” that their relationships suffer from both this speed-up
and the rational-impersonal logic that accompanies it (Coltrane 1996; DeVault 1991; Hochschild
1997, 1989). Similarly, the fast pace of contemporary life manifests itself in parents’ daily
experiences as leisure that is “fragmented” and “contaminated” with multitasking and non-
leisure activities (Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Mattingly and Sayer 2006). Parents
apparently feel rushed on account of these interruptions and recognize them as a worsening in
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the quality of their leisure experience (Mattingly and Sayer 2006). Mothers’ leisure, in
particular, is so entangled with domestic work and care-giving duties that they experience it as
far less “leisurely” than do their husbands (Mattingly and Sayer 2006). In parallel manner,
contemporary mothers’ and fathers’ child-centered time-use patterns lead them to hurry quickly
as they chauffeur their children to and from one extracurricular activity after another (Arendell
2001, Daly 2001b, Lareau 2003). Despite enriching their children’s lives, both parents regret
that this rapid pace of childcare harms the quality of their own daily experience; but for mothers
especially – who are disproportionally held responsible for meeting these chauffeuring duties –
this fast-paced use of time signals an exacerbation of gendered equality in the family!
Sociological studies that highlight the pace of contemporary parenting practices,
however, are quick to note that many parents’ actively search for alternative styles of parenting
in order to introduce slower rhythms into their lives, which they perceive as more manageable
and conducive to more ‘family time’ and stronger emotional connection between parents and
children (Lareau 2003). Thus, when the literature relies on a temporal pace perspective –
whether covering childcare, paid and unpaid work, or leisure – it presents parents who interpret
harried rhythms as harmful to the quality of daily life and see a slower speed as indicative of
better quality time-use.
The temporal affect perspective is usually found in time-use studies that trace parents’
emotions throughout the day as they go from home to work and back. Although these studies
present complex patterns in the emotional states that parents exhibit throughout the day, they
consistently note that positive emotions toward activities are associated with a better quality of
time, while parents’ quality of time is worse when they feel negatively about their activities
(Adam 2005, Sexton 2005). These studies also find consistent gender disparities in the quality of
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time that parents enjoy at home (Adam 2005, Koh 2005, Larson 2001, Sexton 2005). The home
is a more emotionally hostile environment for mothers than it is for fathers in large part because
it is where they are either most alone or most rushed to meet the needs of others (Koh 2005,
Larson 2001). By contrast, fathers – who are largely exempt from these expectations and thus
able to perform activities at their own pace – enjoy their time at home and the company of their
children more than do mothers (Koh 2005, Larson 2001, Matjasko and Feldman 2005).
According to the temporal affect perspective utilized in studies such as these, parents rely
on the way that they feel about activities to determine whether their use of time is of a positive or
negative quality. Presumably, parents view time spent on activities that make them feel
productive, focused, and positive as a qualitatively positive experience; whereas they interpret
spending time on activities that make them feel guilty, stressed, conflicted, and negative as a
qualitatively negative experience. In this way, for instance, married mothers, who feel less
positive about their time at home than their time in public and at work, view themselves as
enjoying a better quality of time in these other places than at home (Larson 2001). Additionally,
married mothers who are employed feel the most stress at home in the late afternoon than at
other hours, identifying this as the period of the day during which they experience the worst
quality of time (Larson 2001). Parents feel an array of emotions toward activities, which often
results in emotionally ambivalent states at different times of the day (Koh 2005, Sexton 2005);
nevertheless, when scholars consider the feelings that parents have about their time-use, the
quality of that time-use presumably depends upon those feelings, and fathers’ increased time-use
in their positive emotional context of the home thereby appears to translate into an improved
quality of life for them, while mothers’ tug-of-war between their two emotionally negative, or at
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best emotionally ambivalent, spheres of home and workplace seems to represent a degraded
quality of life for them, relative to time-use patterns of parents from previous decades.
It is important to recognize that what are being synthesized here are implicit interpretive
perspectives, not necessarily individual scholars’ research findings or overall schools of thought.
Family scholars often draw from all three of these competing perspectives; in fact, it is not
uncommon for scholars to evidence these different perspectives within the same research project.
After all, these interpretive lenses are useful for other analyses, too, not just for identifying
parents’ own assessment of their time-use quality. For instance, in her widely influential book,
The Time Bind (1997), Hochschild draws from the three perspectives to investigate the various
ways through which parents strike a “work-life balance.” By looking at the amount of time
parents spent performing activities she identified a sense of time-insufficiency in family life,
whereby parents recognized that they spent so much time meeting the demands of the workplace
that it left them without enough time to fulfill their duties at home:
Over the last three years Gwen’s workday has grown longer. She used to work a
straight eight-hour day. Now it is regularly eight and a half to nine hours, not
counting the work that often spills over into life at home. Gwen is not happy
about this (12)…. Gwen and Bill complained that they were in a time bind: they
wanted more time for life at home than they had…. They wanted a quality life
(14).
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On the other hand, by shifting her attention to the pace at which parents performed activities, she
uncovered a speed-up in family life, whereby parents efficiently organized and outsourced care-
work in order to get through everything on their daily schedules:
Gwen regularly squeezed one activity between two others, narrowing the “time
frame” around each…. Except when she and John self-consciously applied the
brakes, they found themselves “keeping the engine running all the time”….
Family time is chopped into pieces according to the amount of time each
outsourced service requires…. Each service begins and ends at an agreed-upon
time somewhere else. This creates a certain anxiety about being “on time” (49-
50).
Finally, when Hochschild focused on how parents felt about their daily activities she found a
need and desire on their part to repair the anguish of a time-pressured life:
Both their time deficit and what seem like solutions to it force parents… to
engage in a third shift – noticing, understanding, and coping with the emotional
consequences of the compressed second shift (83)…. [Gwen] found herself
engaged each day in an anguished third shift, coping with Cassie’s resistance as
well as her own exasperation and sadness at living such a Taylorized life (51).
In all cases, shifting from one theoretical and empirical focus to another yields useful and
complementary information about everyday life in contemporary families. However, when we
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utilize these analytic perspectives to decipher contemporary parents’ own understandings of what
their time-use patterns mean for the quality of their daily life we are left with significant
empirical interpretive conundrums. These constitute the topic of the next section in this paper.
INTERPRETIVE PERPLEXITIES
The abovementioned constitute the interpretive lenses available for sociological analyses
of parents’ own construal of their time-use quality. While one perspective posits parents who
consider how much time they spend on activities, another one presents parents who consider the
pace with which they perform activities, and a third depicts parents who take into account the
way they feel about activities. Although these perspectives offer valuable insights into the daily
life of contemporary families, all three of them share two important interpretive limitations.
First, none of them is comprehensively sensitive to the spectrum of variations of time-use
evaluations throughout the day. Time-use interpretations vary across persons; how one parent
thinks about an activity is not necessarily the same as how another parent thinks about that same
activity. Time-use interpretations also vary across time; how a parent thinks about an activity
one day is likely to change under different circumstances on another day or at a later point during
that same day. The temporal allocation, temporal pace and temporal affect perspectives propose
that enjoying or disliking more or less time spent on an activity at a faster or slower pace implies
a better or worse quality of experience, but they consider the evaluation that parents have of that
activity to be fixed; what varies is not their assessment of the quality of that time-use, but the
activity being performed, the amount of time spent on it, and the rate at which it is performed.
This evaluative stasis reduces parents’ interpretive work to the simple exercise of linking
predetermined pairings of time-use variables with evaluations of time-use quality. In this way,
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much time spent in paid and unpaid work and little time spent in leisure and personal care mean
low quality time-use for parents, whereas little time in paid and unpaid work and much time in
leisure and personal care mean high quality time-use. Likewise, performing activities with a
leisurely pace is presumed to signify high quality time-use, whereas performing activities with a
hurried pace is presumed to indicate a low quality of experience. And finally, parents apparently
equate activities for which they feel positive emotions with high-quality uses of time, whereas
they equate activities for which they feel negative emotions with low-quality uses of time.
Unfortunately for those of us interested in parents’ own perceptions of their time-use, by
positing a priori assessments of time-use quality, these perspectives do the work of interpretation
for the actors; in doing so, they are incapable of registering parents’ situated evaluations of what
they are doing throughout the day. Since these perspectives consider a parent’s evaluation of
time-use quality to be fixed, depending on the time-use variable in question (duration, pace, or
elicited emotion), they are unable to explain variation across time in that same parent’s
interpretation of identical activities; in other words, they cannot account for different – often
opposing – evaluations of the same form of time-use at different times of the day or week. The
temporal affect perspective does not recognize that parents do not always feel the same way
about an activity, the temporal pace perspective overlooks that fast does not always mean low
quality, and the temporal allocation perspective ignores that quantity does not necessarily equal
quality.
The temporal affect perspective overlooks change in the way that parents feel about a
particular activity. Multitasking, for instance, is a form of time-use that elicits negative feelings
of stress for mothers at home and in public but elicits positive feelings when they are in the
company of their children and husbands (Offer and Schneider 2011). In fact, mothers’
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multitasking becomes negatively associated with feelings of work-family conflict and
psychological distress when husbands and children enter the picture! For its part, the temporal
pace perspective overlooks parents who perceive their fast-paced participation in activities as an
enjoyable, high-quality use of time. “Busy bees,” for instance, absorb the time-bind into their
sense of self, identifying as busy persons who are energized by time-pressure and find hurry to
be a fun challenge (Hochschild 1997). The speed up that others interpret as a hassle, “busy bees”
construe as a form of time-use that they enjoy and that permits them to thrive! Finally, the
temporal allocation perspective cannot account for uses of time that are construed as both high-
and low-quality experiences when a large or small amount of time is spent on them. For
instance, parents generally regard the increased time they spend on childcare, relative to previous
generations, to be a favorable change in contemporary life, indicative of high-quality time-use
that contributes to emotional connection between family members and a multiplicity of positive
outcomes for children (Bianchi and Robinson 1997, Eccles and Barber 1999, Hofferth and
Sandberg 2001, Osgood et al. 1996, Sandberg and Hofferth 2001). However, parents also view
this increased amount of interaction that they have with their children as indicative of a lower
quality, more stressful use of time that burdens them with intensified pressure to go hurriedly
from one location to another and arrive at specific, pre-arranged times (Arendell 2001, Daly
2001b, Hays 1996, Lareau 2003). Childcare is a form of time-use that, in large amounts, gets
construed as both a high-quality, enriching experience and a low-quality, taxing activity!
What these respective interpretive limitations all have in common is their shared inability
to account for parents’ situated evaluations of time-use. In the abovementioned examples, the
context within which time-use takes place is what changes, not the time-use variable: the
amount of time spent on childcare is the same, what changes is the “logic of parenting” that
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structures that amount of time; the rate at which activities are carried out remains the same, what
changes is the “temporal strategy” that facilitates a relationship to that rate while hindering
others; and the way they feel about multitasking remains the same, what changes is the company
or lack thereof that accompanies the simultaneous performance of multiple activities. It is these
contextualizing factors (the concerns of parenting, the attempts to deal with overwork, the
presence of others), not time-use variables, that lead to the evaluative variation of time-use
quality that is presented above. Unfortunately, the temporal allocation, temporal pace, and
temporal affect perspectives all tie temporal evaluations to temporal variables, resulting in an
evaluative stasis that is contrary to situated evaluations of time-use quality such as these.
Evaluations of time-use quality are not static, nor are they tied to time-use variables, as
the available perspectives posit; rather, individual parents’ time-use evaluations vary across time
and they are contingent upon the specific circumstances within which that particular time-use
takes place. It is important to consider such “contextually-varying evaluations” when examining
the impact that contemporary time-use patterns have on the quality of parents’ daily life. The
dense interconnectivity of our 21
st
century networked world – with its flux, risk, and uncertainty
– nourishes a daily context of blurred boundaries and temporal flexibility (Castells 2000,
Duncheon and Tierney 2013, Hassan 2003). In such a context, the institutions of work, home,
and leisure bleed into each other, with the activities of one getting carried out in another just as
easily as their meanings get transplanted from one to the next (Castells 2000, Eliasoph 2011,
Hochschild 1997, Wajcman 2014). Likewise, time-use has become more personalized with the
increased malleability of schedules and the greater control that individuals have over the
negotiation and coordination of their daily activities (Duncheon and Tierney 2013). Time-use
interpretations likely vary with the constant fluctuation of time-use contexts that persons
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experience from moment to moment throughout the day. By recognizing the multiple variations
in time-use evaluations across persons and time, we are better able to accommodate these
“personalized” and “liquid” (Bauman 2000) circumstances of contemporary living in our
understanding of the impact that time-use patterns have on the quality of parents’ daily life.
The second interpretive limitation of the three available perspectives is that neither one of
them captures the shared, culturally-patterned nature of parents’ time-use evaluations. All three
perspectives equate time-use evaluations with subjective interpretations that derive from parents’
knowledge and identification of the pre-determined pairings discussed above (more or less time
at a faster or slower rate on an enjoyed or disliked activity means higher or lower time-use
quality). However, rather than recognizing these pairings as widespread cultural guidelines
publicly-available for interpretive use, these perspectives instead focus on the subjectivity of
evaluations and present parents who think one way or another about the quality of their time-use.
While personal thoughts offer parents a valuable resource for making assessments about the
quality of their daily life, shared meaning-systems about time-use constitute another set of
important tools for evaluating their use of time. Capturing “the subjective dimension of
evaluation” is vital for scholars who monitor the well-being of contemporary parents; but this
cannot be done at the expense of neglecting “the intersubjectivity of evaluations,” especially in
sociological analyses.
Widely shared meaning structures constitute the subject matter of an entire sub-field of
sociological research. Cultural sociology, among other things, is dedicated to uncovering the
power of widely shared, publicly available symbolic systems (Sewell 1992; Smith 1998; Swidler
1986). It is well documented that social behavior is not solely guided by the experience, interest,
life history, or social position of individuals; rather, it involves processes that are mediated by
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the cultural guidelines made available to them by their larger environment. These cultural
guidelines become part of the “structure” that facilitates or hinders their assessment of the world
around them. Despite these sociological insights regarding relatively stable, publicly available
cultural tools mobilized by people to interpret social life and behave in certain ways, very little
research actually examines how time-use and time-use construal may be enabled and constrained
by such cultural structures. This is surprising because studies from other fields, such as
anthropology, suggest that stable widely available configurations of historically deposited
meanings about time-use actually do influence persons’ time-use interpretations and time-use
behavior.
E. P. Thompson’s (1967) well-known work on the historical development of industrial
capitalism in 19
th
century England, for instance, shows a shift in the cultural resources that
factory workers utilized to think about and carry out their use of time. When the dominant
cultural notions about time-use at workers’ disposal linked the passage of time with the natural
cycles of work and chores, factory workers lengthened and shortened their work days according
to the duration of tasks and they alternated their work patterns with bouts of intense labor and
bouts of idleness. Their task-oriented notions of time-use fostered particular interpretations of
‘work,’ ‘haste,’ and ‘passing the time of day’ that differed markedly from the interpretations of
these forms of time-use that were generated by the clock-oriented imagery of time that
eventually gained prominence in these workers’ cultural repertoire, whereby time was seen as
currency to be spent, not passed; put to use, not squandered. Concomitant with workers’
changed understanding of time-use came a new time discipline and the formation of ‘productive’
labor habits.
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It is important to import such insights about time-use meanings and their impact on time-
use behavior into sociological analyses of daily life in families because they teach us that
personal time-interpretations are also shaped by broader, publicly-available, widely-shared
meaning-structures, not just feelings and thoughts derived from personal experience. Taking into
account the supply of time-use meanings that United States society makes available to parents
renders visible the cultural categories that channel time-use and time-use interpretations. This
highlights the structure of possibilities for particular ways of thinking about time-use while also
allowing individuals to be active agents of such thoughts. Attention to widely shared meaning-
structures that shape time-use thought and experience allows us to carefully and critically think
about the repertoire of temporal categories and time-use imagery that our social arrangements
and institutions sustain and reinforce. Consequently, we are better equipped as social researchers
and more empowered as policy makers to understand and implement effective measures that can
change the way parents feel about, interpret, and experience their use of time. In short, an
analytic focus on inter-subjective interpretations about time-use highlights critical elements of
time-use that a focus on subjective thoughts simply does not. If we are interested in assessing
the quality of parents’ time-use we would do well to complement our analytic consideration of
their subjective time-use evaluations with consideration of the inter-subjective time-use
meanings that ‘structure’ their time-use interpretation and experience. Intersubjective
interpretations of time-use meanings are precisely the analytic focus of a spatiotemporal
coordination framework.
Regrettably, none of the three perspectives available in the literature account for (a)
variation in parents’ time-use evaluations across personalized and liquid contexts throughout the
day; nor (b) the publicly available, inter-subjective time-use meanings that ‘structure’ their time-
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use evaluations and experience. An analytic perspective that is sensitive to both of these
limitations would be useful for better understanding parents’ own interpretations of their time-
use quality and the impact that contemporary time-use patterns may have on the quality of their
everyday life experiences. A spatiotemporal coordination framework is precisely that required
perspective.
EMPIRICAL CONUNDRUM
This section provides an account of the empirical conundrum from my fieldwork that
makes necessary the application of a spatiotemporal coordination framework in order to
accommodate patterned variation in parents’ evaluations of time-use quality. The available
analytic perspectives were unable to account for contextually-varying, inter-subjective time-use
evaluations. Parents often performed the same activities during different days of the week and
they allocated the same amount of time to them, paced them similarly within their schedules, and
felt the same way about them – yet they still evaluated the quality of that experience quite
differently from one day to the next. Despite more or less identical time-use allocation, pace,
and affect, variation in parents’ evaluation of their time-use quality persisted. Counter to what
the available perspectives had led me to expect, time-use allocation, pace, and affect were not
linked to evaluations of time-use quality. Mr. D’s surfing experiences offer a clear illustration of
this important analytic puzzle.
TWO WINDOWS OF SELF-CARE
Mr. D is a typical professional-class father who lives day in and day out the ‘craziness’ of
contemporary busyness: juggling career and family life, ‘tag-teaming’ with his wife to chauffeur
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their 3 daughters to and from extracurricular activities, ‘sharing’ the unpaid duties of child-care
and housework, and trying to ‘squeeze in’ a few leisure pursuits amidst the ‘chaos’ that is their
‘frenetic’ life. Mr. D is a financial advisor for an investment firm about 2 miles from his home.
Although his work hours are inflexible – he works from 6am to 1pm, Monday through Friday,
without lunch or coffee breaks – he does enjoy nonstandard work hours that grant him plenty of
time to be involved in the daily life of his daughters. “I spend tons of time with them every
day,” he explains, “And I like it, it’s great. A lot of that is because of my job – getting off early.”
Mr. D’s work hours also grant him a “little window” of “down time between work and
kids” during which he can “re-group and get some fresh air.” He recognizes how fortunate he is
to have “that 1:30 to 3:00 window” and he tries to enjoy it as best he can: “Most people
definitely need a little bit of me-time; and I get that little one hour slice after work every day.”
Mr. D’s preferred activity during that “slice” of the afternoon is undoubtedly surfing, “because
I’m in front of a computer screen all day – to just get outside and be in the ocean, it feels great!”
Mr. D attempts to surf in the afternoon because it allows him to “be outside and get the exercise
and get the fresh air,” but he also has very clear criteria regarding what constitutes good surfing
conditions. Besides a non-crowded beach and good waves, Mr. D prefers to surf when he has
enough time to fully immerse himself in the experience. He elaborates, “It’s nice to have a good
day and I’ll ride down there to be out there for 45 minutes to an hour.” Surfing is an important
self-care activity that allows Mr. D to contend with his many work and family obligations; it is
not something that he takes lightly, and allotting a sufficient amount of time for its enjoyment is
one of the criteria that render surfing a worthwhile activity for him.
Mr. D was able to accommodate surfing into his “little window” of “down time” during
two of the days that I spent with him. Between 1:00pm and 1:04pm on Monday, Mr. D logged
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off his computer, said goodbye to some co-workers, walked away from his workstation, strode
through the parking lot, stepped into his white suburban mini-van, turned on the radio, and
headed home. “Daisy had a friend she might want to come play with,” he told me as we headed
down the freeway, “but I haven’t heard anything about it, so I’m not going to worry about it.”
And not worry about it he did.
Without heavy traffic on the road, Mr. D arrived home by 1:16pm and allowed surfing to
emerge organically into his schedule. As soon as he arrived home, Mr. D began his daily ritual
of pacing from one room to another, preparing the home for family activity:
Before entering the house he takes the mail out from the mailbox
(advertisements). Once inside, he walks into the kitchen and checks the
answering machine (no messages), lets the dogs in through the kitchen door (he
greets them and they greet him), feeds them (making a mental note that he’ll need
to buy some dog food soon), and then walks into the living room to open the living
room windows (a warm breeze enters the room). Today his wife did not call him
at work to request an errand or update him with new information about their
daughters’ afterschool whereabouts. He glances at the large calendar above the
kitchen counter – nothing on there for today. Everything seems to be in order.
Mr. D finds himself free of work and family obligations from now until his
daughters return home from school.
Recognizing this as a perfect “window” for going surfing, Mr. D thought, “Alright, well, I’ll go
down there and just get in.” He went into his room, packed a towel in the backpack that he
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always takes to the beach, changed into a t-shirt, and sandals, put on his waterproof watch, and
went into the garage to change into his wetsuit.
Mr. D is in his garage, changing into his wetsuit. He has already applied
sunscreen to his face, hands, and back. Mr. D installs the surfboard rack on his
bike and secures his surfboard there.... It is 1:30pm. He rides his bike down the
main avenue toward the beach, sometimes taking the bike lane, sometimes the
sidewalk, and other times riding on the wrong side of the street. Cars whizz by
rapidly; they have places to be. Mr. D is in no hurry. It is warm and sunny. He
does not bother to zip-up the top of his wetsuit – it hangs down, almost brushing
against his sandals as his feet peddle calmly up and down. A light breeze strikes
Mr. D’s bare chest (his t-shirt is in the backpack). He smiles. Expecting today’s
swell to be just right, he looks forward to a fun and relaxing time of ‘sun and surf’
at the beach.
Mr. D arrived at the beach at precisely 1:38pm. He locked his bike to a bike rack and walked
toward the shore.
It is 1:40pm. Mr. D is a bit disappointed, noting that conditions are actually not
good for surfing. He tells me, “It looks like it’s walled up…. It’s not too fun
[when it’s walled up] – for me, at least.” He takes his time, staring off into the
ocean, calmly looking up and down the shore for the best spot, surfboard tucked
under his arm. Finally, after 10 minutes of sun-bathed standing and staring, he
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finds the spot that convinces him the most and he walks toward the sparkling
water, disappearing into the horizon one step at a time. He sets the timer on his
watch for 45 minutes.
At 2:35pm Mr. D returned to land and once again stared off into the shore, taking his time,
drying himself and smiling. He confided in me, “It was better than I thought it would be. Even
though I didn’t get any good rides today, I still enjoyed it – I saw a seal and a dolphin within
several feet of me.” He finally left the beach at 2:42pm and was home by 2:52pm. After leaving
his bike in the garage and changing out of his wetsuit, he began rinsing sand off of himself and
his wetsuit with a hose in the backyard. A couple minutes later, while still rinsing his wetsuit,
Mr. D heard bikes screeching, the garage door opening, giggles, and hurried steps. His daughters
were home, and his “little window” “between work and kids” had closed.
Mr. D was able to successfully incorporate surfing into his daily schedule one other day
that week, although his experience of both surfing episodes differed markedly in important ways.
On Friday, Mr. D also went through his daily ritual of logging off, saying goodbye to coworkers,
and driving home immediately after work. But on that day, Mr. D was completing a busy week
that included 2 appointments with contractors who gave him estimates for installing new
windows in his home, 3 soccer practices for his middle daughter that he and his wife had to
coordinate with other parents, and numerous play dates for his daughters which he had to
monitor. Anticipating the cumulative fatigue derived from his various after-work duties
scheduled for this week and noticing that the family calendar in the kitchen showed nothing
scheduled for today, Mr. D planned – on Tuesday – to go surfing this Friday afternoon.
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Mr. D was looking forward to his “little bit of me-time” in the afternoon, but he was
compelled to alter his plan when he received a phone call from his wife earlier that morning
informing him that he would have to pick up their youngest daughter from school because their
two older daughters had play dates to attend and therefore could not walk with their younger
sister home today. This information threatened Mr. D’s afternoon plan; nevertheless, he decided
to go surfing anyway, even if it meant he would have to spend a less than optimal amount of time
surfing. “I’m going to try to fit in a quick dip before I have to go pick up Daisy,” he told me in
the van as he opened the glove compartment, took out his water-resistant watch, and put it on.
“If it wasn’t such a beautiful day I wouldn’t consider it, but it’s so nice out. Normally with the
short window I have today, I wouldn’t bother, but it seems like a very nice day, so if nothing else
[I’ll] get a little exercise in... Water time might be 45 minutes.”
Traffic today was more congested than usual and Mr. D became a little anxious, tapping
his fingers on the steering wheel and switching lanes whenever he saw an opportunity to do so.
Mr. D arrived home at 1:19pm, only 3 minutes later than on Monday. With his after-school
pick-up duty at 2:50pm looming on the horizon, Mr. D went through his customary preparation
ritual of packing a towel, getting his bike ready, and putting on his wetsuit as soon as he got
home. He did glance at the answering machine (no messages) on his way to his room, and he
did greet the dogs on his way to the garage, but he did not let them inside the house, he did not
get the mail, and he did not open the living room curtains.
At 1:30pm – the same time as on Monday – Mr. D closed the backyard gate and rode his
bike toward the beach. This time he wore a T-shirt – the wetsuit only covered his lower body;
the top half, unzipped, hung from his sides. Just like on Monday, it only took Mr. D 8 minutes to
ride to the beach. Once there, he locked his bike to a bike rack, and he headed straight for the
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water, surfboard in hand. Today he did not take his time staring off into the ocean looking for
good waves. He simply dropped his backpack on the sand and went into the water. At 2:25pm,
45 minutes later, Mr. D waded back onto shore and, smiling, took out the towel from his
backpack to dry himself. “I feel really good,” he told me. “Even though it was just 30 minutes,
that got me exercise, and just to be out in the fresh air [was good].”
Two minutes later Mr. D left the beach and was back home by 2:39pm. He stored his
bike and surfboard in the garage and quickly brushed some sand from his head and body. He
turned on the hose, rinsed his wetsuit, and laid it out to dry on the backyard fence. With
uncharacteristically long strides, he went into his room to change into khaki shorts and kept the
same wet T-shirt that he wore to the beach. At 2:43pm Mr. D entered his van and drove away to
pick up his younger daughter from school. He had 7 minutes to get there – plenty of time to
maneuver around all of the other vans lined along the school parking lot and find an empty space
on a side street near the school. It was upon returning from school that Mr. D picked up the mail
from the mailbox, brought in a role of newspaper that was lying on the driveway, and fed the
dogs.
HASSLE-FREE vs. TIME-CRUNCHED
As expected, Mr. D recognized his “little” Monday “window” “between work and kids”
as a relaxing, uneventful time of the day (“Daisy had a friend she might want to come play with,
but I haven’t heard anything about it, so I’m not going to worry about it”) and he experienced it
as such (he calmly went through his home-arrival and wave-selection rituals). This was expected
because the available interpretive perspectives link leisure activities, slow pace, and positive
feelings with calm, high-quality, stress-free time-use. By contrast, and quite unexpectedly, Mr.
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D identified his Friday “window” as an active and busy time of day (“I have to go pick up
Daisy,” “I’m going to try to fit in a quick dip,” “Normally with the short window I have today I
wouldn’t bother”) and he experienced it as such (postponing part of his home-arrival ritual and
skipping his wave-selection ritual). This was unexpected because Friday’s after-work window
was identical to Monday’s, in terms of temporal allocation, pace, and affect. The empirical
conundrum, then, is this: While Mr. D’s “slice” of “me-time” on Monday was a tranquil
experience, he interpreted and experienced that same “slice” on Friday as a busier, more stressful
use of time. Why was Mr. D’s evaluation of the quality of each self-care episode so different?
On both Monday and Friday Mr. D was “outside” getting “fresh air” and “exercise” for
over an hour, and actual “water time” was 45 minutes. He lived a balanced work-life
arrangement on both days by surfing for an amount of time that he deemed sufficient to ease the
friction between his paid and unpaid work allocations (“I’ll ride down there to be out there for 45
minutes to an hour”). Yet he construed and experienced Friday as busier. Why? On both
Monday and Friday Mr. D enjoyed a continuous, un-fragmented leisure experience that was
uncontaminated by work or multitasking activities. Work life and home life were also not
packed close up against each other as they are on harried days; rather, his surfing episode
introduced a framing around each sphere and slowed down the pace for both afternoons (“Most
people definitely need a little bit of me-time; and I get that little one hour slice after work every
day”). Yet he construed and experienced Friday as busier. Why? On both Monday and Friday
Mr. D participated in a form of leisure that he associated with positive emotions (“To just get
outside and be in the ocean, it feels great!”). Neither episode was a negative experience that may
have led to feelings of guilt, stress, or conflict (Monday: “It was better than I thought it would
be.” Friday: “I feel really good.”). Yet he construed and experienced Friday as busier. Why?
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If the time-use characteristics emphasized by the available perspectives were identical on
both days – he surfed for the same sufficient amount of time on both days, surfing on both days
slowed down the pace of those days, and his love and joy of surfing remained the same on both
days – then why was Friday’s me-time construed and experienced as busier than Monday’s?
Why did Mr. D express variation in his evaluation of time-use quality despite identical time-use
allocation, pace, and affect? The available perspectives lead one to expect Mr. D to recognize
both episodes as equally leisurely and relaxing – because time-use experience and evaluation are
presumably linked to time-use allocation, pace, and affect. But, as we have seen, his
interpretation of the quality of both experiences was different. Available interpretive
perspectives cannot account for this interpretive puzzle.
ANALYTIC EPIPHANY
For the remainder of this chapter I argue that rather than looking at the time-use
characteristics that have heretofore been the focus of analysis with current perspectives, we
should instead analyze the coordination contexts and cultures of evaluation that frame the
interpretation and experience of time-use. An analytic model, such as the spatiotemporal
coordination framework presented in chapter 2, capable of registering coordination contexts and
shared evaluative cultures of time-use can explain the absence of correlation between time-use
characteristics and time-use evaluations. The qualitative difference in Mr. D’s evaluation of both
self-care episodes is shaped by these cultures and contexts. s and time-use contexts – not time-
use characteristics – are the movers and shakers of time-use evaluations.
CHAPTER 6
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COORDINATION CONTEXTS
As discussed in chapter 2, coordination contexts are the set of logistic circumstances that
impinge upon a person’s inclusion of activities into his or her daily schedule. Paying close
attention to these contexts reveals very different framing scenarios that color Mr. D’s
interpretation and experience of both afternoons. On Monday, Mr. D’s surfing activity
effortlessly emerged as a viable option. With everything in order at the house, and without any
news of any playdate scheduled for his daughters, he found himself obligation-free and
recognized this as an opportunity to integrate surfing into his afternoon schedule. Mr. D is
averse to scheduling too many activities – as he puts it, “We don’t like running around in circles,
running from place to place, just being super-duper busy.” An improvised trip to the beach
(“Alright, well, I’ll go down there and just get in”) that matched his over-scheduling aversion
had elective affinity to an interpretation of Monday’s self-care time-use as hassle-free and
comfortable.
This contrasted dramatically with the coordination context that faced Mr. D on Friday.
On that day, surfing was a pre-scheduled activity planned since Tuesday – but heavier traffic,
last-minute play-dates, and unscheduled after-school pick-up duty threatened its inclusion on that
afternoon’s schedule (“I’m going to try to fit in a quick dip before I have to go pick up Daisy”).
The specter of 2:50pm pick-up duty also altered Mr. D’s perception of durations. Although 45
minutes of potential “water time” fell within Mr. D’s acceptable time to “be out there” and
although that would be the same amount of time that he spent surfing on Monday, he
nevertheless construed it as a “short” amount of time and he even questioned if pursuing his
intended activity for that afternoon was still worth it (“Normally with the short window I have
today, I wouldn’t bother.... Water time might be 45 minutes.... It was just 30 minutes”). These
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distorting circumstances which threatened his self-care plan had elective affinity to an
interpretation of Friday’s “window” between work and family as busier and more time-crunched
than Monday’s equivalent “window.”
TIME-USE CULTURES
As discussed in the previous chapters, time-use cultures are prescriptive cultural
structures that render particular uses of time meaningful, desirable, and worthwhile. Bringing
into focus these cultural guidelines reveals different patterns of experience and highlights distinct
interpretations of those experiences. Mr. D relied on one of these ethics during each of his free-
time episodes – using them to orient his actions and to set the terms of his evaluation of those
actions.
Recognizing a favored opportunity for spontaneous self-care on Monday afternoon, Mr.
D followed the guidelines of balance to seek diversion from work in communion with sun, surf,
and sand (savoring his bike ride and wave-selection ritual). Concurrently, Mr. D considered
personal enjoyment and fun as criteria for thinking about the harmony that he sought on that day.
He based his interpretation of that self-care “window” on whether or not it was fun and enjoyable
to him, which are qualities of proper time-use according to the time-use culture of balance (“It’s
not too fun [when it’s walled up] – for me, at least.... Even though I didn’t get any good rides
today, I still enjoyed it”). Deployment of the time-use culture of balance (with its curatic and
divertive terms of evaluation) was compatible with Monday’s context of comfortable
improvisation. Ethic and context worked in tandem to facilitate an evaluation of that time-use as
a tranquil experience – worthwhile for ensuring a harmonious state of being and enabling a
balanced life.
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Friday afternoon’s busier, more stressful context of unexpected threats to pre-arranged
self-care plans was more amenable to Mr. D’s deployment of a different time-use culture. On
that occasion, he followed the guidelines of achievement in order to complete a planned activity
and incorporate an unplanned duty into his schedule. He abided by a timeline that was stipulated
by that same schedule and he monitored the timely execution of key tasks – biking, surfing,
returning home, driving to school – regardless of any postponement or foregoing of customary
rituals. Mr. D interpreted his Friday self-care “window” on the basis of attention to logistics and
completion of tasks, which are qualities of proper time-use according to the time-use culture of
achievement (“If nothing else, I’ll get a little exercise.... Even though it was just 30 minutes, that
got me exercise”). Whether or not outcomes were attained constituted the legitimate criteria for
thinking about the plan that he sought to accomplish on that day. Deployment of the time-use
culture of achievement (with its logistic and impositive terms of evaluation) was compatible with
Friday’s context of unexpected interruption. Ethic and context again worked in tandem, but this
time to facilitate an evaluation of Friday’s time-use as a time-crunched experience – although
still worthwhile because it got things done and obtained required outcomes: he did surf, as
planned, and he did get back on time to pick up his youngest daughter, as intended.
INTERPRETIVE EXTENSION
Using a spatiotemporal coordination framework – with its emphasis on time-use cultures
and coordination contexts – we can clearly distinguish between the two very different
interpretations that Mr. D gave to his “little windows” of self-care; and, more importantly, we are
able to clearly explain these distinct evaluations. Both days he construed his “own time” as
worthwhile – albeit for different reasons. Mr. D evaluated his Monday “down time” as
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worthwhile for its regenerative properties of harmony and comfort. His Friday “me time,” by
contrast, was worthwhile for its tactical properties of calculation and completion. Coordination
contexts framed his time-use experiences and time-use cultures provided a platform for his
appraisal of these experiences. According to this analytic perspective, s and contexts – not time-
use traits – correlate with (or, have an elective affinity to) time-use evaluations.
SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES AND FAILED STRATEGIES
A spatiotemporal coordination framework maintains that in assessing their use of time,
parents’ do not evaluate their experiences as balanced or imbalanced, rushed or relaxed, positive
or negative; not even as better or worse, or improved or degraded relative to previous generations
of parents. Rather, parents assess their time-use as worthwhile or worthless endeavors;
successful or failed attempts to get things done, balance life, or care for others. Mr. D’s self-
care uses of time on Monday and Friday afternoons were worthy efforts to stabilize himself and
to execute a plan. Successful on both occasions, he evaluated these uses of time as worthwhile
(“It was better than I thought it would be…. I still enjoyed it” and “I feel really good… even
though it was just 30 minutes”). But the parents in this study also identified some of their uses of
time as worthless – failed attempts to use their time in appropriate ways. Mr. E’s busy Sunday
offers a clear illustration of this situation.
Mr. E, a father with two paid jobs, was a full-time fireman and a part-time salesman.
According to him, the time that he spent with members of his family was extremely valuable.
Driving his children to locations where they needed to be, especially, was for him an exercise in
commitment. He did not view these parenting actions as something he did for them; rather, these
were something he did with them. He and they were generally present at these times, sharing
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daily information with one another, gossip, joys, and frustrations. Mr. E tended to use a time-use
culture of commitment to recognize these as moments of connection that fulfilled obligations and
reciprocated responsibilities to his children as well as to his wife.
It’s connection…. They say at this stage it’s important for the dad to be close to
girls because they need a father figure…. The way I see it, in ten years I won’t be
driving them anywhere. They’re only young once. Why not?
But driving children from one location to another was not always experienced as a gratifying
experience by Mr. E:
Some days it’s overwhelming. It depends on the day. Probably how tired you
are. If you’re tired, it’s overwhelming.
“Overwhelming” is precisely what best described Mr. E’s driving responsibilities on the Sunday
that I shadowed him. But I also witnessed and experienced a reconfiguration of that morning’s
schedule which turned out to render it a worthwhile use of time for Mr. E.
The practical circumstances of coordination that contextualized Mr. E’s Sunday morning
included crisscrossing back and forth across three different cities to drop off and pick up his two
youngest children to and from their volleyball practices at scheduled times. Sandwiched in-
between these obligatory trips were three additional trips – one to church, another to drop off his
son with friends at the movies, and the third one to the mall with his wife. Mr. E essentially
faced the prospect of being unable to enter his house and rest until 3:30 or 4:00pm, at which time
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he would have to quickly leave it once again in order to pick up dinner in a fourth city for his
parents’ party that night, which he would have to leave early because he had to go to work the
next morning at 4:30am. This meant that Mr. E would be spending most of his Sunday
exhausted, driving from one location to another. He was not particularly looking forward to this.
Like some of the other parents in this study, schedules made Mr. E feel uncomfortable: “I
never write a schedule out for myself.” Instead, the way that Mr. E typically got things done
when he was not at work was by having his wife tell him what his schedule was for the day. As
he explained it, “When I’m home I drive whatever way we’re supposed to drive…. My wife tells
me [when to drive]. I just drive.” Adding to the discomfort brought about by a dense and
planned-out Sunday were his youngest daughter’s frequent inquiries regarding the day’s
schedule and his wife’s even more frequent reminders of the practical sequence and timing of
pick-ups, drop-offs, and destinations.
After attending church, as Mr. and Mrs. E went to pick up their son from his volleyball
practice and drop off their daughter to her own volleyball practice, Mr. E stopped at Subway
upon his wife’s request – so that they all could get something to eat, so that they could get
something for their son to eat as soon as his practice was over, and so that their daughter could
change out of her Sunday clothes and into her volleyball clothes in the restroom. Ten minutes
later,
Mrs. E and Erin [daughter] are inside the van taking out their sandwiches from
the bag, unwrapping them, slowly. Mr. E once again gets behind the wheel, takes
a deep breath and exhales. As he exhales, he reveals to me his strategy for
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dealing with his busy day: “Just roll with it. That’s all you can do.” With a spirit
of acceptance, Mr. E turns on the van and we head to the next destination.
This was one of those days during which Mr. E was “tired” and driving from place to place was
quickly becoming “overwhelming.” However, upon the E family’s arrival to the practice site, an
unforeseen turn of events provided Mr. E with an opportunity to change his scheduled fate for
that day and experience what at that point would be for him a more worthwhile use of time.
Mr. and Mrs. E had arrived to pick up their son on time, just as his practice was about to
end, but that meant that they were early for their daughter’s practice, which would be in that
same gym but half an hour later.
The boisterous shouting and laughter of boys flooding out of the gym, scurrying
toward their respective adults has turned into a heave silence. I can hear the
screech of Erin’s timid steps echo across the empty gym as she walks across the
shiny wooden floor and stands next to a table on the opposite side of the entrance,
looking around for someone from her team. The gym is empty. Empty silence.
Noting that “there’s no one there,” Mr. E walked back to his van, explained the situation to Mrs.
E, and since the movie was scheduled to begin at 1:30pm, they both decided that she would drop
off their son at the movies while Mr. E stayed and waited with their daughter. The rest of her
team would surely arrive by the time Mrs. E returned from dropping off their son.
In total, Mr. E waited for 21 minutes with his daughter. Normally, Mr. E despised
waiting: “I’m not a good waiter.” Earlier that week I saw Mr. E leave a gas station and get back
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on the freeway even though his tank was almost empty instead of waiting in a 3-person line to
pay the gas station attendant. Emphatically, he told me, “If I have to wait in line, I’m outta
here!” Today, however, given an uncomfortable, tiring, and overwhelming context of
coordination, waiting was a welcomed use of time! The quiet, empty gym offered him a pleasant
space to finally eat something (it was 1:12pm at this point and he was very hungry) and to
“connect” and “be close” to his youngest daughter.
Given his inconsistent work hours as a fireman, Mr. E did not always get to see his
children practice or play. When he was available, he tried to attend as many and as much of their
events and games as possible, especially for his youngest daughter: “She gets bummed if I don’t
go. The others are older, they understand more, but she [doesn’t].” To his and her great joy, this
episode of waiting permitted them to even practice a little bit of passing, setting, and hitting with
one of the volleyballs that was in a ball basket next to the court. And since the net was already
set up for the team’s upcoming practice, they both had a fun time rallying back and forth across
the net – something that they usually didn’t get to do when they practiced in their front yard.
After the full Subway sandwich and the laughter and giggles with is daughter, other girls
from the team and their parents began trickling into the gym. Mr. E received a text from his wife
informing him that she was entering the parking lot. Mr. E left the gym smiling, nourished, and
re-energized. A proud “father-figure” to his daughter, Mr. E deployed a time-use culture of
commitment to explain to me, as we walked out into the bright sunlight, that “It’s fun to see your
kids practicing or doing well, or whatever they’re doing…. It’s enjoyable because they’re a part
of your life and you have a positive influence on your children.”
On this occasion, Mr. E followed the guidelines of commitment to reciprocate driving
responsibilities with his wife, link his role as a father (“It’s important for the dad to be close to
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girls”) to his daughter’s emotions (“she gets bummed if I don’t go”), care for his daughter
(“they’re only young once”), and thereby ensure her allegiance (“it’s connection”). That 20-
minute wait was worthwhile for Mr. E on this particular Sunday because it was a successful
exercise in commitment; it was a gratifying opportunity for him to adjoin with is daughter (“Why
not?”). Mr. E’s interpretation of his time-use for those 20 minutes was based on relationship
nurturance and care, which are qualities of proper time-use according to the time-use culture of
commitment (“It’s enjoyable because they’re a part of your life and you have a positive influence
on your children”). That moment’s context of opportunistic escape from an “overwhelming”
driving schedule and of equally opportunistic father-figuring provided the appropriate conditions
for deploying the ethic of commitment (with its connectic and reciprocative terms of evaluation).
Ethic and context worked in tandem to facilitate an evaluation of that time-use as a connection
experience – worthwhile for nurturing his father-daughter relationship.
WORTHLESS TIME-USE
While that particular time-use was, according to Mr. E, a successful attempt to care for
his daughter, another similar attempt earlier that week was a failure. It was Tuesday 3:47pm and
Mr. E had stopped by a Subway to grab a bite to eat before heading to his older daughter’s
volleyball game. Excited to see his daughter play her favorite sport “with her friends; cheerful,”
Mr. E sped down the road. “We’ll be lucky to get there on time,” he told me. We did arrive on
time and we did see an exciting volleyball game. But his daughter’s team lost. Throughout the
match Mr. E frowned, grimaced, and shook his head as the coach made questionable
substitutions and “lost them the game.” After the game,
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Ellen [daughter] is nowhere to be seen. Mr. E says “bye” to the other parents
and looks for her amidst the swarm of backpack-carrying, kneeguard-wearing,
jersey-ed girls moving about in search of their parents. Some talking excitedly
with friends. Ellen appears, comes into the gym from the side door (when did she
exit?). She’s looking for her sweater. She says, “hi” to me. Her eyes are red;
she’s visibly upset and about to cry, or has been crying. When she gets her
sweater, she quickly walks past us out the door. Ellen (to Mr. E): “Let’s go! I
want to leave now!” Mr. E notices she is upset. He looks at me. We shrug to
each other with our eyes. We quickly walk out.
The drive home was tense. For the first several minutes his daughter was silent. Then, suddenly,
Ellen burst out ranting about her coach’s incompetence. “I’m not going to practice anymore,”
she exclaimed. Mr. E attempted to share her pain and frustration by pointing out what he noticed
from the sidelines, but Ellen abruptly cut him off. “No, dad, I don’t want to talk about it!” she
said forcefully. Knowing that saying something might make the situation worse, Mr. E kept
quiet. He usually had the radio on when driving, but not during that drive.
Mr. E expected that trip home from the game to be an occasion for “connection,” as such
trips usually were when he drove his children places, but Ellen’s fury and frustration where such
that Mr. E neither saw her “with her friends; cheerful,” nor did he have an opportunity to
commiserate with her and be an understanding “father figure” with answers and solutions. Upon
their arrival home, Ellen rushed into the kitchen and excitedly told her mom about the bad
coaching. As she washed the dishes that she used to make dinner, Mrs. E tried to be positive:
“At least you won the first game.” Ellen: “That doesn’t matter; I’m not going to practice
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tomorrow.” Mrs. E: “Yes; you are.” Mr. E joined them at the counter and pitched in, supporting
Ellen’s decision to not practice. Mrs. E raised her voice at him: “This is a lot of negative energy
and you’re not helping!” Ellen continued to argue with Mrs. E. The vibe was one of tension.
Ellen got up and went to take a shower.
Mr. E’s second attempt to condole and sympathize with his daughter was again silenced,
this time by his wife. Resigned, Mr. E accepted his failure to express care. “I’m [just] a taxi
driver,” he told me as he escorted me out of his home. The next morning, he offered a more
thought-out explanation for his worthless time-use during the previous evening.
So, basically, you and I are both suckers because we’re not women.... That’s how
they are – she got me aggravated because of sports, but Mrs. E was right. She
was fine this morning. She texted the coach last night, apologizing, and the coach
said good job to her.
And that was the end of the tension.
The trip home and kitchen conversation where, for Mr. E, failures in the practice of
commitment. He tried to establish “connection” with his daughter, as he usually did, but on that
particular evening, not being a woman was detrimental to him and he failed. The coordination
context of that Tuesday afternoon and evening was simple compared to the contexts of some of
his other drives that week. It simply involved stopping by the game site on the way home from
work, picking up his daughter, and driving home to a home-cooked family-dinner made by his
wife. Recognizing the opportunity to see his daughter “cheerful,” Mr. E followed the guidelines
of commitment to nurture his relationship with her during the drive home and when they were
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around the kitchen counter. These were moments when the time-use culture of commitment and
the coordination context of ‘family evening together’ had an affinity with one another. Relying
on the ethic of commitment (with its connectic and reciprocative terms of evaluation), Mr. E
interpreted his time-use on the basis of his role as father (“it’s important for the dad to be close to
girls”) and his careful consideration of emotions (agreed that the coach “lost them the game” and
supported Ellen’s decision of “not going to practice anymore”). Consequently, due to his
inability – for various reasons – to share his daughter’s cheerfulness or sadness, Mr. E evaluated
that evening’s time-use as an experience of connection gone awry – worthless for not nurturing
his father-daughter relationship (“I’m [just] a taxi-driver”).
It is important to note that Mr. E’s use of time on Tuesday afternoon was worthwhile: he
did successfully accomplish pick-up duty. Thanks to that, his daughter was safe at home about
to eat dinner with her family. Evaluated from the standpoint of a taxi service, this time-use was
very effective and worthwhile. But Mr. E did not approach pick-up duty as a task, or something
to get done; rather, he tried to make it a father-daughter moment. His platform of evaluation was
the time-use culture of commitment, not the ethic of achievement. Mr. E regretfully
acknowledged that as a taxi driver he was a great success on that evening, but as a father-figure,
not so much.
NEGOTIATING BUSYNESS
Commitment failures such as the episode described above get to the heart of much of the
guilt and regret felt by the busy parents in this study.
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I do take care of my family, and my family, at this stage, I don’t think that they
need me here all the time, because they have their things that they do, but I still
feel a little bit of guilt.... The guilt part is, I put it on myself because I’m the one
who goes to school all day, and then I’m with the cross country or track team
from 2 ‘til 5:30. Then I come home and I make dinner and then I got 5 hours of
homework. Or I took 2 or 3 hours that day to run or ride my bike or go
swimming. Okay, now, I’m putting it on myself, right? So that’s where the guilt
comes in (Mrs. H).
When Warren is napping sometimes I’ll sit and watch a TV program for half an
hour, but then I feel guilt because I could have been doing something more
productive... within the context of our family.... Like I manage our photographs...
I’m constantly creating our photo book for the year so that it’s a photo album at
the end of the year. Catching up on that. Doing bills. I always feel that there’s
something that could be cleaned here. Reorganizing the pantry – that’s something
I’ve been wanting to do (Mrs. W).
Parents (mostly mothers) who expressed guilt and regret for what could be (mis)perceived as
family neglect often (mis)attributed these feelings to overscheduling habits, personal selfishness,
time-pressure, or general busyness.
In the busy lives of these families, busy contexts of coordination generally provided the
conditions for failure to meet time-use standards stipulated by the time-use culture of
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commitment. Deploying a time-use culture of commitment as a platform of time-use evaluation
presented a clear path to guilt and regret when “overwhelming” schedules made it difficult for
parents to properly reciprocate responsibilities, take careful note of emotions, and connect with
loved ones. Not lack of time, but an inability to carry out a culture of “commitment” explained
such feelings of distress and intra-personal conflict.
Conversely, feelings of pride, joy, and relief expressed by parents for managing time
wisely, juggling schedules successfully, or striking a balance between work and family realms
were explained by coordination contexts that facilitated parents’ ability to meet the standards
stipulated by the particular time-use cultures available for their time-use evaluations. Among the
families in this study, an affinity between coordination contexts and time-use cultures explained
parents’ sense of relief, work-life balance, and successful management of time.
I usually go [grocery shopping] towards the end of the week – Wednesday or
Friday. Because a new ad breaks Wednesday and I usually have Wednesday off…
With the girls scouts I do that twice a month on Fridays. I plan out all those
meetings, too, and all the handouts and things.... I’ve done most of that during
the day when the kids are at school..... That’s been time-consuming and
rewarding, too. The girls are all first grade and I think it’s good for them to be
able to bond together and have some friendships.... I decided to treat myself and it
was the massage place... to me that is full relaxation time. And I try really hard
not to talk. It’s just quiet time.... The massage just helps to relax and have
someone take care of me.... It’s taken me a long time to realize that that’s just as
important as [me] taking care of them [my family].... It’s two families that we
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carpool that have the same age kids.... Brilliantly, it works. We go to junior high
with 3 boys, and then we go to [the elementary school] with 3 boys. And then I’ll
do that on Mondays and Wednesday mornings. And then Wednesday afternoons
it’s 3 different pick-ups (Mrs. B).
I have to fuel my tank in order to be happy all the time to the kids and Charles
[her husband]. I’ll go out in the back yard and just kind of sit there and look at
the flowers... and then also reading my books. Just having that down time is so
important.... I love to garden and pull weeds, and I just do it when I feel it’s time.
I guess every 2 weeks I’ll go out and just do it while the kids are usually here....
When the kids are having a playdate in the afternoon and the house is going wild;
I’ll just step outside and garden.... I love to read. I love to go to the library and
get nonfiction books and biographies, and I like to read historical romance novels
and contemporary romance novels. I usually read those like for an hour when I
have everyone tucked in from 9 to 10 o’clock (Mrs. C).
The spatiotemporal coordination framework utilized here – with its up-close look at time-
use cultures and coordination contexts – revealed an intricate cultural process that suffused
parents’ time-management strategies. When the characteristics of coordination contexts had
affinity with the requirements stipulated by the time-use cultures deployed by the parents to
coordinate their activities, these parents expressed pride and pleasure for their busy lives. They
became empowered over having successfully negotiated daily busyness. That busyness was not
a daunting specter of chaos; it was a feature of their lives over which they held control. By
CHAPTER 6
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contrast, when the coordination contexts proved antithetical to the coordination contexts which
situated the deployment of specific time-use cultures, these parents expressed frustration and
regret for the impoverishment of their busy lives. They viewed their busyness as overwhelming
and beyond their control.
DISCUSSION
In this chapter I have provided empirical data that demonstrates interpretive limitations of
the currently available perspectives for assessing the impact that busyness has on the quality of
everyday life among busy families. Two leisure-time episodes demonstrated interpretive
differences derived from linking time-use characteristics to time-use evaluations, as do the
temporal allocation, temporal pace, and temporal affect perspectives. Despite identical
allocation, pace, and affect, Mr. D interpreted his trip to the beach on one day as an act of
balance, and on another day as a scheduled action to be completed – although he saw both of
these as worthwhile uses of time, albeit for different reasons. I discussed how contexts of
coordination and time-use cultures, serving as evaluative cultures of time-use, explain these
differences in assessment.
Building upon this insight, two child-care experiences illustrated the use of identical
evaluative criteria to assess the worthwhileness of time-use episodes. Mr. E relied on a time-use
culture of commitment to determine his success of failure to care and bond with his daughters.
While an affinity between coordination context and rendered one attempt worthwhile, the other
attempt involved an emotionally tense context that was antithetical to the time-use culture of
commitment – providing the conditions for an evaluation of that time-use as worthless.
According to the spatiotemporal coordination framework that I have featured here, this
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worthwhile-worthless dynamic of time-use explains the pride and joy that parents feel when
navigating busy lives, as well as their guilt and frustration when busyness overwhelms their
time-management efforts.
A spatiotemporal coordination framework – with its focus on time-use cultures and
coordination contexts – reveals that parents’ own interpretation of the quality of their time-use
depends on their success or failure to carry out particular cultures of time-use within specific
contexts of coordination. This analytic framework further posits that such evaluations come in
the form of worthwhile or not worthwhile uses of time rather than improved or impoverished,
balanced or skewed, rushed or relaxed, or pleasant or unpleasant. Currently available
frameworks, by contrast, cannot account for variation in parents’ situated time-use evaluations
throughout their day, nor can they account for the intersubjectivity of the meanings that form the
parameters of those evaluations.
The findings that I have presented in this chapter derive from a spatiotemporal
coordination framework’s capacity to register situated evaluations and shared cultures of time-
use. These findings can be summarized in this manner: parents interpret the quality of their
time-use – that is, determine its worthwhileness or worthlessness – on the basis of time-use
cultures (of achievement, balance, or commitment), using these as evaluative platforms to assess
experiences that are framed by particular coordination contexts.
As this chapter argues, it is important to focus on contextually-situated evaluations of
time-use when examining the impact that contemporary time-use patterns of busyness have on
the quality of parents’ daily life (Bianchi et al. 2012, Williams and Boushey 2010). My
spatiotemporal coordination framework recognizes variation in time-use evaluation across
fluctuating contexts of everyday life. This more easily accommodates the “porous” (Wuthnow
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1998) circumstances of contemporary living into our understanding of the impact that time-use
patterns have on the quality of everyday experiences for United States families.
Likewise, it is important to focus on the intersubjectivity of time-evaluations when
examining the quality of contemporary parents’ daily life. Cultural categories about time enable
and constrain particular interpretations and experiences of everyday life (Nippert-Eng, 1996;
Thompson 1967; Zerubavel 1979, 1981, 1985). Incorporating these insights into our analysis of
busyness renders visible the cultural process whereby a repertoire of publicly-available meaning-
structures provides the evaluative criteria for assessing schedules and time-management
strategies. A spatiotemporal coordination framework highlights this precise dynamic that
hinders and facilitates the terms of families’ own time-use evaluations. This framework also
permits us to carefully and critically think about the repertoire of widely-shared time-use
meanings that our institutional arrangements sustain and reinforce (Blair-Loy 2003, Gerson
2009, Hochschild 1997). A spatiotemporal coordination framework complements discoveries of
gendered- and class-based patterns of busyness with explorations of the time-use meanings that
our society makes readily available to families for thinking about that busyness and how to
manage, or negotiate it, in everyday life.
To conclude, my overall, stand-alone point in this chapter has been the following: If we
are interested in assessing the implications of time-use patterns on the quality of families’
everyday lives, we would do well to complement our consideration of family members’
subjective time-use evaluations with a consideration of the coordination contexts and s that
structure those evaluations. By changing the way we as researchers interpret time-use quality,
the spatiotemporal coordination framework featured here is offered as an initial step in that
direction.
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The next chapter explains how this and the previous two empirical chapters fit together
within the spatiotemporal coordination framework, and how the empirical findings of this study
speak to the broader, global issues of contemporary life in a “porous” (Wuthnow 1998) society.
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CHAPTER 7
Negotiating Busyness with Coordination Work
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ANSWERS TO RESEARCH QUESTION
Analytic and empirical gaps in the busyness literature led to me explore the daily activity-
administration strategies which parents rely on to manage time, orchestrated schedules, and cope
with a life of busyness. Analytically, chapters 4, 5, and 6 have demonstrated a sensitivity to
coordination work which is absent in the busyness literature. In doing so, these chapters bypass
the interpretive limitations of the time-deficit model which permeates the busyness literature.
Empirically, these chapters document plural underlying logics of proper time-use which organize
activity-administration strategies, not just a single logic of efficiency, as proposed by the busyness
literature. Empirically, these chapters also document previously-unacknowledged activity-
signification means for coping with busyness which are related to, but separate from, activity
administration strategies. Theoretically, these three chapters illustrate a spatiotemporal
coordination framework that provides a cultural intervention of the busyness literature by
reinterpreting busyness to be plural coordination-work performances. Chapters 4, 5, and 6
accomplish all this by describing time-use cultures – their internal structure, their power to shape
the form and meaning of activity-administration strategies, and their power to shape evaluations of
those strategies and of the quality of busyness in everyday life. This chapter explains these
aforementioned analytical, empirical, and theoretical features of my research.
TIME-USE CULTURES AND TIME-MANAGEMENT IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Chapter 4 described the internal components of time-use cultures – the interrelated
meanings (about appropriate time-use concerns and time-use density) that structure them and the
organizing logics (about worthy time-use) that hold them together. In doing so, this chapter
presented some of the more common activity-administration strategies (such as planning to wait
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for children to be released from their extracurricular activities, carefully tracking the passage of
time, and carpooling) which parents used to manage their time and deal with busyness. Time-
use cultures rendered these activity-administration strategies meaningful, logical, possible, and
desirable lines of action for the middle class parents in my study. Ensconced in parents’ cultural
repertoires and instantiated in local everyday settings, the time-use cultures of achievement,
balance, and commitment were mobilized by parents at different times throughout their days to
make sense of their busyness and to orient the way they managed their busy schedules. Chart 1
below illustrates this cultural process with three examples that were presented in chapter 4.
Chart 7.1 Time-Use Cultures Orienting Different Activity-Administration Strategies
“plan for waiting”
“chill around the house”
“work together”
Achievement Balance Commitment
Logic of Getting Things
Done
Logic of Ensuring
Harmony
Logic of Nurturing
Relationships
Logistic
Concerns
Impositive
Density
Curatic
Concerns
Divertive
Density
Connectic
Concerns
Reciprocative
Density
Mrs. E, who had to be in
multiple places after
child’s practice
Mrs. D, who was
frustrated by the pace of
year-round sports
Mrs. G, who required her
children to do weekly chores
Chapter 5 described time-use cultures in action – parents mobilizing them in real-time to
perform activity-administration strategies, and these cultures orienting parents to carry out and
construe activity-administration strategies in particular ways. This chapter focused on one of the
more reliable activity-administration strategies (multitasking carpooling duties with other chores)
of the middle class parents in my study. I show that mobilizing one versus another time-use
culture changed the form and meaning of the same multitasking strategy. Saving time by doing
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multiple things on the way to pick-up children from extracurricular activities was a means for
getting things done, nurturing commitments, or ensuring harmony – depending on which time-
use culture was mobilized by parents. The power of time-use cultures to shape activity-
administration strategies evinces pluralism in parents’ cultural repertoire of resources available
for inspiring and rendering logical time-management tactics. This empirical finding contrasts
with the prevailing viewpoint present in the literature which postulates a single dominant
“culture of efficiency” as the supplier of ways to carry out and construe activity-administration
techniques. Chart 2 illustrates the cultural process presented in chapter 5 with the three examples
from that chapter.
Chart 7.2 Time-Use Cultures Orienting The Same Activity-Administration Strategy
Juggling Work & Family While Chauffeuring Children
Multitasking, Squeezing Activities, Saving Time
Practical Accomplishment of Tasks Restorative Self-Care Attentive Care of Family
Achievement
Mrs. A, who stopped by the
pharmacy to pick up pet
medication
Balance
Mrs. D, who stopped by
the park to walk the
dogs and exercise
Commitment
Mr. B, who stopped by the
computer store to get
technician’s phone number
Chapter 6 described time-use cultures in action once again – but this time orienting
parents’ evaluation of activity-administration strategies. This chapter highlighted the role of
time-use cultures to serve as platforms of evaluation, providing the cultural criteria for assessing
their own success or failure to manage time effectively. This chapter presented the interplay
between time-use cultures deployed by parents and the rigid or flexible coordination contexts
that framed that deployment. It was through this cultural process of evaluation that parents
deemed their time-management efforts worthwhile or worthless attempts to accomplish tasks,
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balance the day, or care for others. Featuring the time-management efforts of two parents, this
chapter described two common activity-administration strategies present among the families in
my study. One of these was “escaping rigid schedules” by monitoring children; the other
strategy was “capitalizing on flexible schedules” by participating in personal leisure. Mr. D
made the most of a window of unscheduled time in his busy week day in order to regenerate with
a bike ride to the beach; Mr. E jumped on the opportunity to escape a busy Sunday morning
schedule pre-set with fixed pick-up and drop-off times by replacing it with an improvised
moment of connection with his daughter before her volleyball practice.
This chapter also described another important time-management pattern among the busy
families in my study. When the time-use culture mobilized by a parent to manage busyness was
compatible with the coordination context, that time-management strategy was assessed to be
qualitatively sound – worthwhile given the context – and time was deemed well-managed,
schedules were deemed successfully coordinated, busyness was deemed coped with. Relief
ensued. This was the case with Mr. D when he deployed the time-use culture of balance during a
flexible context and the time-use culture of achievement during a fixed context. This was also
the case with Mr. E when he deployed the time-use culture of commitment during a fixed
coordination context. However, when the time-use culture mobilized by a parent was
incompatible with the context, that was recognized as qualitatively faulty – given the context, not
worthwhile – and time was deemed poorly-managed, schedules were viewed as uncoordinated,
and busyness was seen to be out of control. Time-pressure was felt and tension ensued. This
was the case with Mr. E when he deployed the time-use culture of commitment during a flexible
coordination context.
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This finding provides insight into inter-personal family tensions that are often explained
in terms of time-pressure and time-insufficiency. What the data presented in chapter 6 indicates
is that some of these threats to family health and well-being actually spring from frustrated time-
management efforts – parents trying to follow the guidelines of a particular time-use culture and
evaluating their activity-administration techniques in terms of that ethic given a coordination
context that renders it difficult to meet those particular time-use standards. This insight suggests
the importance for future research to further explore patterns in the temporal-ethic-mobilization
process and the intricacies of which coordination contexts have elective affinities with which
time-use cultures. Chart 3 illustrates the cultural process presented in chapter 6 with the
activity-administration examples from that chapter.
Chart 7.3 Time-Use Cultures Orienting Self-Evaluation of Activity-Administration
Strategies
Successful Time-Management
Failed Time-
Management
Fixed Schedule Flexible Schedule
Hurry
Escape from
Rigidity
Capitalize
on
Flexibility
Connect During
Chauffeuring
Duty
Achievement Commitment Balance Commitment
Mr. D
surfing
before school
pick-up duty
Mr. E
waiting with
daughter
Mr. D
surfing
before
children
return
Mr. E driving
daughter home
after game
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TIME-USE CULTURES AND TIME-DEFICIT
Time-use cultures are a central component of the spatiotemporal coordination framework
that this dissertation proposes as an alternative to the time-deficit model of interpretation which
dominates in the busyness literature. Together, the three empirical chapters are testament to the
power of a coordination framework to extend the insights offered by a time-deficit model while
also avoiding its limitations.
All of the parents in this study were white, middle-class, suburban parents with flexible
work-family arrangements. All of them self-identified as very busy parents and all of them
viewed their execution of activity-administration strategies as an essential means for coping with
that pervasive busyness. My empirical findings regarding time-use cultures challenge the time-
deficit model’s emphasis on time-deficit. Despite flexible work-family arrangements, the
parents in this study continued to feel busy throughout their days. Often, parents even expressed
the ailments of busyness despite enjoying leisure moments of presumable relaxation, as was the
case with Mr. D who felt busy on the Friday afternoon that he squeezed a little surfing into his
schedule before going to pick up his daughter from school. Time deficit did not accurately
explain their situation of busyness. Furthermore, time deficit was also not a useful way to
describe these parents’ busyness because they carried out the time-management practices of
activity-administration regardless of time-deficit or abundance. They attempted to administer
activities and coordinate schedules irrespective of time-constraints. Time deficit did not
accurately explain what these parents were “responding to” when they tried to manage their
busyness. As the three empirical chapters demonstrate, time-use cultures structured variation in
meaning, means, and valuation of activity-administration techniques regardless of time-
constraints or resource availabilities. Time-use cultures and coordination contexts explained
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recognitions and assessments of busyness when time-deficit did not. Likewise, time-use cultures
and the processes which implicated them explained the presence of activity-administration
techniques despite the absence of time-deficit.
The time-deficit model also places emphasis on a principle of efficiency as the dominant
cultural resource deployed by busy parents to carry out activity-administration strategies. But as
the three empirical chapters demonstrate, the concept of efficiency cannot explain variation in
apparently identical time-management techniques. Mrs. A and Mr. B, for instance, both
multitasked their respective trips to pick up their children with additional trips to complete
errands. “Efficiency” proved too clunky a concept to capture differences in these apparently
identical excursions across the city. Time-use cultures resolved this limitation, accounting for
variation in the meanings and means of activity-management strategies.
Time-use cultures also resolved a contradiction in the busyness literature. Whereas some
scholars view busyness as a problematic hassle that parents try to eliminate and deal with, others
note its liberating qualities that empower busy persons. Time-use cultures offer a way to resolve
these contradictory positions by revealing a process of self-reflection and time-use evaluation.
Parents do not rely on the characteristics of their busyness to assess the quality of their time-use.
Instead of considering how much time they have, at what pace they are carrying things out, and
how they feel about those things, parents consider the meanings of their actions to assess their
busyness as worthwhile and empowering or worthless and beyond their control. Busyness is not
always a problem. It is also often an enjoyable, empowering feature of everyday life.
Time-use cultures and the spatiotemporal coordination framework of which they are a
part provide the foundation for an understanding of daily busyness that does not consider it an a-
priori hassle addressed mainly through efficiency techniques that arises from time-scarcity.
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TIME-USE CULTURES AND ACTIVITY-SIGNIFICATION
Time-use cultures also reveal a separate category of strategies for coping with busyness
that had previously gone undetected by studies which followed a time-deficit model of
interpretation. As indicated by the empirical data, a cultural process of interpreting everyday
activities in meaningful ways which renders them manageable and administer-able precludes
parents’ actual administration of activities. This process of signification is related to but
different from the practical administration of activities and schedules because it involves
subjectively and intersubjectively rendering meaningful particular time-management strategies.
The process, present in the three empirical chapters, whereby parents mobilize time-use cultures
of achievement, balance, and commitment to carry out, construe, and evaluate lines of action for
managing busyness constitutes an altogether separate category of strategies.
Understanding actions as instances of “getting things done,” or as instances of
“balancing things,” or as instances of “nurturing relationships” was itself a way of dealing with
busy lives. It brought parents comfort and security to recognize themselves as active participants
in legitimate uses of time. The busyness that confronted them was less daunting knowing that
they were addressing it in a meaningful way. The mothers from chapter 4 who “plan[ned] for
waiting” and chill[ed] around the house” in order to confront unreliable practice-end-times and
overwhelming year-round-sports-schedules had actually stabilized their outlook on their busy
lives before even waiting or chilling, respectively. In fact, whether waiting or chilling worked as
means for managing their busyness was immaterial as far as their activity-signification strategies
were concerned. Simply by identifying legitimate means for dealing with busyness, Mrs. E and
Mrs. D already felt empowered to deal with their respective episodes of busyness. Recognizing
her ability to address a late-ending practice by carefully monitoring time was already one way
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that Mrs. E coped with her busyness – the logic of ‘getting things done’ gave her a way to
control the situation, and that by itself helped her to minimize her sense of bewilderment and
take matters into her own hand by doing something about it; in this case, monitoring the time.
Likewise, recognizing her ability to combat overscheduling tendencies by monitoring the health
of “growing little bodies” was already one way that Mrs. D coped with her busyness – the logic
of ‘balancing life’ gave her a way to control the situation, to minimize her sense of frustration,
and to do something about year-round sports schedules; in this case, countering them with off-
days spent ‘chilling’ at home. The empowerment to act that they derived from time-use cultures
was itself a means for dealing with busyness.
Mobilizations of time-use cultures in this manner are heretofore unidentified activity-
signification strategies for coping with daily busyness. My point is that we are better equipped
to understand parents’ mechanisms for coping busyness when we recognize that parents perform
one set of strategies to instrumentally meet the practical challenges of coordinating drop-offs,
pick-ups, mealtimes, and the like; and a different set of strategies to identify these challenges as
“meet-able” and manageable. A close observation of time-use cultures and activity
administration strategies revealed the presence of these separate type of busyness coping
strategies present in contemporary parents’ repertoire of strategies. This was visually
represented in Table 1 of the dissertation.
A THEORETICAL INTERVENTION
Underpinning the abovementioned findings regarding time-use cultures lays the
spatiotemporal coordination framework of interpretation that was presented in chapter 2.
Activity-signification is encompassed within this interpretive framework. Chart 4 provides a
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representation of this framework, as explained in the theory chapter and evidenced in three
empirical chapters.
Coordination work encompasses the coordination of meanings with activities and
activities with contexts. These are the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of coordination
work. Activity signification strategies are coordination work that takes place on these two levels.
Through the power of time-use cultures, the signification of activities renders possible specific
activity-administration strategies. The administration of activities involves the instrumental
coordination of schedules and the physical coordination of human bodies. Recurring and
routinized coordination work on these two dimensions coagulates into recognizable
configurations of work, family, and leisure institutions. On this level, coordination work
involves the sociocultural coordination of institutions, and it is the process of institutional
configuration. Furthermore, activity-signification involves the interpretation of meaningful time,
activity-administration involves the allocation of measured time, and institutional-configuration
involves the rhythms of made time. This framework explains time-management, schedule
synchronization, and busyness-coping strategies as interrelated components of coordination
work.
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Chart 7.4 Spatiotemporal Coordination Framework
COORDINATION WORK
INSTITUTIONAL CONFIGURATION
Sociocultural Coordination of Institutions
Temporal Rhythm
ACTIVITY ADMINISTRATION
Instrumental Coordination of Schedules
Physical Coordination of Bodies
Temporal Allocation
ACTIVITY SIGNIFICATION
Intersubjective Coordination of
Meaning with Activity
Subjective Coordination of Activity
with Context
Temporal Meaning
A B C
Activity
Fixed Flexible
“Regroup” with “Down-Time” during a
flexible “Slice” of day
“Squeeze” a Surfing Session Before Children Arrive
Home From School
Work – Leisure – Family
(6am to 1pm) – (1:30pm to 3:00pm) – (3:00pm to bedtime)
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The spatiotemporal coordination framework provides the basis for the analyses presented
in the three empirical chapters of this dissertation. It is possible to explain the interrelated
elements of time-management in terms of this elegant and parsimonious framework. To take the
case of Mr. D from chapter 6, he mobilized the time-use culture of balance within a flexible
context of coordination to formulate the activity-signification strategy of “regrouping,” which in
turn enabled his activity-administration strategy of “squeezing” leisure between paid work and
unpaid child-care; recurrent “regroupings” and “squeezes” of this sort eventually crystallized
into the predictable institutional configuration of ‘work’ followed by ‘leisure’ followed by
‘family’ in a linear, segmented fashion.
PATTERNS OF COORDINATION WORK
Previous studies look at the phenomenon of raising children (Lareau 2003) or caring for
family members (Hochschild 1989) or mothering (Hays 1996) or fathering (Townsend 1996) or
juggling work realms and family realms (Bianchi et al. 2006). In this dissertation I have focused
on the spatiotemporal coordination of family members throughout the day, what is typically
identified as time-management within the busyness literature. Coordination work is different
and separate from – although related to – the tasks of parenting and caring for family members
which typically constitute the focus of analysis in busyness studies. Coordination work is about
the mundane aspects of living together as a family group – not about dealing with the prospect of
“declining fortunes” for one’s children (Newman 1993; Lareau 2003), nor about coping with a
particular degree of job flexibility (Bianchi, Casper, and Berkowitz-King 2005; Jacobs and
Gerson 2004) – which are much more “macro” and “long-term” concerns that families contend
with. Coordination work is about more “immediate” concerns than raising children or striking a
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balance between work and family commitments; it is about a different “project” that families
engage in – the project of “doing” daily life.
Coordination work was an essential component of how parents “did” daily life – pieced
together the day, given obligations, demands, and constraints in order to achieve their vision of a
good life spent in worthwhile activities. Daily life for the parents in this study was a production.
As they performed coordination work, they were striving to produce the daily life they would
like to have. Their coordination efforts were attempts to materialize their vision of the good life.
Through the mechanism of coordination work, the institutions of work, family, and
leisure crystallized into predictable, patterned arrangements such as the linear-segmented one
described above for Mr. D. Future research must closely explore these patterned processes of
“institutionalization” as they pertain to the topic of busyness in the lives of contemporary
families. Family literature does suggest the existence of different ways of “achieving” family
life, different styles of coordinating the movement of bodies in families, different techniques of
tying together the distinct rhythms of family members.
Time-use studies that measure the time parents spend in childcare, housework, paid work,
personal care, and leisure activities suggest distinct styles of time allocation in different kinds of
families. The time-allocation patterns of married-mothers and single-mothers, for example, were
vastly different from each other half a century ago; as married mothers have shifted toward more
paid and less unpaid work, however, their styles of time-allocation have become more similar
(Bianchi et al. 2006), evincing a converging similarity in the ways their institutions of work,
family, and leisure articulate in everyday life.
Likewise, Presser (2003, 2005) emphasizes the “time diversity of family life” in a United
States society with a 24/7 economy. Among dual-earner families there are distinct
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configurations of work-schedules; the style of synchronizing family activities in a family with
both parents working non-traditional work hours is likely different from the style of
synchronizing activities in a family with one parent working non-traditional work hours; both of
these styles, in turn, are probably different from the style in a family with both parents working
the traditional 9-to-5 shift. Family scholars have yet to adequately address “the issue of which
hours and which days people work;” but initial research in this direction suggests patterns in
styles of daily life configuration and synchronization (Presser 2003, 2005).
Research addressing work-family conflict also finds patterned styles of coordination
work in daily life. Roy et al. (2004) find shared styles of coordinating day-to-day obligations
among poor Chicago mothers, Blair-Loy (2003) discovers distinct styles of juggling career and
family devotions among highly-educated upper-middle class mothers who hold executive
positions in corporations, and Nippert-Eng (1995) identifies different styles of segmenting and
integrating the experiential realms of “home” and “work” among employed individuals. All of
these findings on work and family balance indicate shared patterns of coordination work in
everyday life among these different categorizations of families. What kinds of families share
which styles is an empirical question that merits extensive future research, but the existing work-
family literature does suggest the existence of such shared patterns.
The literature on childrearing patterns is no exception; it too describes different
arrangements of coordinated institutions in everyday life. Historical comparisons of child-
centered versus adult-centered childrearing techniques demonstrate different parental styles of
coordinating childrearing tasks with other obligations (Apple 2006; Hulbert 2003). Similarly, in
her research, Lareau (2003) uncovers a middle-class childrearing pattern that produces a fast-
paced rhythm of family life, with strongly entwined children’s and parents’ schedules, and a poor
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and working-class pattern that produces a slower-paced rhythm, with children’s growth and
development not interfering with parents’ organization of their obligations. The style of
coordinating children’s activities with parents’ activities in families practicing one kind of
childrearing “logic” looks very different from the style in families practicing the other “logic.”
Literature from the “Hochschild school” of care and emotion likewise suggests distinct
styles of coordinated action in families (Hochschild 2005, 2003, 1997, 1989). Some families
assign care as the purview of women, others deny the need for care, some relinquish child and
elderly care to institutions, and finally, others combine impersonal institutional care with gender-
egalitarian private care. These diverse techniques of caring for family members indicate distinct
patterns of coordinating child and elderly care with work and leisure pursuits, and thereby
articulating the institutions of family and work in a particular manner.
This literature also indicates that families have different patterns of allocating emotions
between home and work (Hochschild 1997). Some couples employ a gendered division of
emotion allocation, with men concentrating their emotions at work and women in the home;
some forge intense emotional bonds with co-workers; others do so with family members; and the
fortunate few establish emotional anchors in both locations, achieving an emotional balance
between home and work. These patterns of emotion-allocation are indicative of separate
patterns of configuring home and work commitments.
Finally, family demographers note the proliferation of diverse family forms over the past
half century in the United States. During this period, demographic changes – including longer
life expectancy, postponed marriage, postponed childbearing, increased childbearing and
childrearing outside of marriage, and the growth of singlehood, cohabitation, divorce, and
remarriage – coupled with economic and cultural transformations spurred a wide variety of
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highly-visible family forms, including single-mother families, blended families, childless
families, and gay and lesbian families (Casper and Bianchi 2002). Since the mid-1990s,
however, much of the transformation in family composition has stabilized. Instead, what
continues to morph is family life. Presumably, the style of coordinating daily life within these
new family forms is different from how life is organized in “traditional” two-biological-parent
families. Family demographers see explorations of how adults and children live everyday life
within these new family forms as a next step in understanding family characteristics in the
United States.
Many studies of family life imply distinct patterns of family-life coordination. Instead of
emphasizing coordination, however, these studies have focused on other matters, like emotional
attachments, childrearing tactics, time use, or juggling paid work with unpaid caregiving. The
spatiotemporal coordination framework from this dissertation provides the theoretical foundation
to take these implications seriously and explore patterns in the ways that families become
articulated with the institutions of work and leisure, thereby rendering particular institutional
arrangements predictable and consequential.
WORTHWHILE FORMS OF BUSYNESS
The empirical data in this dissertation and the spatiotemporal coordination framework
used throughout highlight the fact that the practical, day-to-day coordination of schedules and
time-management involves culturally-informed practices. As it turns out, there is much more to
the work of coordinating daily activities than responding to time-deficits or negotiating gendered
power-struggles. When parents coordinated their schedules, they did not just maintain an
instrumental, means-ends relation to that task – absent of meaning, focusing solely on
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overcoming time-deficit or minimizing institutional friction (clashing demands and competing
devotions from work and family). Rather, the work of coordination was a meaningful enterprise
that entailed allegiance to cultural ideals. For parents, adhering to time-use cultures was not
simply a matter of mechanical pragmatics. Activity signification and activity administration
strategies were the visible manifestation of daily projects to use time appropriately. As such,
they evinced daily efforts to be busy in a particular manner.
At different times, parents deliberately selected one time-use culture over the others.
They approved of other persons’ adherence to the same guidelines and they were annoyed when
others strayed from these tenets. As we saw in chapter 4, parents disliked it when coaches ended
practices late. For most parents this came at a time of the day when they were mobilizing the
time-use culture of achievement to get things done and successfully accomplish multiple drop-
offs and pick-ups. Parents noted that by ending practices late coaches showed little consideration
for their own logistic concerns. As Mrs. E explained in chapter 4, “when one of the kids’ things
goes really late, that gets tedious” because “in the meantime I’ve had to be at 3 different places.”
And Mrs. A corroborates this sentiment of frustration: “You don’t know what time to be there…
I don’t have time to be sitting there waiting for when the woman decides to let them out!”
But parents also found comfort and solace when others shared their choice of ethic. All
of the parents in this study, for instance, encouraged both in themselves and in others the
periodic selection of balance as an appropriate guiding principle of time-use. At different times,
parents read, appreciated nature, and took “a step back” “in order to be happy” with their rushed
lives; and they admired the attention to curatic matters and divertive activities that other others
incorporated into their own lives. As Mrs. W expressed,
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They do that in Europe. They dedicate 2 hours a day to a nap in the afternoon. I
think that they’ve got it right. They’ve got the busy life but they recognize that
you need the time to be a human and an active participant in the cycle of the
world.... You can’t just go with this frenetic energy forever. You’re going to
crash!
Finally, parents were careful to model the three time-use cultures for their children and to ensure
that they learned how and when to use them. When parents used an achievement ethic to drive
children from one after school activity to another, for instance, they invited children to also
concern themselves with logistic matters and to perform impositive activities – asking them if
they had completed items on their list of things to do (like homework) and reminding them to be
wary of the time. And whenever possible, parents emphasized their adherence to connectic
concerns and reciprocative densities so that their children recognized this mode of time-use and
its importance their lives. As Mrs. F stated in chapter 4, she strongly believed in the importance
of being “a good role model for [her] kids,” especially when it came to time-use that
“support[ed]” family members.
Certainly, getting things done, balancing life, and caring for others were behavior
patterns that parents wanted their children to learn. They modeled the mobilization of time-use
cultures, they approved of others’ use of them, and they became annoyed when others did not
deploy the same ones as they did at that particular moment. Their deployment of these time-use
cultures was much more than the practical response to the need for coordinated schedules. It was
an expression of allegiance to specific cultural ideals.
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Importantly, the spatiotemporal coordination framework introduced here is well-suited
for analyzing the conditions of daily busyness in our contemporary world. Leading scholars in
the busyness literature present the contextualization of time-use patterns as a fruitful direction for
future research to take (Bianchi et al. 2012; Williams and Boushey 2010). With its spotlight on
situated assessments of coping strategies, the spatiotemporal coordination framework fits neatly
into this emerging research focus. The empirical findings presented here using this framework
indicate that we cannot determine the quality of parents’ busyness in everyday life without first
taking into consideration the specific context of coordination within time-management strategies
takes place because that context is precisely what nestles parents’ interpretations of their
busyness. Consequently, the quality of busy schedules as perceived by parents varies throughout
each day. A focus on coordination work and the activity-signification process of mobilizing
plural time-use cultures across daily contexts to orient activity-administration strategies
accommodates the liquid reality of contemporary living. This makes the spatiotemporal
coordination interpretive framework a useful framework to bring into studies of busyness in
everyday life. Busyness according to this framework becomes reframed as an endemic cultural
feature of contemporary life in a world where the work of coordination is made increasingly
difficult by uncertainty, “loose connections” (Wuthnow 1998) and acceleration (Harvey 1984).
PUBLIC SOLUTIONS
The research presented in this dissertation also pertains to sociologists who seek to
relieve some of the busyness that parents feel in everyday life. While current efforts to do so
attempt to overcome institutionally-imposed time-deficits and transform institutionally-
structured role-identities by promoting work-life flexibility and modified ideologies (Blair-Loy
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2003; Gerson 2009; Hochschild 1997), a spatiotemporal coordination analytic framework shifts
concerns away from roles and amounts and redirects them toward the cultural resources that are
available for parents’ use in contexts of coordinated interaction between family members.
As this dissertation reveals, assessments of time-use quality among middle-class
suburban families have more to do with intersubjective understandings of proper time-use than
with actual time-deficits and role-identities. In terms of policy application, this means that
effective relief from busyness could come in the form of measures that foster accessibility of the
cultural resources that parents deploy to define their use of time as worthwhile in different
situations throughout the day, and in the form of measures that render more common the contexts
that sustain the use of such cultural resources and of the time-management strategies which
parents themselves deem to be effective. A spatiotemporal coordination framework yields a
complementary approach to current busyness-relief efforts which focus on time amounts rather
than time meanings.
It is true, as many others before me have so rightly pointed out, that effectively
addressing the social problem of contemporary busyness requires collective, public measures.
This dissertation echoes those sociological calls for broad-scale public action and adds that, to be
effective, such measures must render the burden of coordination work shareable among
communities. The conclusion of this dissertation is dedicated to this plea for public action.
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CONCLUSION
Busyness as a Social Problem
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FAMILIES AND BUSYNESS
Over the last 30 years, journalists, scholars, and the general public have socially
constructed “busyness” as a problem that affects the health and well-being of individuals,
families, and communities in United States society. As the research reviewed throughout this
dissertation indicates, contemporary United States parents are increasingly busy working and
caring, they feel increasingly anxious and guilty while fulfilling daily obligations, and their
workplaces are increasingly incompatible with the busyness of their everyday lives.
To claim that busyness-as-problem is socially constructed is not to stipulate that the
work-family tensions, feelings of role overload, and experiences of hurry are not actual features
of contemporary families. Rather, it is to remind us that this “narrative of angst” is tied to
broader discourses and is rooted in particular ways of interpreting the world. Efforts to “solve,”
or at least address, this social problem and its deleterious effect on parents’ well-being must,
then, carefully consider the implicit, foundational perspectives, models, and frameworks that
inform this construction of “the problem of busyness.”
This dissertation has done precisely that. With an analytic sensitivity to coordination
work, it has (a) explored an empirical gap (activity-administration strategies) in the sociological
literature on busyness (chapters 4, 5, 6); it has (b) identified a theoretical model (time-deficit)
that informs these concerns about busyness (chapter 1), and (c) developed an alternative
framework (spatiotemporal coordination) that reconstructs busyness into a qualitatively-plural
cultural feature of everyday life (chapter 2 and 7).
The alternative, meaning- and movement-sensitive model of interpretation that I present
with this dissertation equips sociologists with more culturally-robust insights into the context and
experience of “busyness” in United States society at the beginning of the 21
st
-century. This
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allows us to step back, outside of the analytic role as researchers, and step into the prescriptive
role of public-policy promoters with a renewed outlook on the problem of busyness, its
deleterious effects on the health and well-being of families, and the viable remedies for the these
afflictions.
I conclude this dissertation by offering renewed outlooks on five interrelated topics which
pertain to the problem of busyness among contemporary United States families. These are: (a)
the cultural encroachment of rational-capitalism on family life, (b) the assault on family time
brought about by time-deprivation, (c) the stall in a gender revolution that seeks greater equality,
(d) the promotion of family-friendly flexibility, and (e) the search for relief from busyness.
THE CULTURAL ENCROACHMENT OF RATIONAL-CAPITALISM
Embedded within many sociological studies of family life lie apprehensions about an
historically powerful ethos of self-interested instrumental-rationality that potentially intrudes
upon the social sphere of family, corrodes ties between family members, and overpowers their
feelings of care and intimacy for one another (Bellah et al. 1985; Blair-Loy 2010; Blumberg
1991; Ciscel and Heath 2001; DeVries 2008; Fevre 2003; Hareven 1983; Hartmann 1981; Hays
1996; Heath et al. 1998; Hochschild 2013, 2005; Horn et al. 2010; Lasch 1977; Marx and Engels
1978; Polyani 2001 [1944]; Rapp et al. 1979; Sahlins 1976; Snyder 2013; Swidler 2001;
Thompson 1967; Tönnies 1957; Trebilcot 1983; Weber 1958; Zelizer 2005). The temporal
permutation of this cultural encroachment translates into the “zealous husbandry of time”–
whereby time is seen as currency to be spent, not passed; put to use, not squandered (Thompson
1967). Sociological misgivings about this zealous application outside of the workplace of an
“industrial” orientation toward time revolve around the fear that when people take on the role of
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time-accountants their rational-efficient book-keeping of time-use invariably translates into a
deficit of care in private life, an emotionally-ascetic relationship with family members, and a
sense of urgency that weakens bonds of love.
While remaining wary of these dangers posed by standardized views of time, rationalized
schedules, and efficient management tactics, a spatiotemporal coordination framework offers
hope that, although rational-capitalistic symbols and practices may compete with the rituals of
family togetherness (such as sharing dinner and relating to each other through talk), other
alternative cultural systems of time-use remain powerful sources of guidance and purpose
available for family members to deploy when actively managing their schedules. Recognizing a
plurality of equally deep and widespread temporal cultures that people actually use in lieu of and
in spite of an efficient time-husbandry logic is more encouraging than when we only
acknowledge the presence of an overpowering culture of capitalism (Hays 1996).
The prospect for strengthening feeble family ties is magnified with a spatiotemporal
coordination framework. We can, for instance, divert our qualms away from the fact that parents
have had to become time and motion experts and refocus our attention on the supportive
structure of institutions (schools, carpools, neighborhoods, church, friendship-networks, etc.) that
accompanies their daily efforts to get things done, care for others, and balance their days. Just
like a constellation of workplace, mall, and television nourishes the market view of time
efficiency (Hochschild 2003), so too must other constellations symbiotically support these
cultural structures of time. Consequently, the questions we ask can go from ‘Why are rational-
instrumental time-orientations so powerful?’ to ‘What can we do to make specific time-use
cultures more accessible, well-supported options for day-to-day schedule configurations?’
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Perhaps herein lies a more practical path for combating and countering the rational-capitalistic
encroachment of non-work spheres that concerns us all.
Unfortunately, current understandings, opinions, and narratives make it extremely
difficult for this approach to resonate and take hold within the political landscape of means for
addressing the problem of busyness. Redesigning constellations of workplaces, schools, and
families to be more amendable to the time-management efforts of parents –for instance, through
changing school hours or offering different daycare options – is not desired as a solution by the
general public. Polls suggest that parents overwhelmingly see increasing “flexibility” of the
workplace as the most viable solution (Boushey and Williams 2010). As I discuss below,
“flexible” work hours and schedules do not publicly reconfigure institutional constellations.
Flexibility-as-solution-to-busyness just puts the onus on individual parents to confront the time-
dilemmas of busyness on their own. But contrast, redesigning the constellation of public
institutions in amendable ways shares the burden of coordination work with communities. My
dissertation suggests that making coordination work a visible, public presence – not an implicit,
private affair – is a sensible option for bettering the daily lives of contemporary families.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF FAMILY TIME
One of the harmful consequences of the problem of busyness that is most decried by
scholars and parents alike is the “hemorrhaging” of “family time.” It is widely understood that
calendars, schedules, and timetables from a variety of institutions lay claim on family members’
lives, taking precedence over “quality time” that they could be spending together, bonding and
making memories (Daly 2001c, 1996; Gillis 2001, 1996). It is also widely understood that one of
the goals that parents strive for when synchronizing schedules is to ensure at least some amount
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of “family time” within their busy days (Hochschild 1997; Roxburgh 2006). By paying close
attention to the cultural resources that parents use to actually carry out this schedule-
synchronization, a spatiotemporal coordination framework offers a better understanding of the
process of constructing “family time” in busy families. Among other things, this analytic
framework provides a view of how busy parents make time for “family time,” what that
challenge means to them, and where they situate these moments of togetherness in relation to the
wider range of activities that constitute their days.
Previous literature notes that family time is a residual commodity actively produced by
parents and orchestrated into schedules after the allocation of work commitments and social
activities (Daly 1996). While parents strive to produce family times that are spontaneous
memory-making experiences of togetherness, the constraining reality of everyday busyness
makes them feel dissatisfied and disillusioned with these moments of the day because they are
experienced as insufficient and conflict-ridden, and constructed solely for the benefit of children,
at the exclusion of parents’ needs (Daly 2001c). Sociological studies also note that family time
means different things for different families. Snyder (2007), for instance, finds three distinct
views of what middle-class parents consider to be quality time with their families: some parents
feel these moments of togetherness come about through planned family activities, others see
them as involving heart-to-heart conversations, and a third set of parents qualify all of the time
that they spend with their children while at home as quality time that strengthens family bonds.
Whether or not family time conforms to parents’ cultural ideals, relationship-building
moments of togetherness occur unintentionally at many points throughout the day, even in
everyday activities like household chores and errands (Kremer-Sadlik and Paugh 2007). Overall,
family research indicates that family time means different things and that parents produce it in
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different ways. But we still need a clearer understanding of how parents do this – assign meaning
to these moments and produce them through different means. A coordination framework and the
concept of time-use cultures provide analytic tools which offer a glimpse into the meanings and
means of family-time production.
As we saw in chapter 4, Mrs. F feels that supporting family members when they are
counting on that support is extremely important, whether it be something large like attending a
graduation or something more mundane like driving someone somewhere. Mrs. F effectively
deploys ideas about connectic concerns and reciprocative actions to interpret, talk about, and
coordinate activities which previous research identifies as quality moments of family time. Like
her, the other parents in this study often relied on the time-use culture of commitment when
seeking to reinforce the idea that “family is important.”
But the parents in this study also used the other ethics for that same purpose. Mrs. A, for
instance, tended to achieve schedules – observing external regulations in pursuit of outcomes –
so that the members of her family could have dinner together as often as possible: “we just try to
work it out around whatever the activities are that week.” In her case, “the constant looking at
the clock” is a pathway to family time; whereas for Mrs. F that pathway comes in the form of
modeling supportive behavior toward persons who constantly count on her to do things for them.
For Mrs. F the meaning and means of family time resonate with Snyder’s (2007) category of
parents who defined quality time with family as any time spent together, while for Mrs. A the
meaning and means of family time appear to more closely align with those of parents for whom
these relationship-building moments of togetherness come in the form of time specifically set
aside away from the hectic pace of work and school.
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How do parents configure schedules to produce family time? Which guidelines of proper
time-use guide their construction and interpretation of such moments of togetherness? Which
cultural resources do they draw from to qualify some times as relationship-building and memory-
making opportunities and other times as simply part of the humdrum of everyday life? When,
how, and for whom does an activity such as driving a child to an after-school event become
recognized as family time and when, how, and for whom does it not? Are there any socio-
structural patterns in the types of parents who tend to draw from one ethic as opposed to another
to construct family time?
The spatiotemporal coordination framework lends itself quite well to bridging the gap in
our understanding of how parents produce family time and what family time means to them.
With its meaning- and action-centered focus on micro-coordinations, this cultural framework
also offer a way to better understand where parents situate these moments of togetherness in
relation to the wider range of activities that constitute their days. Through the analytic lens of
coordination work, family times become practical compromises between abstract ideals and the
existing social supports and constraints of everyday life. As such, the relationship between time-
use cultures and coordination contexts illuminates the structure-culture interaction and that plays
a central role in the construction of family time and which is identified by contemporary family
scholarship as consequential in matters of dealing with busyness (Gerson 2009).
Focusing on the deployment of time-use cultures offers a view of the processes by which
people construct quality, “family time” amidst the uncertainties of everyday life. Identifying and
understanding socio-structural patterns in these processes of family-time construction provides
headway into the widespread project of figuring out how to rescue “family time” from the assault
of contemporary busyness.
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THE STALLED GENDER REVOLUTION
The close examination of the micro-politics of time between mothers and fathers that is
offered by the spatiotemporal coordination framework also improves our understanding of
gendered politics in family life (Daly 2001a). The transformation of gender responsibilities that
are seen in parents’ work-life decisions and dual-earner family structures are also enacted in the
day-to-day care-work of family life. Mothers’ and fathers’ negotiations of temporal obligations
evidence the daily challenge of attaining fair and equitable division of labor in the home.
Despite widespread narratives of egalitarianism between spouses (Coltrane 1996; Hertz
1986) and increased contributions to housework and childcare by fathers (Bianchi et al. 2006;
Coltrane 1996), women nevertheless continue to perform a much greater share of the work at
home than men (Bianchi et al. 2006; Cowan 1983; Hochschild 1989). Examining the cultural
resources that parents utilize to carry out “the new care work” (Arendell 2001) of managing and
monitoring family members’ time-use sheds light on the gendered exchanges of help and support
that take place in daily life (Bianchi and Milkie 2010). Focusing on the coordination work that
parents rely on to deal with the practical predicaments of ‘piecing together the day’ allows us to
better understand “the stall” in “the gender revolution” (Hochschild 1989).
As we saw in chapter 4, Mrs. E deploys the time-use culture of achievement to interpret,
talk about, and coordinate the “little juggling” that she does on a typical day, which includes,
among other things, going to the store, working out, and chauffeuring her children to and from
after-school activities. Mrs. E shared how she is the one who feels stressed by carpooling
responsibilities, she is the one who plans the pick-ups and drop-offs, and she is the one who
accommodates waiting for annoying coaches. Her husband, on the other hand, takes a back seat
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and gets told what to do and where to be: “Jeff will go to that. Jeff will go there and be there.” As
anticipated by previous family literature (Arendell 2001, Coltrane 1996), Mrs. E and the other
mothers in this study are the primary managers, coordinators, and executioners of schedules,
while their husbands take on a secondary role, silently negotiating the tasks assigned to them by
their wives.
The active role that mothers play planning and carrying out schedules, in conjunction
with the more passive role that fathers play as helpers in the execution of those schedules, is one
of the mechanisms that sustains the gendered pattern in families whereby women are held
responsible for a disproportionately greater share of hidden care-work responsibilities (Daly
2001b). A spatiotemporal coordination framework provides an opportunity to go deeper into the
real-time mechanisms that sustain this gendered pattern of inequality in families. For the most
part, the mothers in this study relied on the time-use culture of achievement to interpret and
perform their coordination work of planning, monitoring, and executing schedules: Their
concerns were mostly logistic and their activities were mostly impositive when carpooling,
chauffeuring, and, in general, crisscrossing the city.
During her after-school busyness, Mrs. E focuses on precise times, evokes specific
locations, and expresses a sense of powerlessness over unforeseen occurrences and the
vicissitudes of authority figures. Why do mothers, more than fathers, achieve schedules rather
than commit to them or balance them? Why do they overwhelmingly seem to focus on logistic
matters and to construe pick-ups and drop-offs as impositive when driving children throughout
town? More broadly, are there time-use cultures that parents tend to use consistently for certain
activities? Are these activity-ethic pairings at all gendered? Could it be that fathers and mothers
tend to consistently draw upon different time-use cultures to construe and carry out their
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respective afternoon chauffeuring duties – with fathers interpreting and experiencing these, for
instance, as relaxing times of the day that bring balance, while mothers perceive and live these
same moments as tasks to be accomplished and accurately monitored? If so, why? Which social
processes conspire to orient mothers’ reliance on one and fathers’ reliance on another set of
temporal guidelines? And how might gendered cultural patterns such as this serve to reinforce
gendered experiences of care-work in the family?
The micro-mechanisms of a “stalled” gender revolution are deeply ingrained in our social
and cultural fabric of everyday life. Perhaps parents deploy other cultural structures – like time-
use cultures – in conjunction with naturalistic assumptions about fundamental differences
regarding men’s and women’s organizational and multitasking abilities to arrive at gendered
patterns in the division of family labor. Paying close attention to the cultural resources circulated
by mothers and fathers to carry out gendered practices offers one pathway to “un-stall” the
skewed division of care work. Maybe addressing the cultural tools – such as time-use cultures –
that are used in these circumstances but that are not as closely tied to biology as are naturalized
gender assumptions would make the task of un-stalling easier. Bringing these cultural tools and
mechanisms into our analytic radar is certainly a research agenda worth pursuing.
Furthermore, recognizing that cultural resources such as time-use cultures have a life of
their own apart from gender relations yet also influence the concrete shape that gender ideologies
take in everyday life can provide useful research foci with which to develop alternative
theoretical perspectives that address limitations in current theories that cannot adequately explain
continued gendered strategies within a contemporary context of busyness (Bianchi et al. 2012).
Scholars and mothers express frustration over women’s and men’s mired roles in family life. A
spatiotemporal coordination framework is a beacon that lights the way toward a greater
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understanding – and a solution – to this deleterious aspect of the problem of busyness in
everyday life.
FAMILY-FRIENDLY FLEXIBILITY
Family research consistently demonstrates that effectively ameliorating the daily burden
of having to juggle intensive time-demands from the spheres of work and family requires public
social reform not personal time-management strategies (Bianchi et al. 2005; Schneider and Waite
2005). Family-friendly legislation and workplace policies are offered as one pathway to such a
broad-scale collective approach meant to help parents attain work-life balance (Schneider and
Keating 2010; Williams and Boushey 2010). These programs – which provide options for job
sharing, flextime, compressed weeks, and unpaid leaves, among others – essentially increase
workers’ control over their own hours of work. This is widely lauded as an antidote to the
problem of busyness: “The stress and pressures of work-family conflict are only likely to
increase unless more flexibility options are designed and implemented to meet the needs of
today’s working parents” (Schneider and Keating 2010: 10). Although offering the freedom
and flexibility to configure daily schedules that foster work-life balance, many working parents
surprisingly do not make use of these available aids (Hochschild 1997); and many of those who
do use them unfortunately continue to struggle arranging their daily activities in a way that is
conducive to their personal and family well-being (Cousins and Tang 2004; Schieman et al.
2009; Van der Lippe 2007).
One of the strongest reasons given for the futility of these public reform efforts and the
persistence of busyness in parents’ lives is their own resistance to reduce long work hours
because of several factors, including financial necessity (Schor 1991), a competitive workplace
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culture (Blair-Loy 2003), and the emotional and cognitive benefits conferred to them by work
(Schneider and Waite 2005). A spatiotemporal coordination framework grants a view of parents’
activity administration techniques that offers a complementary explanation for the persistence of
work-family temporal friction despite the availability of well-intentioned policies that try to
maximize work-life balance.
As this perspective demonstrates, the efficiency of parents’ practical scheduling tactics
signifies different worthwhile uses of time; for the parents themselves construe their efficient
acts of speeding up, planning ahead, multitasking, squeezing, and packing activities throughout
the day as convictions of achievement, commitment, and balance. Current family-friendly work-
life policies assume that parents invariably define these scheduling techniques as efforts to
control their use of time and opportunities to save it for presumably more meaningful family
time. Based on this limited understanding of parents’ coping strategies, public legislation and
workplace policies simply offer working parents the ability to control the design of their own
work-schedules. This, however, does not provide sufficient aid: It’s one thing to have the
freedom to configure flexible schedules, but it’s quite another to actually identify specific
schedule configurations as effective means for relieving time-pressure. What some parents may
perceive to be promising roads to maximal work-family balance and minimal work-family
conflict, others may interpret to be futile and ineffective techniques.
As the cases of Mrs. A, Mr. B, and Mrs. D demonstrate in chapter 5, parents continue to
face the practical challenge of administering the arrangement of their daily activities despite
enjoying work hours that make it possible for them to meet the time-demands of family
members. Getting off from work at convenient times that coincided with childcare and
239
chauffeuring needs was helpful, but these parents still felt time-pressured by the burden of
coordinating links to other institutions – like health-care, school, and leisure.
Additionally, these three parents interpreted in different ways their particular manner of
linking work, family, and these other institutions – not as optimal uses of available time-
amounts, but as achievements, commitments, and harmonies. Despite facing very similar time
pressures from work and family, each parent preferred a very different schedule arrangement;
and while each one of them viewed their own design as an effective strategy for chauffeuring
children from locations, all three of them avoided the other two parents’ coping strategies for
dealing with what basically amounts to identical temporal circumstances. What constituted an
effective way to relieve time-pressure for one parent was not identified as an effective technique
for juggling work and family by the other parents. A spatiotemporal coordination framework
highlights the significant culture work that parents must still perform once family-friendly
policies have already granted them relative control over the temporal boundaries between their
work and non-work lives (Osnowitz 2005; Schieman et al. 2009; Wight and Raley 2009).
In this way, a spatiotemporal coordination framework invites us to expand the horizon of
family-friendly policies beyond flexible work schedules, channels our well-intentioned public
reform efforts into new territory, and suggests a more comprehensive approach that is consistent
with the culture work that parents already perform. Such an approach would complement
current programs which already (insufficiently) help parents administer activities, negotiate the
time-pressures from competing time-demands, and cope with overall daily busyness. Such a
complementary approach must do this by facilitating parents’ deployment of their preferred time-
use cultures and concomitant schedule configurations.
240
For instance, to complement her work-life flexibility, Mrs. A – the mother who rushed
from work to pharmacy to school on a Friday afternoon – could have benefited from fixed
arrangements with the school and pharmacy so that picking up children and medication would
take place at pre-determined times, like appointments; and just like school allowed her to pick up
her own children after school without having to sign-in at the front office, so too could the
pharmacy offer a self-service system that allowed her to pick up the medication on her own,
without having to wait in line and socialize with the cashier. These accommodations would have
been consistent with her deployment of achievement principles and thereby facilitated running
her afternoon errands.
Similarly, Mr. B – the father who rushed from work to computer store to karate studio
before going home – would probably have found it easier to be considerate toward his wife and
son if the computer store and karate studio would have accommodated his use of a commitment
ethic. The computer store could have done this, for instance, by offering a web-page with the
technician’s phone number and the karate studio could have done this by requiring the periodic
attendance of parents during lessons. The latter would, of course, have to be in conjunction with
the provision of a flexible work schedule.
Finally, Mrs. D – the mother who mentally transitioned from work life to family life by
multitasking carpooling duties with her own pursuits for pleasure and leisure – could certainly
have benefited from the availability of a dog park near her home or the nearby presence of an
exercise center for adults, making it easier to get her restorative self-care prescribed by the time-
use culture of balance.
These kinds of family-friendly reforms would require the concerted accommodation of
more institutions than just the workplace; but such a supportive structure is precisely what it
241
would take to anchor parents’ deployment of their preferred time-use cultures, complementing
current workplace programs that already foster schedule flexibility. Why shouldn’t we seek
concerted, community-wide, inter-institutional efforts to help parents like those presented in this
dissertation with the facility to multi-task their child-chauffeuring duties in the manner that most
accommodates their individual needs and desires? Why shouldn’t we turn the work of
coordination into community projects of cross-situational, publically-available-yet-individually-
accommodating institution-constellations? Providing the shared conditions to deploy time-use
cultures in widely-shared, patterned, and desired ways would do just that; instead of keeping
coordination work as the challenging, private affair that it has become, and which flexible
workplace policies do little to transform.
Whatever the public policies, we cannot neglect the actual meaning that parents attribute
to their practical efforts of arranging activities and coordinating schedules. A spatiotemporal
coordination framework, with its focus on coordination work and the deployment of time-use
cultures, cautions us that public attempts to minimize work-life time-pressures would do well to
verify that the time-management techniques induced by well-intentioned policies are actually
seen as worthwhile and meaningful activity-administration pursuits by their intended
beneficiaries. Policy-makers could also investigate existing regulations regarding
institutionalized social exchanges – such as customer service and public facility usage – to
determine whether these inadvertently enshrine one temporal culture over others, and these
regulations should be changed to become more accommodating of the cultural pluralism that
parents evince in their daily coordination efforts.
In an important sense, the time-use cultures perspective lends support to the view that
United States society requires a broad-scale social and cultural re-evaluation of temporal values
242
– one that re-structures the multiple institutions involved in rendering time-and-space relations
difficult for different people (DeGraaf 2003; Hochschild 1997; Honore 2004; Lafargue 1989).
This dissertation suggests that the persistence of busyness among many families despite the
availability of workplace flexibility options stems from the absence of a cultural re-evaluation of
this magnitude, as well as from the lack of community-wide sharing of coordination work that
would stem from such a re-evaluation. It is only through these society-wide means that truly
family-friendly policies can come to be.
TIME-PRESSURE RELIEF
Finally, a spatiotemporal coordination framework allows sociologists to securely link the
private challenges that parents face coordinating drop-offs and pick-ups with the public issues of
institutional requirements and time demands. As this dissertation has proposed, negotiating
busyness in everyday life is a temporal interface between the micro time-management strategies
of families and the macro institutional demands of society. Exploring and understanding the
coordination work that it takes to deal with the daily limitations of insufficient time and
fragmented temporal domains equips researchers with valuable information that can be used to
design and implement effective institutional measures and policies that actually do help parents
comply with temporal commitments from work and other institutions while also permitting them
to remain attentive to the temporal needs of their families. Identifying the cultural resources that
parents rely on to pull off this daily feat is useful for developing work-life policies that relieve
daily time-pressures. Designing busyness-reducing policies around making these cultural
resources available and readily accessible to parents would help them balance work and family
commitments in ways which they themselves deem to be effective.
243
In chapter 6 we witnessed Mr. D deploy the time-use culture of balance to craft his vision
of daily balance, deploying guidelines of curatic concerns and divertive density to stay within his
comfort zone, do a little bit of everything, and keep things manageable. Key to his “well-
rounded approach” to daily scheduling is the availability of multiple resources – material and
cultural – which made it possible for his daughters to enroll and participate in ‘a little bit of
everything’, as well as for him to enjoy daily episodes when he too could care for his mental and
physical health by going surfing, bike-riding, or just staying in the house and reading for a little
bit:
After work when I have that down time between work and kids – I’ll sit in the
backyard, and play my guitar; read a book; do something…. I get that little one
hour slice after work every day; so, that’s good for me…. It’s when I get my
time, and it’s nice (Mr. D).
The curatic and divertive elements of balance that Mr. D and the other parents in this study
actively sought require a degree of freedom from material and temporal constraints that not
everyone enjoys. The families in this study were white, middle class suburban families in
southern California. Since a different set of families with a different set of cultural and social
circumstances framing their daily lives likely respond to a different set of structural constraints,
material supports, and financial resources (Edin and Lein 1997; Lareau 2003; Williams and
Boushey 2010), it is well worth examining the “ease of access” present in families’ lives to
deploy certain time-use cultures at different points throughout the day. The daily episodes that
parents recognize and experience as ‘balance’ should be promoted among a wide spectrum of
244
families, but it must be acknowledged that doing so requires attention to the interaction between
material and cultural resources that foster these health-promoting moments of health and
equilibrium.
Public policy efforts such as the workplace flexibility programs mentioned above
essentially increase working parents’ ability to control their own work hours and the design of
their own work schedules. But it’s one thing to freely configure flexible schedules and it’s quite
another to actually identify specific schedule configurations as effective means for “balance.”
What patterns exist in the configurations of activities that balance parents’ daily schedules? For
whom is a “well-rounded approach” that includes “a little bit of everything” readily available,
both culturally and structurally? How do material and cultural resources interact to foster these
healthy episodes of equilibrium? What can be done to help parents address their curatic
concerns and to participate in activities that are divertive? How can we facilitate such
circumstances?
The spatiotemporal coordination framework offers the possibility of comprehensive
work-life programs that are consistent with the coordination work that parents already perform
on a daily basis to carry out practical tasks of schedule-coordination and time-management.
Truly family-friendly measures like the ones discussed above could complement current
programs which offer parents’ relative control over their schedules. As my dissertation
proposes, parents require more than the freedom to balance their daily schedules; they also need
the material and cultural possibilities to balance those schedules – constellations of coordination
contexts, time-use cultures, and congealed institutional configurations that render it possible for
them to practically and meaningfully balance schedules when they need to and want to. The
spatiotemporal coordination framework explores the nexus between material and cultural
245
resources, and it thus equips policy-makers with complementary pathways to deal with the
contemporary problem of busyness – maximizing work-family balance and minimizing work-
family conflict.
Yes, as Mr. D so correctly recognized, “it’s nice” to coordinate balance into one’s life.
The spatiotemporal coordination framework can help sociologists make it “nice” for as many
families as possible.
FUTURE RESEARCH
Findings from this research have opened up a whole new set of questions about how
people coordinate themselves and others in time and space. I was able to identify three time-use
cultures that parents consistently deployed throughout their busy days to negotiate contemporary
busness. There may be more of these time-use cultures to find if we study other kinds of
families or other kinds of persons. Parents face different time-constraints and express different
time-ideals than non-parents (Jacobs and Gerson 2004). Perhaps they also rely on a different set
of time-use cultures. The social location of time-use cultures is certainly an important research
topic for future studies of contemporary busyness. The families in this study were white,
middle-class suburban families in southern California. It is entirely possible that a different set
of families – based on race, class position, and region of residence – reveals different time-use
cultures that are more common among them and more salient given the different set of cultural
and social circumstances that frame their daily lives (Lareau 2003).
This dissertation reveals the presence of multiple s that may be widely-used among
different families in everyday life. Future research should point out how and why parents switch
from one of these multiple time-use cultures to another, as well as whether families have one
246
main ethic that is most prevalent in their daily use – one that they tend to rely on the most.
Explorations of everyday busyness among families must also examine what happens when
families conflict over the deployment of multiple time-use cultures – like when a husband
schedules activities one way but his wife would rather it be done a different way. Research on
these intricacies of the deployment of time-use cultures can provide valuable insights into the
temporal tensions and disagreements that permeate everyday family life.
Finally, future research on daily busyness using a spatiotemporal coordination framework
should reveal insightful information about many of our public institutionalized exchanges that
we rarely stop to think about. Which coordination contexts and time-use cultures constitute the
temporal basis for these various social exchanges? Many of these might presuppose an ethic that
is not in line with what a lot of people would want. Store clerks with customers, pharmacists
with clients, city parks with community members, youth leagues, teams, and clubs with
participants’ parents, dog owners walking their dogs with other dog-walkers – all of these
institutionalized exchanges of time, emotions, attention, and investments and many more public
encounters like these necessarily operate partly on ideas about worthwhile and appropriate time-
use – as the examples presented in this article illustrate. Aligning the time-use cultures brought
into these exchanges by both sides of the relationship might go a long way to facilitate the well-
being of public life and the comfort of public institutionalized encounters.
CULTURES OF BUSYNESS
In conclusion, this dissertation, its empirical findings, and the insights that it generates all
highlight the merits of a meaning-sensitive and action-focused exploration of busy families’ day-
to-day activity-administration efforts. Although narratives of busy families permeate
247
contemporary United States society, social researchers still have plenty to understand about what
such busyness entails and how parents and children negotiate the plural cultures of busyness in
everyday life. Paying particular attention to the cultural processes and practical techniques
involved in family members’ coordination and arrangement of daily schedules brings us closer to
a greater, more comprehensive understanding of families and busyness at the beginning of the
21
st
century. As I have argued throughout, the meaning- and movement-sensitive spatiotemporal
coordination framework is a promising cultural-analytic step in that direction.
248
APPENDIX:
INTERVIEW SCHEDULE
Interview No.
Date:
Gender:
Race/Ethnicity:
1. What city do you live in?
2. What is your age?
3. What is the total number of people living in your household?
4. How many of these are children?
a) What are their ages?
5. What was the highest grade/year you completed in school?
6. What kind of business/industry do you work for? What is your occupation?
7. Do you work full time or part time?
8. What do you do in this job?
9. How do you get to work?
10. How long does it take you to get to work?
11. What are some of the household tasks primarily done by each family member?
12. How do you feel about this arrangement in division of tasks?
13. Do you hire anyone to help out with daily household tasks? Who? How often?
14. At what time do you usually have dinner?
249
15. What is your children’s daily/weekly schedule?
Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat Sun
16. How would you describe a good childhood?
17. How do you feel about the time you spend with your children?
18. What are some of the activities that you do when you are not working or doing things with
your children?
Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat Sun
19. How do you feel about spending your “free” time in this way? Would you prefer some other
arrangement?
20. To what extent have you made sacrifices in your personal leisure for the sake of your career
or job?
21. To what extent have you made sacrifices in your personal leisure for the sake of your
obligations to members of your family?
22. Please tell me about your day yesterday, beginning from when you woke up and ending when
you went to bed. Was this a good day?
23. We have been talking about your daily schedule and the schedules of your children. Can you
please tell me how you manage to do all of these activities? For example, how do you balance
work life and home life?
250
24. How/when do you personally use a(n)_____?
a) Airplane –
b) Train –
c) Boat –
d) Car –
e) Bike –
f) Telephone –
g) Cell phone –
h) Television –
i) Radio –
j) Computer –
j) CDs, DVDs, etc. –
k) i-pods –
l) Cameras –
m) Clock –
n) Watch –
o) Calendar –
p) Note pads –
q) Planning calendar/Activity organizer –
r) Diary/Journal –
25. Do you always, sometimes, or never feel rushed to do the things you have to do?
251
26. How often do you find yourself doing more than one thing at a time, such as talking on the
phone while cooking, reading while watching TV, etc.?
27. How do you feel about the amount of activities in which you are involved?
28. How successful do you feel at balancing your job obligations, your family tasks, and your
personal leisure?
29. What would a perfect day look like for you? How would it be organized?
30. I am now going to read you some broad philosophical phrases that have to do with time.
Please respond with the first thoughts that come into your mind when you hear these phrases.
Any answer is okay.
a) Time is money –
b) My time is valuable –
c) Family time is important to me –
d) Spending time on my own is important to me –
e) I try to save time whenever I can –
f) Doing nothing is a waste of time –
g) It is important to be on time –
h) I am a busy person –
i) I am usually in a hurry –
j) I try to organize my life –
k) I dislike waiting –
l) Time flies –
252
31. If you could draw a picture that represents time in your day-to-day life, what would that look
like? Can you please draw that here?
32. Is there anything else that you would like to add that we have not covered about the way in
which you spend your time and coordinate activities with the other members of your family?
253
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Despite a vibrant literature that explores the everyday busyness of American families, we still have much to learn about how families construe and carry out the practical work of managing time on a moment-by-moment basis. I analyze the time-management techniques of white middle-class families using qualitative data from over 900 hours of participant-observation in the lives of busy families and 45 semi-structured interviews with the members of those families. I argue that by focusing on the coordination of schedules we can recognize daily busyness not as a matter of greater or lesser amounts of time, but rather, as a matter of meaningfully performing the practical administration of activities in plural ways. The theoretical concept of “time-use cultures” is introduced here. A time-use culture of achievement prescribes getting things done as an appropriate use of time
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Creator
Rodriguez Cruz, Edson
(author)
Core Title
Families and time: coordinating daily busyness in middle class families
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Sociology
Publication Date
08/03/2015
Defense Date
06/23/2015
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busyness,culture,Family,OAI-PMH Harvest,time-management,time-use,work-life balance
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English
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Lichterman, Paul (
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), Casper, Lynne (
committee member
), Eliasoph, Nina (
committee member
), Sandholtz, Wayne (
committee member
)
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ecrodrig@usc.edu
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(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
busyness
time-management
time-use
work-life balance