Busyness as the Badge of Honor for the New Superordinate Working Class

Jonathan Gershuny Busyness as the Badge of Honor for the New Superordinate Working Class 1. ON THE RATING OF A SUBJECTIVE STATE “BUSYNESS” PLAINLY RELATES TO EXTERNALLY OBSERVABLE WORK OR leisure activities, but the state itself is entirely subjective. I will argue in what follows that there may have been fundamental changes in the connection between the external circumstances of work and leisure and internal feelings of “busyness.” Through the last century funda­ mental shifts have occurred in the relationship between the pattern of daily activities and patterns o f societal sub- and superordination. “Are you busy?” addressed to an upwardly mobile member of the Victorian English orAmerican middle classes may have had a quite different mean­ ing than when asked of an office worker at the turn of the third millen­ nium. Individuals’ representations of their states of “busyness” play an important and changing role in establishing their positions in the order of social stratification. A leisure class (and hence I presume not busy) at the end of the nineteenth century perhaps, but the dominant groups in the early twenty-first are in the most straightforward sense of the word, workers. Iwill suggest that the social construction of “busyness,” reflect­ ing this fundamental shift in social structure, has also changed. The problem addressed in this paper is a paradox. There is a welldocumented , cross-nationally consistent historical growth of busy feel­ social research Vol 72 : No 2 : Summer 2005 287 ings through the last part o fthe twentieth centuiy. But there is an equally well-documented, long-term, and very substantial growth in leisure time in nearly eveiy countiy for which we have appropriate evidence. Three general approaches explain this apparent contradiction. The first relates to the observable changes in the allocation o ftime between work and leisure. It may be that although average work time is declining, the work time (and hence feelings o f “busyness”) of specific groups of people are moving differentially so as to produce particular groups that are particularly susceptible to busy feelings. Jacobs and Gerson (2004:123) point to “the increasing time pressures facing dual earner couples, single mothers, employed parents” among others as explaining the increase in “tim e squeeze” perceptions. Similarly, Bittman (2004:154-157), entirely accepting the long-term cross-national trend of increase in leisure time, points to the polarization between household-level unemployment on one side, and dual-career couple households on the other, and identifies the growing size of the latter group as the reason for the ready and initially uncritical acceptance of Schor’s original (1991) overworked American thesis. Bittman’s particu­ larly helpful contribution, which forms the background to this paper, is his combination o f evidence of change in the aggregate of both paid and unpaid work within multiple job parent households as the key issue. Undoubtedly, taking this broad view o f work, and despite the overall growth in leisure time, a growing number o f households face a time squeeze. The second approach, from Linder (1970), is that feelings o f rush­ ing or “busyness” may relate not to work but to changes in the density of leisure. I discuss this line o f argument in the next section. A third approach to the resolution of the paradox, entirely consis­ tent with the forgoing, involves not the externally observable evidence of historical changes in work and leisure time, but a change in the way feelings of “busyness” are constructed out of these. In the discussion that follows, I first address some theoretical approaches that contribute to an understanding ofthis change, and then consider some evidence on the externally observable behavior that might be expected to underlie 288 social research the subjective rating of the phenomenon. What emerges is the hypoth­ esis that the growth in busy feelings may in part reflect an increasingly positive view of “busyness” that results from its association with the increasingly busy lifestyle o f the most privileged groups in developed societies. The brief empirical part of this paper is suggestive rather than conclusive, but it does provide a new perspective on the paradox that merits further investigation. For the moment I w ill leave “busyness” undefined, caged...