Winner of the 2015 Max Weber Award from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2015 William T. Goode Distinguished Book Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2015 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association

“How long is the workday, and how thick the paycheck? To these questions, scholars have offered answers. But the key questions, Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel propose in this fascinating book, are: how shielded are we from unpredictable demands? And how do we control the unpredictability we’re made to face? Comparing doctors, nurses, EMTs and nursing assistants, men and women, the authors explore the lives of the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of such control, as well as the friends, co-workers and family on whom they call to create orderly lives in an increasingly disorderly world. A thought-provoking and very important read.”

—Arlie Hochschild, professor emerita, University of California, Berkeley

“Unequal Time is a meticulously and creatively researched study of how time at home and work is understood and managed. Time is not only an individual possession, but is relational. ‘Normal unpredictability’ rules. Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel explore the gaps between the rhetoric and realities of workplace flexibility. They find that flexibility is not just a matter of choice, but power.”

—Robert Aronowitz, M.D., professor and chair, History and Sociology of Science,
University of Pennsylvania

“Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel provide a powerful account of how inequalities are at the core of many of the vexing problems of work and family. Based on in-depth multi-method research in the health care industry, and this compelling book will change the way you think about work time issues. Essential reading for scholars and practitioners alike.”

—Juliet Schor, professor of sociology, Boston College

“This book's careful research design pays enormous dividends: comparing four critical occupations in the health care sector, Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel generate important new insights into the ways class and gender inequalities interact to shape struggles for control over working time. Unequal Time demonstrates that gender and class advantage and disadvantage are deeply implicated in the dynamics of ‘work-family balance’ and ‘flexibility,’ complicating the conventional wisdom in a provocative and fruitful way. This book is indispensable for scholars, policymakers, and anyone who cares about working families.”

 —Ruth Milkman, professor of sociology, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Life is routinely unpredictable. Control over one's time is a critical resource for managing that unpredictability, keeping a job, and raising a family. But the ability to control one's time, much like one's income, is determined to a significant degree by both gender and class. In Unequal Time, sociologists Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel explore the ways in which social inequalities permeate the workplace, reverberating through a web of time in which the schedules of one person shape the schedules of others in ways that exemplify and often exacerbate differences between men and women, the privileged and disadvantaged.

Unequal Time investigates the connected schedules of four health sector occupations: professional doctors and nurses, and working-class EMTs and nursing assistants. While the work-family literature mostly examines the hours people work, Clawson and Gerstel delve into the process through which schedules are set, negotiated, and contested. They show how workers in all four occupations experience the effects of schedule uncertainty but do so in distinct ways, largely shaped by the intersection of gender and class. Doctors, who are largely male and professional, have significant control over their schedules, though they often claim otherwise, and tend to work long hours because they earn respect from their peers for doing so. By contrast, nursing assistants, primarily female and working-class, work demanding hours because they face penalties for taking time off, no matter how valid the reasons. Without institutional support, they often turn to co-workers to help create more orderly lives.

Unequal Time shows that the degree of control that workers hold over their schedules can either reinforce or challenge conventional gender roles. When male doctors work overtime, they often rely on their wives and domestic workers to care for their families. Female nurses are more likely to handle the bulk of their family responsibilities, and use the control they have over their work schedules to dedicate more time to home life. Surprisingly, the authors find that in the working class occupations, workers frequently undermine traditional gender roles. Male EMTs often take significant time off for child care, and female nursing assistants sometimes choose to work more hours to provide extra financial support for their families. Employers often underscore these disparities by allowing their upper-tier workers the flexibility that enables their gender roles at home, while low-wage workers are pressured to put their jobs before any unpredictable events they might face outside of work.

We tend to consider personal and work scheduling an individual affair, but Clawson and Gerstel put forward the provocative hypothesis that time in the workplace is both collective and highly unequal. A valuable resource for workers' advocates and policymakers alike, Unequal Time illustrates how social inequalities in the workplace shape the lives of workers and their families.

DAN CLAWSON is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

NAOMI GERSTEL is a distinguished university professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In the course of its television lifetime, "Sesame Street" has taught alphabet-related skills to hundreds of thousands of preschool children. But the program may have attracted more of its regular viewers from relatively affluent homes in which the parents were better educated. Analyzing and reevaluating data drawn from several sources, principally the Educational Testing Service's evaluations of "Sesame Street," the authors of this book open fresh lines of inquiry into how much economically disadvantaged children learned from viewing the series for six months and into whether the program is widening the gap that separates the academic achievement of disadvantaged preschoolers from that of their more affluent counterparts.  The authors define as acute dilemma currently facing educational policymakers: what positive results are achieved when a large number of children learn some skills at a younger age if this absolute increase in knowledge is associated with an increase in the difference between social groups?

THOMAS D. COOK is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair of Ethics and Justice and professor of sociology, psychology, and education and social policy at Northwestern University.

Americans have a reputation for moving often and far, for being committed to careers or lifestyles, not place. Now, with curtailed fertility, residential mobility plays an even more important role in the composition of local populations—and by extension, helps shape local and national economic trends, social service requirements, and political constituencies.

In Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States, Larry Long integrates diverse census and survey data and draws on many academic disciplines to offer a uniquely comprehensive view of internal migration patterns since the 1930s.  Long describes an American population that lives up to its reputation for high mobility, but he also reports a surprising recent decline in interstate migration and an unexpected fluctuation in the migration balance toward nonmetropolitan areas.  He provides unprecedented insight into reasons for moving and explores return and repeat migration, regional balance, changing migration flows of blacks and whites, and the policy implications of movement by low-income populations.

How often, how far, and why people move are important considerations in characterizing the lifestyles of individuals and the nature of social institutions.  This volume illuminates the extent and direction, as well as the causes and consequences, of population turnover in the United States.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

Now considered a classic in the field, this book first called attention to what Kanter has referred to as the "myth of separate worlds." Rosabeth Moss Kanter was one of the first to argue that the assumes separation between work and family was a myth and that research must explore the linkages between these two roles.

ROSABETH MOSS KANTER holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.

Discusses the intellectual processes involved in social planning. Professor Kahn provides critical tools for the analysis of the planning process, and shows what social planning is and can be.  Clarifying the major phases in the planning process, he shows how planning can succeed or fail at any one of these stages.  He examined planners in their various roles: as "neutral" technicians and as advocates, as representatives of interest groups and as public officials. 

The book describes both the social aspects of planning and the relationship between social and physical plans.

ALFRED J. KAHN was professor of Social Policy and Planning at the Columbia University School of Social Work.

The notion of law as a social phenomenon would have surprised educators and scholars a century ago. For them, law was a science and the library was the ultimate source of all legal knowledge. Our contemporary willingness to see law in a social context—reflecting social relations, for example, or precipitating social changes—is a relatively recent development, spurred during the last quarter century by the work of a generation of scholars (mostly social scientists and law professors) who believe the perspectives of the social sciences are essential to a better understanding of the law.

Law and the Social Sciences provides a unique and authoritative assessment of modern sociolegal research. Its impressive range and depth, the centrality of its concerns, and the stature of its contributors all attest to the vitality of the law-and-society movement and the importance of interdisciplinary work in this field.

Each chapter is both an exposition of its author’s point of view and a survey of the pertinent literature. In treating such topics as law and the economic order, legal systems of the world, the deterrence doctrine, and access to justice, the authors explore overlapping themes—the tension between public and private domains, between diffused and concentrated power, between the goals of uniformity and flexibility, between costs and benefits—that are significant to observers not only of our legal institutions but of other social systems as well.

LEON LIPSON was Henry R. Luce Professor Emeritus of Jurisprudence and Paul C. Tsai Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale University.

STANTON WHEELER was Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus of Law and the Social Sciences and professorial lecturer in law at Yale University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard L. Abel, Shari Seidman Diamond, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Mark Galanter, Julius G. Getman, Jack P. Gibbs, Jeffrey L. Jowell, Edmund W. Kitch, Leon Lipson, Stewart Macaulay, David R. Mayhew, Sally Falk Moore, Austin D. Sarat, Richard D. Schwartz, Stanton Wheeler. 

Regulatory Justice is based on a case study of two closely linked federal agencies—the Cost of Living Council (CLC) and the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP)—which administered a nationwide wage-price freeze in 1971.

ROBERT A. KAGAN is Professor of Political Science and Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

What determines the systematic allocation of status, power, and economic reward among lawyers?  What kind of social structure organizes lawyers’ roles in the bar and in the larger community?

As Heinz and Laumann convincingly demonstrate, the legal profession is stratified primarily by the character of the clients served, not by the type of legal service rendered.  In fact, the distinction between corporate and individual clients divides the bar into two remarkably separate hemispheres.  Using data from extensive personal interviews with nearly 800 Chicago lawyers, the authors show that lawyers who serve one type of client seldom serve the other.  Furthermore, lawyers’ political, ethno-religious, and social ties are very likely to correspond to those of their client types.  Greater deference is consistently shown to corporate lawyers, who seem to acquire power by association with their powerful clients.

Heinz and Laumann also discover that these two “hemispheres” of the legal profession are not effectively integrated by intraprofessional organizations such as the bar, courts, or law schools.  The fact that the bar is structured primarily along extraprofessional lines raises intriguing questions about the law and the nature of professionalism, questions addressed in a provocative and far-ranging final chapter.

This volume, published jointly with the American Bar Foundation, offers a uniquely sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of lawyers’ professional lives.  It will be of exceptional importance to sociologists and others interested in the legal profession, in the general study of professions, and in social stratification and the distribution of power.

JOHN P. HEINZ is Professor of law and Urban Affairs at Northwestern University and Executive Director of the American Bar Foundation.

Concentrates on the historical, statutory, judicial, and administrative aspects of philanthropic foundations.  It begins with a general survey of the rise of foundations, particularly as a legal concept, and examines existing provisions for state registration and supervision, with special atention to the role of the attorney general.  There are field reports on ten states with programs aimed at following charitable activities closely.  

The concluding chapter provides appraisals and recommendations, and appendices include state legal requirements for charitable trusts and corporations, selected state acts, rules, reporting forms, and a list of cases.

MARION R. FREMONT-SMITH is a practicing attorney in Boston.