THE TIME BIND: When Work Becomes Home & Home Becomes Work.<i> By Arlie Russell Hochschild</i> . <i> Metropolitan Books: 306 pp., $22.50</i>

The 20th century began with scientific management and it will end with total quality management, different sides of the same coin. While scientific management routinized the minds and muscles of workers and multiplied productivity, TQM achieves productivity and quality by digging into the very hearts and souls of workers. It’s one thing to make people work faster and another to get people to want to spend most of their time at work.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild says TQM did for work what Benjamin Spock did for child rearing. “It presumes that a worker is a capable adult, not a wayward child.” To most people, this sounds like progress, until they read Hochschild’s new book, “The Time Bind,” and discover the dark side of the enlightened workplace.

Hochschild has written some of the best critiques of work in America: “The Managed Heart” explores service work as a form of emotional labor, and “Swing Shift” takes a poignant look at the tensions at home when two parents work. “The Time Bind” is the study of how people balance work and family at a Fortune 500 company that Hochschild renames Amerco, identified as one of the 10 most family-friendly companies by the Family and Work Institute, Working Mother magazine and the organization Companies That Care.

Hochschild studied four two-parent families and two single-parent families for three years and had access to company employees and the company’s climate surveys, which management uses to get feedback on the working environment. From these surveys and interviews with employees and their families, Hochschild discovered a paradox. At Amerco, the average employee worked 47 hours per week, and the majority of employees reported that they needed more time with their families. When Amerco offered generous policies designed to give them more time with their families, none of them took advantage of the policies that would have let them cut back on their hours.

In “The Time Bind,” Hochschild attempts to unravel this paradox. She begins by eliminating the usual reasons people might not want to work less, one of which is typically financial. Oddly, people who made more money were less interested in cutting back on time than those who made less. Another reason employees might not want to work less is the company’s leadership. Workers believed that the chief executive was sincere in his support of family friendly policies. Although some middle managers did not like these policies, others did. Nonetheless, even people who had supportive managers didn’t take advantage of the family policies. Employees reported that they were not worried about layoffs, an answer Hochschild accepts early in the book but questions later on. A line from the employee handbook says, “Time spent on the job is an indication of commitment. Work more hours.”

The paradox begins to unwind when we read about the families that Hochschild studied. She is an engaging writer, and it doesn’t take long for the reader to feel the exhaustion and strain on these families. Linda, a shift supervisor and 38-year-old mother of two, is married to Bill, a technician in the same plant. They both work overtime on opposite shifts. Linda says she usually goes to work early to get away from the house. The workplace is friendlier and more supportive than her home. Hochschild observes that for many people, work has become home and home has become work. As Hochschild mentions, men have always used work as a refuge from unhappy marriages and from wives and children who do not offer the same deference as employees. It’s not surprising that women would also use work as an escape, especially when they think they are not appreciated at home.

Not all of the people Hochschild studied were escaping to work. Some were seduced by their own career ambitions; others simply enjoyed either their jobs or their friends at work. Next to work, home life can be boring. Hochschild notes that the home used to be a place that produced entertainment, whereas today it is a place where people consume entertainment.

Other Amerco employees seemed to have created their own circle of hell at home. By working long hours, they have less time to take care of their houses and children. So they respond by instituting rigid time schedules and outsourcing parenting responsibilities to day care and baby-sitters. While their workplace has a feminine and caring feel, their homes become masculine and impersonal. The children protest their parents’ efficient time management. They stage sit-down strikes and refuse to go bed after quality time. They riot, produce shoddy work at school and extort toys, treats and exemptions from their parents. It’s no fun for parents to go home to a family that behaves like an angry labor union, especially when they are riddled with guilt.

Hochschild leaves the reader to speculate on the fate of these timed and regimented children and the emotional state of their overworked parents. One mother named Vicky measures her parenting by how well her children are doing, not by the amount of time she spends with them. A father tells Hochschild that he thinks that the nine hours a day that his 3-month-old spends in day care will make her grow up to be more independent. Hochschild says that many of the people she interviewed have an image of their “potential self,” the self who could meet his or her family’s needs “if only” this or that or “after I finish this project.”

In the end, Hochschild doesn’t really solve the paradox of why people work more than they have to. It’s difficult to tell if the time bind comes from the people she studied or the company or some mixture of both. At the end of the book, she wonders: Is the time bind “leading us toward not only the parent-free home, but also the participant-free civic society and the citizen-free democracy?”

Hochschild offers some solutions to the time bind but does not develop them in detail. She asks us to consider a movement to shorten the work week and examines three ways of managing time at work. She also suggests that the Commerce Department broaden its criteria for the Malcolm Baldridge Award.

The real answer to Hochschild’s paradox--unbeknownst to her--is found in the last part of the book. After she completed her interviews, the company went through a “re-engineering process” called Amerco Competes. The psychologist who ran the work-life balance program was laid off or, as it is more euphemistically expressed, “internally de-hired” as the company went through downsizing. Those who weren’t laid off had to work even longer hours. Amerco set up a two-month stress-reduction workshop for salaried employees. Maybe the employees put in so many hours because they knew all along that the company’s carrots were really sticks in disguise and that their company, like their mates, might eventually divorce them.

Perhaps most important, Hochschild questions the wisdom of making the workplace seem like a haven that encourages people to feel the same way about work as they do about their homes and families. Although TQM enriches the quality of work life for people, it is difficult for companies to live up to its espoused values of commitment, trust, loyalty and teamwork. These are reciprocal moral values that you can’t get from people without giving something back. At Amerco, people thrived on promises that they knew, deep down, the company could not keep (namely, prioritizing family life the way employees themselves would if they could). At the beginning of this century, the routine labor of scientific management broke workers’ backs; at the end of the century, TQM might be breaking their hearts.