The Sociology Bind
Christopher Shannon
January 1, 1998
Seventy years ago, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd undertook the first major empirical study of the effects of industrialization on a small Midwestern town. Middletown, the classic study that resulted from this investigation, took as its central question "Why do they work so hard?" and concluded that people were driven to overwork themselves largely by a desire to acquire more money to spend on consumer goods. In The Time Bind, Arlie Russell Hochschild returns to this question (and the Midwest).
Hochschild spent three years studying six families employed by a large corporation, "Amerco," based in the town of "Spotted Deer" (all the names are fictional). Somewhat surprisingly, Hochschild discovered that, increasingly, people work hard not for money or prestige, but simply to avoid the problems and responsibilities of family life.
Hochschild certainly marshals enough evidence to support her thesis, and the book is fairly unobjectionable if you accept the conventions of sociological inquiry. Reading this book, however, only confirmed my own doubts about these conventions. The real question the book raises is not "Why do they work so hard?" but "Why does she work so hard?" Ultimately, the book reads less like a diagnosis of a social problem than a symptom of the problem of sociology.
Hochschild's brand of sociology is the modern secular heir to the Puritan tradition of self-scrutiny we have come to associate with the Protestant work ethic. Against the other-worldly devotionalism of Catholic piety, Puritanism's this-worldly asceticism sought to create an outward sign of inward grace through the progressive regimentation of daily life through work. Nineteenth-century Transcendentalists traded God for Nature, but still saw in work ...
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