Family life without time shortage

This is the home page of the research project ”Family life without time shortage”. Its overall aim is to increase the knowledge of how the time pressure of individuals and families can be reduced. The following texts are available in english.

Political proposal for lowered time pressure for parents
After a research course on work-life balance by Arlie R Hochschild I initiated a collaboration for developing a political proposal. The result was published in the largest swedish daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. There is an english translation of the article. Read here.

Self help books on avoiding time shortage
This article was published in Time & Society 2005. It was based on an analysis of advice for mastering time pressure in self help books. The abstract reads as follows ”Self-help books are tokens of our reflexive individualized society. The widespread experience of too high a pace in daily life and too little time for recovery and for social relations has resulted in books focussing on avoiding time shortage. In our analysis of the advice in such books we found time management categories, like streamlining activities and buying services. Other identified categories focus on life management strategies, like setting limits to time-consuming aspirations. Questioning personal aspirations in areas such as work and consumption appears to be adequate ways of avoiding time shortage and increasing one’s quality of life but this is also a challenging task due to the importance most people attach to these areas for identity creation and social acceptance.” Read the full text version.

Previous research and research plan
This is a paper presented at a conference on work-family balance i France 2005, September 2005. It contains a brief description of previous research as well as a description of planned studies. It can be downloaded here.

The project is financed by FORMAS which is a Swedish governmental research-funding agency. The project is running until 2010.

The project is mainly carried out by Jörgen Larsson. He is Ph.D. candidate at the department of Sociology, Göteborg University, Sweden. mail Office phone: +46 31 773 10 00 or cellphone +46 708 833370.

Christer Sanne is the formal project leader. Mail

Anna-Karin Kollind is Jörgen Larsson's supervisor at the department of Sociology, Göteborg University. Mail

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