The Time Bind is one of this decade's most influential studies of our work/family time-dilemma. For three years at a Fortune 500 company, Arlie Russell Hochschild, the best-selling author of The Second Shift, interviewed everyone from top executives to factory hands. What she found was startling news: none of these working parents was taking the company up on chances for flex-time, paternity leave, or other "family-friendly policies." Instead, they were fleeing homes invaded by the pressures of work, while the workplace seemed transformed into a strange kind of surrogate home. Hochschild paints a picture of spouses as efficiency experts, children as emotional bill-collectors, and parents who feel like helpful mentors mainly to their workmates. "An important, provocative, ground-breaking analysis" (Newsweek), The Time Bind exposes the rifts in our crunch-time world and reveals how the way we live and work isn't working anymore.

The national bestseller that put "work/family balance" in the headlines and on the White House agenda, with a new introduction by the author.

When The Time Bind was first published in 1997, it was hailed as the decade's most influential study of our work/family crisis. In the short time since, the crisis has only become more acute.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, bestselling author of The Second Shift, spent three summers at a Fortune 500 company interviewing top executives, secretaries, factory hands, and others. What she found was startling: Though every mother and nearly every father said "family comes first," few of these working parents questioned their long hours or took the company up on chances for flextime, paternity leave, or other "family friendly" policies. Why not? It seems the roles of home and work had reversed: work was offering stimulation, guidance, and a sense of belonging, while home had become the place in which there was too much to do in too little time.

Today Hochschild's findings are more relevant than ever. As she shows in her new introduction, the borders between family and work have become even more permeable. With the Internet extending working hours at home and offices offering domestic enticements -- free snacks, soft music -- to keep employees later at their jobs, The Time Bind stands as an increasingly important warning about the way we live and work.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s fall 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, addresses the increasingly bitter political divide in America. Based on five years of immersion reporting among Tea Party loyalists in Louisiana, Hochschild tries to bridge an “empathy wall” between the sides, to explore the “deep story” underlying the right that remains unrecognized by the left. Mark Danner calls the book “a powerful, imaginative, necessary book, arriving not a moment too soon." Robert Reich writes” Anyone who wants to understand modern America should read this captivating book." In its review, Publisher’s Weekly notes: “After evaluating her conclusions and meeting her informants in these pages, it’s hard to disagree that empathy is the best solution to stymied political and social discourse.”

Her 2012 The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, explores the many ways in which the market enters our modern lives and was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Her other books include: So How’s the Family?, The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, The Commercialization of Intimate Life, The Unexpected Community and the co-edited Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. In reviewing The Second Shift (reissued in 2012 with a new afterword) Robert Kuttner noted Hochschild’s “subtlety of insights” and “graceful seamless narrative” and called it the “best discussion I have read of what must be the quintessential domestic bind of our time.” Newsweek’s Laura Shapiro described The Time Bind as “groundbreaking.” In awarding Hochschild the Jesse Bernard Award, the American Sociological Association citation observed her “creative genius for framing questions and lines of insight, often condensed into memorable, paradigm-shifting words and phrases.” A retired U.C. Berkeley professor of sociology, she lives with her husband, the writer Adam Hochschild in Berkeley, California.