Michael G Flaherty

Lucas Seipp-Williams

Sociotemporal Rhythms in E-mail A case study

Keywords: mail, sociotemporal rhythms, temporality, time

This study examines sociotemporal rhythms in the volume of e-mail. E-mail is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but we hypothesize that there are non-random patterns in the temporal flow of e-mail. We counted the total number of e-mail messages received per hour by any address at our college for more than eight months. Non-random patterns emerged in our data. The volume of e-mail per hour is above average during traditional working hours and below average during the early morning and evening hours. Also, there are significant differences in the mean number of messages per hour/per day.

Introduction

The discovery of sociotemporal rhythms figured prominently in the origins of sociology. Durkheim (1897Durkheim ( /1951: 108-18) : 108-18) found seasonal, monthly, daily, and hourly variations in his study of suicide. Later, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim (1915Durkheim ( /1965: 23) : 23) established the sociology of time in more explicit fashion: 'a calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularity. ' Sorokin and Merton (1937: 620) elaborated on Durkheim's work by noting that 'systems of time reckoning reflect the social activities of the group.' Unlike astronomical time, social time is not purely uniform and quantitative, but is characterized by qualitative differences, such as anniversaries and other celebrations. Moreover, Sorokin and Merton point out that calendars often reflect the underlying periodicities in various means of production: 'periodic rest days seem to be unknown among migratory hunting and fishing peoples or among nomadic pastoral tribes, although they are frequently observed by primitive agriculturists ' (p. 620). By the same token, however, technological transformation can modify sociotemporal rhythms and systems of time reckoning. A famous example is the standardization of time in response to the development of the railroad and telegraph systems [START_REF] Cottrell | Of Time and the Railroader[END_REF]Zerubavel, 1982a). [START_REF] Engel-Frisch | Some Neglected Temporal Aspects of Human Ecology[END_REF] advanced our understanding of the relationship between time and technology by distinguishing three temporal aspects of human ecology: rhythm (the times at which people do things), timing (the synchronization of these rhythms), and tempo (the number of activities per unit of time). But 20 years passed before Moore (1963a) rekindled interest in the temporal structure, of organizations. Given that '[m]ost people concentrate their waking activities during "the daylight hours", he concludes that sleep 'represents an apparently biologically necessary but still socially significant segregation of time ' (p. 162). The alternation of work and sleep make for traffic patterns that epitomize sociotemporal rhythms, and [START_REF] Moore | Man, Time, and Society[END_REF] argues that the need for synchronization restricts efforts to address related problems:

The attempt to reduce rushhour traffic congestion by 'staggered' daily work schedules has early limits if the worker is to have some time synchronized with other members of the family, and a staggered workweek would affect not only the family but also a host of associations ranging from churches to recreational groups. (p. 121) In contrast to the familiar frustrations of traffic, [START_REF] Melbin | Behavior Rhythms in Mental Hospitals[END_REF] has demonstrated that sociotemporal rhythms can be found where one least expects them: 'patients in a small private mental hospital behave crazily far more often on weekdays than they do on evenings and weekends' (p. 650). Of course, as is typically the case, that rhythm is the product of another: the presence during weekdays of clinicians who are interested in, and tolerant of, symptoms they view as clues to proper therapy. 1 Similar periodicities can be found in very different settings. For example, [START_REF] Fine | Organizational Time: Temporal Demands and the Experience of Work in Restaurant Kitchens[END_REF] reports that restaurant employees must deal with the fact that most people want to eat at roughly the same time, thereby producing a regular 'rush' of customers. As [START_REF] Zerubavel | Timetables and Scheduling: on the Social Organization of Time[END_REF] puts it, timetables and scheduling make for the social organization of time.

Standard temporal units (e.g. the hour, day, week, and month) are integral to less formal types of periodicity as well as other facets of social interaction. Influenced by Durkheim and Sorokin, Zerubavel (1977;1982b) has examined the relationship between calendars and collective identity. Of special relevance, however, is his study of the weekly rhythm. [START_REF] Zerubavel | The Seven-Day Circle: the History and Meaning of the Week[END_REF] shows that, by 'imposing a rhythmic "beat" on a vast array of major activities (including work, consumption, and socializing), the week promotes the structuredness and orderliness of human life' (p. 4). What is more, the weekly rhythm is crosscut by a distinction between private time and public time as individuals negotiate the boundaries of social accessibility [START_REF] Zerubavel | Private Time and Public Time: the Temporal Structure of Social Accessibility and Professional Commitments[END_REF].

A numeric claim, once rare, is now increasingly prevalent in public discourse: 24-7-365. In contrast to the research on social periodicities, these numbers have come to represent the ceaseless availability of service and, more broadly, a round-the-clock level of commitment or involvement. Twenty-five years ago, Melbin (1978: 4) marshaled 'systematic evidence of steadily increasing 24-hour activity' in the United States. Of course, his study preceded the creation of e-mail, which provides almost constant access to innumerable people and on-line services.

E-mail offers a convenient source of data with which to examine the relationship between time and technology. With e-mail, we have technology that is available 24-7-365, so any patterns in the flow or volume of e-mail will be dictated not by the technology itself, but by the rhythms of social activity. Thus, this study has been provoked by the following question: in what ways do sociotemporal rhythms shape the flow or volume of e-mail?

Data and Methods

We asked the System Administrator in the Computer Center to write a program that counts the number of e-mail messages received by any address at our college during every hour of every day. Data collection began on Friday, 15 February 2002, and ended on Thursday, 3 October 2002. The total volume of e-mail per hour was recorded for 5,533 continuous hours, making for 230.5 days, 32.9 weeks, or 8.2 months. All members of the college community have round-the-clock access to their e-mail, free of charge, but those who live off campus must have a personal computer with modem connection to the campus system. There were 279 members of the faculty (including 104 adjuncts), 3,299 students, and 300 members of the administrative staff.

We did not have any access to the content of e-mail messages, and there was no way for us to distinguish between faculty, student, and staff e-mail. Consequently, our data consist of three variables: (a) the volume of e-mail, (b) hour of the day, and (c) day of the week. We used the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) to calculate the means and standard deviations of e-mail per hour and per hour/per day. The resulting distributions were tested through the analysis of variance. We hypothesized that the mean number of e-mail messages per hour would not be equal, and that the mean number of e-mail messages per hour/per day would not be equal.

The design of our campus system is such that we were unable to count the number of messages sent from any address at our college. Still, there may be some virtue in this necessity. Counting the volume of e-mail messages received (rather than sent) provides us with a rough measure of behavior beyond the confines of the college. The vast majority of our students have families and friends who are in the same or nearly the same time zone. Still, an unknown (but certainly small) proportion of the e-mail was sent from people in very different time zones. Anecdotal evidence indicates that these messages are not concentrated within particular hours or days. If that is the case, then we can assume that the already strong patterns in our findings are only conservative estimates.

There is some unknown amount of spam in our data. Recently published complaints in the popular press suggest that spam is a large and increasing portion of e-mail. However, given strong evidence for sociotemporal rhythms in the volume of e-mail, spam either conforms with, and thereby contributes to the overall rhythms, or it does not conform with the overall rhythms, but there is not enough of it to disrupt those rhythms. Anecdotal observations support both interpretations, but our data do not enable us to distinguish spam from other forms of e-mail.

Results

Messages per hour

Table 1 reports the means and standard deviations for the number of e-mail messages received per hour. In support of our first hypothesis, there are significant differences among the means, with F (23, 5,509) = 105.2, and p < .001. A distinct pattern emerges from these data. The overall mean is 489.1 messages per hour. All of the hours from midnight until 8:00 a.m. have means below that figure. All of the hours from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. have means above that figure. All of the hours from 6:00 p.m. until midnight have means below that figure. Of the ten hours above average, four are in the morning and six are in the afternoon. The shape of the distribution is roughly bimodal, with a minor peak in the late morning from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (i.e. just before lunch) and the major peak in the afternoon from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. The minimum values occur in the early morning hours from 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. during which most people are sleeping, preparing to leave for work, or traveling to work. In short, although there is round-the-clock activity, the overall pattern corresponds to the traditional rhythms of the working day.

The trends from hour to hour are consistent with the foregoing interpretation. Beginning at midnight, there is a general downward trend (with two small exceptions from 1:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.). The number of messages increases steadily from 7:00 a.m. until noon, with the three largest increases during the day from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. (+ 64.7), 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. (+ 101.6), and 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. (+ 65.0). There are a few sizable increases during the late morning and early afternoon (+ 34.4 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., + 24.0 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., and + 38.3 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.), but nine of 12 trend differences are negative in the afternoon, with the two largest drops coming from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. (-77.5) and 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. (-88.1). Of course, these are hours during which most people are leaving work.

Messages per hour/per day

In Table 2, we present the means and standard deviations for the number of e-mail messages received per hour/per day. Again, in support of our hypothesis, there are significant differences among the means, with F (6, 5,526) = 397.4, and p < .001. And again, there is an obvious pattern in these figures. Using the We used a factorial design to test the possibility of interaction between hour of the day and day of the week. The interaction term is significant, with F (6, 23, 138) = 14.3, and p < .001. Generally speaking, the volume of e-mail per hour is higher during the late morning and early afternoon as well as workdays. By the same token, the volume of e-mail per hour is lower during the early morning and evening hours as well as the weekend. These factors interact because the volume of e-mail during the early morning and evening hours of the weekend is even lower than it is during workdays, while the volume during the late morning and early afternoon during workdays is even higher than it is during weekends.

The weekly cycle

The strength and stability of the weekly cycle are evident in Table 3. Despite round-the-clock availability of e-mail, a distinct, non-random pattern is apparent. The daily volume of e-mail per hour begins at its lowest point on Sundaythe traditional day of rest -which ranked seventh for 30 of 32 weeks and never higher than sixth. Monday was typically ranked fifth, although it was fourth about one-third of the time. Tuesday was a busy day, coming in first eight times, but more likely to be second or third. Wednesday earns its name -'hump day'by being the peak of the distribution 16 times and coming in second 12 times. By Thursday, volume begins to drop, with only seven first place finishes and a modal rank of third. The decline continues on Friday, with a modal rank of fourth. On Saturday, the volume drops to its second from the lowest point, with 29 sixth place finishes. And then the weekly cycle begins again.

The curvilinear pattern in Table 3 would have been even more distinct were it not for a single week during which Wednesday was ranked fifth and Friday was ranked first. Yet that week provides us with a classic case of the 'exception that proves the rule' since the week in question was not only the first anniversary (Wednesday) of the 9/11 attack on the United States, but also the first full week of classes for the school year. Here, we have striking evidence for the difference between social time, with its qualitative periodicities, and astronomical time, where every day is just another day [START_REF] Sorokin | Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis[END_REF].

Finally, it is worth noting that the total volume of e-mail is a very 'mixed bag'. A sizable proportion of it is strictly work-related, but a great deal is produced by personal correspondence and various forms of recreation. Given this variation in content, it is all the more remarkable to find distinct patterns in the temporal flow of e-mail. 2

Discussion

An individual can commit suicide at any hour of the day, any day of the week, and any month of the year, yet Durkheim (1897Durkheim ( /1951) ) context, he concludes that time is a 'social institution' in relation to which 'all things are temporally located ' (1915/1965: 23). Likewise, individuals have access to e-mail 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but our findings indicate that, as with suicide, their use of this technology is not temporally random. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that the volume of e-mail per hour and per hour/per day is structured by sociotemporal rhythms. What is more, in accord with previous studies [START_REF] Melbin | Behavior Rhythms in Mental Hospitals[END_REF][START_REF] Fine | Organizational Time: Temporal Demands and the Experience of Work in Restaurant Kitchens[END_REF], it would appear that rhythms in the volume of e-mail are related to other forms of periodicity. Of primary relevance would be the biological need for regular sleep coupled with the sociological need for interpersonal synchronization [START_REF] Engel-Frisch | Some Neglected Temporal Aspects of Human Ecology[END_REF]Moore, 1963a;[START_REF] Moore | Man, Time, and Society[END_REF]. Indeed, temporal coordination is integral to social interaction. A member of the college community who sleeps during the day in order to use e-mail at night would be out of 'sync' with nearly everyone else. It remains to be seen whether e-mail will transform sociotemporal rhythms and systems of time reckoning as thoroughly as did the railroad and telegraph in an earlier era [START_REF] Cottrell | Of Time and the Railroader[END_REF]Zerubavel, 1982a). [START_REF] Melbin | Night as Frontier[END_REF] predicted that the colonization of night would continue, but, due to the need for interpersonal coordination, not in unimpeded fashion. Our findings support this projection. There is considerable e-mail at all hours of the day and days of the week, but there also is evidence of resistance to round-the-clock use of this technology. Clearly, the traditional rhythms of the day and the week continue to exert a powerful influence on the use of e-mail despite its nearly ceaseless availability. The weekly cycle that dominates our society, and much of the contemporary world, has its roots in the Hebraic story of 'Genesis' and the need for agricultural people to rest periodically [START_REF] Sorokin | Social Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis[END_REF]. However, [START_REF] Zerubavel | The Seven-Day Circle: the History and Meaning of the Week[END_REF] points out that God gave us only one day of rest; the unions gave us another.

Both days of the weekend have unique histories, but what about the other days of the week? Why should any weekday differ from another in systematic fashion? [START_REF] Zerubavel | The Seven-Day Circle: the History and Meaning of the Week[END_REF] notes that each day of the week has socially defined attributes -an observation anticipated by Thompson (1967: 74) when he describes the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century custom among European workers of celebrating 'Saint Monday' (i.e. neglecting work on Mondays for the sake of leisure as well as 'marketing and personal business'). [START_REF] Zerubavel | The Seven-Day Circle: the History and Meaning of the Week[END_REF] assertion is corroborated by the distinct patterns in our data. Following two days of rest and recreation, many people find it difficult to 'resettle into a productive state of mind ' (p. 90). And, of course, it is tempting to extend the weekend by 'calling in well' on Monday (generally acknowledged by moving many national holidays to Monday, even when the original holiday marked a particular date, like Washington's birthday). 3 In combination, these tendencies make Monday the least productive day of the week. Similarly, there are retrospective and prospective reasons for the relatively low volume of e-mail on Friday. It is 'the last day of the workweek' and, as such, 'many people succumb to the fatigue they [have] accumulated during the preceding four days' (pp. 90-1). There is also 'preoccupation with how the coming weekend is going to be spent' (p. 91). In fact, some people get a head start on the weekend by loafing while at work, leaving work early, or not coming in at all.

Zerubavel states that 'whatever "qualities" Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday might have, they are generally experienced not quite as intensively as the other four days ' (1985: 113). Nonetheless, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday represent the productive heart of the weekly cycle. Those days account for 31 of 32 first place rankings in terms of volume of e-mail per hour, with Wednesday claiming half of them and the balance almost evenly divided between Tuesday and Thursday. By Tuesday, people are geared into productivity; Tuesday's momentum carries over into Wednesday; by Thursday, they are not yet exhausted. Moreover, these are not the best days to 'call in well' since a day off in the middle of the week cannot be combined with the weekend for a three-day break. These are the busy days of the week, where most of the work is done.

Further research on sociotemporal rhythms is warranted. In particular, e-mail offers a constant tide of measurable units that seems to ebb and flow in response to the pull of social forces. The findings of this study can only be confirmed by comparable research within organizations of different kinds and sizes, but it is difficult to collect this information across organizational boundaries. In addition, longitudinal studies of e-mail could reveal whether there is a continuing trend toward 24-hour activity. The content of e-mail provides further opportunities for research. De [START_REF] Certeau | The Practice of Everyday Life[END_REF] has described 'what in France is called la perruque, "the wig"', a term that represents 'the worker's own work disguised as work for his employer ' (p. 25). This is a form of temporal deviance because 'the worker. . . diverts time' from productive labor. We can expand the concept to include those who pretend to work while they are merely playing. Conduct of this type is not new, but the increasing use of personal computers makes it easier to disguise play as work. How much of e-mail at work (and, for that matter, at home) is actually work-related? Research on questions of this sort will help us to understand the dynamic and often clandestine relationship between labor and leisure.

Notes

We are grateful for the assistance of Lloyd Chapin, Lori Ducharme, Edmund Gallizzi, Walter Moore, Michele Murteza, and Linda O'Bryant.

1. According to [START_REF] Anderson | Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City[END_REF], inner-city violence exhibits a contrapuntal rhythm:

'in the morning and early afternoon, the surrounding neighborhood is peaceful enough, but in the evening the danger level rises. Especially on weekends, tensions spill over, drug deals go bad, fights materialize seemingly out of nowhere, and the emergency room becomes a hub of activity' (p. 27). 2. Other forms of electronic communication (such as surfing websites and visiting chat rooms) may exhibit very different patterns. 3. George Washington, commander of rebel forces during the Revolutionary War and first President of the United States, was born on 11 February 1731, under the Julian calendar. His birthday changed to 22 February when the Gregorian calendar was adopted 20 years later. From 1865 through to 1970, the United States celebrated 22 February as a national holiday in his honor. In 1968, Congress passed legislation moving the celebration of his birthday to the third Monday in February (effective from 1971), thereby creating a three-day weekend.

TABLE 1 E-mail messages received per hour: means and standard deviations

 1

	Hour	N a	Mean	SD
	00	230	385.5	111.8
	01	230	378.6	108.4
	02	229	392.1	109.3
	03	230	366.7	104.5
	04	230	355.1	95.1
	05	230	345.5	100.2
	06	230	347.8	101.3
	07	230	346.5	96.1
	08	230	411.2	117.1
	09	231	512.8	192.3
	10	231	577.8	237.8
	11	231	604.2	214.1
	12	231	638.6	244.6
	13	231	604.1	213.3
	14	231	628.1	218.2
	15	231	666.4	234.2
	16	231	666.2	239.2
	17	231	654.3	259.9
	18	231	576.8	207.1
	19	231	488.7	161.2
	20	231	469.6	152.3
	21	231	468.5	149.0
	22	231	438.6	146.0
	23	230	409.1	125.0
	Total	5,533	489.1	207.9

a N represents the number of hours during which data were collected. overall mean of 489.1 messages per hour as a point of reference, we can see that the means for Saturday and Sunday are much lower at 335.0 and 296.4, respectively. On average, there are 154.1 fewer messages per hour on Saturday, and 192.7 fewer messages per hour on Sunday. In contrast, the means for Monday (508.8), Tuesday (582.6), Wednesday (599.0), Thursday (576.8), and Friday (526.2) are higher than the overall mean. Moreover, there is a good approximation to the normal curve, with the distribution of means peaking on Wednesday and tailing off in both directions toward Sunday and Saturday.

TABLE 2 E-mail messages received per hour/per day: means and standard deviations

 2

	Day	N a	Mean	SD
	Sunday	791	296.4	80.8
	Monday	792	508.8	200.7
	Tuesday	791	582.6	194.2
	Wednesday	783	599.0	215.0
	Thursday	792	576.8	209.5
	Friday	792	526.2	168.9
	Saturday	792	335.0	92.2
	Total	5,533	489.1	207.9

a N represents the number of hours during which data were collected.

  observes that suicides are not randomly distributed across the clock or calendar. Within a very different

TABLE 3 Number of weeks (out of 32) that each day was at each rank by volume of e-mail received

 3 Note: Only full weeks were classified in this table.

	Rank	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
	1st			8	16	7	1
	2nd			11	12	9
	3rd		1	10	3	13	5
	4th		11	3		2	17
	5th		19		1	1	9	1
	6th	2	1					29
	7th	30						2

TIME & SOCIETY 14(1)

FLAHERTY & SEIPP-WILLIAMS: SOCIOTEMPORAL RHYTHMS IN E-MAIL


Book Reviews

Pietro Basso, Modern Times/Ancient Hours. Working Lives in the Twenty-first Century. London: Verso, 2003. 288pp. ISBN 1859845657, £13.70 This book presents a set of excellent arguments for the contemporary debate over time and work. Clear and eloquent, well supported with scientific data, the central kernel is represented by a thesis: in industrial society the average working time of wage labourers has become, in the author's words, 'increasingly burdensome and invasive -more intense, fast-paced, "flexible" and long' (p. 1).

In the last decades most attention has been spent around the perceived tyranny of time [START_REF] Hochschild | The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work[END_REF]; fragmentation and degradation of work (Bravermann, 1974(Bravermann, /1999)), the intensification of labour in a 'flexitime' context [START_REF] Odih | Gender, Work and Organization in the Time/Space Economy of Just in Time Labour[END_REF] and the compression of time and lives [START_REF] Harvey | The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change[END_REF]. Much has been written on time and gender and time and health [START_REF] Adams | Mad Cow Disease and the Animal Industrial Complex. An Ecofeminist Analysis[END_REF], linking time contraction with stress and burn-out, in a era of precarious jobs -part-time, seasonal, contract work -and the uncertainty of future times [START_REF] Leccardi | Futuro breve[END_REF]. The epoch of just-in-time cities has been described, whereas synchronization becomes a must in social relations [START_REF] Corradi | Le città just-in-time. Per una critica del tempo neoliberale[END_REF], and survival strategies of 'time squeeze' necessary in order to realign commitments and 'free up' some time to spend with the loved ones [START_REF] Southerton | Squeezing Time. Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society[END_REF]. All this has to do with the changing quality of our time both at work and in the sphere of so-called leisure, the latter becoming -under the hill of neoliberalism -a time of productive consumption (Corradi, 1991(Corradi, /2003).

Basso's work has the indubitable merit of shifting our attention from the qualitative aspect to the quantitative frame within which these phenomena take place: he is one of the few European scholars who has recognised that work is becoming more onerous, fatiguing and oppressive -by enveloping our life in a subtle yet overwhelming manner. Working hours are becoming extended at the weekly and often daily level.

In a pathbreaking analysis -grounded in Marxist theory, yet offering a wide range of references -Basso highlights the contradiction between the technological promise of more free time (let's remember Keynes's guarantee of a three-hour day) and the harsh reality of extended working hours -for a normal life of pain, so well described by Lilian Rubin (1976Rubin ( /1992)). Basso reminds us that profit is unpaid working time -and the progressive reduction of living labour embodied in the commodity is not in contradiction with the numerical increase of industrial workers on a world scale: in the process of valorization, the reduction of the part constituted by the living labour 'heightens the necessity for capital to "squeeze" the residual labour to the utmost, in intensity as well as duration' (p. 24).

The reduction of working time necessary for commodity production does not translate into a diminution of working hours: in Pietro Basso's terms, this is another 'genetic contradiction' harboured in capitalism between the social character of labour and the private character of appropriation, so that the creation of time 'free from work' takes the opposite forms of mass unemployment and the idleness of our proprietor classes.

His critique proposes a synchronical and a diachronical perspective, by reviewing both the historical and contemporary debate. Starting with those who have been forcefully opposing a reduction of the working day, from the Manchester philantropists' antagonism to the ten-hour day to Marshall's hostility to the eight-hour day, up to unmasking the exegetes of the present who maintain that working hours have been progressively shortened.

In doing so, Basso magisterially unveils the ways in which statistics are manipulated and used to lie: for example, one widely quoted study of working hours includes both children and retired people in its averages. Restating the truth becomes the path of this book, and the reader is guided through the 'horror story' that is life in modern capitalistic societies confronted by the gap between promises and reality.

In so called developing countries, where capitalist accumulation reaches its wildest acme -in the dramatic passage from domestic modes of production to salaried labour -working hours increase for everybody. The issues highlighted by Basso lead us to understand how 'Third World' conditions are a reality in our own backyards. It seems that the reality of different forms of time slavery are more difficult to cover up.

As Mike Davis pointed out introducing Basso's work, one of the merits of his urgent and authoritative investigation is that 'nothing is more corrosive of social solidarity than the "American disease" of longer work hours and greater economic inequality'. Desolidarization is in the structure: unemployment is on the rise, especially among African-american males (almost twice compared to white males) while employment rates have decreased steadily since 1948.

Basso's book, from a priviledged standpoint in the hyperproductive north-east of Italy, with an emphasis on European data, has a double merit: the first relates to the courage of swimming upstream, offering a new perspective on aspects often neglected in the context of industry-sponsored studies; the second advantage of this work has to do with the author's marble-like aptitude of unravelling the structural reasons underlying each and any process, in an exciting and polemic writing style, which does not get lost in the translation from Italian to English by Giacomo Donis. Modern Times/Ancient Hours is a milestone in the sociology of time and in the sociology of work; it is also important reading for anybody who is interested in social change, both scholarly and in the activists/unionists milieu. This little book brings together Henri Lefebvre's key writings on time, in English, for the first time. Rythmanalysis contains the first full English translation of Éléments de rythmanalyse, published in 1992, shortly after Lefebvre's death, together with two earlier essays, jointly written with his last wife Catherine Régulier, 'The Rhythmanalytical Project' and 'Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities'. In sum, it provides the most thorough account of Lefebvre's work on time yet available to an English-speaking audience and, as such, it really demands to be read.

In an insightful introduction, Stuart Elden, Lefebvre scholar and one of the book's translators, suggests that the recent emphasis, among anglophone scholars at least, on Lefebvre's work on space has been to the detriment of his lifelong concern with time and, more especially, the conjunction of time and space in rhythm. Rhythmanalysis redresses this imbalance, making clear that Lefebvre was a theorist of time as much as of space and, above all else, insisted on the importance of thinking space and time together: spaces are timed; times are spaced. The clearest articulation of one of Lefebvre's key points is provided late in the book, in the co-authored 'Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities':

Time & Society copyright © 2005 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) VOL. 14 No. 1 (2005), pp. 155-160 0961-463X DOI: 10.1177/0961463X05049951 www.sagepublications.com

TIME & SOCIETY 14(1)


Helen Jarvis

Moving to London Time Household co-ordination and the infrastructure of everyday life

Keywords: constraint, co-ordination, household, London, time squeeze

This article calls for cross-disciplinary scrutiny of the costs of time squeeze -beyond current preoccupation with time allocation and the organization of employment. Discussion turns to an integrated, materially embedded infrastructure of everyday life, drawing on vignettes from in-depth biographies with London working families to put the time-squeeze into material context. Reference is made to generic decision 'dilemmas' commonly experienced across the sample: housing affordability, childcare shortage, transport failure and school choice. These illustrate the co-constitutive nature of urban inequalities and city time.

Introduction

Like city dwellers in all parts of the world promoting competitive advantage, Londoners are obsessed with time. Peter [START_REF] Ackroyd | London the Biography[END_REF] notes this in his biography of London with regard to 'how quickly Londoners walk' and the way commercial transactions are 'conducted and monitored in the shortest possible time ' (pp. 663-4). Yet, paradoxically, Londoners often spend as much time stuck in traffic or trapped in overcrowded public transport as they do striking the all-important business deal. This irony is captured in the strains of continually disrupted plans relayed by mobile phone users across the city: 'the train's running 40 minutes late'; 'I'm walking in from Holborn because of a security alert at Chancery Lane' (Jarvis et al., 2001: 2).

While we know time to be a constant and finite resource, it is popularly identified today with 'famine', 'squeeze' and accelerated use [START_REF] Schor | The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure[END_REF][START_REF] Hochschild | The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work[END_REF][START_REF] Robinson | Time For Life: the Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time[END_REF][START_REF] Ciulla | The Working Life: the Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work[END_REF]. This is variously explained by steadily rising working hours, increasing consumer expectation (shopping takes more time today, with more choices to make), less leisurely leisure (the trend towards bite-sized exotic travel, or 'leisure canapés'), and demand for fast, global, networked activity, 24 hours a day, seven days a week (Future Foundation, 2000;[START_REF] Southerton | Squeezing time": Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society[END_REF]. Claims that we are witnessing the speeding up of daily life resonate with the general feeling that none of us has enough time in our lives (Florida, 2002: 150). But we are frequently reminded (by writers of fiction at least) that time moves differently from place to place according to the rhythms imposed by industry and inhabitants (Ackroyd, 2001: 665). So it is that the harriedness associated with daily life in cities like London today is not universal but unevenly manifest. [START_REF] Gershuny | Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial Society[END_REF] observes, for instance, that well-paid workers tend to work considerably longer hours than less-well-qualified workers because high status is attached to 'being busy' (p. 9). Others stress that this tendency towards self-exploitation, whether a product of 'willing workers' [START_REF] Reeves | Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back into Work[END_REF] or an 'always on' work mentality [START_REF] Reich | The Future of Success: Work and Life in the New Economy[END_REF], is not alone responsible for differential harriedness [START_REF] Pratt | Hot Jobs in Cool Places. The Material Cultures of New Media Product Spaces: the Case of the South of the Market, San Francisco[END_REF]Jarvis and Pratt, forthcoming).

A criticism of existing theories of time squeeze is that important social and environmental inequalities tend to be overlooked. There are two reasons for this. First, it is because of an overwhelming preoccupation with time allocation (and associated work-life balance) as a function of the organization of employment. Here time is typically conceived according to a featureless plane -of working hours (length of the working day) and working times (extended office hours and non-standard shift arrangements). This emphasis on time as the essential currency of production (also measured as a deficit of care for family life) (Daly, 1996: 9) contributes to a growing work 'fetishism' in government policy. In effect it is a by-product of a 'workification' or work-centredness of contemporary life associated with the new economy [START_REF] Hochschild | The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work[END_REF][START_REF] English-Lueck | Cultures@Silicon Valley[END_REF]. Second, it is because emphasis on the 'speeding up' of daily life (particularly in relation to new information and communications technology or ICT) draws attention away from what slows many people down a lot of the time. The paradox by which people feel more harried at the same time as the city becomes increasingly paralyzed by this mass of 'busy bodies' does not simply describe a failure in transport policy. It is a metaphor for a growing individual burden of risk and time spent searching for services once the responsibility of the state (whether by coercion or subsidy). In this respect, commentators such as [START_REF] Rose | Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought[END_REF] point to a dramatic shift from a macro, top-down, law, to a micro, internal, self-regulated neo-liberal governance of society. A neglected impact of this transfer of responsibility is the added burden of time (and energy-consuming movement) on individuals and households as they process information and gain access to open markets for education, health, transport, family care services and so on. A mundane illustration of this inefficiency can be seen in the handling of household waste. Most local authorities hold individual households responsible for collecting items for recycling and taking them (by car) to an identified collection point (typically as part of a weekly trip to the supermarket). This means that in homes across the country, tasks of washing, storing, sorting and transporting bottles and tins for recycling add to the burden of domestic labour to be factored into daily life. For those without access to private transport, whether for financial or ideological reasons, scope to behave environmentally is limited even if desired (see [START_REF] Hinchliffe | Helping the Earth Begins at Home: the Social Construction of Socio-Environmental Responsibilities[END_REF][START_REF] Hobson | Thinking Habits into Action: the Role of Knowledge and Process in Questioning Household Consumption Practices[END_REF]. A more inclusive time (and energy) efficient approach would see local authorities asserting collecting responsibility for such private practices out of public concern.

This highlights another failing in existing time-squeeze literature: the tendency to locate the problem as one lying in the realm of individuals and their capabilities. Explanations are sought from evidence of changing tastes and practices to explain why 'despite it being possible for most people to have more free time and a more relaxed pace of life, they perversely opt to remain harried' (Southerton, 2003: 6). This emphasis on the 'willing worker' and consumer treadmill effects (working more to consume more) neglects the many structural constraints on individual choice. Consequently, this article reorients discussion to account for the infrastructure of everyday life encompassing all that it takes in a practical sense for individuals and households to 'go on' from one day to the next. Highlighted is the way this social and material context (which may be enabling or constraining) shapes individual choice over time-use. It also shows the corollary: that the solutions people arrive at to co-ordinate activities (taking the car rather than the bus to work so as to visit a sick relative on the way home) in turn shape the social and built environment.

The article is structured in three parts. The first part takes existing concerns with the time squeeze and puts them into material context. A framework of theory is developed to account for the way material, institutional and moral structures of constraint circumscribe the co-ordination of daily life. This draws on the principles of time geography and an understanding of household resource distribution. The second part animates this framework of theory by introducing short vignettes from in-depth biographies with London working families. The article concludes by drawing implications from this one case for the wider time-squeeze debate.

Putting the Time Squeeze into Context

The question as to whether or not people are actually working more, and why they might choose (or feel compelled) to do so, is not the focus of this article. It is sufficient to note that scholars generally agree that we are witnessing the symptoms of time squeeze (acceleration in the pace of life, a rise in time-saving innovations, increasing stress, and role overload), though explanations for this vary (Schor, 1992: 22). Moreover, the evidence from time-budget analysis is contradictory [START_REF] Southerton | Squeezing time": Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society[END_REF]. For example, while Juliet [START_REF] Schor | The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure[END_REF] makes strong claims that Americans are working longer hours, a separate study, also drawing on data for the USA, suggests that middle class parents are spending more time with their children than in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s [START_REF] Sandberg | Changes in Children's Time With Parents, US 1981-1997[END_REF]. In part this is because labour-saving devices in the home have reduced the time required for domestic chores. A shift to intensive or 'quality' parenting is also explained by observing that, as families purchase more services and mothers feel fulfilled by their lives outside the home, the time that parents spend with their children outside work is far more child-centred than it might otherwise have been (Folbre and Nelson, 2000: 128). Arguably, in some situations the time squeeze is more perceived than real. Dale [START_REF] Southerton | Squeezing time": Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society[END_REF] makes this point by stressing that a sense of harriedness does not necessarily stem from a substantive shortage of time (p. 8). Emphasis on anxiety (rather than time shortage per se) implies that feelings of harriedness are as likely generated by what slows people down as what hurries them up. Yet existing accounts of socio-temporal organization largely deny the existence of a material world. 1 This section identifies spheres of structural constraint making up the infrastructure of daily life (when and where the buses run, when the shops are open, how safe the streets appear, levels of congestion, parking restrictions and so on). This builds on an established body of social and feminist theory scrutinizing the inner workings and lived experience of the household [START_REF] Morris | The Workings of the Household: a US-UK Comparison[END_REF][START_REF] Himmelweit | The Discovery of "Unpaid Work": the Social Consequences of the Expansion of "Work[END_REF]. The aim is to be able to observe activities, schedules and disruptions to usual routines in their material settings as well as to acknowledge situated processes of interpretation which give meaning to these activities and settings [START_REF] Smith | The Everyday World as Problematic: a Feminist Sociology[END_REF][START_REF] Boulin | Times in the City and Quality of Life[END_REF].

Three spheres of structural constraint are identified in Table 1. Material context is evident in the distribution of fixed assets such as housing, schools, shops as well as street layout and ease of circulation. Institutional regimes encompass all manner of regulation from that functioning within the household to that of the state and the extent to which it regulates behaviour or subsidizes private markets. Then it is with regards to a local or regional moral climate that norms of 'good parenting' and cultures of work gain popular currency (Duncan and Edwards, 1999: 272;[START_REF] Duncan | Family Geographies and Gender Cultures[END_REF]. None of these spheres function in isolation, nor is there such a clear distinction, in practice, between 'agency' and 'structure' as suggested by the separate column headings. As Nancy [START_REF] Folbre | The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values[END_REF] observes: 'choice is a funny thing, affected by both moral values and by social pressures. This is why too much choice -or too little social co-ordination of choice -can lead to outcomes that can be just as problematic as having no choice at all' (p. 6). 2 This statement conveys the understanding that behaviour is moderated through agent-structure interdependence and by this process liable to generate unintended or unacknowledged outcomes [START_REF] Giddens | The Constitution of Society[END_REF][START_REF] Gregory | Social Relations and Spatial Structures[END_REF]Jarvis et al., 2001: 90). It is in this respect that aspects of Giddens's structuration theory help to locate sources of time-squeeze in a local urban context.

Caution is required when applying this theoretical framework in practice on two counts. First, it is important not to overdetermine the constraining (as opposed to enabling) role of different structures and settings. Thus a lone parent may experience limited scope to shop, travel or socialize freely without a partner to mind the children from time to time. Yet in other circumstances scope for individual choice may be increased by the absence of a partner with the capacity to veto this or impose an alternative point of view. Second, the household effectively features as a decision-making agent and as an institutional structure of constraint. This is because the household is conceived as a network or institution that mediates, or translates, social action (see for instance [START_REF] Pratt | Coordinating, Employment, Housing and Transport in Cities: an Institutional Approach[END_REF]. In short, the agency of a household can only be observed through revealed action (making what neo-classical economists view as unitary decisions) as an outcome of group compromise. To make sense of this interdependence in practice it is necessary to expand on two foundational properties of everyday co-ordination: time-space-matter and household resource distribution. Each is introduced in turn in the following section before returning to the case illustrations from London household research (snapshots of activity, disruption and unintended consequence) included in Table 1.

Time-space-matter

Throughout this article, everyday co-ordination assumes spatial as well as temporal parameters. This reflects the reality that, despite information and telecommunications 'saturation' [START_REF] English-Lueck | Cultures@Silicon Valley[END_REF], most of us spend much of each day orchestrating continual movement in relation to others. Whether this involves long journeys or local interaction, knowledge of where, when and how activities and relations are to be conducted is essential. In the absence of teleporting, we have to move our bodies and co-ordinate with those of others; this takes time and energy, and has to be factored in. Just because you can call the child minder and tell them that you are running late does not remove the fact that you have to get there and pick up your child somehow (see for instance [START_REF] Skinner | Running Around in Circles: Coordinating Childcare, Education and Work[END_REF]. Moreover, workers have to anticipate what will slow them down and thwart their efforts to juggle home and work demands. Living this close to the constant threat of crisis is very stressful. The daily routine is practised to a fine art. Knowing local traffic conditions might mean if you get on the road at 7.25 you are at work in 20 minutes but waiting until 7.30 it takes you 40 minutes or more.

There are continual pressures to be on the move and always busy. The theoretical possibility for ICT and home-working to liberate people from the stress of dashing between fixed appointments appears to remain just that -theoretical. Of course, new technology has changed the way we organize our days. For a minority of autonomous workers ICT provides increased scope for working leisurely at home, making up for time spent meeting children from school by answering emails after children are asleep [START_REF] Perrons | The New Economy and the Work-Life Balance: Conceptual Explorations and a Case Study of New Media[END_REF]. At the same time there are pressures to be always 'on call' and a tendency to pack more activities into each day because these can be synchronized while on the move. While ICT can be variously liberating and burdensome the point is technology has not brought about the 'death of distance' as once predicted [START_REF] Cairncross | The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives[END_REF]. This is not simply to make the plea that 'geography matters'. Indeed, as Sayer (2000: 109) points out, the concrete (material world) is always already spatial so it is not necessary to 'add on space'. Any observations of socio-temporal organization in urban daily life necessarily encompass spatiality, even if this is then abstracted or simply alluded to in the form of distance and travel. Nevertheless, to explain how urban inequalities and differential harriedness are co-constitutive, a framework of theory is required which makes time, space and situation specific social processes explicit. Again, [START_REF] Sayer | Realism and Social Science[END_REF] warns against the erroneous use of 'space' and 'time' as contentless abstractions (separately, or together). He argues instead for a concrete, situated analysis: space-timematter. Thus, space and time are not considered important in a general or universal sense, but rather as a specific set of contingent relations (of time, and spaced persons) that may, or may not, enable a causal process. Of critical importance here is an understanding that people seldom have much choice about the location of their work, and where a two plus income earner household sets up home will almost certainly be sub-optimal in relation to work [START_REF] Jarvis | The Secret Life of Cities: the Social Reproduction of Everyday Life[END_REF]. For instance a suburban residential location might reflect the choice to minimize travel times for the working mother to assist in her 'double shift', even if this then extends those of the working father (see for instance [START_REF] Brun | Lifestyle and Location Choices -Trade-offs and Compromises: a Case-study of Middle-class Couples Living in the Ile-de-France Region[END_REF].

The beginning of a situated analysis is evident in pioneering time-geography research (see for instance [START_REF] Parkes | Times, Spaces and Places[END_REF][START_REF] Pred | Social Reproduction and the Time-Geography of Everyday Life[END_REF]. Central to this approach, Törsten Hägerstrand (1976) identifies three constraints with respect to individual paths through time-space. The first of these, the capability constraint, concerns physical limits to movement including the inability to be in two places at once. Second, a coupling constraint describes situations which compel people to come together at certain times and locations such as for face-to-face service delivery, family celebrations, medical appointments and the like. 3 Finally, Hägerstrand points to authority constraints associated with legal sanctions and regulations. While these 'simple but fundamental' concepts have contributed greatly to social theory (Davies, 2001: 133), application to questions of work-life balance and time squeeze has been limited in practice (the exception being a body of Scandinavian feminist research: [START_REF] Ellegård | A Time-Geographical Approach to the Study of Everyday Life of Individuals -a Challenge of Complexity[END_REF]; [START_REF] Vilhelmson | Daily Mobility and the Use of Time for Different Activities. The Case of Sweden[END_REF]). In a rare UK example, Andy [START_REF] Pratt | Coordinating, Employment, Housing and Transport in Cities: an Institutional Approach[END_REF] takes a 'day in the life' schedule of activities for a typical two-wage couple with children to illustrate the way everyday routines are essentially spaced and time-bound as well as being constantly threatened with unexpected disruption. [START_REF] Jarvis | The Secret Life of Cities: the Social Reproduction of Everyday Life[END_REF] expand upon this theme in relation to household 'strategies' to coordinate work, employment and daily life in the city of London. Others have sought to revive the visual qualities of [START_REF] Hägerstrand | Geography and the Study of Interaction Between Society and Nature[END_REF] time-space prism to illustrate dynamic interactions of people and place (Chatterton, 1999: 125). Feminist researchers offer the best explanation of why time-geography has not fulfilled its original promise. For [START_REF] Davies | Responsibility and Daily Life: Reflections over Timespace[END_REF], emphasis on time as a quantity-based resource (equally available to all as a measure of the calendar or clock) and space as a gender-neutral, fearless dimension, obscures important social processes such as contradiction and power (see also [START_REF] Friberg | Everyday Life: Women's Adaptive Strategies in Time and Space[END_REF].

Household resource distribution

Problems relating to the time squeeze are made more difficult in particular urban contexts (such as where the cost of housing is high). In this respect, individuals and household collectives gain (or lose) relative advantage in the competition for goods and services through structures of constraint (material, institutional, moral) as identified above. In turn, these are reproduced, at any one time, according to household resource distribution. Here it is constructive to rehearse the highly regarded explanation that economist Amartya Sen provides for the cause of famine. [START_REF] Sen | Poverty and Famine[END_REF] explains that famine is attributed less to an absolute shortage of food than failure of socially specific food entitlement (whether in relation to production, purchase or exchange). Feminist economist Nancy Folbre (1994: 66) makes a similar point when she stresses that economic advantage is not the primary structure of constraint. From a whole economy perspective, resources include assets of income and property, state transfer payments, location-specific amenities such as transport, schools and shops, inheritance or gifts and the reciprocal exchange or unpaid donation of social reproduction services made possible by proximity to close-knit social/kin networks. If, rather than think of 'time famine' as a shortage of time associated with longer working hours, attention focuses instead on resource distribution, the problem emerges as one of situation-specific prospects for time-space coordination. Once again, this suggests the growing problems of time squeeze stem, at least in part, from individual inefficiencies attributed to a neo-liberal 'rolling back' of the state.

To understand the role of entitlements in resource distribution, it is essential to open up the 'black box' of the household in the manner widely adopted in feminist research. Doing so rejects the interpretation of rational choice theory that household decisions are made on the basis of 'calculative and predictive capacities' [START_REF] Jordan | Putting the Family First: Identities, Decisions, Citizenship[END_REF]. Rather than to view the household as an atomistic consensual unit, feminist theory understands that individual household members participate in group compromise through conflict and cooperation over household resources (including time) [START_REF] Sen | Gender and Cooperative Conflict[END_REF]. This approach acknowledges the influence of norms, convention, habit and hearsay. Thus decisions about whether to allocate time and energy to commercial or domestic activities are not determined by utility maximization. Arguably, explanations of everyday co-ordination need to take into account the way that individuals form preferences as well as an appreciation of the way these are negotiated (and ultimately compromised) in relation to identities formed in group settings such as the household [START_REF] Himmelweit | The Discovery of "Unpaid Work": the Social Consequences of the Expansion of "Work[END_REF]. Only by situating individuals in their household arrangement is it possible to account for the role that gender and power play in strategies to cope with increased competition in the open market. Here it is recognized that the power of each individual to act, or to veto the action of another, is differentially constructed across time and space and, consequently, subject to ongoing negotiation between household members and between the household institution and the wider social and economic milieu. This 'duality of structure' of the household is a cornerstone of Giddens's structuration theory (Clegg, 1989: 138). Included in this context is the density and intensity of social networks. This is important because many workers require 'face-to-face co-location in (the right) place' to remain connected to the pulse of new ideas (Graham and Guy, 2002: 370). Similarly, in order to meet competing moral, civic and business obligations, households draw on a complex web of social relations (with the child minder, cleaner, friends and neighbours) according to carefully orchestrated routines.

Tracing the Infrastructure of Everyday Life

The way location-specific attributes and amenities mutually shape and re-shape activities and social encounters can be understood in terms of the infrastructure of everyday life. In this, attention is paid to the critical role of spatial arrangement whereby the distribution and 'spacing' of jobs, housing and services within a particular area determine the working time arrangements and childcare options actually available to households managing two jobs or careers from a fixed residential location. [START_REF] Gerstel | Commuter Marriage: a Study of Work and Family[END_REF] claim that theorists overlook the possibility that labour market demands may be at cross purposes for husbands and wives who are both employed. They observe this in the extreme case of commuter marriages in which dual career couples live apart at least three nights a week in separate residences (p. 4; see also [START_REF] Green | Long Distance Living: Dual Location Households[END_REF][START_REF] Hardill | Gender, Migration and the Dual Career Household[END_REF]. Even in more conventional domestic arrangements, it is notoriously difficult for households with two working parents to overcome the logistical as well as moral and economic obstacles to daily life. Yet the proportion of couples with children who represent 'work-rich' (time-stretched) dual income earners with very long working hours far exceeds that of the now outmoded 'male breadwinner' structure. 4 This is explained both by a cultural change where a similar proportion of women to men are economically active (though typically employed in lower status part-time positions) and by a strong economic shift to dual income earning in couple households in order to achieve the necessary household wage. 5 Significant in this imperative to increase household income is the rising cost of owner-occupied housing (the dominant tenure in the UK) especially for first-time buyers.

The remainder of the article draws on household interview data from one of five metropolitan case studies conducted as part of a larger programme of UK-US comparative research. Each case study examines the way working families (employed couples with children) draw on local employment, housing, transport and childcare to co-ordinate daily life in a dynamic urban context experiencing pressures of growth and attendant congestion. In all five cities (London and Edinburgh in the UK and San Francisco, Seattle and Portland in the West Coast USA) it is widely held that families require more than one income to gain a foothold in the housing market or simply maintain current living standards. This article limits discussion to the 20 interviews conducted with households living in central London (Hackney and Islington) and outer London (Barking). While these households share a similar composition (heterosexual couples with children) and are relatively advantaged by virtue of their employment (most having two parents in paid employment), the sample captures a range of spouse working hours, times and occupations. 6 Biographical extracts are selected for discussion on the basis that they animate connections between particular material settings and associated socio-temporal practice. Illustrations are made with respect to generic decision 'dilemmas' commonly experienced across the sample: housing affordability, childcare shortage, transport failure and school choice. Of critical importance is the point that solutions to these generic problems are context dependent. People are observed to get by in profound and subtle ways.

Housing affordability

Ed and Sonia Lewis live in a social rented two-bedroom flat in the heart of fashionable Islington. Their flat is on the third floor of an attractive Edwardian terrace on a square with street parking arranged around a small communal garden. Despite living in a much-sought-after location, their situation is far from ideal: their three children share one bedroom. This is crammed with bunk beds and a cot, leaving no room for storage or space in which to play. The only realistic way they can move to a bigger property in the area is to take part in a mutual exchange, but scope to do so is limited by reduced social rented stock. When the couple first moved in, many of their neighbours were buying their homes from the council under the 'right to buy' provisions of the 1980 Housing Act. Since then most have sold to incoming professionals in a classic illustration of state-assisted gentrification. While Ed can 'earn a decent living' as a cab driver, the only way they could afford to buy a home of their own would be to move to a less expensive housing market outside London. But Ed insists that the living he earns involves long hours and the knowledge he can pick up work 'on his doorstep' as and when he needs. He explains:

Because I'm a cab driver I can literally get in my cab and start work straight away. I can leave here at eight, half eight in the morning and come home at six at night, like in the middle of both rush hours, but most taxi drivers tend to, when they earn good money, they move out, they can't do them hours, they have to come in at half five in the morning or start two o'clock in the afternoon, come in, like stagger it, the long shift, because they don't want to get stuck in the traffic. I do long enough hours as it is without getting stuck an hour and half in traffic both ends of the day just so we can have more room by moving out.

Being self-employed, Ed is tempted to work very long hours. He routinely works a six-day week and adds to this a Sunday shift if his takings for the week have been slow or they face additional expenses such as a family holiday. His living is seasonal whereby 'January dies and I'll rob Peter to pay Paul, so February I'm playing catch up'. It is also the case that what he can earn putting in the same hours each week is unpredictable, as he explains: I could leave here at eight o'clock in the morning and I might not get a job for (a while), or I might get a stupid two or three quid job and then other days I can leave here and there might be a couple waiting on the corner wanting to go to Heathrow, it's just the luck of the day. This lack of guaranteed income drives a regime of long working hours. Ed admits he will sometimes go out to work on a Sunday evening to 'get a head start on the week', anticipating poor earnings, but rarely reimbursing himself this time if takings turn out better than expected.

I can just keep working and working and I can work as long as I want. It normally works out that I work Monday to Friday and that will cover the cab, tax and everything and the money for family life and then Saturdays tends to be for extras, if we've got stuff like we need to go shopping, clothes shopping. I call Saturday my Barclaycard Day, because that's what it covers! Then to pay for holidays I'll just try and work three or four hours every Sunday. It's the way I like doing it, because I'll get the money that way, it's the perfect job because it's instant overtime but it does sometimes put a strain on your family life.

Childcare shortage

Prioritizing the capacity for Ed to take his cab out at any time or day of the week to boost household income restricts not only housing choice (though cost is the primary constraint), but also Sonia's employment prospects. These material constraints are revealed in the difference between Sonia and Ed's (stylized) time-space prisms in Figure 1. Ed's prism is city-wide as a consequence of his auto-mobility, though his exact movements may be modified by traffic congestion. Sonia's prism is limited in scope by the time it takes to travel places on foot or by fixed bus routes as well as by the hard constraints of the school run and shop opening times.

Sonia has not worked for pay since her first child was born. Now, with two children in school, she is taking up a school office job. She chose this opening because it only requires her to work school hours, but childcare remains an issue for the youngest child (who has just turned one). Neither set of grandparent lives sufficiently close to babysit and she could not afford the cost of a private nursery or child minder on her low wage. A subsidized place in a state nursery will only be made available when their son turns three. This means that in the intervening period Ed will have to change his working hours to provide childcare during term-time when Sonia is at work. He can do this because he is selfemployed but Sonia explains that this will reduce Ed's earning so that having both of them at work will not make them any better off:

We won't necessarily be any better off but what we said was if I could get this job that's going at the school, if I'm there now, if we can manage for a year and a half, once the baby's in at nursery then Ed could go back to work normal, you know. We wouldn't necessarily benefit from it (now) but I'd get my foot in the door to get the job because them jobs are hard to come by.

The problem of access to affordable child-care is well known and by no means unique to London. The problem is most severe for low wage households but shortages are also apparent for others able to afford private-for-profit nurseries. This is reflected in the way mothers queue up for a nursery place long before they give birth and once this is secured they show great reluctance to switch facilities to suit a change in personal circumstance. The problem illustrates clearly the co-constitution of material and temporal constraint (housing and employment). Access to affordable childcare is not only limited by inadequate state provision: shortages occur in private-for-profit markets because wages paid to care-givers (the majority of them women) do not compete with other commercial activities. In high-cost cities in particular, lack of affordable housing for 'key workers' means that minimum wages are not living wages. David Blau (2001: 8) looks in detail at the shortfall in childcare services in high-cost cities in the US context. He finds that pressure to keep costs down to what working parents can bear in the private-for-profit sector degrades the pay, status and skill of childcare workers. This is reflected in evidence that the UK currently has the least qualified childcare workforce in the EU, high staff turnover and a low average age of nursery workers of 24 [START_REF] Land | Building on Sand? Facing the Future[END_REF]. Consequently, the availability of very low wage workers, many of whom are themselves mothers, typically rests with the supply of unpaid childcare by grandmothers, friends and relatives. Complicating the notion of a care deficit and estimates of its likely scale is evidence that child-care is not limited geographically to the state-market-family mix of any one nation or region. In their book Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (2003) generate the image of a 'global care chain'. They see the growing care deficit as the female underside to globalization, whereby:

FIGURE 1 Stylized time-space prism for the Lewis family -showing gender difference associated with hard and soft constraints

Sonia and kids home via shops in the absence of help from male partners, many first world women have succeeded in tough 'male world' careers only by turning over the care of their children, elderly parents and homes to women from the Third World. (p. 2)

Transport failure

Other households higher up this chain of provision are not without experiencing constraint in the way they co-ordinate daily life. Take for example the case of Mr and Mrs Loxton, both full-time lawyers living in central London. They can afford to pay a day nanny to look after their two children (aged 5 and 7) after school as well as employ a cleaner once a week. Living where they do in Islington, within walking distance of a North London Line station, they hoped to run only one car and otherwise take advantage of London's high-density bus and train networks. It was Mr Loxton's intention to take the children to school by train each day on his way to work in the city. This arrangement fell apart because severe overcrowding made it impossible to predict journey times:

We tried to use the train but it was absolutely hopeless. You couldn't get on the train it was so full when it arrived. Then of course you are really in trouble, because you are stuck at a station, they are only every 15 minutes, you can't get on the train, what you end up doing, you come back here, get the car and drive, you know.

Now the Loxtons run two cars so Mr Loxton can drive one to his central London office each day and the nanny they employ can use the other for the school run. Mrs Loxton alone uses public transit, travelling to work each day by bus. The fact that this family can afford to run two cars and employ a nanny and enjoy a home in an accessible central location is indicative of the way high earners have more options in resolving their work-life arrangements: but this is not the only point of note. Co-ordinating daily life in this fragmented way is labour (time) intensive and energy inefficient. This case shows how private solutions to overcome infrastructure failure impose heavy social costs (more private cars on the roads contributing to pollution, congestion and hazards to pedestrians and cyclists). While this is a generic problem, it reflects a particular local context. [START_REF] Jerram | Traversing the Great Divide: the North London Line and East London[END_REF] observe of the 'much derided' North London Line that:

the timetable provides for a train every 15 minutes between Richmond and North Woolwich, and every half-hour between Gospel Oak and Barking. But, notoriously, these trains do not run on time. They may not run at all, especially at weekends, because of engineering works. During the morning and evening rushhours, the two or three-carriage trains only approach capacity over some sections of the line, with commuting schoolchildren, workers and students. At other times, especially on the Barking branch, there is a mere scattering of the typically lowincome clientele who are dependent on public transport, as also to be found on any London bus: women with small children, older people, and members of ethnic minorities, making short journeys. (p. 256)

School choice

In the case of the Locke family, both parents drive in separate cars to work in the same street because they each drop off children attending different schools. This narrative begins with the conscious decision this couple made, both working full time as partners in the same entrepreneurial business, to live and work in central London so as to create a time-efficient, distinctly urban, non-commuting lifestyle. Mr Locke explains: What we've created is a business close to our home, which is a ten-minute drive away, where our business revolves around Hackney, Clerkenwell and Islington. So we're neither of us commuters. We've created that lifestyle for ourselves.

Then Mrs Locke goes on to explain how, searching for schools they felt were suitable for each of their four children, they abandoned this local way of living. Now our commuting is all family related, not work related. It's all about the kids, the school run and all that. Because our two youngest children go to school in Knightsbridge and you can't get much further than that.

With two children attending a school in Knightsbridge, a third near Regents Park and a fourth in the City of London itself, each parent drives for over an hour before finally reaching their place of work located just three miles from the family home. Moreover, as their business has prospered and the effort of living at the heart of a congested city has increased, they have invested in a holiday home 'in the middle of the (county) countryside' where they 'have a separate lifestyle' 'when (they) need to escape'. Thus, what started out as a justification of city living on the basis of time efficiency soon became a narrative of time squeeze. Harriedness is here not adequately explained in relation either to rising work effort or consumer treadmill (working more to consume more). Why these 'urban villagers' make recourse to time-and energy-consuming long-distance daily movement is better explained in terms of competing identities (as gentrifiers and 'good parents'). In a state of neo-liberal governance, parents are held individually responsible for ensuring their child has the best education (and associated cultural capital advantage) drawing on cultural capital to interpret imperfect information on school standards, paying for better performing schools and travelling further afield.

Time efficiency

Just as Ed Lewis (the cab driver) defends living in central London in overcrowded accommodation in terms of the way it brings work to his door, so Harry Law, a successful investment banker, justifies his mode of transport by claiming it is more time efficient. Harry explains why he chooses to travel 20 minutes to Canary Wharf by cab each day: I start work as soon as I step out the door. I'll have 15 voice-mail messages and I deal with them on the way in. I work while I'm in the cab, whereas if I take a bus or the underground I lose up to 45 minutes.

But Harry and his wife Kate, a lawyer (currently on maternity leave), demonstrate their strong attachment to a home in central London on the basis of quite different material entitlement to Ed. They recently bought a run-down terrace house in the London Fields area, which they identified as 'one of the last affordable bits of N1' because it met their taste in urban vitality. While they enjoy proximity to shops and restaurants they do not plan to send their son to the neighbourhood school. By rejecting public transit in favour of a more private means of conveyance, Harry Law not only 'saves time' by speeding up the journey he also improves his capacity to conduct work on the move (buses are noisy and mobile phones do not work underground) (Jarvis et al., 2001: 2). By underwriting this perk, Harry's employer effectively entitles him to 'jump the queue' in the competition for space on the roads (taxis use priority lanes and are exempt from inner London congestion charges). In effect the cab is a mobile work-place for both the cab-driver and his fare, but in viewing this observation in terms of unequal resource distribution it is clear they each experience time quite differently.

Discussion

The impact uneven resource distribution has on individual and household time squeeze is most easily identified in relation to discrete dilemmas. This was first illustrated in relation to a lack of affordable owner-occupied housing and reduced mobility in the social rented sector where the sale of former council homes has reduced the overall supply. To raise the deposit for a home in a highcost city such as London, buyers increasingly rely on inheritance, financial gifts from extended family, bonuses or equity from earlier property transactions [START_REF] Hamnett | Winners and Losers: Home Ownership in Modern Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Jarvis | The Quest for Work-life "Balance" and its Impact on the Urban Environment: the Case of London, an Exemplary Sustainable World City?[END_REF]. This puts those without these particular resources at a huge disadvantage. In turn, those pushed out of accessible central locations can experience fresh constraints with respect to long-distance commuting and disruption to social and kin networks which typically provide vital support with routine or emergency childcare.

The Lewis family vignette introduced earlier clearly illustrates how sociotemporal practices and material context (in this case residential location) are co-constitutive. To view Ed's long working hours or Sonia's decision to limit her search for employment to low-wage 'mothers hours' as questions of temporal constraint alone is to miss the point. Structures of housing (and childcare and social networks) effectively circumscribe household employment (and income prospects). In turn, of course, resource distribution associated with Ed's occupa-tion and the normalization of him as the primary breadwinner limits this household's ability to compete in the private market economy.

Traditionally, families have constructed clear temporal boundaries around 'work-work' and 'home-work' through the differential meaning attached to the work week and weekends, family time and vacations -but these are breaking down [START_REF] Zuzanek | Life Cycle Variations in the Weekly Allocation of Time to Selected Daily Activities[END_REF][START_REF] Silverstone | Time, Information and Communication Technologies and the Household[END_REF]. We see this in the Lynsted family case included by way of illustration of group compromise in Table 1. On the one hand, the colour-coded family calendar identifies 'who's taking who and who's doing what' in terms of business and after-school activities. On the other hand, these activities (and communications regarding their co-ordination) transcend clear spatial and temporal demarcation. Moreover, Ed is not 'always on' in the fugue-like sense of an ideas-generating professional, but he does live with the continual possibility of 'going to work'. With his cab parked out front (the benefits of a resident parking permit) and the city on his doorstep, like an alchemist, he knows he can always turn time to financial advantage.

It has long been recognized that family households are 'greedy institutions' in which women, despite changes in their participation in the paid labour force, are still expected to devote much of their time and energy to unpaid domestic work [START_REF] Coser | Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment[END_REF]. We see this in the case of Mr and Mrs Little in Table 1. One way that families can control, shift or ultimately 'save' their time is to purchase substitutes for aspects of household social reproduction work. It is usual to conceptualize the potential to 'buy time' by substituting purchased services in terms of family resource management. Mr and Mrs Loxton have adopted this strategy. What we also see with insight from the framework developed here is the differential role of moral cultures in this regard. A number of the London households defused conflict over wives' unfair 'second shift' by delegating unpopular cleaning tasks to paid helpers. Others who could technically afford the services of a cleaner resisted the idea because of competing values concerning selfsufficiency, unique standards of domestic labour and privacy (see also Daly, 1996: 111).

Conclusion

This article seeks to lift concern with symptoms of time squeeze out of the current preoccupation with work (particularly paid employment) and time-use. Attention is drawn instead to the paradox that as people are feeling more rushed and short of time they are also routinely held up by obstacles to access, movement, reliability, comfort and safety. Arguably, in order to understand uneven development and differential harriedness research is needed which identifies what restricts activity and interaction as much as what drives general 'busyness'. While existing explanations of time squeeze locate the problem in the realm of individual choice, the evidence presented here suggests that choice is contingent upon material context, institutional regime and moral climate. None of these spheres function is isolation. Rather, the impact of these combined structures cut across all dimensions of time-space co-ordination. Moreover, they may at any one time be enabling or constraining where co-ordination necessarily implies both spacing and timing (as a function of time-spacematter) and differential resource entitlement determines the everyday infrastructure actually available. What this demonstrates is the closely bound nature of spatial arrangement and temporal ordering (of 'work' and 'life').

For the sake of clarity, discussion focuses on discrete 'dilemmas' which highlight connections between concrete relations and social processes (such as between housing distribution and working hours; household structure and childcare availability; residential location, school choice and long-distance movement). The critical point to note is that effort to reconcile competing demands of employment and domestic work (as well as moral responsibilities toward spouse, children, friendships and kin) are profoundly shaped by local urban context. Thus a central purpose of this article is to urge urban planners, educationists and civic leaders to engage in a shared debate concerning the private and social costs of time squeeze alongside policy makers and trade unionists focusing on work and employment issues. For this debate to have meaning a more integrated, materially embedded theory of everyday co-ordination is required. A related point to make is that, regardless of whether people are working more, the time squeeze debate essentially focuses attention on social values. The question is raised, for instance, whether we care sufficiently about the consequence of escalating inequality, congestion, pollution and uneven development, to invest in public solutions to private co-ordination problems, in situations where these threaten social cohesion and environmental sustainability. Here this question is highlighted in relation to a fundamental shift toward a neo-liberal mode of governance (in Britain but also in other advanced economies) and, with this, increased individual risk and time spent identifying services once the responsibility of the state.

The household data and scenarios introduced by way of illustration in this article relate to a relatively advantaged population of working families. Despite the Lewis family experiencing quite severe overcrowding and few options to improve their housing situation, they can afford overseas holidays and up-todate domestic technology. It is unsurprising that Ed Lewis works a six-to seven-day week to earn money for 'the extras' when he sees his new neighbours enjoying the fruits of their better-rewarded labour. By scrutinizing relative within-class differences it is possible to make two final observations. First, ostensibly similar working families have to adapt in a wide variety of ways, on a practical level, to piece together elements of housing, employment and family. Second, regardless how uneven the distribution of resources (such as income, assets and location) between households, there are no simple winners.

Notes

This paper draws on research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (R000271085). Thanks to Diane Perrons for constructive input on an earlier version of this article and to Andy Pratt for frequent discussion of these issues through collaborative publication.

1. It is important to note that this partial view is not restricted to the sociological literature. The urban studies and geography literature can be accused of preoccupation with spatial relations (proximity of jobs to homes) to the neglect of time. 2. The clearest examples of this pertain to the environment such as the free-rider effect or the 'tragedy of the commons' associated with unrestricted opportunity to pollute a public good such as the atmospheric (see for instance the classic argument by [START_REF] Hardin | The Tragedy of the Commons: the Population Problem Has No Technical Solution; It Requires a Fundamental Extension of Morality[END_REF]). 3. Recognizing this coupling constraint, demand for 'concierge services' is booming, set up to meet the needs of highly paid workers too busy to wait at home for deliveries or supervise house cleaning. Access to such liberating personal attention comes as a perk with employment at some of the top City firms. 4. Both parents work for pay in 65 percent of 'nuclear' families (couples with dependent children) in Britain. Of this two-income population, more than half represent oneand-a-half earners with only one in six comprising two parents working full time in professional/ managerial 'careers' (data derived from the 1991 SARs from MIDAS, updated in relation to 2001 early release Census of Population data (Jarvis, 1997: 527)). 5. It is important to note that a 'necessary household wage' is contingent on many factors. Necessity relates to that which households aspire to, as well as what is essential to facilitate their 'getting by'. Of course, this is totally subjective, but that's the point. People choose to compromise on some issues to achieve other ends. 6. In five of the dual earning couples with children, both parents are employed in hourly paid 'jobs'; in 12 they are both employed in salaried 'careers'. Three of the families represent (temporary) 'male breadwinner' structures (two hourly paid, one professional). In eight of the dual earning couples, the female spouse works reduced hours.

Pseudonyms have been given to all interviewees (all surnames beginning 'L' to denote London source of this case study) and all identifying features removed to preserve anonymity. Interviews were conducted with partners together so as to engage directly with issues of spouse negotiation in the joint telling of both everyday routines and life histories.

  Author's diagram adapted fromPacione (2001: 339), based on ideas developed byHägestrand (1982).

TABLE 1 Tracing structure-agent interdependence in everyday co-ordination: decisions, networks, action and unintended consequence (illustrated with extracts from the London household research) -structures can be enabling and/or constraining

 1

		Agency		Structures
	Decisions/
	Action	Individual Preference	Group Compromise	Material Context	Institutional Regime	Moral Climate
	Conscious/	e.g. Career building	e.g. The 'colour-	e.g. Transport	e.g Childcare: Britain	e.g Non-waged
	Planned	and family formation:	co-ordinated' family	infrastructure, cost,	promotes 'maximum	work discounted
		'I wasn't going to	calendar: 'We plan the	reliability and safety:	private responsibility	as a 'moral
		start a family until	calendar, often by the	'You couldn't get on	mode' daycare in a	responsibility'
		I'd finished my	week, by the months,	the train it was so full	climate in which	which is binding
		training which (in	that's knowing who's	when it arrived'	private-for-profit	in intimate relations
		medicine) involves	taking who and who's	(Mr Loxton).	nurseries remain in	(as parent or
		long hours and a lot	doing what'		short supply	spouse)
		of moving about'	(Mrs Lynsted).		(O'Connor et al.	(Folbre, 2001: 66).
		(Mrs Lamb).			1999: 15).
	Taken-for-	Occupational sex	Blurring of work-	Purchase of second	In the British context	The second shift:
	granted	segregation and	work and home-work:	car/contribution to	'private' means	'It's just happened
	Norms/	dominant cultures of	'Our (lives are	traffic congestion:	informal. Working	that way, I'm not
	Unintended	work: 'I left (the	completely mixed up,	'You can't get on the	round childcare	the type of person
	Consequences	Law) because they	we are always	train (so) you come	restricts women's	that says a woman's
		consider a woman	working on the	back here, get the	hours and pay and	place is in the
		with a baby to be a	computer (at home)	car and drive'	exploits a 'care chain'	kitchen (but) that's
		liability, who won't	doing bits of (work)	(Mr Loxton).	of potentially	the way it goes'
		be committed to work	and the kids call		global extent.	(Mr Little).
		daft city hours'	me at work'		(Ehrenreich and
		(Mrs Lonmore).	(Mrs Lynsted).		Hochschild, 2003).
	Mrs Lamb (Barking): full-time GP, spouse full-time hospital consultant, two children (3, 6).
	Mrs Lynsted (Hackney): full-time nursing adviser, spouse full-time artist/lecturer, two children (10, 14).
	Mr Loxton (Islington): full-time lawyer, spouse full-time lawyer, two children (5, 7).

Mr Little (Barking): full-time electrical engineer, spouse full-time care assistant (eves/w'ds), two children (4, 7). Mrs Lonmore (Islington): part-time civil servant, spouse full-time solicitor, one child (3).

TIME & SOCIETY 14(1)

JARVIS: MOVING TO LONDON TIME