Editor’s Introduction

Arien Mack Editor’s Introduction THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH WAS OCCASIONED BY AN ALL tOO familiar and equally banal exchange with a colleague right before a meeting we both were attending. Just to be polite, I asked him how he was. Not surprisingly, he answered, “Busy, aren’t we all?” He then went on to say, “Why not do an issue on Busyness?” and hence this issue was bom. Many of us seem to feel that our lives are overtaken by busyness. We seem never to have enough time, and we lament it. Has this always been so or has something changed? Ifchanged, when did it change, and how universal a condition is it? If this is a relatively new phenomenon, what are the factors that contributed to its occurrence? Any exploration o f this subject must begin by asking what, precisely, we mean by “busyness”—how it differs from drudgeiy and hard work, such as manual labor, for example. How do work, labor, and busyness relate to each other, and where does leisure fit in? Has the appearance of being busy replaced the importance of conspicuous leisure as a sign o f power? Can our sense ofbeing too busy be attributed, at least in part, to the over-scheduling even of our “leisure tim e”—the gym, the therapist, the class, and so on. Even the lives of our middleclass children seem over-scheduled in much the same way, which then makes their parents, especially their mothers, even busier. Of course, there must be economic, social, cultural, and even scientific dimensions to busyness. Is busyness evenly or unevenly distributed between men and women, between classes (white collar vs. blue collar workers, the wealthy vs. the poor), between developed and social research Voi 72 : No 2 : Summer 2005 v developing countries, between different societies within the developed world? Technology is often cited as having contributed to an “explosion of busyness.” What is the relationship between technological change and busyness—the effect, for example, of household appliances or the way new technologies multiply the continuous flow of interactions (multitasking), providing a constant stream of new information and thus opening new opportunities for ever-more intense time commit­ ments? A related question is how conceptions and perceptions of time have changed as a result ofthis. That is, what is the connection between busyness and how we conceive of time in the twenty-first century? Is there a correlation between Westerners’ attraction to eastern religions or “spiritual”movements and busyness? How did we turn some of the wisdom of the East—about the value of quietude and meditation, for example—from an opponent of busyness into an instrument that serves it (allowing people to “recharge their batteries,” so to speak)? The authors in the papers that follow address some o f these and many of the other questions that can be asked about busyness. Together, they provide compelling observations and data about why we seem to think we are always too busy. I hope you are not too busy to read them. Arien Mack Editor vi social research ...