Book dossier

The Time Bind

by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Mechtild Oechsle

In her remarkable new book, The Time Bind, Arlie Hochschild brings us startling news of the ways in which home is being invaded by the time pressures and efficiencies of work, while the workplace is, for many parents, being transformed into a strange kind of surrogate home. For three years at a Fortune 500 company, she interviewed everyone from top executives to factory hands, sat in on business meetings, followed sales teams onto golf courses, and trailed working parents and their children through their days. In a series of vivid portraits, Hochschild paints a surprising picture of couples as time thieves, children as emotional bill-collectors, spouses as efficiency experts, parents who feel like helpful mothers and fathers mainly to their workmates, and women who - like generations of men before them - flee the pressures of home for the relief of work. Hochschild's groundbreaking study exposes our crunch-time world and reveals how, after the first shift at work and the second at home, comes the third, and hardest, shift of repairing the damage created by the first two.