The changing conceptions of time in the social scheme of daily life: a work-life balance approach

ABSTRACT

Analysing widespread feelings of time squeeze in Spanish contemporary society, this article offers an innovative relational approach that considers daily life as the structuring of work, care and personal life on the basis of family life, and framed in asymmetrical gender relations. The authors argue that the phenomena that most affect an individual’s perception of time squeeze are not the stressful changes of paid work, unpaid work or personal life, but their concurrence and impact on work-life balance, and how they are differentially experienced, managed and perceived by men and women in their daily family life.

KEYWORDS:

• Work-life balance
• daily life
• time squeeze
• gender relations
• qualitative methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The study of everyday life has a long tradition in the history of sociology. Among the authors who have placed this concept and its reality at the centre of their approach to the analysis and understanding of social life are Lefebvre (1984) and Erving Goffman and Agnes Heller (Prieto, 2015). In contrast with these authors, this paper defends a conception of daily life that, apart from defining it, facilitates its investigation.

2 Thus, we concur with Losoncz and Bortolotto (2009) in that role preferences and identification with family and work roles must be simultaneously considered to analyse the work-life spillovers on the part of women, and also with Glucksmann (1995, p. 68) when she affirms: ‘in addition to the internal organization of each (work and care), there would be also a structure to the relation between them. What occurs in one is affected by and in turn affects the other so that they are interdependent. The concept of TSOL (total social organization of labour) thus restricts the possibility of there being an autonomous sphere of production, or single “motor force” or causal determinant, all spheres interacting with each other’.

3 In Spain, the replacement of the generation currently aged between 55 and 65 years old (the parents of our interviewees) by the one now aged between 30 and 40 years old (our interviewees) coincided with the cultural changes that accompanied the democratic transition. The fathers and mothers of our interviewees reached the age of forming a family in a cultural context in which the Francoist ideology about the family, based on a clear division of gender roles, still had a strong public presence and hold. Our interviewees, on the contrary, were born during the phase of democratic transition and consolidation and their youth coincided with the expansion of feminism in Spain. This enabled, especially women, to have a new educational, work and family trajectory, which led to very intense social transformations in a very short period of time. Among these transformations is the breaking of the previous ‘familist’ pattern that kept a considerable number of women in the home. This rupture becomes particularly evident if one observes the evolution of activity rates among married women at the age when they are usually mothers: as is evidenced in the Spanish Labour Force Survey, if thirty years ago, it was normal for married women between 30 and 39 to stay in the private, domestic sphere (with a 30% activity rate), nowadays the opposite is the norm (in 2019 the activity rate for these women is around 80%).

4 The normative model of intensive parenting has been identified by different researchers (Hays, 1996; Jacobs & Gerson, 2001; Nockolds, 2016; Wajcman, 2015) as being a contributing factor to the perception of time squeeze.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain [grant number CSO201458378-R] and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [grant number CSO2010–19450].