Time for Things: Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption

Economists say there is a limit to what we gain by buying consumer goods. Americans say they want to work less. Yet we continue toiling away and use the proceeds to buy, buy, buy. Why? Stephen Rosenberg offers a novel theory, arguing that workers have learned to treat goods as stores of potential free time, legitimating endless wage work.

Table of Contents:
Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. The Puzzle Chapter 3. Empirical Pattern in the United States Chapter 4. A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration Chapter 5. Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background Chapter 6. Standardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages Chapter 7. Standardizing Utility: Brands and Commercial and Legal Warranties Chapter 8. Product Testing and Product Regularization Chapter 9. Moral Panic about Utility: Planned Obsolescence Chapter 10. Conclusion: Capitalism, Commensuration, and the Normativity of Economic Action Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Notes References Acknowledgments Index

Review :
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. -- Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End? 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. -- Monica Prasad, author of The Land of Too Much 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. -- Andrew Abbott, University of Chicago 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. -- Andrew Leigh Inside Story [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. -- Chris Rojek Business History Review Rosenberg argues that consumers are plunged into an insatiable quest to consume enough so that they can feel that they are receiving at least fair pay...Hence the propensity for capitalist production and consumption, work and spend, to spiral upwards indefinitely...Rosenberg is to be congratulated for a book that, unusually nowadays, has something genuinely original to say. -- Ken Roberts International Review of Social History