The Rhythm Of Everyday Life

How Soviet And American Citizens Use Time

John Robinson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367295509
• eBook ISBN: 9781000305159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book describes an important advance in international social science research—the first cooperative survey of representative samples of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It identifies changes in the time-use patterns of both cities during the last two decades.

1
Background

This volume presents the first results from a pioneering Soviet-American research project in the social sciences. A jointly administered methodology was developed for the project to examine both general and specific aspects of the use of time by the employed and non-employed populations in two cities: Pskov in the Soviet Union, and Jackson, Michigan, in the United States.

Our study identifies changes in the time-use patterns of both cities during the last two decades. In 1965, the same two cities were part of the Multinational Time-Budget Research Project, which included twelve socialist and capitalist countries. That project was the first social science venture in which capitalist and socialist countries took part (Szalai 1966). This new Soviet-American study built upon the experience gained in the earlier study and provided an ideal opportunity to see how several aspects of daily life had changed over the last two decades.

This study, however, moved well beyond simply documenting quantitatively how life had changed over the years. Indeed, it includes more than 600 other questions on descriptive aspects of daily life—how frequently did respondents engage in various activities beyond their single diary day, what levels of skills did respondents have to engage in various activities, what household technology did they have available, how did they feel about engaging in certain activities and what levels of satisfaction did they derive from these activities? The study went beyond the quantitative accounts of how much time was spent on activities to ask respondents various questions about the meaning of these activities in their daily lives.

The specific questions and hypotheses addressed are detailed later in this chapter and in Chapter 2. The study results are described in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 and are summarized in Chapter 7.

Let us first turn to some general background description and conceptualization of the central study variable—time—for social science research. Time is one of society’s most basic and most equitably distributed resources. Each of us has 168 hours each week, or 8,760 hours each year, to spend as we see fit. The activities we choose to engage in during that time reveal a great deal about our underlying motives, values and attitudes.

The variable of time also provides useful methodological properties for studying human behavior. It can be measured readily; moreover, it can be measured in basic units (minutes, hours, etc.) which are universally familiar. Societal life revolves around time schedules that both coordinate activities and order our daily lives. As Zerubavel (1981: p. 141) notes, “Time functions as one of the major dimensions of social organization along which involvement, commitment and accessibility are defined and regulated in modern society.”

Time-based indicators are already familiar in social and economic accounts. Government and commercial agencies in different countries regularly collect and review data on the length of the workweek, hours of television viewed per day, time spent commuting to work, hospital-days of illness, and time spent on volunteer activities, among others. However, these official data are subject to several sources of distortion and ambiguity, as will be discussed shortly.

Time-use data can also function as an important zero-sum criterion for assessing processes of social change. If time spent on one activity increases (e.g., television), time spent on some other activity must decrease (e.g., radio, movies). As people move from one stage in the life cycle to another (e.g., parenthood, retirement), time-use data provide a direct measure of the impact of that change in behavioral terms. In much the same way, aggregate changes in how people spend time across historical periods can reveal fundamental changes in the character of daily life.

Time-use studies, therefore, provide expenditure data to test a wide variety of hypotheses about trade-offs and trends of daily life in society. Similar data are now being collected in more than twenty countries around the world to study trends in daily activities on several topics of long-range scholarly and policy interest—such as the informal economy, broadcast and print media usage, the “information society,” the changing division of household labor, changing patterns of transportation and the increased diversity of leisure. While most of these issues can be addressed properly only with very large and intricately-designed time-diary studies, even modest time-diary data can indicate the plausibility of many of the contentions that are raised.

USSR Interests in Time Use Research

In Soviet research, time is conceived of as the medium through which the implementation of all human activity, both economically productive and non-productive, takes place. Time must be divided up to encompass the needs of a society as a whole and the needs of each family and its members. People’s needs, and correspondingly the amount of time needed for satisfaction of those needs, change with the development of the society. Since the 168 hours available for use remains unchanged each week, changes that occur must occur within this structure.

The need for time is an objective, continual human phenomenon. That need conditions how time is converted into the various non-material forms of wealth in a society; how it is used by the people who live in that society. Sufficient time is needed for the satisfaction of daily, physiological, educational, and leisure needs, and for participation in public life. Like other forms of wealth, time is used and distributed by various classes and social groups for the satisfaction of their needs.

Social structure naturally places a significant stamp on how time is used. In the Soviet view, socialist society strives for an equitable distribution of time among classes and social groups to guarantee its rational use. It sees itself as a unique society in history, one that treats all time, both working and non-working, as the property of society as a whole.

Time is not only a form of wealth, but a measure of activity as well. While Soviet sociologists realize that Karl Marx considered working time as a measure of labor, various forms of non-working time are, to the same extent, measures of other forms of human life activity. As a measure of activity, time essentially acts as an index of its effectiveness. Thus, the expenditure of working time is an objective index of the effectiveness of labor and serves to define its productivity. In the same way, the time the population spends shopping becomes an index of the effectiveness of a society’s trade network or marketing system. The control by society of proper distribution and use of time by various social groups in the population has become an important social concern. This task is especially urgent in the USSR’s current period of accelerating socio-economic development.

It is important to remember that the first study of the use of time by various social groups in the world was the one undertaken in the USSR in the 1920s. During the 1920s and 1930s, and then in the 1950s and 1960s, significant research experience was gained on how to conduct such studies. Time budgets of various social groups were studied and certain ways for improving time use became understood. By the beginning of the 1960s; a number of other socialist countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, etc.) had also begun to undertake time-budget studies.

However, these were still local studies. Although enormous bodies of factual data were amassed, they were collected by different techniques, at different periods in time and with different scientific or policy goals. That made comparison of data most difficult. There arose an obvious need to conduct a cross-national comparative study of time budgets. Under the leadership of the Hungarian sociologist Alexander Szalai (1972), a joint 1965–66 multinational study was conducted of urban communities in twelve socialist and capitalist countries, including the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States. Data collections and coding methods developed largely on the basis of the Soviet research experience in conducting time-budget studies were employed in the project.

Three basic aims were envisaged in this earlier program of cross-national research:

• the measurement of the distribution of types of daily activity and the influence of industrialization and urbanization on these ways of life in the urban population;
• the development and testing of a technique of comparative international study of time budgets of the urban population, applicable for various countries; and,
• the promotion of expanded international collaboration in the study of time use.

In the USSR, the city of Pskov was chosen as the target community. This was done in accordance with the following criteria established by the multinational project:

1. It should be a small, independent industrial city (not a suburb), with at least 30 percent of its able-bodied population employed in local industries. Various branches of the economy should be represented, with not more than 25 percent of the workforce involved in the agricultural sector, and not more than 5 percent who work outside the territory of the city.
2. The city’s population should range between 30,000 to 280,000 people.
3. The boundaries of the city should also include suburban settlements, whereby about 5 percent of these suburbanites commuted to work in the city.¹

The first time-budget survey of the Pskov population was conducted in October and November of 1965. As part of an international research project Soviet sociologists discovered both regularities and peculiarities in the use of time by Pskov residents in comparison to the urban populations of various other countries. The data also suggested various influences and processes of industrialization and urbanization. These conclusions and results of the 1965–66 data are reflected in many publications.²

Several socio-economic processes have affected life in the USSR since 1965. There has been further industrial development, an increase in the population of cities, continued growth in the education and well-being of the population, and new developments in consumer services. These have naturally resulted in certain changes in people’s way of life and use of time. The need to describe the changes tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Maps
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Background
• 2 Survey Methodology
• 3 Demographic and Personal Characteristics
• 4 Time Use Patterns in Pskov and in Jackson
• 5 Historical Trends: 1965–1986
• 6 Subjective Aspects of Daily Life
• 7 Summary and Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index