[2]
~
[3]
L. GORDON, E.KLOPOV
__TITLE__ ManPROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[4]Translated from the Russian by JOHN BUSHNELL and KRISTINE BUSHNELL
JI. TOPAOH, 3. KJIOHOB
1EJIOBEK nOCJIE PABOTbl eH JI. OHHKOBA
Ha
__COPYRIGHT__ First printingThis book is an attempt to describe the social aspects of the behavior of urban workers in their daily routine and to analyze the patterns that define its dependence on living conditions. In this sense, this book is a continuation of the social research of the past years devoted to leisure time, to the problems of everyday life, the family and urban development.^^1^^
The increasing interest in such areas shown by Soviet sociologists is not mere happenstance. In the final analysis, it is connected with the general tendencies in the development of Soviet society at its present stage.
Building a new world naturally begins with reforming the socio-political life of the country, the socialist reorganization of the economy, and creating the material and technical base of socialism. In each of these areas, the Soviet people has achieved success. Backward in the past, Russia came an immense distance in a few decades and, under the leadership of the Communist Party, was transformed into a powerful industrial and agricultural state. Her success in the political remaking of society, her economic, cultural and scientific achievements are well known all over the world.
_-_-_~^^1^^ See S. G. Strumilin, Problems of Socialism and Communism in the USSR, Moscow, 1961; G. A. Prudensky, ``Problems of Working Time and Leisure Time" in: Selected Works, Moscow, 1972; V. D. Patrushev, Time as an Economic Category, Moscow, 1966; B. A. Grushin, Free Time. Current Problems, Moscow, 1967; A. G. Kharchev, Marriage and the Family in the USSR. Results of Sociological Research, Moscow, 1964 (all in Russian).
10Building and defending a socialist society meant that the standard of living of the Soviet people had to be held down for quite a long time. This became less necessary as the country passed from one stage of its development to another, achieving new successes in building its technical, political and military base. There was a corresponding increase in the necessary material prerequisites for raising the level of the culture and prosperity of the working people and for ensuring a harmonious development of all members of society.
``From the first days of Soviet power, our Party and state have been doing their utmost in this respect. But for wellknown historical reasons our possibilities were limited for a long time. Now they are substantially greater, which enables the Party to raise the question of centering economic development still more fully on improving the life of the people."^^1^^
On the one hand, scientific and technological progress and the growth of labor productivity provide conditions for significantly improving the people's well-being, for increasing their free time. On the other hand, the issue today is not merely whether Soviet society has the chance to give the individual's daily routine more attention. Improving the quality of everyday life and leisure time is now a requirement for developing Soviet society as a whole. The Party and Government leaders are giving much attention to the problems of everyday life, to developing the service sector, to the need for careful, economical, efficient and creative use of free time. ``Free time should really be considered a social resource when it is used for the harmonious development of the individual, of his abilities and, by the same token, for the further increase of the material and spiritual potential of society as a whole."^^2^^
At a period in the development of Soviet society when the building of communism has become a practical task and realistic goal, the individual's non-productive activities, his daily routine and free time are just as important for _-_-_
~^^1^^ 24th Congress of the CPSU, Moscow, 1971, p. 51.
~^^2^^ L. I. Brezhnev, Resolutions of the24th Congress of the CPSU--- the Militant Program of Activity of Soviet Trade Unions. Speech at the 15th Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1972, pp. 11-1? (in Russian).
11 the development of his personality as labor is for social production. Application of the latest achievements of science and technology, the use of intensive rather than extensive methods of economic development, the increased intensity and weight of mental labor---all this substantially alters the individual's place in social production and imposes new demands on him. In these conditions, activities outside the sphere of production are no less important than activities within the working collective. ``Free time---which is time for leisure and for more elevated activity---naturally turns the person who uses it into a different subject and as a different subject he enters into the direct process of production."^^1^^ In communist society, leisure time activities are a condition ``for the full development of the individual, which, in turn, as a very important productive force, has a reciprocal influence on the productive force of labor".^^2^^ __FIX__ Missing paragraph breaks.It is natural, therefore, that the individual's non-- working hours be the subject of constant attention in the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Soviet Government, which are taking practical measures in such areas as housing, public education, communal services and retail trade, physical education, publishing, mass media, and transportation. The individual's activities outside working hours and his everyday behavior will, as Soviet society develops, become a more and more important element in building communist society.
It is important to investigate leisure activity because, first, it is a factor in personality development---a component in the totality of the individual's life and activities. Second, such research helps reveal ways to influence the individual, social groups and society as a whole (i.e., it is a basis for finding scientific methods of educating the working people in the spirit of communism and of social planning). And, finally, this subject has not been investigated as deeply as other aspects of the economic and social development of Soviet society.
Thus, we hope that our study is timely and will be of .both theoretical and practical interest. The subject is, of course, _-_-_
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Grundrisse Arr Kritik der polltixhen Okonomte, 1857--1858, Moskau, 1939, S. 599.
~^^2^^ Ihid., S. 599.
12 too broad for a single monograph. Therefore, the general problem---the study of the individual's everyday behavior and its dependence on the conditions of life---must be narrowed down and made more specific.The object of our research, to be specific, has been to study not the problem of the daily routine of the whole population, but of a comparatively homogeneous social group--- urban industrial workers. Further, we have analyzed the data obtained in the course of a specific sociological survey. Strictly speaking, this approach means that quantitative results are limited to the cities studied. But since our research was carried on in representative but diverse industrial centers, we may assume that qualitative conclusions with respect to basic trends in the everyday life of the workers studied do reflect a situation characteristic for workers in analogous, major industrial centers (excluding, of course, those cities that are exceptions by virtue of their national composition, climate, etc.).
Finally, our study employs time budgets in the analysis of the social problems of daily life. The advantages of this approach will be examined in detail at a later point, but we wish here to note that time-budget studies were employed because they are the best instrument for analyzing sociologically the daily routine. In this sense, our study is based on methods already developed by many Soviet researchers. At the same time, it is obvious that research on the social aspects of behavior can be based not only on time-budget studies; this method can and should be supplemented by an analysis of other characteristics of the mode of life (social setting, social attitudes, etc.).
__b_b_b__A few words should be said about the general concepts employed in this work. The daily routine is understood to designate here a broad sociological category encompassing that sphere of human activity lying outside of production and beyond formal supervision. In this sense, this sphere corresponds roughly to non-working hours.
The daily routine (at least at the present stage of social development) consists primarily of the individual's consumption of material and spiritual values and of the labor associated with this consumption. We are employing herein 13 not an ethnographic, but a philosophical, general sociological approach to the definition of the daily routine. This approach is based on functional differentiation (production, consumption, etc.), while the distinguishing feature of the ethnographic approach to the definition of the daily routine is its focus on the everyday, commonplace and traditional characteristics of behavior. Of course, one should take into account the everyday nature of the activities that make up the daily routine (for the exceptional, the rare occurrence has no place in the daily routine); but this factor is only of secondary importance in our study.
Of course, the above definition of the daily routine does not cover all forms of social activity. In some cultures, especially in pre-capitalist societies, productive and nonproductive areas of activity arc so intermixed that distinguishing between them is an abstraction of the highest order. In terms of concrete research, it is practically impossible (or extremely difficult) here to separate productive activity, i.e., work, from the daily routine. In such circumstances, it is natural to use division of life activity into its everyday and non-everyday forms, i.e., an ethnographic conception of the daily routine, as a frame of reference. Soviet daily life, like that of any other developed country, is of course a different matter. Here, it is preferable to define the daily routine functionally, as the non-productive, i.e., non working, portion of daily life.
This general definition of the daily routine is necessary only for delimiting the principal forms of social life ( production, management, daily routine). It does not suffice for a further analysis of that area of the individual's life because the daily routine is under this definition so varied and heterogeneous and because it encompasses the individual's material environment, his everyday behavior, different aspects of family life and many aspects of culture. Therefore, in order to use this general sociological definition of daily routine we must isolate its homogeneous elements. Isolating these elements is a prerequisite for a logical analysis both of the daily routine and of the basic areas of life of the social organism in general.
The basic concepts from which a description of these areas of social life can be drawn were indicated by Marx and 14 Engels. As they observe in The German Ideology: ``The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live...."^^1^^
In connection with our study of the social aspects of the daily routine, the focus of this book, it is important to point out that it is the behavior of the ``active'' individual outside of production and management that makes up the daily routine---routine in the literal sense of the word, routine as daily existence---as opposed to the environment in which it occurs. One's behavior in the daily routine is determined chiefly, but not exclusively, by various forms of consumption---material, cultural, etc.---and by directly connected service activities.
Of course, behavior can also be isolated in other spheres of social life: labor---in production; civic and political activity---in administration. Taken together, all of these elements (labor, civic and political activity, behavior in the daily routine) constitute the mode of life of an individual, family, group or society as a whole. Thus, behavior in the daily routine, the subject of this study, is a component part of one's way of life, one's mode of everyday life.
This book, however, will not examine all the aspects of behavior in the daily routine but only its most overt forms--- behavior as a series of acts. We will but rarely deal with people's intentions, opinions, or emotions. In other words, behavior will be understood in a narrow sense, as real behavior, readily observed, which can be located in time.
Moreover, it is necessary to isolate among the concepts describing the basic elements of the daily routine and of other areas of human activity the determinants of behavior, the material conditions of life. In a certain sense, we can speak of the conditions of production (i.e., labor or work, in a narrow sense), the conditions of civic and political life, and the conditions of the daily routine. But this delimitation is relative: wage or income, for example, is, on the one _-_-_
~^^1^^ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow, 1964, p. 31.
15 hand, a condition of labor and, on the other, a condition of the daily routine. With respect to behavior, the conditions of life clearly fall into two categories: first, external conditions, one's environment, i.e., the conditions of life in the strict sense of the word; second, the particular characteristics of the people or social groups themselves, i.e., the subjects of the behavior.The external conditions of life can be divided into general ---such as the nature of productive relationships, the characteristics of the socio-political system, the national and social features of culture, etc.---and specific, concrete determinants of behavior. The first are in effect the most important, the primary conditions of human activity. In the final analysis, they determine all aspects of human relations. In everyday life, however, the individual does not meet up with abstract and general forms of external conditions, but rather with a plethora of varied circumstances in which the former take concrete form. For example, in general socialist production relationships take the form of social ownership of the means of production, the laws of planned development and the sway of comradely relations and mutual assistance. However, in actual day-to-day life the general living conditions of Soviet society take the form of specific conditions of labor, of a specific per capita income, in general, a specific material environment, and a system of behavioral norms, traditions, and so on. The totality of such factors acting directly on the individual and his behavior constitutes the concrete conditions of life. In our study dedicated to the daily behavior of one particular group---urban industrial workers---the basic focus is not on the general, but the concrete conditions of life.
It is important to bear in mind that it is only in the final analysis that the external conditions of life determine the behavior of an individual or a social group. The interconnection between external conditions and behavior is rather broad; this interrelationship determines behavior only in a general sense and takes concrete form through the particular characteristics of the people themselves, characteristics formed under the influence of external conditions of life but not coinciding directly with them. If we liken the external conditions of life to a source of light, the 16 particular characteristics of people can be thought of as lenses refracting the rays.
This mechanism is rather complex and can be examined from different points of view. In our study, social, group characteristics, position (``status'') in social structures, and the socially significant characteristics of a particular group are the most significant factors. These include social and professional status (i.e., one's place in production),sex, age, family status, education, skills, etc. Such factors determine the individual's basic social functions and role and, consequently, they define his most important duties, goals and norms, in a sense delimiting his everyday behavior.
Of course, social and group characteristics are connected with external conditions of life and are determined by them. These characteristics sum up a series of conditions in which the individual finds himself over the course of his life and, in a certain sense, they are a generalization of the conditions under which preceding generations lived. But as direct data, the individual's social and family status, his education or skills are factors that are relatively independent of the present external conditions of life. In other words, social and group characteristics are like concrete, external conditions of everyday behavior in that they determine a person's mode of life as a whole, and his behavior in the daily routine in particular.
The sum of both these series of factors can be viewed as the concrete social situation of the individual's mode of life, or, to use the terminology of Engels and Lenin, the ``conditions of life".^^1^^
It is impossible simply to divide the conditions of life into those in the daily routine, those involved in production, etc. However, in examining any given area of life it is useful to isolate those conditions that are most closely connected with the subject at hand.
Along with social and group characteristics, the individual, personal characteristics of people---socio-- psychological, psychological and biophysiological characteristics--- have a tremendous influence on behavior. These are, for _-_-_
~^^1^^ See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1973, p. 488; V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 411.
17 example, an individual's temperament, personality, his tendency toward conformity and his physical constitution. They are all closely linked to the individual's behavior. From one standpoint, they and everyday activity form a whole human personality in the broad sense. However, in the sociological study of behavior, individual psychological characteristics are one of the preconditions of everyday activity, they connect the conditions of everyday life with man's concrete acts.The correlation of the general concepts described above (schematically represented in Fig. 1) makes it possible to clarify the structure of our exposition and to specify its limits. It will consist of two parts. First, we shall analyze indices that describe the conditions of everyday life and the basic forms of everyday behavior. Second, we shall directly examine the connection between the conditions of life and the individual's mode of everyday life. In other words, we shall first describe independent variables (the __PARAGRAPH_PAUSE__ Conditions of life Conditions of production Production Labor S o c i a Socio-political conditions 1 and politica 1 1 i f e Social activity Determinants of the daily routine Daily routine Behavior in the daily routine General and concrete conditions of life : Social, group, ! i i socio-psycliological, i ! psychological i i Everyday behavior i and biophysiological , ; (mode of life) i characteristics i ; of man i : Personality as a social category Fig. 1. The Place of the Daily Routine Within the Principal Spheres of Human Life __PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2---0512 18 __PARAGRAPH_CONT__ conditions of life) and dependent variables (behavior), and then we shall analyze their interrelationship.
Of course, this study cannot touch upon all of the conditions of life or all areas in one's mode of life. The subject of the present study is a description of the most important forms of behavior in the daily routine (as they are reflected in the data on the use of free time) and of the connections between this behavior and some conditions of life. Obviously, such an approach, which excludes the broad area of sociopsychological factors and individual characteristics, leads only to a socio-statistical analysis of the subject. The reader should be aware that the data in this study refer not to individuals but to a specific group. The authors, however, hope that a socio-statistical description, in spite of its limitations, may indicate many of the important aspects and tendencies in the daily routine of urban workers at the present stage of development of Soviet socialist society.
__b_b_b__This work is based on time-budget studies and research on workers' conditions of life carried out by the authors at seven iron and steel works, machine-building and textile plants in Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhie, Odessa and Kostroma between 1965 and 1968.^^1^^ The total number of persons employed in all these plants runs to several tens of thousands.
Research on so huge a group naturally entailed selectivity. Male and female workers were selected separately, in two steps. First, with the aid of representatives from the administration and social organizations, factory shops were picked out that seemed the most typical of the employees of each plant in terms of skills, levels of culture, and demographic composition. A number of shops were selected, so that approximately one-fifth of the employees of each plant would be included. Then from each shop one out of every ten workers were arbitrarily selected (from a list). 550 _-_-_
~^^1^^ Research was conducted at the iron and steel works named after G. I. Petrovsky, the Krasny Profintern Machine-Building Plant, the Agricultural Machines Plant in Dnepropetrovsk, the Dneprovsk Aluminum Plant in Zaporozhie, the Flax Works named after V. I. Lenin and the Iskra Oktyabrya Factory in Kostroma and the Jute Works in Odessa.
19 female and 350 male workers were selected in all, corresponding to 2 to 3 per cent of all the workers at the plants studied.As is apparent from the above, the second step is actually random in nature and is thus not susceptible to systematic error.^^1^^ Assuming the basic parameters of the total group are distributed in accordance with the binominal law, it is not difficult to judge within a certain degree of probability the limits within which the make-up of the sample obtained differs from the make-up of the whole. In particular, with respect to samples of a size such as ours, one can say with a probability of P--- 0.9 that the relative magnitude (weight) of the basic social, demographic, educational, etc., groups differs from the corresponding indices of the hypothetical total group by no more than 5 per cent in each case. In practice, this means that if sampling is repeated in these plants (given the same scale and procedure) the probability of obtaining results, different from ours in the basic socio-demographic parameters by only 5 per cent, is nine times greater than the probability of more substantial discrepancies.
With this degree of accuracy, our selection should be considered representative of the male and female workers of the typical shops in the enterprises studied. And since the selection of typical shops was made with assistance from experts, the selection, within given limits, can be considered representative for all male and female workers of the enterprises studied in Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhie, Odessa and Kostroma.
The study itself consisted of gathering 3 types of data from each of the subjects. First, by means of a questionnaire (of standardized format) data were gathered on the subjects' professions, skills, age, education, family status, family income (type of earnings, pensions, stipends), housing, property, etc. Questions of this sort are extremely easy to understand and can be interpreted in only one way; they _-_-_
~^^1^^ Strictly speaking, this is a quasi-random selection. In practice, however, such a selection, made with the stipulation that the compilation of the list in no way be connected with the subject of the research, assures the same effect as would a random sample in the strict sense of the term.
__PRINTERS_P_19_COMMENT__ 2* 20do not encourage subjects to give imprecise answers, intentionally or unconsciously. In practical terms, this means that socio-demographic, socio-cultural and other indices gathered by the questionnaires fully reflect the respective characteristics of the group selected and, within the margin of selection error, represent all the workers in the factories studied. The margin of error essentially depends on the number of subjects in a given category. However, as already noted, there is no more than a 5 per cent error in the overwhelming majority of instances.
The second type of information gathered was the so-called time budgets, i.e., the time spent by subjects within a certain period. In our study, we collected the data for a threeday period---a work day, a Saturday and a Sunday---so that the total number of 24-hour time budgets from which the arithmetic means were then computed and used in the study exceeded 2500.
The technique of time studies and the basic principles for constructing time budgets have been repeatedly described in Soviet economic and sociological literature---from the classic work of S. G. Strumilin (published in the 1920s) to studies of the past decade by G. A. Prudensky, V. D. Patrushev, and V. I. Bolgov. Therefore there is no need to describe in detail the research procedures associated with time budgets. We will discuss only the probability of error in evaluating time budgets and the measures taken to keep such error to a minimum.
The specific errors characteristic of time budgets often stem from the relative complexity of the information that subjects must provide. The evaluation of time budgets presupposes that subjects will provide data accounting for their activities in a definite time period. In contrast to questions relating to the most elementary socio-demographic indices, one must here anticipate so-called errors of memory: it is not always easy for subjects to remember just what and for how long they did something during the time period under investigation.
In this respect, we do not consider very reliable the data gathered on a time period from answers to direct questions, such as how many hours were spent on housework, reading, TV watching, etc. (with the exception of questions on strictly 21 regulated activities that might be called naturally chronometric, such as commuting or classes).
In our research, as in a number of other studies, a different technique for gathering data was adopted. The subjects were not asked direct questions. Instead, the subjects compiled, with the aid of a specially trained clerk, a follow-up record of their activities of the previous day, giving approximate times of the beginning and end of the activities (e.g., subject got up at 7:00 a.m., washed until 7:15 a.m., began breakfast at 7:15 a.m.). The subjects were warned in advance that they would meet with the clerk and were asked to prepare by making note of how they spent their previous day. The subsequent processing was carried out by the research group: classifying all their activities into specific kinds (according to a code), measuring the amount of time used in each kind of activity and calculating the arithmetic means.
Of course, this procedure demands much more work than gathering answers through direct questioning. However, it substantially reduces the danger of lapses of memory that are quite likely and inevitably significant in the directquestion method. The method of consecutive recording (especially when the events of the previous day are recorded) greatly facilitates the task of remembering things. To omit or add some important activity simply out of forgetfulness is, in this kind of consecutive recording, almost impossible. Moreover, making a consecutive record almost automatically forces the subject to double check to see that the time he enters is correct. Each subject has certain fixed times during the day---the beginning and end of the work day, the time of his favorite radio or television program, show times at the theater, the time of a date, etc. The consecutive enumeration of his activities constantly prompts the subject providing such fixed points in time and does not allow him to make too great an error in determining the beginning and end of his activities. In this sense, the technique of keeping a consecutive record of time reduces the probability of omitting activities out of forgetfulness and prevents major error in determining the duration of the activities.
Lapses of memory, however, are only one side of the problem. Everyday allocation of time can encompass a great 22 number of activities, and subjects may associate the length of some activities with prestige: it is logical to expect that many subjects may intentionally exaggerate or understate the time spent on certain activities. However, the technique we have used---a consecutive recording of activities over three different days instead of direct questioning on the length of activities---somewhat reduces the danger of such distortions. Such a technique is a kind of instantaneous observation. The subject is not asked about prestigious or intimate activities in general, but only about their manifestation within one given segment of time. To say that one hasn't read a book on any particular day sounds totally different from saying that one doesn't read books at all or that one only reads rarely.
'Pf course, there remain many intimate and covert activities that the subject finds unpleasant to recall or simply avoids bringing up. Studying this aspect of behavior through time budgets is simply impossible. Moreover, the object of our research was not to collect specific data on intimate behavior. Subjects and clerks were forewarned about this; intimate activities were not included in the daily records made according to the list of ways of spending time. (That time budgets, as will be shown below, can give an indirect picture---independent of the subject's wishes---of many antisocial and deliberately covert activities---not for individuals, but for large groups, is another question.)
?,As a whole, the features of the procedure used in our research allow us to trust that the information obtained realistically reflects people's activities for the three-day period that we have surveyed. Here, however, we come across yet another problem. Data on the time expenditures, especially observations limited to a specific moment, fluctuate greatly. Correspondingly, the representativity of a sample's sociodemographic parameters cannot, even when the data are fully verified, guarantee that the instantaneous ``snapshot'' of the use of time will reflect the most characteristic features of how the group studied, as a whole, usually allocates time.
Additional measures were taken to reduce the range of error with regard to the fluctuation of data from day to day. The most important of these was to increase the sample, as 23 compared to the one from which the socio-demographic characteristics were obtained. As already mentioned, each subject provided information on three days and thus the amount of data on the use of time is three times as great as the amount of data on socio-demographic characteristics. This amount of data ensures that the mean figures for each of the basic categories that will be examined below (e.g., married working woman having a particular educational level) can be calculated on the basis of several dozen 24-hour time budgets (in most cases, from 50 to 100).
It was extremely important, too, that each subject provided data on the use of time during a working day, a Saturday and a Sunday. For people working on a rotating schedule, one work day and two consecutive days off were selected. Such an approach eliminated one of the most serious sources of fluctuation in data on isolated time segments. Moreover, the average figures used in our subsequent analysis always (with exceptions that will be specifically noted) represent not a 24-hour, but a week-long use of time. These figures were specially calculated to provide proportional ``input'' from data on week days and days off in the determination of the averages.^^1^^ In this way, the influence of random differences in time budgets for week days and days off is eliminated.
In addition, we would point out that in the course of research and in the following exposition, all data are examined separately for men and for women. Such an analysis neutralizes one further source of high fluctuation in data on time allocations.
All of these measures reduce the fluctuation of data to a more or less acceptable level. The comparison of fluctuations in the individual time expenditures in the course of a week with the mean figures (taking into account the number of time budgets on the basis of which the arithmetic mean in each category was obtained) allows one to say, with a probability of P = 0.9, that the discrepancies caused by these fluctuations (i.e., the intervals within which the moment of the arithmetic means obtained from the data _-_-_
~^^1^^ Mean indices were first calculated separately for week days and for days off. Then the former were multiplied by 5, the latter, by 2, so that the totals provide indices for a one-week period.
24 of a number of uniform samples are found) in the overwhelming number of types of time allocation do not exceed 15 to 30 minutes.Of course, such discrepancies are quite large in relation to certain time expenditures whose averages do not exceed 30 minutes. This is why the research program envisioned gathering yet another category of information, on the usual intensity and regularity of certain activities, particularly those whose average duration in a day or week is not very great. The subjects were asked how many books they had read during the month preceding the survey, how many movies they attended, the regularity of civic activities, athletics, amateur artistic activities, etc. The fluctuation in the answers in such a survey is naturally much lower than in the data on time expenditures; standard statistical tests show that discrepancies in the distribution of subjects with respect to a given answer do not exceed 5 per cent of the total number of persons surveyed. The comparative simplicity of the questions, as with socio-demographic characteristics, practically eliminated all lapses of memory. It should be acknowledged, however, that distortions in answers to this type of question are possible when considerations of prestige and popular stereotypes enter the picture. However, in conjunction with time budgets, information on the general intensity and regularity of activities can play a very useful role.
On the whole, the materials of our study provide valid information (within the limits noted above) on the social, demographic and cultural make-up, on the material situation and basic time expenditures of industrial workers in Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Odessa and Kostroma. The immediate focus of the study is precisely this group of workers; the conclusions of this study relate, in a strictly quantitative sense, to this particular group.
At the same time, a number of considerations give us grounds for thinking that the materials of the study allow us to discern not only local, but also more general tendencies. The enterprises studied, viewed in terms of the make-up of their employees and other factors affecting the daily routine, are typical enough of processing industries in major towns in the European part of the USSR. Among 25 these are iron and steel works, with their predominantly male work force; textile factories, in which the overwhelming majority of workers are women; and machine-building factories, in which the number of male and female workers is approximately equal. The study covered some factories in which equipment reflects the latest technological advances; their workers have relatively high levels of skill, education and wages. But the study also dealt with older factories, employing less developed groups of workers. In much the same way, the enterprises studied show the influence of different levels of services provided for the workers by factory organizations. Among these enterprises are big plants offering a wide range of recreation facilities and child care institutions, as well as the relatively small enterprises that provide more modest opportunities.
And, what is perhaps even more important, the study dealt with various types of major and large cities typical of the basic regions in the European part of the USSR. Dnepropetrovsk, for example, represents traditional centers of heavy industry that have developed at a furious pace in the five decades of Soviet power; Zaporozhie typifies new industrial and cultural centers created by socialist industrialization; Kostroma belongs to those old centers of light industry whose growth in past decades has been relatively slow; Odessa reflects the peculiarities of life in cities that have developed not only as industrial centers but also cultural, transport (sea port) and administrative centers.
Lack of data prevents direct comparison of the indices of our sample with corresponding indices of workers of the entire processing industry in the major cities of the European part of the USSR. Quite indicative, however, are the following data (see table on page 2(>) on average duration of time expenditures of the workers we have studied and workers in Sverdlovsk, Gorky, Rostov, and Ivanovo, whose time budgets were studied by the RSFSR Central Statistical Board in 1963 (hours-minutes per week).^^1^^
_-_-_~^^1^^ These are relative figures calculated from averages (if time expenditures for men and for women separately in a hypothetical situation in which both sexes are represented equally in corresponding samples. Such figures, naturally, are not appropriate for a substantive analysis since the disparity in time expenditures of men and women is too __NOTE__ Footnote cont. on page 26. 26 Dnepropet-- rovsk, Zaporozhie, Odessa, Sverdlovsk Gorky Rostov Ivanovo Kostroma Working time 39.50 39.50 39.30 37.50 41.00 Non-working time connected with production 11.20 10.10 10.50 10.10 8.50 Housework 21.40 23.30 22.30 22.40 22.00 Free time, leisure 30.30 28.00 29.10 29.30 27.20 Sleeping, eating, etc. 64.40 66.30 66.00 67.50 68.50
As is apparent, the basic indices in our study differ from the figures for Sverdlovsk, Gorky, Rostov, and Ivanovo, calculated on the basis of data from the Central Statistical Board of the RSFSR, no more than the latter totals differ from one another. Moreover, many of the small differences between our data and the data of the Statistical Board stem not from the nature of the sample but from the date of the research. In 1963, when time-budget research was being carried on in Sverdlovsk, Gorky, Rostov, and Ivanovo, the 5-day work week was in force only in individual, experimental factories. By the time our research began, the 5-day work week was basic to industry, so that the overwhelming majority of the workers we studied had two days off per week. The transition to the 5-day week shortened time spent on housework and increased leisure time proper. This fact alone explains the most important difference between our figures and the others (the shorter duration of housework and the somewhat longer duration of leisure time). In addition, it should be pointed out that _-_-_ __NOTE__ Footnote cont. from page 25. great (as already mentioned, we shall analyze all data for male and female workers separately). However, the figures are appropriate for comparing the two studies, which is our goal here. The data used to determine these relative indices characterizing the results of the study by the Central Statistical Board of the RSFSR are found in On the Basic Totals of Time Studies on the Inhabitants of Pskov, Novosibirsk, 1968, p. 76 (in Russian).
27 our research represents only workers, while the figures of the Statistical Board include engineering and technical personnel and clerks. Conseqiiently, by virtue of specificity, our results would be more precise.In this sense, we trust that on the basis of studying the daily behavior of tens of thousands of workers in the factories selected, one can succeed in highlighting the general patterns and tendencies of the daily routine of workers in major cities, or at least in the basic areas of the European part of the USSR.
The potential for a broader interpretation of our study (in the qualitative rather than quantitative sense, of course) is enhanced by the fact that in the following exposition the materials of our basic research are supplemented and verified by data from some of our other studies carried out at the same time and by the same methods. In cities where the factories we studied are located, we also studied conditions of life and time budgets of several hundred male and female workers who at that time had a 6-day work week. The 6-day week makes it impossible to use information on their time expenditures directly in our calculations. However, these data can serve as control figures to aid in checking conclusions when something is in doubt. Although the following exposition does not specify every instance where we have made use of the control figures, all the most important conclusions presented were formulated only if the materials of our basic research did not contradict relationships revealed by analysis of the control figures.
In addition, parallel to our work in major and large cities. we conducted research on 500 male and female workers in Pavlovo-Posad, a small town near Moscow (here about 200 persons had a 5-day work week). The data from this group are used as a background for clarifying and evaluating the specific features of the daily routine and conditions of life in the major cities.
Finally, in a number of cases, the description of the life of urban workers is supplemented by materials from several sections of a composite sociological study carried out in 1967--69 in Taganrog by several institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences. It is to be understood that, in the following study, materials from sociological research^were 28 supplemented and verified, wherever possible, with government statistics and information drawn from other sources. However, our study remains fundamentally a monograph describing the results of a specific sociological research project. This determines the internal coherence, compatibility and reliability of the material analyzed as well as the limits of this reliability---the impossibility of extrapolating, directly and without qualification, the quantitative indices obtained in the course of the analysis beyond the limits of the group of workers studied. Whether the general nature of our conclusions, their qualitative side, has broader import, is another question.
[29] __NUMERIC_LVL1__ Part One __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE METHODOLOGYConditions of life play the decisive role---i.e., they are the independent variables---in determining the urban worker's daily routine. We shall deal first with the totality of the workers' external environment and the most important social characteristics that form, by our definition, the conditions of life. Generally speaking, all the environmental factors to one degree or another influence the daily routine, but some (pertaining to conditions of life per se or to group characteristics of individuals) are especially closely linked to the non-production sphere of life.
Among these conditions of life are, first of all, the material conditions of the day-to-day existence of a given group. Particularly noticeable here are such material and economic conditions as the level of income and other revenues; the amount and type of property, especially consumer durables; housing, including communal conveniences; the level of production of consumer goods and services.
Socio-demographic characteristics are of great importance for the conditions of life connected with the daily routine: sex, age, family status, the proportion of workers and of dependents in a family, etc.
Finally, daily behavior depends to a great extent on cultural factors such as the nature and structure of the value system, behavioral models and stereotypes, traditions, educational level, and the individual's outlook.
For the purposes of our study, these three categories of conditions of life (material and economic, demographic, 32 and cultural) can be viewed as the fundamental, base conditions of the daily routine.
Per capita income. The per capita income of an urban family is without a doubt one of the most characteristic and clear indicators of the material conditions of the daily routine in the city.^^1^^ In our research we have taken only the regular income into account---salary, pensions, stipends, alimony, and payments for temporary disablement. In most of urban worker families, such revenues constitute the overwhelming part of the income.
The mean income in the families of workers studied was somewhat over 60 rubles per month. On the whole, this provides the opportunity for a normal daily routine. Special research conducted by the Institute of Labor shows that a monthly per capita income of 50 rubles satisfies a family's essential needs.
Our research also reflected the characteristically small differentiation, under socialism, of the levels of industrial workers' per capita income. In only 5-10 per cent of the families studied was the per capita income below 50 rubles and roughly the same percentage of people were in families whose monthly per capita income exceeded 100 rubles.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to ignore the differentiation in the level of income. For the following analysis, and for research on the connection between income and everyday behavior, it is reasonable to divide the workers studied into three groups:
---those whose income does not satisfy the essential needs (less than 51 rubles a month per capita);
---those whose income satisfies the essential needs (from 51 to 75 rubles a month per capita);
---and those whose income approaches a level assuring rational consumption (more than 75 rubles per month per capita).
Workers whose level of income guarantees material comfort compose from 40 to 50 per cent of the entire group of persons studied. A significant proportion (approximately _-_-_
~^^1^^ In examining the data on per capita income, we take into account all subjects, including single persons, the latter categorized as families consisting of one person.
33 a quarter of those living in large cities) live in conditions that exceed this level. At the same time, a significant portion of workers, mainly those with large families, still belong to the group that is not economically well off. Of course, it is necessary to take into account that our data were obtained from studies undertaken from 1965 through 1968. At the present time, the level of the workers' income has risen substantially. During the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1966--70), the average wage and salary rose by 26 percent and real income per capita rose by 33 per cent. In accordance with the new five-year plan, wages will rise by yet another 20--22 per cent and there will be increases in stipends and pensions. Moreover, under socialism it is not income alone that determines the standard of living: material wealth is also distributed through social consumption funds. In this way, in material terms, different groups of the population are brought closer together. In the current five-year plan, the total of free allowances and services, as well as monetary disbursements from social funds, will reach 90 billion rubles. In 1975, social consumption funds will provide 30 per cent of the total volume of allowances and services.Housing conditions. First of all it is necessary to take into account the communal conveniences provided by a given type of living unit. It is customary to list the communal conveniences provided and to determine how widespread they are. This method, despite (or rather because) of its detail, complicates the matter and is inconvenient. In situations where a detailed description of housing conditions is not the main goal, it is more expedient to adopt more general indicators.
In particular, these indicators might be arranged on a scale reflecting the level of communal conveniences provided. To establish the scale, it is necessary first of all to divide living units into three categories---those providing all communal conveniences (running water, plumbing, central heating, gas, bath or shower, hot water);~
---those providing basic communal conveniences (running water, plumbing, central heating);~
---and those not providing any communal conveniences. To these important three we can add two intermediate categoires: living units providing many communal conveniences 34 (the basic ones plus several others) and those providing some conveniences.
Because of the relatively small size of our sample, this study will single out three categories of living units: those with all communal conveniences, those with some, and those without any at all. In certain cases we shall restrict ourselves to contrasting the two extreme categories.
But here, as in the case of income, one should remember that housing conditions are one of the most rapidly improving aspects of the people's standard of living. During the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1966--70), approximately 55 million persons received new apartments. By 1971, 60 million families, i.e., three-quarters of the population of the Soviet Union, had moved into apartments and houses built within the last 20 years. Such is the pace of housing construction, which is increasing every year. The Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971--75) calls for building another 580 million square meters of living space---12 per cent more than the previous five-year plan.
Particular attention will be given to improving the architecture of the houses, their interiors and exteriors. The new apartments, which are modern and comfortable, can accommodate the needs of different types of families, are designed to specific climatic conditions, and ensure the most economical housekeeping.
New blocks of apartment houses are being planned and built along the same lines. For convenience, stores, nursery schools, post offices, savings banks, laundries, tailor and repair shops are located within walking distance of every building. The older built-up areas will be reconstructed to satisfy these needs.
The changes in the housing situation today reflect the definite progress that is being made to solve the housing problem. However, even today the housing problem is connected with the most pressing problems of the daily routine.
Per capita income (as well as its relationship to the level necessary 1'or material comfort) and housing conditions constitute today the most keenly felt material and economic determinants of the daily routine. A special questionnaire in Taganrog demonstrated that half of the workers feel that changing these two factors would improve their daily lives.
35Demographic factors. Economic conditions affect the material aspects of daily life, while the individual's behavior and his general orientation depend upon socio-demographic factors---age, family status, etc. These factors determine the individual's most essential duties and roles in his daily life and are connected with numerous norms and expectations upon which a person's daily activities are based. In other words, socio-demographic status to a large extent determines the nature of one's daily behavior, within a broader framework of its possible variants. Therefore, our selection of socio-demographic factors is important for our study of the relationship between the living conditions and everyday behavior.
The family-demographic conditions of a particular individual or group are often treated as a combination of such indicators as sex, age, marital status, presence of children, etc. The wealth of information such indices offer for describing the many socio-demographic and other aspects of behavior makes it difficult to consider them appropriate for this study.
The individual's behavior is directly connected not so much with a given demographic trait as with the social role one assumes and the obligations and opportunities connected with that trait in a given society. It seems, however, that of all the demographic indices usually employed in sociological research, dividing people by sex alone draws a distinct line between their positions and social roles in the daily routine. The dissimilarities of the daily chores and of behavioral stereotypes of men and women, stereotypes prescribed by the existing norms, traditions and contemporary culture, are so obvious that they need not be repeated here. This is one index that we shall continually refer to. This study will at no point use data on workers without specifying sex.
So far as other indices are concerned, they correspond only roughly to family and age status traits that define the most important social functions and roles of the daily routine. In studies such as ours dealing with comparatively limited differences---within a group of industrial workers---age and family status, especially when taken by themselves, only distantly re-fleet changes in social roles. People in the __PRINTERS_P_35_COMMENT__ 3* 36 same age and family-status groups are often, in fact, in entirely different age-family groups, so their behavior is determined by different social roles and functions. A 25-- yearold woman may have a profession and raise children, i.e., her socialization may be completed, or she may be an unmarried student who is just entering the social system. The category of single people in the ordinary sense---- unmarried---also includes young people who are just preparing to start a family as well as elderly persons who live alone. In the married group, in turn, there are young couples without children, parents raising children, and elderly people whose children have grown up. It is hardly necessary to demonstrate that traditional demographic indices in these cases group together people whose social roles, positions in the system of social relations and, in particular, in bringing up the new generation, are quite different.
On the other hand, people are sometimes found in different age and, at times, family groups whose age-family status is in fact more or less identical. To expand the example given above, the 25-year-old working woman with a family is closer in her position in life and general daily behavior to a 35-year-old working woman with children than to a student her own age. The age of thirty---the notorious age at which we usually distinguish the young from the old---often turns out to be simply a fictional watershed.
Stages of the life cycle. The obvious inadequacy of the most simple demographic characteristics, taken individually, suggests that one should devise a composite index for studying everyday behavior---an index that would simultaneously take into account both age and family status (as well as other traits) and therefore reflect more precisely the family-age situation as a whole. Such an index would seem to be the stage of the life cycle at which an individual is found.
What we call the life cycle is the succession, characteristic for a given society, of age periods in the individual's life, periods differentiated by changes in function and role in the social system in general and, in particular, in the system of rearing the younger generation. Each such period can be treated as a particular stage in the life cycle. In effect, stages of the life cycle characterize the family-age situation 37 as a whole, the social age, so to speak, that defines the basic family-age criteria of everyday behavior.
It is to be understood that the transition from this theoretical definition to an instrument for identifying a specific individual's stage in the life cycle unavoidably involves certain approximations. Nevertheless, in spite of `` instrumental" distortions, the concept of the normal life cycle and its stages provides a somewhat more exact index of a person's family-age status than do the simplistic demographic traits that are often used in social research.
It should not be too great an oversimplification to state that the normal life cycle in the modern city has the following basic stages:~
---childhood and adolescence---the initial period of socialization that takes place primarily in the family and in school;~
---youth---the lime in which the individual's socialization is basically completed and he begins his working life and emerges from under the dominant influence of his parents;~
---maturity---the central stage of the life cycle connected with work, family life, raising children;~
---old age---the stage of life at which the individual usually completes his working career and in which his children become independent.
Within each of these stages, there are shorter periods: and between these stages we can isolate transitional stages and also ``combined'' stages (e.g., elderly people with minor children).
The practical correlation between a working individual and the specific stage of his life cycle in cases when his life follows a more or less normal pattern is made with the aid of data on family status, age, and the presence of children. Under normal circumstances, the border between youth and maturity is the point at which one begins to raise a family.^^1^^
_-_-_~^^1^^ We stress lhal we are referring here specilically to working persons. If we were to determine the point at which basic socialization has been completed for the entire population, then using just the point at which Ihe individual starts his own family would hardly be adequale. In such cases it is necessary to use a composite index made up of at least two factors---Ihe creation of a family and the beginning of an independent working life.
38 In connection with our study of the daily routine, it is reasonable to posit an intermediary stage in the life cycle between youth and maturity---from the time of marriage to the time children are born. In most cases, old age is characterized by a slacking off of work; therefore, it is marked not so much by the independence of children as by the non-participation in social production. We should keep in mind, however, that between the time children come of age and the time the individual retires there is usually a certain transitional period. Therefore, we shall designate that group of people who have already raised their children but have not yet retired, an intermediate period in the normal life cycle---a period between maturity and old age, that is to say, the ``pre-old age" period.In other words, if the lives of the entire populace in all cases progressed normally (i.e., if each person without exception passed through the series of stages of the life cycle consecutively---from youth through marriage and the raising of children to old age), then to place working people in the life cycle (youth, young family, mature family, the ``pre-old age" period) it would be enough to determine whether a particular individual is a childless bachelor, whether he (or she) is married and has no children, whether he (or she) is the parent of minor children or, finally, of adult children.
This is complicated, however, by the fact that not everyone passes through all stages of the normal life cycle. The post-war demographic situation, for example, created a noticeable group of people who never formed their own families. And while this group has gradually decreased, it is obvious that one will always find a certain percentage of unmarried, childless persons. Moreover, there is always a certain number of childless couples, and families in which only the mother or the father raises the children. Nevertheless, even these groups can be assigned to stages of the life cycle. One can say that people who never marry or marry but do not have children in a sense pass from youth or from the initial stage of family life directly to a stage analogous to the one in which children have become independent, i.e., they bypass one or two periods of family life. Single mothers bypass the transitional stage between youth and maturity; people who 39 raise minor children until the time they retire bypass the intermediate stage between maturity and old age.
Such an approach, of course, requires the establishment of a certain age limit within which an unmarried individual is considered to be in the stage of youth or the first stage of family life, and beyond which he (she) should be related to the eroup of elderly persons. Obviously, such an age limit is arbitrary. In our study, the limit will be 40 years of age. Of course, within this limit there will be some people in a rather ambiguous position, such as unmarried, childless men and women who are approaching 40 but will formally be grouped as ``youth''. However, the number of such persons is relatively small. Unmarried and childless persons between 30 and 40 years of age comprise no more than 3-4 per cent of the workers studied. Allowing for this slight ambiguity, we can relate any worker to a given stage in the life cycle: all single persons below 40 who do not have children are considered ``youth'' who have not yet begun a family; all childless married persons under 40 are considered young marrieds; all parents with minor children are related to families with minor children; and, finally, all parents with adult children and all childless couples over 40---elderly people. F One should keep in mind, too, that the family status of individuals in the same stage of the life cycle will not always be identical. To take this situation into account, it is reasonable to divide the above categories into groups with a similar family status. For example, among youths one can distinguish between those living at home and those living alone; among parents raising children---between those with more or fewer children and those with and without family members who help out at home; among older people---those living alone, living in families with or without minor children. Of course, there are other ways to make the system of agefamily groupings more precise but the size of our sample makes it expedient to isolate smaller groupings only among the group of parents with minor children.
Thus, the system of classifying family-age groups that we have employed in our study is the following:~
---unmarried youths (unmarried persons under 40);~
---young married couples (childless married persons under 40);~
40---parents of minor children, including:~
---families consisting only of parents and minor children (we shall term this the ``nuclear family''),~
---families consisting of parents, minor children and other relatives (we shall call this the ``extended family''),~
---and parents in broken families (as a rule, single mothers living with the children);~
---older people without minor children (people wilh grown children, or childless couples over 40).
In certain cases, especially when dealing with data thai encompass only a part of the total sample, we make use of broader family-age categories: youth, parents with young children, older people.
Cultural traits. Among the most important conditions of life that go to make up the base conditions of the daily routine is culture. Sociologically, culture is often understood as the system of knowledge, norms, customs, stereotypes and values functioning in a given society. The norms and knowledge that the individual acquires describe his individual culture; the totality of knowledge, norms, etc., existing in a particular community of people, form the cultural level of a stratum, class, or society as a whole. We note that it was in this sense that culture was understood in the later works of V. I. Lenin, where culture, the daily routine and habits are treated as an integral whole.^^1^^ Obviously, such a broad notion of culture embraces a great number of factors that exert the most decisive influences on our daily behavior, for it is these factors that determine the individual's reaction to his environment.
Unfortunately, singling out the variable indices that describe the culture as a whole is an extremely complex and little-studied task. In this study we shall largely coniine ourselves to using indices that show the general level of knowledge among a particular group of workers. The natural index here is data on education.
For our purposes and given the size of our sample, it is sufficient to differentiate workers into four groups according to the level of their education: ---those with a four-grade elementary school education _-_-_
^^1^^ __NOTE__ Bizarre in original: "Lenin" indented an inch! Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 488.
41 or those who have had no elementary education at all ( inasmuch as illiterate persons among urban workers are practically non-existent, wo may refer to this category as literate and semi-literate workers);~---those who have completed 5, 6, or 7 grades (i.e., those who have basic education);~
---those who have finished 8-11 grades, i.e., well-- educated workers,~
---and those who have a vocational training or higher education, and also workers who began but did not complete higher education (this is the group of highly educated workers, ``worker specialists'').
Of course, education cannot describe directly all the aspects of culture in the broad sense. It reflects chiefly a particular level of knowledge for an individual or group. However, the individual's level of education is connected with many other features of culture as well as his value system and concepts. In effect, the higher one's educational level the greater one's knowledge, and along with changes in the level of education also change norms, habits and tastes which determine everyday behavior. In this sense, tracing connections between education and everyday behavior allows us to evaluate the influence of culture as a whole (or at least of changes therein) upon one's mode of life.
Another indirect basis for determining the influence of culture is a comparison of data on everyday behavior in large and small cities. The close connection between culture and a type of behavior is clearly evident from that fact alone that the level of education of workers in large cities is substantially higher than in small towns. It is scarcely possible to doubt that other elements of culture---traditions, norms of behavior, social values---are different in towns of different types. It is apparent even from the data in our study, for example, that one usually marries earlier in small towns and has more children, which facts unquestionably testify to different customs. (In Pavlovo-Posad, only 17 per cent of the working women under 30 are unmarried, and only 25 per cent of them have no children, whereas in large cities, the percentages are: 43 per cent unmarried, 52 per cent childless. 56 per cent of married women in small 42 towns have more than one child, only 40 per cent in largo cities.) Thus, the size of town may, with a certain degree of probability, indicate not just the level of education, but the general culture of a given group.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ 2. COMPOSITE INDICES OF THE CONDITIONSIndices for per capita income, housing conditions, familyage status, education, etc., form the backbone of conditions of life that directly determine behavior in the daily routine. But it is impossible to understand their influence on everyday activities if one fails to take into account that they form a sort of composites. Indices of conditions of life accordingly form syndromes of closely interrelated variables.
If one is not aware of the nature of the indices of condition of life, one might reduce the influence of many factors to the influence of one, or gloss over a decisive factor that happens to be closely related to the indices under study at the moment. For a more precise definition of the influence of conditions of life on behavior, one must establish the interrelationships between these factors.
Income and family-age status. Among these interrelationships, we will examine first the relation between per capita income and the stages of the life cycle. In our sample, i.e., adult employed persons, this relationship manifests itself in the fact that people with a high per capita income are found comparatively frequently among young and old workers, while, on the other hand, the percentage of persons with a low or average per capita income is greater among workers with minor children.
The nature of the dependence of per capita income on the stage of the life cycle of a particular group of people is quite clear. The family's per capita income is determined directly by the gross family income and the number of persons in the family. In practical terms, this means that it is not only dependent on the wages of family members, but also on the number of workers in the family, the so-called coefficient of family employment. Moreover, the relatively small difference in wages among workers under socialism leads to the fact that the number of workers in a family influences per 43 capita income in any case no less than the level of their wages.
In most cases, a young worker either lives alone or with a family in which there are other wage earners or pensioners besides himself. The number of dependents in such families is usually quite small. Elderly workers with grown children are in a similar situation. But for most workers with minor children, the number of dependents is noticeably greater and it is often especially great in extended families in which relatives help out at home. The combined influence of these factors, given the quite insignificant differences in wages, gives rise to the dependence of per capita income in the family on the stage in the life cycle.
Inasmuch as the life cycle is, in turn, closely related to age, the connection between per capita income and age is also apparent. Mean per capita income in groups of workers under 30 and over 40 is usually higher than that of people in their 30s. On the whole, however, the dependence of income on age is much weaker than is the dependence of per capita income on the life cycle.
The existence and nature of such relationships is quite important. It points up, for example, such an important feature of the Soviet working class as the relatively high standard of living among most young workers (as compared to workers with families). Moreover, the dependence of per capita income on the coefficient of family employment presents rather serious problems for society. It is beyond doubt that the reduction of per capita income that occurs when children are added to the family leads to a reduction in the birth rate and, in part, has a negative effect on the material conditions in which children are raised. This circumstance, along with others, is, as a rule, taken into consideration when the competpnt bodies decide on the distribution of social funds, family allowances, aid to mothers with many children, etc. Socialist society takes into consideration the fact that although material wealth is distributed among workers according to their labor inputs, the actual level of consumption, in the first phase of communism, depends not only on labor contribution but also on a multitude of other factors, among which the stages of the life cycle and the coefficient of family employment are particularly decisive.
44A detailed analysis of such factors lies beyond the framework of our study. However, we must constantly keep in mind that per capita income is dependent upon the stage of the life cycle, since changes in these factors have a serious effect on the individual's everyday behavior.
Per capita income and, in part, the stages of the life cycle are likewise related to the possession of private gardens by workers. Although the possession of gardens is important not only because they add to one's well-being but also because they provide a specific form of recreation, the first reason is still of prime importance. In short, families that are not well off make use of private gardens more often than do families that are financially more secure.
Age and education. Many features of the urban worker's mode of life are determined by the interconnection between his age and education: usually the younger the group of workers, the higher their general level of education.
Of the workers studied who were under 30, about half were well educated or specialists; there was almost no semi-- literacy in the group. Among older workers, semi-literacy claims a larger proportion and the proportion of well-educated persons in most cases does not exceed one-fourth of the entire group. It is scarcely possible to doubt that the difference in the educational level of the different generations creates a difference in their culture in a broader sense.
The connection between education and age leads naturally to a connection between education and stages of the life cycle, though differences in education among family-age groups are not so striking as those between age groups.
The reasons for the differences in the level of education among age and family-age groups follow from the rapid development of education in Soviet society. The genuine cultural revolution in the USSR and the improved school education mean that each succeeding generation of Soviet citizens receives a better education. This is one of the more important achievements of Soviet power. There are, of course, limits to how long schooling may be extended. One can well imagine, for example, that the universal 10-year school education will reduce, and finally eliminate, the discrepancy in educational indices (the number of grades completed) among the generations of workers.
45However, today's scientific and technological revolution has dramatically increased the tempo of cultural development in general, and the accumulation of knowledge in particular. Consequently, the amount of time needed for radical changes in the content of basic knowledge imparted in high school is reduced. While earlier it took a few generations, and in the past, many generations, fundamental knowledge imparted by a general education is now renovated within the individual's lifetime. Thus it follows that people who have, formally, obtained the same school education at different points in time will in fact possess educations that differ in content. In this sense, one may suppose that rapid progress in culture will turn the difference in the level of education of generations into a constant feature of social life.
The connections between per capita income and the life cycle, and also between age and education, are so strong and organic that in many cases they should be viewed together as single, merged conditions of life.
Material well-being and housing conditions. To understand the conditions of the daily routine in Soviet society, it is important to take into account not only the existing interaction of the conditions of life but also, in some cases, the lack of such interaction. In particular, a quite distinctive characteristic of the worker's life under socialism is that the housing conditions do not, as a rule, depend on his income. Since housing is practically free and is publicly controlled, the determining factor in providing apartments is the family's need rather than the ability to pay. In our sample, for example, the proportion of workers with low per capita incomes living in fairly good apartments and that living in poor apartments hardly differs from the average. Such a situation clearly illustrates the equalizing effect of social funds and social forms of distributing material wealth. So profound a social equality in providing apartments hardly requires further elucidation.
Education and standard of living. The lack of a relationship between the level of income and education is more difficult to evaluate. At first glance, such a situation seems abnormal. It is well known that a better education provides higher skills and facilitates the mastery of difficult crafts 46 and, in the final analysis, means higher wages. It seems natural to expect that a more educated group of workers would have higher wages.
We must point out, however, that among workers there is an obvious correlation between age and education: the formal education of older and more experienced workers is in most cases worse than among young workers. Nevertheless, work experience and seniority prove to be, at least under present conditions, factors as important in raising skills and in competing for positions as education. All this is often reflected in wages and, accordingly, in family income. In short, there is an equilibrium manifested in the lack of dependence of urban workers' income on education.
[47] __NUMERIC_LVL2__ CHAPTER TWO __ALPHA_LVL2__ TIME AS A MEANSAdvantages and disadvantages of the ``language of time''. To obtain a picture of everyday behavior and the individual's mode of life (to be more precise, the mode of life of the groups of adult workers studied), we shall use data on time allocation, i.e., a more or less detailed enumeration of the types and forms of everyday activity, indicating distribution, frequency and duration. There are a number of reasons for using these data as a language for describing a mode of life.
Above all data on time allocation provide information on a whole complex of different aspects of everyday behavior that are characteristic of a given group. With such data, one can evaluate not only different aspects of life, but give a more or less general description of human activity, in any event with respect to that part that is overt and connected with manifest acts. By using indices of time allocation---and an organic part of this is the very enumeration of basic types of activity---we can present an integral picture of everyday behavior.
The capacity to reflect not just one or two, but a multitude of the aspects of everyday behavior, is not the only feature that provides data on time allocation suitable for describing a mode of life in general and the daily routine in particular. Any meaningful evaluation of time expenditures, as well as their classification, is at the same time a substantive description of different types of activity and everyday behavior as a whole. For example, calculation of the time that a given group expends in communication with friends or in reading is to some extent a qualitative description 48 of specific aspects of behavior. That the language of time allocation, at least at the present level of sociological technique, gives only a very crude and approximate picture of the content, of the qualitative side of a given type of activity, is another question.
Finally, one other property of the indices of lime allocation makes them especially suitable for the description of everyday behavior: as a rule, these indices can be expressed in homogeneous magnitudes---minutes, hours, days, unils of frequency, percentages---and so easily lend themselves to quantitative analysis. This circumstance is particularly important, especially as applied to our goal---to attempt to describe behavior in the daily routine through its connections with the basic conditions of life.
Thus, the language of time allocation can encompass a multitude of forms of behavior, can reflect some essential moments in its content and can give a quantitative characterization of the correlation of various forms of activity and their dependence on specific conditions of life. Therefore, we have used data on time expenditures, while distinctly aware of their limitation and at the same time feeling that this instrument of analysis is more suitable for our purposes than any other set of indices. Other indices---e.g., on the motives, norms or results of activity---are convenient chiefly for describing individual aspects of the mode of life. Yielding to them in every such instance, the language of time allocation surpasses all other sets of indices, taken separately, in the ability to give---albeit crudely and approximately---an integral, general picture of behavior in the daily routine.
Elementary types of behavior. As has already been mentioned, data on allocation of time fall into two types of indices: a) a list of activities and types of behavior and b) data on the duration and intensity of these activities. Consequently, we must define, first, the principles by which activities used in describing behavior, its structure and content, will be divided and classified and, second, the units expressing the absolute and relative magnitude of each of the activities examined.
Enumeration of activities is based on the isolation of comparatively simple and more or less homogeneous (in content) 49 types of behavior---uniform activities that, within the framework of the given study, are considered to be primary, elementary manifestations of human activity. Inmost works that make use of indices of time, the simplest elements forming the general picture of behavior are such activities as work, sleeping, eating, cooking, purchase of products, housework, reading, child care, visiting, walks, watching television, etc.
The degree of fractionalization of simple activities, the level, so to speak, of their primariness, is determined, on the one hand, by the goal of a study and, on the other hand, by the nature and size of samples. (Excessive subdivision of activities in studying time expenditures can lead, if the sample is relatively small, to mistakes that make all data obtained senseless.) We have isolated for our study about thirty elementary types of activity; the most detail is given to activities that make up the daily routine, outside the sphere of social production and management.
Classification of time expenditures. The mode of life and, what particularly concerns us, behavior in the daily routine, is no simple totality but a definite system of forms of activity that complement one another. Therefore, we must group the elementary types of activity that we have selected into consolidated classes corresponding to broader or, so to speak, basic (and not elementary) categories of activity.
We need data on allocation of time in order to describe the mode of life, which is considered here to be a specific system of types of activity. It is natural, therefore, to classify individual elementary activities with a view to those functions that are inherent in the basic areas of human activity.
One may state that, for most of the adult urban population in contemporary Soviet society, the functions of everyday behavior outside the realm of production and management are the satisfaction of material, social and cultural needs, the physical and socio-cultural reproduction of the human race, and immediate service to family and self. This view of the functions of everyday behavior outside the realm of production allows the grouping of the elementary activities, for which time expenditures are calculated, into consolidated categories based on their functional __PRINTERS_P_49_COMMENT__ 4---0512 50 content and functional place in the system of everyday activity.
At this point, however, we must deal with a fundamental problem: what scale should wo set for the basic categories of human activity? To what extent, to what level, should one consolidate the elementary types of behavior?
We can, for example, easily picture the consumption of spiritual culture as a function of everyday behavior: in individual consumption of culture with a view to rest and recrea lion, in the consumption of culture at public performances, as study, self-education, etc. By progressive fractionalization of the functions of everyday activity, we arrive at the elementary types of human activity and their reflection iti time expenditures.
On the other hand, the gradual consolidation of the functions of the daily routine and of the types of activity that correspond to these functions leads quite rapidly to extraordinarily broad and scarcely useful banalities.
In itself, to say that we must join elementary types of activity on the basis of their functional proximity is to indicate a general rule. As with any system of classification, several levels of consolidation of the initial elements are possible. It is for this reason that a new problem arises: the selection of the basic, most meaningful scale of classification, the isolation of a level of consolidation of simple types of activity and time expenditures that will yield cate gories and forms of activity that are truly fundamental, what Marx called the ``natural and acquired powers".^^1^^ (We should repeat that we are referring to the basic types of activity in everyday behavior, outside the realm of production and management.)
It would seem that the natural, simplest and most logical way to determine this scale is to isolate types of activity that are so broad---but no broader---that they are a constant feature of the everyday behavior of the group of people studied.
The measure of such ``everydayness'' in the behavior of the overwhelming majority of urbanites is the weekly life cycle. We will posit as the basic level of consolidation that which turns a group of proximate and therefore interchangeable _-_-_
~^^1^^ See K. Marx and F. Engels, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1973, p. 488.
51 initial activities into a type of activity that is irreplaceable and imperative within the framework of the given mode of life.As an example, the classification of the non-productive activities connected with everyday cultural life should clarify this procedure.^^1^^
These activities include: reading belles lettres and sociopolitical literature, newspapers and magazines, watching television, listening to radio, going to theaters, movies, concerts, museums, and sports events, study, self-education, amateur artistic work, non-professional crafts, etc. Because of the comparative proximity of their functional content, these activities can easily be reduced to four groups (the first level of consolidation and classification). These groups are: individual consumption of culture with a view to leisure, entertainment, obtaining information (reading, watching television, etc.); public consumption of culture with a view to leisure, entertainment, obtaining information _-_-_
~^^1^^ To avoid misunderstanding, it should be stressed that the concept ``cultural life" (as well as concepts close to it, viz., ``consumption of culture'', ``participation in culture'', etc.) encompasses fewer phenomena than culture in its broad sociological sense, which we apply to the characterization of the conditions of life. Ordinarily, when one speaks (and this applies to scholarly works, too) of cultural life, of activities connected with culture, cultural activity, consumption of culture, etc., one scarcely lias in view the activities relating to every aspect of knowledge, norms, concepts or values influencing human behavior (for one would then have to consider all human activities as aspects of ``cultural'' activity). In practice, when one speaks of cultural activity, one has in mind activities connected with the consumption of a certain part (recognized by society) of spiritual values (or the creation of them); an important feature of cultural life in this narrow sense is that the contact with spiritual values is mediated by speciiic institutions (the press, television and in general all mass media, institutions that sponsor public performances, libraries, scholarly and cultural institutions, etc.) or at least by custom. One can say, for example, that both the norms of social intercourse and literature are a part of the culture of society in the broad sense; however, only reading is a part of cultural life as this term is used in everyday speech; social intercourse is not a part of cultural life, but a special type of behavior. Thus, here and subsequently, we shall consider cultural life to be the totality of such activities as reading, watching television, attending performances, study, self-education, etc., although we attribute to culture, as one of the conditions of life, a much broader range of phenomena (in practice, all elements of the spiritual life of society that influence behavior)~
__PRINTERS_P_51_COMMENT__ 4* 52 (attending theaters and movies, etc.); consumption of culture with the conscious purpose of development and improvement (study, self-education); non-professional creativity (invention, rationalization, amateur artistic work, and other amateur activities, etc.).^^1^^However, can this level of consolidating elementary activities be considered the fundamental scale of classification, and the consolidated categories of activity thereby obtained, basic categories? According to our definition, they cannot be so considered, for the forms of activity at this level of consolidation have not as yet become so widespread in the urban working milieu that each of them by itself is an obligatory element in the everyday behavior of the majority of adult workers (at least, within the framework of the week-long life cycle). These are today not yet imperative, irreplaceable forms of activity. In this sense, they cannot be distinguished from the primary activities of which they are composed---reading, watching television, visiting theaters, study, etc.
Consequently, it is necessary to proceed to the next scale of classification, uniting all the four groups obtained after the first step into a more general category, encompassing all of everyday cultural life or, in other words, ail activity connected with participation in culture.^^2^^ The transition to a broader type of activity leads not only to quantitative changes (as was true at the first level of consolidation), but to a particular qualitative change, too. As distinct from narrower categories, participation in culture is now an imperative, constant element of the worker's daily routine; to one degree or another, this activity can be found in the everyday _-_-_
~^^1^^ This scale of classification of non-productive cultural activities lias been employed in a number of studies, in particular in B. A. Grushiri's Free Time (Moscow, 1967, in Russian) from which we have borrowed the above groupings.
~^^2^^ We use the term ``participation in culture" (instead of the more common ``consumption of cullure'') inasmuch as it encompasses activities connected not only with the consumption of culture, but also independent, though non-professional, cultural creativity. All the previous remarks made with respect to the non-coincidence of the term ``culture'' as designating a special sort of conditions of life and the concept ``cullure'' as used in connection with cultural activity, cultural life, etc., apply with equal force to the term ``participation in culture" as a special type of human activity.
53 behavior of practically every urban worker. We can, therefore, view participation in culture (chiefly, of course, consumption of culture) as one of the basic, imperative forms of everyday activity.Thus, the gradual unification of proximate activities on an ever broader basis permils the reduction of the great variety of separate types of time allocation to a comparatively small number of basic, imperative types and forms of human activity.
The imperativeness of these forms---the fact that they are all necessarily present in the everyday behavior of all members of a given group (though to a different extent for different individuals)---makes them non-interchangeable or not fully interchangeable. In this sense, the basic types of activity are equivalent (though not equal): all must be present within the framework of the given mode of life; together they constitute the necessary elements of that mode of life.
The historical character of the basic forms of life activity. The basic forms of activity by and large have a distinctly historical and social character: their limits and content change from era to era and from one social group to another.
One hundred years ago, participation in culture (at any rate, in secular culture) was not at all an imperative, constant feature of everyday behavior for the mass of urban laborers. The consumption of culture (not to mention cultural creativity) within the framework of the ``reproductive life" to which workers were doomed in the epoch of industrial capitalism was episodic; it was a component part of entertainment, religious activity, etc. The really imperative and, hence, basic form of activity in the daily routine of urbanites of that time was a broader group of activities, connected not only with the consumption of culture but also with all sorts of extrafamilial intercourse, games, participation in religious activities, etc.; consumption of spiritual culture was only one of the possible manifestations of this form of activity, equivalent, shall we say, to the current relationship between the public consumption of culture and participation in culture in general.
In the future, the accelerating rise in the level of education and the gradual saturation of non-productive activity with the consumption of spiritual values, non-professional 54 creativity, etc., will lead to a further subdivision of the currently imperative category, the activities connected with culture. Its constituent elements---such as individual and public consumption of culture, study, self-education, etc.--- will themselves become imperative elements of everyday behavior.
Socio-historical relativity and mobility do not, however, alter the fact that, for every specific period, specific culture and social group, the basic categories of activity form a strictly determined system of a more or less constant magnitude.
There are five basic, imperative types of vital activity in the everyday, non-productive behavior of adult urban workers:
I. Activities connected with the satisfaction of everyday physiological needs (sleep, eating, etc.).^^1^^
II. Housework in its various forms and some forms of service for oneself.
III. Family life and the raising of children.
IV. Selective extrafamilial intercourse for the purpose of rest, entertainment, exchange of information (e.g., entertaining guests, walks, meeting friends).
V. Participation in culture, everyday cultural life.
These form, in our opinion, the basic structure, the backbone of the mode of life outside the realm of production and management (of course, only to the extent that we treat it as a system of everyday behavior). If we add to this list, labor in social production or the service industries and participation in civic and political life, we have all the most important, constituent elements of the mode of life of adult workers in the modern Soviet city.
It should be recognized, however, that some activities treated in our study as elementary types of everyday behavior cannot be connected with any of the basic types of activity listed above. Examples in the contemporary worker's daily routine are out-of-town trips, tourism and sports _-_-_
~^^1^^ Strictly speaking, according to our definition each of these types of behavior should be viewed as a particular imperative form of activity. But since a detailed analysis of these aspects of life is not a part of our concern, we will, for practical purposes, unite them in a single category.
55 activities. Elements of the consumption of culture and at times even cultural creativity are present in all of these activities, as are selective social intercourse, entertainment, games, satisfaction of physiological needs and, above all, contact with nature---yet none of these elements can be considered determinant. These activities form, in effect, a specific type of activity distinct from the basic forms of everyday behavior treated above.Obviously, we are dealing here with an extraordinarily interesting process---the formation of yet another basic form of everyday behavior (or, perhaps, even two forms). Properly speaking, one expects such ``incomplete'' forms to be present in the structure of the mode of life; after all, change in the basic forms of behavior---division or unification of old forms, birth of new---is a constant, unceasing process.
The scheme of classification. In order to describe the mode of life of urban workers with the aid of data on time allocation, it seems useful to adopt the following classification of the most widespread, elementary activities and the corresponding time expenditures^^1^^:
I. Labor in social production and the service industries.^^2^^
II. Activity that is ancillary to and directly connected with labor (commuting, change of shifts, lunch break, etc.).
III. Participation in civic and political activity and management.
IV. Satisfaction of everyday physiological needs.
1. Sleep.
2. Eating.
_-_-_~^^1^^ Only the most widely occurring activities (which is sufficient for our purposes) are included in this classification. In principle, it could include an enumeration of any number of types of activity, describing a mode of life to any degree of detail and amplitude. We should also note that in the designation of the simplest types of time expenditure, as well as groupings, generally accepted formulae have been retained wherever possible.
~^^2^^ The given forms of activity (I, II, III) and the corresponding time expenditures are not given in detail, since they are not a part of the daily routine; labor and civic and political activity are introduced in the scheme to show the correlation of the forms of everyday activity proper and the structure of the mode of life as a whole.
563. Care for oneself and medical treatment.
4. Inactive rest. V. Housework.
A. Everyday chores.
1. Shopping.
2. Cooking and related activities (washing dishes, etc.).
3. Cleaning house.
4. Care for clothes, linen and footwear ( laundering, ironing, cleaning).
5. Use of everyday commercial services.
B. Labor ancillary to the domestic economy.
6. Work in private subsidiary farms (gardening, care for domestic animals).
7. Household repair and carpentry, repair and making furniture, household appliances, etc.
VI. Family life and activities with children.
1. Direct care for small children (bathing and feeding, taking them to nursery school, kindergarten, or school).
2. Other activities with children (games, talk, reading, walks, checking lessons, meeting teachers, etc.).
3. Talks and other forms of social intercourse among adult members of the family.
VII. Selective extrafamilial intercourse for the purpose of rest, entertainment or exchange of information.
1. Entertaining guests and visiting.
2. Walks, meeting friends and acquaintances outside the home, visiting parks, clubs, cafes, restaurants, etc.
3. Non-athletic games (dominoes, loto, etc.). VIII. Participation in culture.
A. Individual consumption of culture for the purpose of rest, entertainment and obtaining informa. tion. \. Watching television.
2. Reading newspapers and magazines.
3. Reading belles lettres.
57B. Public consumption of culture for the purpose of rest, entertainment and obtaining information.
4. Going to movies.
5. Going to theaters, circuses, concerts, etc.
6. Visiting museums and exhibitions.
C. Consumption of culture for the purpose of raising the level of skills and education.
1. Study in night and correspondence schools, technical schools, universities, etc. (the studies proper and preparation for them).
8. Conscious self-education. D. Non-professional creativity.
9. Engagement in invention and rationalization, amateur artistic activity, etc.
IX. Physical exercises and communing with nature.
1. Sports and physical training.
2. Recreation outside town, tourism, hunting, fishing.
The functional classification outlined above does not, of course, exhaust all the possible approaches to grouping time expenditures. For the purposes of our study, it is especially important to turn attention to some global divisions that describe the most common properties of different sorts of activity as they are reflected in time and thus encompass a much broader range of activities than the basic types of activity in our classification. Such global divisions are, for example, working and non-working time, free time, and the distribution of time expenditures into more or less elastic varieties.
Division into working and non-working time accords best with our scheme. This is understandable, for working time is in essence isolated on the functional principle: by working time, most researchers understand the time spent working in social production and the service industries. To obtain the completely precise correlation to the generally accepted division into working and non-working time, it is enough to divide the basic forms of vital activity that are the basis of our classification into two groups: one including work in social production and the service industries (including professional work in management), and the other including all remaining types of activity.
58In the context of our study, non-working time has the relatively limited importance of a bounded category, only approximately delimiting a time space, a ``field'' of everyday activity. It would seem, however, that sociological study of a mode of life should employ a terminology reflecting the difference of labor from other types of life activity more fully than does the division into working and non-working time.
Elastic and non-elastic time expenditures. A grouping of time expenditures according to their elasticity, i.e., their flexibility, the variability of their indices, is also of practical importance for our study. This grouping, just as the use of the concept of non-working time, forms a bounded division that delimits the basic object of the given study. The essence of such division is quite simple.
The duration of any type of activity changes as the conditions in which it takes place change. However, different activities react differently to changing circumstances. For example, in any given historical period, working time for most urban industrial workers is more or less standard: its duration over a week does not change under the influence of the factors considered in our study. On the contrary, the duration, let us say, of reading, sports or amateur activities is extraordinarily dependent on the stage of the life cycle, material well-being, the character of the surrounding environment, and on individual peculiarities; such time expenditures vary noticeably from individual to individual, from group to group.
Division into more or less elastic types of time allocation makes it possible to highlight the problem of primary concern to us---to understand how changes in the conditions of life influence the mode of life.
For our purposes, it is enough to determine the most general differences in the degree of elasticity, by dividing time expenditures on the basic forms of activity into more flexible and variable, and comparatively constant and inflexible. Given this crude but, for our purposes, satisfactory approach, we will not be mistaken to consider the less elastic types of activity to be, first, the basic time expenditures connected with satisfying everyday physiological needs (sleep and eating, but not inactive rest or medical treatment) 59 and, second, working time, insofar as we are concerned with an instantaneous study, describing a group with an identical (or almost so) duration of socially organized labor activity. All the other basic forms of activity in the daily routine have more elastic time expenditures.
It is to be understood that we will, in the further course of this study, analyze primarily the more elastic types of time utilization, since they establish the actual limits of the everyday behavior that can at all meaningfully be described with the aid of the language of time.
Isolation of free time. For a meaningful characterization of time budgets, as well as for comparison of our classification with the generally accepted scheme, it is useful to compare the functional grouping of the types of time utilization with the category of free time.
In most Soviet studies of time budgets and the problems of time allocation, free time is considered part of the general fund left after calculating the time needed to meet imperative obligations (this is universally taken to mean a quite specific range of activities: labor in social production; activities directly connected with such labor--- commuting; housework; activities to meet physiological needs).
The boundaries of free time can in this case be easily correlated with the divisions of our classification: they encompass the time connected with such types of activity as participation in culture and civic and political activity, active physical development and communing with nature, family life and raising children (with the exception of obligatory care for them), selective extrafamilial intercourse, and inactive rest. The activities that enter into these categories---the elementary units of our scheme---are in practice not different from the enumeration of types of time allocation that figure in the majority of Soviet (and foreign) studies of the 50s and 60s as free time.
However, we will use this category relatively infrequently. There is no question that free time, considered as a definite set of activities, is an absolutely necessary concept when used as a bounded category describing the object being studied as a whole. If one is studying those types of time allocation that are included in ``free time'', the concept 60 makes it possible briefly and clearly to designate the object of investigation. B. A. Grushin, for example, has treated free time as a set of activities quite successfully.^^1^^ But for the analysis of a mode of life as a whole, or at least of everyday activity outside the realm of production, the category of free time in its current interpretation is necessary only to a relatively slight extent.
Naturally, we cannot, nor do we intend, to dismiss out of hand the concept, which is so widely employed in academic and publicistic literature; in fact, we give it a specific meaning in connection with the study of the social aspects of the daily routine.
The fact that there are properties of behavior that cannot be confined within functional divisions and therefore demand the introduction of the concept of free time is obvious. Yet one cannot, by a simple enumeration of activities, reflect the specific features of behavior that in real life separate free time from the general flow of human activity. If these specific features could be reflected better than is done at present, the isolation of free time would make it possible to formulate a category that would not simply repeat and summarize the characteristics of the divisions in our classification, but would show new, specific features of activity not reflected by any other grouping of time expenditures.
The feeling that many activities are included in the category of free time quite arbitrarily, and the impossibility of getting more satisfactory results by excluding particular activities, is in our opinion indirect evidence that free time, in the direct, natural understanding of the term, is different from a given set of activities.
The arbitrariness of the division of activities into those that do and do not belong to the category of free time is apparent, too, when this category is compared with many of the time expenditures in different areas of activity.
At first glance, for example, it seems legitimate to exclude housework from free time. But how can we separate free and non-free time in the care for children? Why is it _-_-_
~^^1^^ See B. A. Grushin, Free Time (in Russian).
61 wrong to consider bathing children free time while walks with them is so considered? Yet the unqualified inclusion of care for children within free time is also unpersuasive. Another example: work in a private subsidiary farm or garden is usually imperative, caused by the need to obtain supplementary income. In this case, it is correct to exclude time spent in such labor from free time. Yet it is easy to see beyond the obvious. After all, work in a garden is now not infrequently a pleasure, an activity that one resorts to not only for the sake of income, but from the desire to commune with nature, to exert one's physical energies for good health, to provide variety in one's activities.This impossibility to express concisely the essence of free time by enumerating activities is apparent even in the realm of time allocated to the consumption of culture. Study is especially indicative. Both the inclusion and the exclusion of this activity from free time seem equally unconvincing: study can be both a free and a non-free use of time.
Finally, there is an element of incommensurability even in the relationship between free and working time, which we mentioned above. Yet the comparison and juxtaposition of working and free time is one of the bases for a definition of the latter category through an enumeration of activities.
As is apparent, the indeterminacy of isolating free time with the aid of a set of activities touches all sides of this category. And it is not a matter of separate mistakes: construing free time through any set of types of activity is unpersuasive; the fact is that free time and functional types of time allocation (labor in social production, sleep, eating, housework, study, etc.) reflect different, though related, aspects of behavior. They are categories based on different principles; they do not supplement, but interpenetrate each other.
Our interpretation of the concept of free time starts from the fact that it is impossible clearly and without contradiction to connect free time with any specific set of activities. This shows that free time is not a type of activity in the same sense as are labor, reading, study, sleep, and so on. 62 Rather, free time is a special form or special character of carrying out any (or almost any) type of activity. Above all, we should not forget the fact that in the everyday use of time, free time is---and is usually felt to be---the most valuable part of activity.
The fact that free time is connected with activity that is not simply necessary for the attainment of goals external to it, but is important in itself, was unequivocally stressed by Marx. ``...Free time,'' he said, ``disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for free activity which---unlike labor---is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfilment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one's inclination."^^1^^
In our opinion the distinction between activity valuable in itself and activity to meet an external goal opens the way to a theoretical definition of free time that will allow us to overcome many of the contradictions inherent in its current interpretation.
In fact, all activities or homogeneous periods of man's activity can be divided into two categories. One includes those acts and periods of activity that are important to the individual only because of their external results (material or spiritual), but are not valuable in and of themselves. Time expenditures connected with activities of this sort are perceived as necessary, unavoidable, in a certain sense unfree. Given the condition that the same results be achieved, the individual strives to reduce such expenditures of time. For most modern urbanites, such activities are, for example, many (but not all, and not for everyone) activities related to housework. Some types of labor in industry are of an analogous character; though under socialism labor has become an honorable duty, it is as yet not a prime necessity.
Actions and activity that are in and of themselves important for the individual or, more precisely, also important _-_-_
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part III, Moscow, 1971, p. 257.
63 in themselves and not only for their results, form a different category. It is the activity itself that is perceived as a value. Frequently, the very use of time connected with such activity is the activity's primary purpose. To the extent that il does not affect other interests, the individual tries to extend---or at least, not to reduce---the magnitude and intensity of such activities. By their nature, these activities, valuable in themselves, are much less in need of any kind of reiiiforcement. The determining influence of the external environment and conditions of life has here a less rigid character than with respect to necessary activity. It is natural that activities important for their own sake are perceived as free activity, as ``disposable time''. Activities of this sort, depending on the objective conditions of life and on personal characteristics, include reading, creative labor, visiting museums, meeting friends; but under specific conditions, such activities may also include those that are far from the ideals of socialism (drunkenness, idleness, etc.).Proceeding from this approach, it is logical to consider free time to be behavior that is valuable in itself or the time of those actions and those periods of activity in which there is an element of value-in-itself.
The essential feature and, it would seem, the advantage of our construction of free time is the fact that it does not discard present definitions, but in a certain sense subsumes them as less precise, approximate characterizations. It is easy to see that activity that is valuable in itself and time spent on such activity is, to put it crudely, principally time of mental, social, aesthetic and physical activity connected above all with rest, entertainment, the development of the individual, time free from the execution of obligatory tasks. In effect, our concept of free time is an attempt to make precise, not to reject unconditionally, the definitions adopted in most studies of the last decade.
Unfortunately, it must be admitted that the precision of our definition is at present of a theoretical, academic nature. Practical implementation of this conception of free time requires the development of a new method for collecting and analyzing sociologically data on time allocation. In sociological research today, there is no way to isolate free time 64 other than to equate it with a specific set of time allocations. This docs not mean, however, that such methods will not be developed in the future.
__ALPHA_LVL3__ 2. QUANTITATIVE DESCRIPTIONHaving enumerated the simplest expenditures of time, which are considered, in the context of this study, the initial elements of everyday behavior, and having joined these expenditures into major groups, it is possible to interpret meaningfully data on time allocation. Figures on time spent on specific types of activity make it possible to determine what makes up the everyday behavior, the mode of life of the group under study. The duration and frequency of activities s.erve, though somewhat crudely, as indices of the comparative importance and intensity of the activities, of their place in the mode of life of a given group. In other words, enumerating and classifying activities make it possible to determine what takes place, while quantitative measurement makes it possible to determine the duration, extent, necessity and urgency of these activities.
Weekly expenditures of time. As has already been indicated, the present study employs primarily data on weekly expenditures of time, calculated on the basis of every subject's consecutive record of all his activities in the course of one working and two non-working days. Therefore, the basic quantitative index of behavior (use of time) in our study is the mean duration of each recorded activity within a given group over the course of a week.
Insofar as we deal not with individuals but with groups, insofar as we analyze the daily routine of the ``statistical individual'', data on the mean duration of time expenditures serves better than anything else to meet our basic goal--- description of the dependency of the mode of life, of everyday behavior, on the conditions of life. To understand the nature of this dependent relationship it is not the absolute magnitude or duration of a given activity that is of significance, but rather the extent and character of a change in duration as the conditions of life change. Data on the mean duration 65 of various types of activity is in most cases adequate to discern these changes.
Naturally, in our subsequent presentation it will be necessary to consider the inevitable limitation of average magnitudes: they conceal differences in the magnitude of time expenditures within the groups studied. Use of mean figures is especially crude in the analysis of types of activity that are relatively infrequent, that is, which do not occur every day or every week.
Therefore, although the generalized character of average magnitudes is one of their basic advantages, their relativity is not always convenient. This is the more necessary to consider, because many types of everyday activity connected with participation in culture or selective activity and being especially interesting in de