Time for Things

Modern life is full of stuff yet bereft of time. An economic sociologist offers an ingenious explanation for why, over the past seventy-five years, Americans have come to prefer consumption to leisure.Productivity has increased steadily since the mid-twentieth century, yet Americans today work roughly as much as they did then: forty hours per week. We have witnessed, during this same period, relentless growth in consumption. This pattern represents a striking departure from the preceding century, when working hours fell precipitously. It also contradicts standard economic theory, which tells us that increasing consumption yields diminishing marginal utility, and empirical research, which shows that work is a significant source of discontent. So why do we continue to trade our time for more stuff?Time for Things offers a novel explanation for this puzzle. Stephen Rosenberg argues that, during the twentieth century, workers began to construe consumer goods as stores of potential free time to rationalize the exchange of their labor for a wage. For example, when a worker exchanges his labor for an automobile, he acquires a duration of free activity that can be held in reserve, counterbalancing the unfree activity represented by work. This understanding of commodities as repositories of hypothetical utility was made possible, Rosenberg suggests, by the standardization of durable consumer goods, as well as warranties, brands, and product-testing, which assured wage earners that the goods they purchased would be of consistent, measurable quality.This theory clarifies perplexing aspects of behavior under industrial capitalism—the urgency to spend earnings on things, the preference to own rather than rent consumer goods—as well as a variety of historical developments, including the coincident rise of mass consumption and the legitimation of wage labor.

An enormously ambitious and highly provocative book, Time for Things addresses one of the most central and most difficult puzzles in economics and political economy: why is it that advanced capitalist societies do not use their high and growing productivity for more free time—with great benefits for individuals, social life, and the environment—and instead increase consumption in line with rising productive capacity? With extraordinary conceptual precision and theoretical acumen, Rosenberg shows how the various versions of modern economics fail to even come close to resolving the puzzles posed by the apparent stability of consumerist capitalism. Whether or not his approach to this puzzle will stand after criticism, the debate that Rosenberg has started will be a major one and is likely to add significantly to our understanding of contemporary capitalism., This remarkable book examines the master issue of our daily lives, the scarcity of time, and makes a startling argument about the norms that facilitate capitalist expansion: time is turned into ever more things because things begin to be seen as time. Rosenberg’s wide-ranging approach draws from, and challenges, historians, economists, psychologists, and philosophers, as much as sociologists. Time for Things is not an incremental addition to an existing conversation, but the start of a whole new conversation., This brilliant book presents a revolutionary account of America’s consumption economy, arguing that standardized consumer durables provided essential legitimation for the very idea of wage labor. Drawing on economics, sociology, and history, Rosenberg combines data on economic trends, consumption patterns, business and labor movements, product development, and marketing. His magisterial study states and defends a novel theory of consumption that has profound implications for our understanding of the modern American economy., Rosenberg settles on an intriguing explanation: that the reason workers stopped pushing to reduce working time is that products got better, and consumers began to demand more of them…Brings a much-needed social dimension to our understanding of work., [Rosenberg] deploys an arrangement of resources drawn from social theory combined with evidence from history and economic data to develop a theory of mass consumption as ‘wage-labor commensuration.’ According to this, since the 1920s the preference to trade the prospect of the leisure dividend with the pursuit of the wage-labor increment (to finance a greater propensity to consume) is the hallmark of work-leisure relations. Rosenberg is nothing less than heroic in assembling an enormous range of the theoretical and empirical date to make the case.

Stephen D. Rosenberg, a historical sociologist and social theorist, is a Visiting Tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.