Page 85 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

76 Cultural change and ordinary life

majority of men’s work is certainly paid work . . . And generally the total
balances of work versus leisure, for men and women, in any country at
any point in history, are approximately the same. But over time the
balances change. The women come to do absolutely more paid, and
absolutely less unpaid work. The men do generally less paid and increase
their unpaid. So the trends for the sexes, are clearly convergent.
(Gershuny 2000: 5–6)

Finally, there is a convergence with respect to status, but with a more complex
set of processes behind it that interact to produce the trend. To summarize the
position:

There is thus overall convergence in time use between the groups, with
more leisure time overall. But an alternative summary of the changes
is: a reversal of the previous status–leisure gradient. Those of higher status
previously had more leisure, and subsequently had less of it, than those
of lower social status.
(Gershuny 2000: 7)
These are significant trends as a broad picture of what is going on in the
patterns of time use in ordinary life. However, there are other important fea-
tures to which Gershuny draws our attention. The first of these is the signifi-
cance of the micro-differences in modern ordinary life. Thus, as he points out
while there are long-run trends and convergences, there may be specific differ-
ences and some of the specific differences around consumption practices are
potentially important for the overall argument of this book. Thus, if the time
available for different forms of consumption is increasing, as the proportion of
time spent on work decreases, then arguments about how that leisure time is
spent become of increased social and cultural significance. As Gershuny says
there are ‘multiple cross-cutting cleavages in leisure’ (p. 32). This he suggests
can, in one sense, be seen as support for some postmodernist arguments: ‘what
we find is to some extent consistent with writings of the “post-modernist”
school: diversifications of consumption styles, the absence of a “leading social
class”’ (p. 42) (see also the discussion of postmodernism and the omnivore
thesis in Chapter 8). Gershuny distinguishes his argument from that of the
postmodernists, as he wishes to retain an emphasis on ‘modernization as a
continuing theme in developed societies’ (p. 42). This is a point that I agree
with and I have used the work of Lipovetsky and ideas of hypermodernization
earlier in the book to offer some measure of theorization of the processes
involved. Thus, we have an argument that places some degree of emphasis
on leisure and consumption, and, even more importantly, that the modes
of differentiation that occur in this sphere are of some social and cultural
significance.
A second key theme to which Gershuny draws our attention is the rela-
tionship between the detailed use of time across the days of ordinary life, the
processes of the life course and the long-run processes. Thus, we can consider
patterns of time use across the day and this will enable us to consider the
‘significance of the mundane’ (Gershuny 2000: 18) in ways that chime with my
emphases on the detail of the processes of ordinary life. Thus, for example, we