Family Time. The Social Organization of Care (Routledge IAFFE Advances in Feminist Economics)

The time we have to care for one another, especially for our children and our elderly, is more precious to us than anything else in the world. Yet we have more experience accounting for money than we do for time. In this volume, leading experts in analysis of time use from across the globe explore the interface between time use and family policy. The contributors:

* show how social institutions limit the choices that individuals can make about how to divide their time between paid and unpaid work
* challenge conventional surveys that offer simplistic measures of time spent in childcare or elder care
* summarize empirical evidence concerning trends in time devoted to the care of family members
* debate ways of assigning a monetary value to this time.

This informative and enlightening book is well researched, well thought through and well written. An important read for students of feminist economics, sociology and gender studies, the contributors here argue that time is not money, in fact time is more important than money.

Nancy Folbre is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and staff economist with the Centre for Popular Economics. Amongst other books she has written is Who Pays for the Kids? also published by Routledge. Michael Bittman is Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia, chair of the United Nations Expert Group on Time-Use Surveys and co-author (with Jocelyn Pixley) of The Double Life of the Family .