Sociology

In The Time Bind, Hochschild studied how couples working at a Fortune 500 company fared in their efforts to extend family time. According to Hochschild, given the lack of family time, absence of community and family support, and a strong work culture, working parents felt the pull of cultural magnets in the opposite direction. Hochschild found that a significant number of working couples find competence and security not at home but at work. Their values pulled them in one direction, while cultural magnets pulled them in another. Now, working parents deal with this contradiction by deploying a number of strategies. One is called the strategy of emotional asceticism or the curtailment of emotional needs. Another strategy was to allow personal needs and hire others to meet them. The third strategy was to develop a potential self  an ideal image of oneself. Hochschild argued that these strategies are means to absorb the emotional strains of a stalled revolution, without altering the conditions which caused those strains. It is synonymous to patching strategies.

The traditional work-home divide has been modified to suit this new phenomenon. The boundary between work and home had been blurred. As such, the traditional notion of work and home had to be abruptly changed. Home was not only an emotional center stage it also became an avenue of productivity. Work was not only an avenue for value-reproduction it also became a motif of personal experiences. Indeed, as Hochschild noted Work becomes home and home becomes work. Working couples found emotional support at work and at the same time, productivity at home.

However, the traditional definition of home is still applicable in many cases. Note that Hochschilds study is limited to a particular culture. In some cultures, the traditional distinction between work and home still holds. As such, the spectral differences between home and work are magnified rather than their similarities.

What are the consequences of these changes on families First, working couples hire others to provide emotional and physical support to their offspring. Offspring are in a sense emotional detached from their parents. Second, working couples find emotional and financial support not from home but from work. Hence, there is a renewed focus on the productive capacity of work. Lastly, it is often impossible to properly delineate what activities are exclusive at home and those at work. Children often view working parents as hasty individuals, incapable of perceiving their viewpoint.

Parents who preferred to spend time at work to avoid spouses who would not share in maintaining a family are likely to experience constant conflict with children who protest their devotion to work. Parents therefore felt that they had to make up for their absence by using the little available time when people were at home. Thus, family life was increasingly reduced into small pockets of emotional care. Since women carry most of the burden of family life, they are most likely to experience what Hochschild called time bind.