A Geography of Busyness

Abstract

Robert Levine A Geography of Busyness [... pause] —David Mamet’s suggestion for his own epitaph IF YOU CASUALLY GREET AMERICANS WITH THE QUESTION “HOW ARE you?” they are likely to respond about how busy their lives are, perhaps scrunching up their faces and bodies to show how anxious and stressed they feel. The odd thing about this is that both parties understand the response may be a type o f bragging, as in “Look how important I am.” This would seem exceedingly curious to visitors from many other cultures—like bragging that you are having a nervous breakdown. It is readily accepted, however, in a culture that assumes time is money and that eveiy moment not doing something is a wasted one. To be busy is to be a worthwhile person. Compare this to a student from eastern Africa whom Ionce inter­ viewed about the meaning o f wasted time. “How can a person waste time?” he asked. “Ifyou’re not doing one thing, you’re doing something else” (Levine, 1997). J. T. Fraser, the founder of the International Society for the Study of Time, wrote, “Tell me what to think of time, and I shall know what to think of you.” The temporal norms of a culture—how people conceive, measure, and use time—provide an exceedingly informative window on what the people of that culture value; and no temporal values divide cultures more than those related to busyness. How much and often should people work? What is the appropriate balance between work and play? Is speed a good thing? Should it be work before play or the other way around? Is there such a thing as doing nothing? Can time be wasted? social research Voi 72 : No 2 : Summer 2005 355 BUSYNESS = SPEED + ACTIVITY I propose that the subjective experience of feeling busy has two main components: speed and activity. Speed refers to the rate at which an activity is performed. It is the amount ofactivity per unit oftime. The speed may be measured over brief and immediate periods of time, as when one experiences rapidly oncom­ ing traffic or an upcoming deadline; or over longer, more sustained inter­ vals, such as when we speak of the accelerating tempo of modem life. The second component of busyness, activity, is the absence of unscheduled time. It is the amount of time that is consumed with activ­ ity; or, the ratio o f doing things to doing nothing. It is easy to confuse speed with activity. For one thing, highs and lows on both dimensions often manifest the same external appear­ ance—movement or lack o f movement—to the outside observer. There is also considerable overlap between the two: people with many things to do often move quickly and vice versa. When people have a lot they need to do, they tend to do these things faster. Nonetheless, activity and speed are not one and the same. Speed is a way of doing more in a fixed amount of time. Activity means simply doing something, at whatever speed. When someone says they are busy, in other words, they may be experiencing a crunch of either speed or activity, or both. This paper is about cultural differences in busyness. On both the speed and activity dimensions, we shall see, cultures may differ profoundly. Cross-cultural data, part 1: Speed For the past two decades my students and I have been conducting crosscultural studies on the speed component of everyday life. In our most recent studies, we conducted several field experiments in the largest or other major city in each o f 31 countries around the world. In one exper­ iment, for example, we timed the average walking speed of randomly selected pedestrians over a distance of 60 feet. Another experiment sampled speed in the workplace; specifically, how long it took postal 356 social research clerks to fulfill a standard request for stamps. Each ofthe measurements was taken during main business hours in main downtown areas. We found large cross-national differences. Most of these mirrored popular stereotypes. The fastest big cities, for example, tended to come from western Europe and industrialized Asia while those in economi­ cally struggling nations (such...