Time Scarcity: Work, Home and Personal Lives

Abstract

This chapter examines the empirical evidence that seeks to reveal whether changes in the amount of time devoted to paid and unpaid work, consumption and leisure, and personal relationships reveal any substantive grounds for time scarcity. It demonstrates that, at best, a focus on more or less activities is inconclusive because no simple correlation between the performance of activities and objective time can be determined, and that on balance the evidence provides little support for the notion that contemporary lives are more time-scarce than were the everyday lives of people in the past. Treating and measuring time allocation across different activities as a matter for individuals are also problematized. This chapter reveals how time allocation is exchanged and negotiated across households, networks of friends and family, social groups and institutions. Measuring changing distributions of the time allocated to everyday activities is rarely a simple calculation of individual time use. Finally, the chapter considers how activities have changed such that comparing time allocations for activities across two or more periods of time fail to recognize shifting expectations and standards of appropriate activity accomplishment.