ISER News
Busyness: a modern badge of honour
Long hours of paid work are associated with advantaged social positions in modern societies. This is a complete turnaround from a hundred years ago, when high social status was demonstrated by how much time people could spend on leisure pursuits.
A new study by Professor Jonathan Gershuny, director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) explores this historical reversal in the relationship between privileged social position and objective indicators of ‘busyness’.
Central to the argument is the growth in the importance of ‘human capital’ – accumulated skills directly marketable in the labour force – relative to the ownership of financial capital or other productive assets, in the determination of life chances.
Nowadays, the best-off are increasingly those with high human capital employed in paid jobs that are intrinsically as well as financially rewarding. At the same time, technical change and globalisation have made it increasingly difficult for those with low human capital to find any sort of paid work.
Professor Gershuny presents evidence for his view from three UK time diary studies – the BBC Audience Research Department ‘Viewer/Listener Availability Survey’ of 1961; an Economic and Social Research Council study in 1983/4; and an Office of National Statistics study in 2000/1 – each of which asked a representative sample of the population to record their activities continuously through the day.
These studies indicate busyness in two ways. The first relates to long hours in paid work. If we are busy in this sense, large parts of our normal days are taken up with the provision of goods and services for others in exchange for pay.
The second concerns the density of paid work taken together with both unpaid work and leisure time, reflecting such characteristics as the variety of different activities undertaken or how tightly packed our days are. The time diaries show that since 1961:
- Paid work has declined overall for both men and women, while an increase in unpaid work for men and a decrease for women leave the total of non-work time slightly increased for men and unchanged for women.
- Within this overall change, people with higher human capital have increased their paid work time relative to people with lower human capital.
- Paid work has become more concentrated into workdays and, particularly for people with higher human capital, workdays now have substantially less non-work time than they did 40 years ago.
- There has been a small increase in the intensity of people’s activities on workdays. Since employed men are increasing their contributions to unpaid work while employed women are increasingly likely to have relatively higher levels of housework responsibility, both groups have greater paid and unpaid work responsibilities on a workday.
- Overall, it seems evident that the negative relationship of a hundred years ago between social status (as indicated by human capital) and work time has been reversed: high human capital is now associated with longer hours of work.
Gershuny concludes that the well-documented and cross-nationally consistent growth in expressions of ‘feeling busy’ through the last part of the twentieth century may be explained not just by the growth of a new busy group but also by the proposition that the assertion of ‘busyness’ now reflects an aspiration to high social status.
He also notes that the substance of what passed for the leisure of the privileged class in the late nineteenth century and what constitutes the paid work of some of the best paid people in the early twenty-first century are not markedly dissimilar.
A Victorian gentleman might have spent his days playing various games or sports, as a politician or administering charities, overseeing the running of his estates or taking an interest in the management of his investments, or organising the good works of a charitable institution. His sons might have been encouraged to spend some time in a fashionable regiment or contribute to the development of the arts or sciences.
Progressively through the twentieth century, these previously ‘amateur’ activities came to be undertaken not for love but for money. Now, placed among the best paid occupations for women and men in western societies are just those sports, politics, business, civil management, armed services, academic and arts activities that formed the unpaid vocations of the leisured Victorian gentleman.
Notes
‘Busyness as a Badge of Honour’ by Jonathan Gershuny is published in the Autumn 2005 issue of the newsletter of the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER). The article summarises Busyness as the Badge of Honour for the New Superordinate Working Class, ISER Working Paper 2005-09.