Social Research articles from June 2005

Social Research archives from June 2005

Editor's introduction.
June 22, 2005... THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH WAS OCCASIONED BY AN ALL too familiar and equally banal exchange with a colleague right before a meeting we both were attending. Just to be polite, I asked him how he was. Not surprisingly, he answered,...

A right to be lazy? Busyness in retrospective.
June 22, 2005... I RECALL AN OLD MAN SELLING PAUL LAFARGUE'S RIGHT TO BE LAZY ON a busy street in the Latin Quarter in the 1980s. At the time I was writing my first book on the history of work time and leisure and felt by seeing this strange and grumpy man so...

Busyness as the badge of honor for the new superordinate working class.
June 22, 2005... 1. ON THE RATING OF A SUBJECTIVE STATE "BUSYNESS" PLAINLY RELATES TO EXTERNALLY OBSERVABLE WORK OR leisure activities, but the state itself is entirely subjective. I will argue in what follows that there may have been fundamental changes...

When the sky is the limit: busyness in contemporary American society.
June 22, 2005... HOW LONG AGO WAS IT THAT I WAS ASKED TO WRITE THIS ESSAY ON busyness for Social Research--a year, perhaps more? I agreed on the spot: the subject seemed interesting and had been bothering me for some time. But I couldn't do anything with it...

On the edge of the time bind: time and market culture.
June 22, 2005... IN THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, KARL POLYANI ARGUES THAT WE HAVE transitioned from a society with islands of market life to a market with islands of society (2001 [1944]). (1) As the market has grown, so too, I would argue, has market culture. In...

A geography of busyness.
June 22, 2005... [... pause] --David Mamet's suggestion for his own epitaph IF YOU CASUALLY GREET AMERICANS WITH THE QUESTION "HOW ARE you?" they are likely to respond about how busy their lives are, perhaps scrunching up their faces and bodies to show...

That busyness that is not business: nervousness and character at the turn of the last century.
June 22, 2005... THE NOTION OF "BUSYNESS" CALLED UP CONFLICTING IMAGES FOR Americans. It denoted the scurry and bustle of a dynamic civilization; it also suggested pointless and unproductive nervousness, and even degeneracy or decline. Americans related...

Busyness as usual.
June 22, 2005... The wish to live as intensely as possible has subjected humans to the same dilemma as the water flea, which lives 108 days at 8 degrees Centigrade, but only twenty-six days at 28 degrees, when its heartbeat is almost four times faster, though...

Keeping busy.
June 22, 2005... PIRANDELLO'S PLAY SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR HAS spawned endless feeble witticisms of the form "six x in search of a y." I was tempted to begin this paper with another: six episodes in the history of ideas about work and leisure in...

Busyness and citizenship.
June 22, 2005... HOW DOES THE EXPERIENCE OF BUSYNESS AFFECT DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL life? My hunch is that those reading this essay might very well offer the following answer: busyness means that we relegate political activities to the bottom of a long and...

Business is busyness, or the work ethic.
June 22, 2005... "NOWHER SO BISY A MAN AS HE THER NAS," WE READ OF ONE OF CHAUCER'S pilgrims; "And yet he semed bisier than he was." And yet? The logic of these lines seems more than a little mischievous. Nowhere could there be found a man as busy as this, and...