Time bind is a concept introduced by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1997 with the publication of her The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. This concept refers to the blurring distinction between work and home social environments.
Hochschild found in her research that although most working parents, particularly all mothers, said "family comes first," few of them considered adjusting their long hours, even when their workplaces offered flextime, paternity leave, telework or other "family friendly" policies. Her conclusion is that the roles of home and work had reversed: work has become more attractive, offering a sense of belonging, while home had grown more stressful, becoming a dreaded place with too many demands.
Famous quotes containing the words time and/or bind:
“Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)