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

1. Cross-national Comparisons of change in the Structure of Everyday Life: Evidence from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) Jonathan Gershuny Centre for Time Use Research Department of Sociology, University of Oxford

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

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

4. Academic motivation 1 • Veblen 1908 “the leisure class” • Dumazadier 1960 “the leisure society” • Linder 1970 “harried leisure class” • Vanek 1974, “counterintuitive technology” • Meissner et al 1975, “dual burden” • Schor 1990 “overworked American” • Robinson and Godbey 1999 “notoverworked”.

5. Academic motivation 1 • Marx 1866: exploitation rate=timedominance • Veblen 1908 “the leisure class” • Dumazadier 1960 “the leisure society” • Linder 1970 “harried leisure class” • Vanek 1974, “counterintuitive technology” • Meissner et al 1975, “dual burden” • Schor 1990 “overworked American” • Robinson and Godbey 1999 “notoverworked”.

6. Academic motivation 2 • Jacobs and Gerson 2004 “Time Divide”: Changing balance of paid, unpaid work, leisure:  gendered differences in human capital  work-rich time-poor / time-rich work-poor • life-course effects eg fertility strikes • Esping Andersen 1999 “Social Foundations” Post-industrial welfare, childcare, etc. regimes: • Outcomes reflect choices within households • Household choices reflect regime provisions

7. CTUR investigations: • More inclusive national accounts, of production in and out of “the economy”. • Modelling diverse interests: Who does what? Who gets what? • Cross-national and historical differences and similarities in activity patterns. • Explanations of these in terms of history, culture, technology and public regulation.

8. CTUR investigations: • More inclusive national accounts, of production in and out of “the economy” • Modelling diverse interests: Who does what? Who gets what? • Cross-national and historical differences and similarities in activity patterns. • Explanations of these in terms of history, culture, technology and public regulation.

9. A Time-use Diary (HETUS)

10. Large scale time diary collections • Strumilin 1921 • Sorokin and Berger 1937 • BBC Audience Research 1938—1975 • Szalai Multinational Study 1965 • Harmonised European Time Use Study 1998-2003 (“HETUS”) • American Time Use Study 2003– (CPS) • Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS)

11. Multinational Time Use Study

12. Evolution of MTUS • WORLD5.0 (2000) • Represents populations aged 20-60 • 40 aggregated time-use activity categories • 15 socio-demographic classifiers • WORLD5.5 (2007) • Represents full age range (above 10) • 40 aggregated time-use activity categories • 30 socio-demographic classifiers • WORLD6.0 (now under discussion) • Revised (more detailed) activity classification • full activity sequence data

20. The importance of gender d.o.l. • Gendered work specialisation within households not inherently inequitable if: • Consumption fairly shared within households • Household membership persists throughout life-course. • But human capital formation uniquely associated with participation in paid work. • Hence growing family instability must be associated with reduction in gendering of unpaid work.

28. Veblen: Theory of the Leisure Class • Leisure as the “badge of honour” • “Conspicuous leisure” denoting superordinate social status. • “imperative…the requirement of abstention from productive work.” (p36) • The principle of emulation: • Each rank of society seeks to emulate the pattern of life of that rank immediately above it in terms of prestige. • Empirical implication: • positive leisure/status gradient

35. The superordinate working class • The centrality of knowledge in post-industrial society (Daniel Bell 1975) • “knowledge elites” and the “technocracy” • Post-materialism…. or Gordon Gecko? • Economic primacy of human capital • Population ageing  hum cap formation as key means of intergenerational status transmission • Income from human capital during working life, from wealth in retirement. • Highest incomes from work not wealth. • work as the new “badge of honour”

36. The Leisure Paradox. • Staffan Linder harrying the leisured: • Rational to equalise marginal returns on different sorts of time, but this implies that… • …productivity growth must be matched by growth in intensity of consumption. • Time-use Keynesianism: • Need to redistribute time available for consumption, since… • more leisure (for some) means more work (for others).

37. Time, Interests, Social Structure • New conflicts of interest: • Between men and women. • Between young and old. • Between human capital-rich and human capital-poor (meritocracy vs citizenship). • Fought out in the arena of the society’s Great Day, the 24 hours that represent the one irresolvable social scarcity.

39. Some time-use references. • A Szalai The Use of Time, The Hague: Mouton 1974. • J Vanek ‘Housework still takes time’ Scientific American,231, 1974 pp. 116–120. • M Meissner, EW Humpreys, SM Meis and WJ Scheu, ‘No Exit for Wives: sexual division of labour and the cumulation of household demands’ Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 12, 1975, pp 424-39. • J Schor, The Overworked American: the unexpected decline of leisure, New York: Basic Books. • J Robinson and J Godbey Time for Life:the surprising ways Americans use time 1999 • J Gershuny, Changing Times: work and leisure in post-industrial society, Oxford University Press 2000. • J Jacobs and K Gerson 2004 The Time Divide: work, family and gender inequality. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.