Empire of Things
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103. For a measured critique of top–down views of social distinction, see Daloz, The Sociology of Elite Distinction.
104. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1840/1994), Vol. II, ch. 13, 138.
105. Euromonitor International, ‘Global Luxury Goods Overview’, June 2011; http://www.wisekey.com/en/Press/2011/Documents/Euromonitor_Report_for_FT_Business_of_Luxury_Summit_2011.pdf.
106. Y. Ait-Sahalia, J. A. Parker & M. Yogo, ‘Luxury Goods and the Equity Premium’, Journal of Finance 59, no. 6, 2004: 2959–3004.
107. ‘Falso di moda’, symposium at Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence, 30 Nov. 2007.
108. Pamela N. Danziger, Let Them Eat Cake: Marketing Luxury to the Masses – As Well as the Classes (Chicago, 2005).
109. Offer, Challenge of Affluence. The decline of self-control is case specific and should not be overstated. It is best documented for obesity. Other types of excessive consumption have their own trajectories. Americans, for example, drank more in the 1860s than in the 1980s, at least outside university fraternities. In Western Europe, serious drug use has declined in the last decade.
CHAPTER 10
1. The deck chairs were in Rorschach on the Swiss side of Lake Constance; http://www.zeitverein.com/framesets/fs_zeitverein.html. See further: Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (New York, 2004), esp. 37–9; Fritz Reheis, Die Kreativität der Langsamkeit (Darmstadt, 1998); James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just about Everything (London, 1999); Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
2. R. N. Levine, A Geography of Time: On Tempo, Culture and the Pace of Life (New York, 2008), 131f.
3. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 106.
4. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918.
5. http://www.cittaslow.org/section/association; Wendy Parkins & Geoffrey Craig, Slow Living (Oxford, 2006).
6. Slow Food Manifesto: http://www.slowfood.com/international/2/our-philosophy. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food: Le ragioni del gusto (Rome, 2001); compare: R. Sassatelli & F. Davolio, ‘Consumption, Pleasure and Politics’, in: Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 2: 202–32; and Richard Wilk, ed., Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System (Lanham, 2006); http://longplayer.org/what/whatelse/slowwalk.php.
7. ‘Schopenhauer als Erzieher’ (1874) in: Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (London: 1909), transl. Adrian Collins, Vol. V, Part II, para. 4, 136.
8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1840/1994), Book 2, ch. 13, 136.
9. See Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 126.
10. Rosa, Beschleunigung; Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten (Frankfurt, 2000) and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York, 2004).
11. The first answer was most forcefully put by Staffan Burenstam Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York, 1970), the second by Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York, 1991). I discuss both below.
12. J. H. Ausubel & A. Grübler, ‘Working Less and Living Longer: Long-term Trends in Working Time and Time Budgets’, in: Technological Forecasting and Social Change 50, no. 3, 1995: 195–213.
13. Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820–1992 (Paris, 1995), Appendix J; Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development (Oxford, 1982); Schor, Overworked American; P. Robinson & G. Godbey, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time (University Park, PA , 1997), quoted at 196.
14. E.g., see the Dutch data in Koen Breedveld et al., De Tijd Als Spiegel: Hoe Nederlanders Hun Tijd Besteden (Time as a Mirror: How the Dutch Spend Their Time) (The Hague, 2006); Klein, Secret Pulse of Time, ch. 8. There is some evidence that in the United States the sense of rush may have slowed in the early 1990s; see Robinson & Godbey, Time for Life, 231–9.
15. ‘Tanto brevius omne quanto felicius tempus’, Pliny the Younger, Epistles, Book VIII, letter 14.
16. V. Ramey & N. Francis, ‘A Century of Work and Leisure’, in: American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1, no. 2, 2009: 189–224.
17. The thesis of Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London, 1993).
18. See 250–9 above.
19. Jan De Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behaviour and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 6. The lack of attention to childcare and emotions more generally is striking. Many scholars erroneously presume that modern consumer culture must have meant the end of home production and provisioning. A useful corrective is V. A. Ramey, ‘Time Spent in Home Production in the Twentieth-century United States: New Estimates from Old Data’, in: Journal of Economic History 69, no. 01, 2009: 1–47.
20. To give a sense of comparison, the figures for France are 30% and 32% respectively. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen & Jean-Paul Fitoussi, ‘Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr’ (2009), 130.
21. Gershuny, Changing Times, ch. 5.
22. A. Heckscher & S. de Grazia, ‘Executive Leisure’, in Harvard Business Review 37, no. 4, 1959: 6–12; Robinson & Godbey, Time for Life, 128f. See also: Mark Aguiar & Erik Hurst, ‘Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades’, Working Paper no. 06-2: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, 2006; although their numbers for leisure are inflated by treating childcare as leisure (rather than as unpaid work).
23. For this and other reasons why Keynes was wrong, see Lorenzo Pecchi & Gustavo Piga, eds., Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (Cambridge, MA, 2008).
24. ‘An Apology for Idlers’, in: Cornhill Magazine, 36 (July 1877), repr. in The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson (1895 edn), 73; emphasis in original.
25. This applies to Thorstein Veblen as well, whose theory of the idle rich ignored the hard-working Rockefellers and more thrifty members of the elite. For a more balanced picture, see Frederic Cople Jaher, ‘The Gilded Elite, American Multimillionaires, 1865 to the Present’, in: Wealth and the Wealthy in the Modern World, ed. W. D. Rubinstein (London, 1980), 189–276.
26. Alain Chenu & Nicolas Herpin, ‘Une pause dans la marche vers la civilisation des loisirs?’ Economie et statistique (2002), 352–3.
27. USB, ‘Income and Leisure: Two Differently Valued Elements of Prosperity’ in the 2006 edition of Prices and Earnings, 36–8. Echoes in Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The Rest and the West (London, 2011), 265f., who treats paid work in isolation.
28. http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/2480/Counting_the_hours.html.
29. David Riesman with Warner Bloomberg, ‘Work and Leisure: Fusion or Polarity?’ (1957), repr. in Riesman, Abundance for What?, 147.
30. Marshall David Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972).
31. D. L. Costa, ‘The Evolution of Retirement: Summary of a Research Project’, in: The American Economic Review 88, no. 2, 1998: 232–6, 234.
32. Dominik Hanglberger, ‘Arbeitszufriedenheit und flexible Arbeitszeiten: Empirische Analyse mit Daten des sozio-oekonomischen Panels’, SOEP paper no. 304, 2010.
33. Breedveld et al., Tijd Als Spiegel.
34. For comparative data on the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Hungary, Finland and the United Kingdom, see Gershuny, Changing Times, ch. 5.
35. See M. Burda, D. Hamermesh & P. Weil, ‘The Distribution of Total Work in the EU and US’, in Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), no. 2270, 2006.
36. Siebter Familienbericht: Familie zwischen Flexibilität und Verlässlichkeit – Perspektiven für eine lebenslaufbezogene Familienpolitik, Deutscher Bundestag. 16. Wahlperiode. Drucksache 16/1360 (26.04. 2006), 223; Jonathan Gershuny, ‘Busyness as the Badge of Honor for the New Superordinate Working Class’, in: Social Research 72, no. 2, 2005: 287–314; and Chartered Management Institute, reported in the Guardian, 15 June 2006.
38. According to the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 9% of all employees were downshifters who opted for lower earnings at some stage during the period 1983 to 1992; R. E. Dwyer, ‘Downward Earnings Mobility after Voluntary Employer Exits’, in: Work and Occupations 31, no. 1, 2004: 111–39.
39. Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener & Norbert Schwarz, eds., Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York, 1999); Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York, 2005); and Luigino Bruni & Pier Luigi Porta, eds., Economics and Happiness: Framing the Analysis (New York, 2006). Of course, happiness extends beyond behavioural economics: for other approaches see: Dieter Thomä, Christoph Henning & Olivia Mitscherlich-Schönherr, eds., Glück: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (Stuttgart, 2011).
40. Richard Easterlin, ‘Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence’, in: Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz, eds. Paul A. David & Melvin W. Reder (New York, 1974), 89–125.
41. Compare M. R. Hagerty & R. Veenhoven, ‘Wealth and Happiness Revisited: Growing National Income Does Go with Greater Happiness’, in: Social Indicators Research 64, no. 1, 2003: 1–27; R. A. Easterlin, ‘Feeding the Illusion of Growth and Happiness: A Reply to Hagerty and Veenhoven’, in: Social Indicators Research 74, no. 3, 2005: 429–43; R. Veenhoven & M. Hagerty, ‘Rising Happiness in Nations, 1946–2004: A reply to Easterlin’, in: Social Indicators Research 79, no. 3, 2006: 421–36; and Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers, ‘Subjective Well-being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation? ’ in: American Economic Review 103, no. 3, 2013: 598–604.
42. A. B. Krueger et al., ‘Time Use and Subjective Well-being in France and the US’, in: Social Indicators Research 93, no. 1, 2009: 7–18. They discuss their method at greater length in ‘National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life’, Working Paper no. 523 (April 2008), Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University, http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/data/ATUS/523alan.pdf.
43. And this is in the upper quintile of the U-index distribution. The difference shrinks in the fourth quintile and virtually disappear in the third; see Krueger et al, ‘Time Use’, fig. 1, 12.
44. Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction (New York, 1976).
45. Ida Craven, ‘Leisure’, in: Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1933; repr. 1949), IX–X, 402–6; Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure (New York, 1962); and Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England. For collective and company leisure, see chapter 12 below.
46. Harry Elmer Barnes, The American Way of Life: Our Institutional Patterns and Social Problems (New York, 1942), 525.
47. J. I. Gershuny & K. Fisher, ‘Leisure in the UK across the 20th Century’, Institute for Social and Economic Research Working Paper, no. 99-03, 1999.
48. Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi, ‘Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’, 126f.
49. Lydia Lueb, Die Freizeit der Textilarbeiterinnen (Münster, 1927), tables 8, 10, 19, 22, 30, quoted at Part II, para. 11.
50. Eurostat, How Europeans Spend Their Time: Everyday Life of Women and Men: Data 1998–2002 (Luxembourg, 2004).
51. Olivier Donnat, Les Pratiques Culturelles des Français: Enquête 1997 (Paris, 1998), 45. Jonathan Gershuny, ‘What Do We Do in Post-industrial Society? The Nature of Work and Leisure Time in the 21st Century’, Working Paper no. 2005-7: Institute for Social and Economic Research, 2005), table 1; Jukka Gronow & Dale Southerton, ‘Leisure and Consumption in Europe’, in: Handbook of European Societies, eds. Göran Therborn & Stefan Immerfall (New York, 2010), 355–84.
52. With a slight delay in Nordic countries, http://tilastokeskus.fi/til/akay/2009/05/akay_2009_05_2011-12-15_tie_001_en.html. See also: Statistisches Bundesamt, Alltag in Deutschland (2004).
53. 35 minutes a day in the United Kingdom (compared to 24 minutes to get to work or study), 34 minutes each in Germany and Norway (vs 21 and 24 minutes for work). Only Hungarians spend four more minutes for travelling to work than for free-time purposes. Of course, not all travel is by car or motorbike, but two thirds is in Western Europe, and for men it is slightly higher. Eurostat, How Europeans Spend Their Time, tables 8.6–8.8, 116–21. For coordination, see further: Dale Southerton, ‘ “Squeezing Time”: Allocating Practices, Coordinating Networks and Scheduling Society’, Time and Society 12, no. 1, 2003: 5–25; and Dale Southerton, ‘Re-ordering Temporal Rhythms’, in: Shove, Trentmann & Wilk, eds., Time, Consumption, and Everyday Life, ch. 3.
54. J. P. Robinson & S. Martin, ‘Changes in American Daily Life: 1965–2005’, Social Indicators Research 93, no. 1, 2009: 47–56, fig. 2.
55. Linder, The Harried Leisure Class, 1–3, 78.
56. Olivier Donnat, ‘Les Pratiques Culturelles des Français à l’ère numérique: Éléments de synthèse 1997–2008’, in: Culture études, 2009-5, 7. The number-one readers in Europe in 2000 were Finnish women, who read 47 minutes a day; French women read for only 23 minutes: Eurostat, How Europeans Spend Their Time, 92.
57. Quoted in Gerald Straka, Thomas Fabian & Joerg Will, Medien im Alltag älterer Menschen (Düsseldorf, 1989), 164.
58. Dutch researchers have found a shift from time-intensive to commodity-intensive leisure, but their actual data is more ambiguous and interesting than this. The time for social contacts declined by over three hours between 1975 and 2005. Sport, on the other hand, increased by over an hour, in spite of Dutch adults spending four hours more on paid and unpaid work: Breedveld et al., Tijd Als Spiegel, 52f. For the United States, see Robinson & Godbey, Time for Life, 268f. For Britain: J. Gershuny & K. Fisher, ‘Leisure’, in: Twentieth-century British Social Trends, eds. A. H. Halsey & J. Webb (Basingstoke, 2000), ch. 18. For Germany, compare the data for 1972 in Kaspar Maase, Lebensweise der Lohnarbeiter in der Freizeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 76, with Eurostat, How Europeans Spend Their Time, 84–7. For mealtimes: Siebter Familienbericht, Familie zwischen Flexibilität und Verlässlichkeit, 212; and Cheng, Olsen, Southerton & Warde, ‘The Changing Practice of Eating’.
59. Vera Mendel & Francis Meynell, The Week-end Book (London, 1931), xiv, xv, 267, 441, 452, emphasis in original.
60. Francis Meynell, The Week-end Book (London, 1955), 468–70.
61. Francis Meynell, The Week-end Book (London, 2006).
62. John P. Robinson & Geoffrey C. Godbey, ‘United States of America: Time-use and Cultural Activities’, in: G. Cushman, A. J. Veal & J. Zuzanek, Free Time and Leisure Participation: International Perspectives (Wallingford, 2005), 277.
63. Donnat, ‘Les Pratiques Culturelles des Français à l’ère numérique’, 10: http://www.pratiquesculturelles.culture.gouv.fr/doc/evolution73-08/T7-PRATIQUES-MUSICALESEN-AMATEUR.pdfhttp://www.pratiquesculturelles.culture.gouv.fr/doc/evolution73-08/T8-PRATIQUES-ARTISTIQUES.pdf.
64. At the time of the 1959 Rome Olympics, one in thirty Italians practised some sport. In 2005, it was one in three. ISTAT, ‘Lo sport che cambia’, Argomenti 29, 2005, 17–19. In France, 33% visited museums and exhibitions at least once a year in 1973. In 2008 it was 37%: http://www.pratiquesculturelles.culture.gouv.fr/doc/evolution73-08/T17-FREQUENTATION-MUSEE-EXPOSITION.pdf. For New Zealand, see the chapter by Sue Walker, Mary Donn & Allan Laidler, in: Cushman, Veal & Zuzanek, Free Time and Leisure Participation, ch. 12; for American trends, see W. B. Beyers, ‘Cultural and Recreational Industries in the United States’, in: Service Industries Journal 28, no. 3, 2008: 375–91.
65. Bohdan Jung, ‘Poland’, in: Cushman, Veal & Zuzanek, Free Time and Leisure Participation, ch. 13.
66. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, 1981); and Miller, The Comfort of Things.
67. See above, 231–3.
68. Elizabeth Shove et al., The Design of Everyday Life (Oxford, 2007). See also: Alan Warde, ‘Consumption and Theories of Practic
e’, in: Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 2, 2005: 131–53.
69. See above, 264–6.
70. M. Bianchi, ed., The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice (London, 1998); and M. Bianchi, ‘Time and Preferences in Cultural Consumption’, in: Value and Valuation in Art and Culture, eds. M. Hutter & D. Throsby (Cambridge, 2007).
71. M. Bittman, J. E. Brown & J. Wajcman, ‘The mobile phone, perpetual contact and time pressure’, Work, Employment & Society 23, no. 4, 2009: 673–691; the authors acknowledge that mobile communication may have intensified pressures at work. See also: J. Wajcman et al., ‘Enacting Virtual Connections between Work and Home’, in: Journal of Sociology 46, no. 3, 2010: 257–75; and Nelly Oudshoorn & Trevor Pinch, eds., How Users Matter: The Co-construction of Users and Technology (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
72. Leopoldina Fortunati & Sakari Taipale, ‘The Advanced Use of Mobile Phones in Five European Countries’, in: British Journal of Sociology 65, no. 2, 2014: 317–37.
73. Emily Rose, ‘Access Denied: Employee Control of Personal Communications at Work’, in: Work, Employment and Society 27, no. 4, 2013: 694–710.
74. 10% of online gaming in the United States takes place at work, according to research undertaken in 2006; D. Deal, ‘Time for play – An Exploratory Analysis of the Changing Consumption Contexts of Digital Games’, in: Electronic International Journal of Time-use Research 5, no. 1, 2008.
75. Olivier Donnat, Les Pratiques Culturelles des Français à l’ère numérique: Enquête 2008 (Paris, 2009), 193–7.
76. See Photokina 2012, Trends in the Photo and Imaging Market, http://www.prophoto-online.de/img/ftp/broschueren/Trends-in-the-photo-and-imaging-market-photokina-2012.pdf; see also: http://mashable.com/2012/11/17/photography/.
77. C. Wingerter, ‘Time Spent by the Population in Germany on Cultural Activities’, Wirtschaft und Statistik, no. 4, 2005: 318–26.
78. 16% and 7% respectively, see http://www.pratiquesculturelles.culture.gouv.fr/doc/evolution73-08/T7-PRATIQUES-MUSICALES-ENAMATEUR.pdf. We can only note here that, in contrast to their growing attendance of theatre and popular music, French workers have fled symphony halls in the last quarter-century; see http://www.pratiquesculturelles.culture.gouv.fr/doc/evolution73-08/T15-FREQUENTATIONCONCERT-R%20J.pdf. For the United States, see Steven Brint & Kristopher Proctor, ‘Middle-class Respectability in 21st-century America: Work and Lifestyle in the Professional– Managerial Stratum’, in: Thrift and Thriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order from the Puritans to the Present, eds. Joshua Yates & James Davison Hunter (Oxford, 2011), ch. 19.