Hochschild, Arlie Russell : University of California, Berkeley

Arlie Russell Hochschild, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of The Center for Working Families, is the author of two New York Times Notable Books of the Year, The Second Shift and The Managed Heart. Her articles have appeared in Harper's, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today, among others. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, the writer Adam Hochschild.

�Truly subversive....Hochschild has exposed something that feels like an unacknowledged home truth, America's clean little secret: work, not even the substance of it but the buzzy surface feeling of office life, is for many a source of pleasure.

--The New York Times Book Review

Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Web Site, May, 2002

The national bestseller that put "work/family balance" in the headlines and on the White House agenda, with a new introduction by the author.

Newsweek called it "groundbreaking" and The New York Times said it was "truly subversive." When The Time Bind was first published in 1997, it was hailed as the decade's most influential study of our work/family crisis. In the short time since, the crisis has only become more acute.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, bestselling author of The Second Shift, spent three summers at a Fortune 500 company interviewing top executives, secretaries, factory hands, and others. What she found was startling: Though every mother and nearly every father said "family comes first," few of these working parents questioned their long hours or took the company up on chances for flextime, paternity leave, or other "family friendly" policies. Why not? It seems the roles of home and work had reversed: work was offering stimulation, guidance, and a sense of belonging, while home had become the place in which there was too much to do in too little time.

Today Hochschild's findings are more relevant than ever. As she shows in her new introduction, the borders between family and work have become even more permeable. With the Internet extending working hours at home and offices offering domestic enticements -- free snacks, soft music -- to keep employees later at their jobs, The Time Bind stands as an increasingly important warning about the way we live and work.