“Time is not time is not time”: A feminist ecological approach to clock time, process time, and care responsibilities

Abstract

Over the past half century, time-use studies have become a leading method for researching unpaid care work, especially in the multidisciplinary field of gender divisions of household work and care and in feminist international studies on counting and accounting for women’s unpaid work. Although attention to conceptual and methodological refinements in time-use methods is increasing, more focus on the challenges of conceptualizing and measuring care responsibilities, the limitations of measuring relational care practices with clock time, the existence of other kinds of time, and the epistemological and ontological moorings of time-use studies is needed. Two research programs inform this article: qualitative and longitudinal research with Canadian households in which parents were challenging norms, practices, and ideologies of male breadwinning and female caregiving; and the development of a feminist ecological ethico-onto-epistemological approach to knowledge making. A case study from the first program and several pivotal ideas drawn from the second—about relational ontologies, multiple ontologies, and the ethico-political dimensions of knowledge making—support three key arguments advanced in this article. First, I argue for a deeper interrogation of methodological and epistemological matters in coding, classifying, and categorizing care tasks in time-use studies. Second, I maintain that care responsibilities exist as “process time”; they can be narrated, but they cannot be measured in fixed units of clock time. Third, I maintain that it is not only possible, but politically and conceptually important for researchers to look beyond clock time, to recognize the ontological multiplicity of time, including relational and non-linear time and to embrace and use different kinds of time. This article is part of a growing call to reimagine how we think about, conceptualize, measure, and make knowledges about time, time use, and care-time intra-actions.

Introduction

Although the study of time is more than 5000 years old (Andrewes, 2006), “the science of measuring how people use time, is barely a century old” (Schulte, 2014: 12; see also Craig, 2007). ¹ Over the last 50 years in this wide and relatively new research area, time-use studies on unpaid work have been central in at least two key fields of research and policy advocacy. The first is the multidisciplinary field of gender divisions of household work and care, in which time-use studies, and particularly from time-use diaries, are now “generally regarded as the ‘gold standard’ for the measurement of time spent in routine activities such as housework” and care work (Altintas and Sullivan, 2016: 456). This field of study began mainly in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, and is still heavily dominated by research in Global North countries (e.g., for overview, see Sullivan, 2018). A second large field that strongly relies on time-use studies include feminist international studies on counting and accounting for women’s unpaid work, which burgeoned especially after the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and the Beijing Platform for Action. This field of research and advocacy, with key contributions by feminist economists and a strong focus on the Global South, has continually called upon countries to make unpaid work visible through time-use research and promotes the inclusion of women’s unpaid work in countries’ Gross Domestic Product or within the “production boundary” of their System of National Accounts (SNA) (e.g., Beneria, 1992; 2003, 2015; Esquivel, 2011; Waring, 1999).

Across these two massive fields, several issues are noteworthy in research on unpaid work. First, the predominantly Global North field of gender divisions of household work and care has rarely been systemically integrated with the mainly Global South field of studies on gendered paid and unpaid work (but see Folbre, 2006, 2018, 2020, this issue). Yet, cross-disciplinary connections would be beneficial, especially for researchers grappling with how to use qualitative studies to complement time-use studies or with methodological refinements in time-use measurement. Second, although interest in defining care time has been slowly growing in both fields (e.g., Esquivel, 2011; Folbre, 2006; Milkie et al., 2021), little attention has been given to the challenges of delineating and measuring responsibilities for care, household work, and other forms of unpaid work. Third, time-use studies are rarely connected to fields that focus on theorizing different kinds of time, including process time and other a-linear and relational forms of time (e.g., Adam, 1989, 1995, 2004, 2018; Ashbourne and Daly, 2010; Daly, 2002; Davies, 1994, 1996; Maher, 2009; Tammelin, 2021; but see Gershuny and Sullivan, 1998). Finally, few researchers have attended to the epistemological and ontological dimensions of time and how these matter in our approaches to unpaid care work.

My arguments in this article are rooted in these four observations. I contend that time-use studies can be enriched by qualitative research on time and unpaid work. Qualitative research can expand how we understand what care tasks are and what they mean in different contexts, why and how people take on particular tasks and within what structures of support or constraint, the diverse gendered and cultural meanings of these tasks, the pervasiveness of gendered social norms related to who-does-what-and-why within households, and the shifting spatial and temporal boundaries between paid and unpaid work. Qualitative research does, however, have many different epistemological moorings, including positivist and representational ones (see Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012). I argue that we therefore need approaches that challenge the representational, Euro-western, and positivist framings found in time-use studies and some qualitative research approaches.

I also argue that the fit between care and time, both conceptually and in terms of everyday practices, requires more critical scrutiny. Whereas care work—the daily doings of care work—especially “direct care,” and “indirect care,” (Folbre, 2006, 2018, 2021) can be measured through time-use studies and with clock time units of measurement, the responsibilities for care pose measurement challenges. Responsibilities for care do not unfold in fixed, linear time units; they are messier, more circular, relational processes that involve flow, constant movement, and temporal modalities (past/present/future). To define care responsibilities, I draw partly on Joan Tronto’s (2013) idea of nested care processes, which focuses on caregivers and care receivers, and the care work of noticing and identifying care needs, taking responsibility for meeting them, monitoring the results of caregiving, and recognizing the collective responsibilities for care work. I argue that care responsibilities cannot be measured with time-use methodologies.

My final point is that greater attention to complexity and multiplicity is needed in studies that measure time. Whereas time-use studies rely on clock time—the dominant Euro-western way of conceptualizing and measuring time—other kinds of time, such as process time, can complement linear and chronological clock time. As I describe below, the feminist ecological approach that guides my research and writing on care and time leads me to the view that it is not only possible but politically and conceptually necessary to recognize different kinds of time.

This article is informed by two wide, long, and inter-connected research programs. The first is a qualitative and longitudinal research program (2000–2016) that included three Canadian studies focused on breadwinning mothers, fathers who identified as stay-at-home and/or primary or shared primary caregivers, and households where fathers took parental leave. ² These studies were broadly informed by research on gender divisions of household work and care and by theories of feminist care ethics. In this article, I focus especially on the case study of Lilly and Billy, a couple who participated in one of those studies.

The second research program that informs this article is my development of a feminist, relational, and ecological approach that attends to the entangled epistemological, ontological, and ethico-political dimensions of knowledge making and my application of this approach to concepts, data, stories, narratives, and qualitative research practices (e.g., Doucet 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). Beginning in the early 2000s and then intensifying across the past decade, my enduring interest in this research area is rooted partly in my diffractive engagement with feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code’s (2006: xi) “ecological thinking” approach and her 40-year “quest for conceptions of knowledge and subjectivity capable of informing transformative, responsible, and responsive epistemic practices.” I refer to my approach, which builds on and extends Code’s work, weaving it with other relational approaches to epistemologies and ontologies, as a feminist ecological ethico-onto-epistemological approach.

Over the past two decades, my two research programs moved along parallel paths, but it eventually became impossible to view and work with them separately. This was partly because of an ontological and epistemological shift in my work from questions of what I am studying to entanglements of what and how. My deepening immersion in my second research program radically altered my approach to the first and it is this entangling—between relationalities embedded in my knowledge making approach and the relationalities of my objects of investigation, in this case care and time—that guides my writing of this article.

I have organized this article in three parts. First, I provide a short overview of time-use studies and highlight four lines of methodological and epistemological critiques of this approach. Second, I briefly lay out the two informing research programs that underpin this article. Third, I discuss insights derived from one case study (Lilly and Billy) from my longitudinal qualitative research program on care and work. I illustrate the challenges of using units of time to measure care responsibilities, convey the need for greater attention to the ontological and epistemological dimensions of care and time intra-actions, and call for recognition of different kinds of time.

Studying time and unpaid care work: Time-use studies

Time-use studies in practice

The field of gender divisions of household work and care slowly developed in the late 20^th century, mainly in the Global North, as a response to the limited public and scholarly attention given to mothers’ domestic work and care work (e.g., Oakley, 1974) as well as the rise of women’s employment and intermittent declines in male employment. Many well-known in-depth qualitative research studies were conducted in the UK, the US, and Canada (e.g., Berk, 1985; Hochschild and Machung, 1989/2012; Luxton, 1980/2010; Pahl, 1984). At the same time, beginning in the mid-1970s, time-use studies (or “time budget studies” as they were then called) began to assess changing gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work (e.g., Gershuny, 2001; Meissner et al., 1975). Since then, time-use studies have been employed across this expanding international field to research gender differences and gender inequalities in the time women and men spend on unpaid household and care work and to study the connections between time spent in paid work and unpaid work (e.g., Altintas and Sullivan, 2016; Bianchi et al., 2006), gender equality in leisure time (e.g., Sayer, 2005), multitasking (e.g., Offer and Schneider, 2011), connections between social policies for parents and time use (e.g., Wray, 2020), and links between gender, race, ethnicity, and time use (e.g., Connelly and Kongar, 2017a).

In the international literatures on women’s unpaid work, time-use studies have gained considerable political traction in the last few decades. Indeed, since 1995, time-use studies have become one of the most widely used methods for measuring unpaid work and are a key input into gender-based and evidence based international and national policies and programming. That year, the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) called upon countries to “recognize and make visible the full extent of the work of women and all their contributions to the national economy, including their contribution in the unremunerated and domestic sectors” by “conduct[ing] regular time-use studies to measure, in quantitative terms, unremunerated work” (UN Fourth World Conference on Women, 1995: Strategic objectives A.4 and H.3; cited in Esquivel, 2011: 216). Guided by the now well-touted view that “to achieve equality in paid work, women also need to achieve equality in unpaid work,” (Elson, 2017: 54) there is a widespread consensus among multi-disciplinary feminist scholars on the positive potential of a “three Rs” research and policy strategy to “recognize, reduce and redistribute women’s unpaid work” (Elson, 2017: 54).

Time-use studies are a critical methodology for assessing large scale and international trends in time use across many types of activities, including unpaid work. Key time-use methods include observational methods, stylized questions within larger questionnaires, and time-use diaries (for example, 24-h time dairies, light and full diaries, and 1 day or 1 week recall) (Gershuny, 2001; ILO, 2018). Despite these varied approaches to studying time, experts and agencies overwhelmingly agree that time-use diaries, which are completed by research participants either online or through a computer assisted telephone interview within a short time frame (i.e., 1–2 days after the selected diary day) to mitigate issues with recall (see Statistics Canada, 2015), are the most reliable methodology.

Methodological and epistemological critiques

Time-use studies have “been invaluable in estimating the labor time contributed by household members and in measuring all forms of work” (Beneria, 2015: 369) across many fields and by multiple stakeholders. Yet despite their widespread acceptance and growing use, feminist and international commentators widely agree that, as with all research that relies mainly on large data sets generated by government bodies or international organizations, there can be difficulties generating reliable, comparable, sex-disaggregated data, partly due to a lack of political will or financial support in many countries. Time-use studies are also underpinned by particular and largely unacknowledged methodological and epistemological assumptions about coding and classification. Here I highlight four lines of critique.

First, coding is guided by wider systems of classification that are created with and maintained by “financial, skill, and moral dimensions” and where each coding category “valorizes some point of view and silences another” (Bowker and Star, 2000: 5). As Bruno Latour (1999: 304) writes, coding is a form of “blackboxing” where “scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success” and where, in the case of the widespread acceptance of time-use methodologies, many researchers “focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on [the] internal complexity” of this methodology. Although international organizations and researchers are paying more attention to rethinking classifications and coding categories (e.g., Charmes, 2019; Folbre, 2020; Folbre, this issue; Milkie, this issue, Milkie et al., 2021; UNESCAP, 2021; UNSTATS, 2017), their internal complexities and how these are shaped by invisible normative, epistemological, and ontological moorings remain largely unaddressed.

A second coding and classification issue relates to what is included and excluded in the unpaid work category. While a recent ILO report by Charmes (2019: 8) defines unpaid care work as the provision of care encompassed by “unpaid domestic services for own final use within households,” “unpaid caregiving services to household members,” and/or “community services and help to other households,” (which includes volunteer work), activities in this last category (unpaid work between households and volunteer work), can be coded differently. “Volunteer work and help to other households can be assigned a specific digit in the classification system or it can be split between care-work and community services. Sometimes, it includes other activities (such as participating in meetings or religious activities)” (Charmes, 2019: 15) or is simply coded as “leisure” (Milkie et al., 2021; personal communication). This counting and coding issue is critical because unpaid care work can, for instance, include time spent doing unpaid work such as maintaining wider kin relations or volunteering in the community or facilitating children’s activities. In broader terms, this means that although in an “ideal world, categories are clearly demarcated bins, into which any object addressed by the system will neatly and uniquely fit” (Bowker and Star, 2000: 10), in practice, classification systems restrict objects to a single category or code and coders do not always agree on what, exactly, they are coding (see Bowker and Star, 2000). In time-use studies, assumptions are made about the uniformity and universality of meanings within and across units of time and unpaid care tasks. As I detail later in this article, this reflects an assumption about the ontological singularity of time, rather than a multiplicity of co-existing times.

A third issue with coding and classification relates to the methodological and epistemological challenges of accurately measuring and recording primary, secondary, and simultaneous activities. Questions linger about how to code the varied dimensions of life that cross boundaries: volunteer work and unpaid work, paid and unpaid work (Johnston and Lingham, 2020), and paid or unpaid work and informal labor (Charmes, 2020; Folbre, 2020). These issues reflect the broader challenges of developing categories and conceptual narratives of care and time that can attend more to the intra-active fluidities and flow of time and care concepts, processes, and practices.

Fourth, concerns have been expressed globally about the overall reliability of time-use diaries, since they rely on people being able (and willing) to self-report their activities (for overview see UNESCAP, 2021; Bittman, 2004). For example, in the Global South, the completion of time-use diaries can be affected by literacy rates, whether people actually live their lives by clock time, the impracticality of interrupting activities in order to record them, and “the pressure of combined activities,” which, for some, is “particularly acute” (Bryson, 2008: 148).

These four critiques speak volumes about the positivist and representational epistemological foundations of time-use studies, which imply that it is possible to access and know time, in this case, clock time, as a representational, “true” object. Although time-use researchers have considered the methodological challenges of measuring different kinds of care by time, much less attention has been given to epistemological issues, such as the performativity of concepts and methods or the relations between knowers, knowledge making, and the known. As with census data, concepts of time in time-use studies are seen “as ordered sets of numbers… [that] appear objective and value free,” when, in fact, “their meanings grow out of socially constructed concepts that are laden with cultural and political values” (Folbre, 1991: 463). Discussing time, specifically, Barbara Adam (1995: 73) argued: “we have to let go of the illusion of an objectively observable reality uncontaminated by observation and unaffected by times, most specifically, the invisibles of past and future” (see also Adam 1989, 2004; Bryson, 2008). Time does not independently exist outside the researchers’ paradigmatic frames of reference just “waiting to be found” nor is it “inert in and unaffected by the knowing process” (Code, 2006: 41).

The concept of time and the study of time can be approached in other ways that allow researchers to recognize and work with the complexity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and situatedness of time(s). I turn now to my feminist ecological approach, which can guide such a focus.

Methodological and epistemological approaches

A feminist ecological ethico-onto-epistemological approach

My overarching approach to studying time and care is rooted in my adaptation of Lorraine Code’s (2006) feminist ecological approach to knowledge making, which, in turn, is informed by and resonates with a diverse set of theoretical, epistemological, and ontological resources, notably feminist epistemologies and her literal and metaphorical interpretations of a broad range of ecological theories, ontologies, and epistemologies (for overview, see Doucet, 2018a; 2018b). ³ Her approach is also underpinned by her discussion about social imaginaries and instituted and instituting social imaginaries of knowledge making.

Code argues that social imaginaries of knowledge making are higher-level social narratives that make possible particular stories, narratives, data, and knowledges. They “work to shape and govern possibilities of being, thinking, acting” (Code, 2006: 7) while also legitimating or precluding other epistemological, ontological, and philosophical possibilities. Although social imaginaries are similar to paradigms (Kuhn, 1970) and meta-narratives (Somers, 1994, 2008), I am drawn to Code’s (2006) idea (borrowed from Cornelius Castoriadis [1998]), that social imaginaries are both instituted and instituting; that new social imaginaries are always unfolding from within instituted ones; that instituted and instituting social imaginaries can exist at the same time; and that sometimes researchers, for pragmatic, advocacy, and ethico-political reasons, may need to work across instituted and instituting social imaginaries of knowledge making (see Doucet, 2021 for overview). The latter is an important point for how we approach different kinds of time.

In a nutshell, Code (2006: 4) characterizes instituted social imaginaries of knowledge making as “epistemologies of mastery” (Code, 2006: 4) and “dominant epistemologies of modernity, with their Enlightenment legacy and later infusion with positivist-empiricist principles’ (Code, 2006: 24). Instituted social imaginaries of knowledge making are broadly representational in that researchers seek facts or findings; they let “the facts speak for themselves” (Law, 2004: 20), proclaiming that ‘“the surveys show” (Code, 2006: 97) or “science has proved” (244). As Code puts it, these are “spectator epistemologies” where the knower “stands as a shadow figure invisibly and indifferently apart from discrete objects of knowledge.” In Haraway’s highly cited words, this is “the view from above, from nowhere” (Haraway, 1988: 589).

Despite the endurance and pervasiveness of the dominant social imaginary of knowledge making, Code (2006: 32) argues that other instituting social imaginaries of knowledge making are continually emerging and that feminist ecological imaginaries are just one of the many instituting social imaginaries unfolding across the Global North and Global South. ⁴ In broad terms, feminist ecological social imaginaries ⁵ refer to “revisioned modes of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency” and are “about imagining, crafting, articulating, endeavoring to enact principles of ideal cohabitation” (Code, 2006: 24). While Code maintains that detailed case studies, narrative, and qualitative research studies are key methods within this approach, the focus here extends beyond methods to the inseparability of ethics, epistemologies, and ontologies, or what Karen Barad (2007: 185) refers to as “ethico-onto-epistemologies.” This approach is also framed by non-representational or more-than-representational thinking ⁶ which challenges divisions between that which is represented and the research practices, contexts, and epistemic communities that bring representations into being or view.

Among the many dimensions of a feminist ecological approach, I discuss three that guide my arguments about time and care: (1) relational ontologies, (2) multiple ontologies, and (3) the ethico-politico dimensions of knowledge making and knowledges.

Relational ontologies refer to how what something is and does is shaped by and within a wide array of intra-affective contexts and habitats, as well as their methodological, conceptual, and onto-epistemological measurement apparatuses. This entails a radical shift away from inter-action (the idea that two separate objects join together) towards intra-action, which denotes how objects, concepts, and practices are constituted within and through their relational entanglements. What this means for defining time is that, theoretically and ontologically, time—as concepts and practices—is dependent on its complex habitats and measuring apparatuses. Time and care intra-actions are thus articulated and experienced differently in varied contexts and through shifting boundaries, and each analytical mapping of time and care “requires understanding how those specificities work together” (Code, 2006: 50). Moreover, these mappings are neither neutral nor innocent; we see from where we are and in accordance with how we believe the world is and should be constituted (see also Haraway, 1988; Somers, 2008).

Intra-twined with relational ontologies, multiple ontologies overturns an assumption of singularity in data, stories, realities, and worlds (see also Mol, 2002; Law 2015). This disruption of “Euro-American perspectivalism” (Law, 2004: 55) is not a matter of holding “different and possibly flawed perspectives on the same object,” but, rather, that “we are dealing with different objects produced in different method assemblages” (55; emphasis in original) and, more broadly, within and through distinct contextual, conceptual, and onto-epistemological frameworks. In relation to time, this means that different kinds of time can exist simultaneously.

Although ontological multiplicity is widely recognized by many relational and non-representational thinkers, it is especially strong in feminist and ecological research and advocacy, where there is some urgency, in the face of such multiplicity, to think through our epistemic responsibilities for the research choices we make; this leads to my third principle of a feminist ecological approach, the “ethico-political” (Code, 2006: 52) dimensions of knowledge making. Rooted in key contributions of feminist epistemologists and ecological thinkers on the situatedness of all knowledge-making practices, there is a recognition that epistemic communities are not “benign” (Code, 2006: v) and are, indeed, becoming increasingly “credentialed epistemic communit(ies)” (Code, 2020: 76) with “opaque structures of vested interest” (66). In the case of time-use studies, and in spite of some of the critiques that I discuss in this article and my call to recognize different kinds of time, I defend the political viability and urgency of time-use studies as a way of making women’s unpaid care work visible and valuable.

Methodological approach and informing qualitative research studies

This article is also informed by a qualitative longitudinal program conducted mainly in Canada over 16 years (2000–2016) on themes of paid and unpaid work in households that in some way challenged norms, practices, and ideologies of male breadwinning and female caregiving. Across three separate but thematically connected projects, I personally interviewed 218 mothers and fathers, visiting some families several times (I revisited 15 couples after 9–10 years and six couples after 5 years). The three projects each utilized individual and couple interviews; creative and visual participatory methods, including the Household Portrait technique, where a couple maps gender divisions of housework and care (tasks and responsibilities) in a grid with columns to indicate who-does-what (see Doucet, 2015; see also Christopher, 2020), and the Lifeline approach for mapping biographical, generational, and historical time (see Doucet, 2018a; Davies, 1996); and data analysis approaches that adapted the Listening Guide (Brown and Gilligan, 1992; Mauthner and Doucet, 2003).

It was in the latter stages of this program of research and analysis that I began to more fully incorporate a feminist ecological approach, which directly affected how I approached concepts, narrative, and my data analysis processes (see overview in Doucet, 2018a). This meant conducting genealogies of concepts, working with principles of relational ontologies, multiple ontologies, the ethics and politics of knowledge making, as well as processes of reflexivity and diffraction (e.g., see Doucet, 2020). In terms of narratives, I further modified the Listening Guide approach to data analysis by integrating it with Margaret Somers’ (1994) narrative analysis approach. Somers’ non-representational approach embraces several narrative forms (ontological narratives, social, public and cultural narratives, conceptual narratives, and metanarratives) and at least four narrative dimensions: “1) relationality of parts, 2) causal employment, 3) selective appropriation, and 4) temporality, sequence, and place” (Somers, 1994: 616). It also attends to the ethico-onto-epistemological dimensions of stories, storytelling, and narratives, including the scholarly narratives we tell (for overview, see Doucet, 2018a; 2018c).

Care tasks and responsibilities: A brief case study of Lilly and Billy

In the province of Ontario, Canada, I visited Lilly and Billy first in 2007 and then again in 2016, when they were 42 and 46 years of age. ⁷ Lilly had been a student and part-time instructor in 2007, and nine years later she was an assistant professor. Billy, who had previously been in the private sector in communications, was working for a non-profit organization. In 2016, they were a two-income, middle class family living in small town with two sons aged 7 and 9.

Lilly and Billy were participants from a research project that focused on couples with fathers who had taken relatively long paid parental leaves of 10–35 weeks (with an average of 19 weeks in the sample) after the birth of at least one of their children. ⁸ It is important to note that my qualitative research studies did not focus on time or time use, but rather on couples’ paid and unpaid work histories and divisions of household work and care, particularly in terms of tasks and responsibilities. Nevertheless, they provide insights on how people live and experience care tasks and care responsibilities and the measurement challenges for care responsibilities.

The following sections present selected findings that I interpreted from my analysis of Lilly and Billy’s Lifelines (in their individual interviews) and Household Portraits (their couple interview). These visual methods did not act as data per se, but as tools to facilitate their mapping and telling of individual and joint stories about their everyday care and work lives and significant (positive and negative) moments and transitions.

Care and household tasks as “separate jurisdictions”: “Billy does all of the food” and Lilly doesn’t want to “let go” of the laundry

When Lilly and Billy constructed their Household Portrait, they reflected on how and why they organized housework work and care for their two young sons the way they did. Lilly shared a story that perfectly illustrated her point that household labor and caring for the children were divided into “separate jurisdictions.” She had taken their sons (then 3 and 5) to visit her parents in Nova Scotia. She explained that her uncle, a seasonal fisherman who fished in the summer and was unemployed through the winter, was “very non-traditional in that he does a lot of domestic work.” One evening, Lilly and the boys were having dinner at her aunt and uncle’s house, where her uncle was preparing the meal. Lilly recalled their conversation, using some dramatic flair to emplot her story and to make a key point about their division of household work:

He said to me: “What will your kids eat? Will they eat this or that?”

And I was completely like, “Uh, I don’t know.” Billy was still in Ontario and I was there in a different province and I kind of joked and said “I might need to phone Billy.”

And he stared at me, like: “What kind of a woman are you?”

I’m like: “That’s how we do it in my house.”

So, Billy does all of the food. … I don’t even know what foods the kids would eat. So, that’s how we’ve done it. We totally have our own separate jurisdictions.

That cooking was more than a task to Billy was demonstrated in another story Lilly told. She recalled that typically the kids played outside just before supper, and she supervised them while Billy was inside cooking. Lilly had assumed that she had the easier and more pleasant job, but when she went away on her first work trip, she discovered this wasn’t Billy’s perspective. She told us:

I always felt like I’ll gladly take these kids out of his hair because he needs to focus and concentrate and make the meals and I always saw that as a hardship that poor Billy had to cook for us. So, when I went away, his dad came and got the supper started because he can do that. Billy had to go pick up the kids and kind of entertain them. And (looking at Billy), I remember you reporting to me that it was exhausting because you missed your Zen time alone in the kitchen, and how cooking the meal was your quiet time. And then I stopped feeling sorry for him after he revealed that.

Whereas Billy did all the food, Lilly did all the laundry. Following a conversation where Billy talked about how his father, a teacher, would do all the laundry in the summer, we asked if Billy did laundry, too. Lilly jumped and made it clear that this was her domain:

Lilly: No, I have to do all the laundry. I have to hang it up the way I hang it up. (Turns to him) You can’t do the laundry… I would have to be pretty sick, not to do it…

Billy: Yeah, I only do it, like, if Lilly is away and the kids have thrown up or something.

Andrea (turning to Lilly): And that works for you?

Lilly: Yeah, I like it. I have my way of doing it. It would bug me for him, (looks at him), no offense, Billy, to hang it up in a certain way. So, I do all of that. Yeah… I would rather do it myself.”

When they came to the sticky note in the Household Portrait labeled “folding laundry,” she put it in the “Mainly Lilly, Billy helps” column. The conversation continued,

Billy: Whenever there’s clothes on the line, I take them in. And I’ll fold them.

Lilly: Yeah, I always hang it out. But Billy can take them in. He can take the clothes in because they’ve already been hung up in my way. So that’s okay. . . I do it in a certain way. But what I would also say, so, yeah, so, the things that I don’t want to let go of it, I just hang onto it.

Background stories: Lilly “did not want to be that poor woman who does it all” and Billy “was aware that [his father] was not the norm”

For Lilly and Billy, cooking and laundry were tasks they chose, and they did not voice any noticeable displeasure in doing them. Billy expressed that although he would like to do laundry, Lilly did not want to let go of “her way” of doing it. She had a “system,” and she enjoyed the task of hanging it out on the line. She was also the person responsible for the boys’ clothes, which linked her to shopping (a consumption activity dominated by mothers) (e.g., O’Donohoe et al., 2014) and to a social network of mothers with whom she shared “hand-me-down clothes.” Mothering networks are part of the still-gendered social contexts of early parenting, which, in Canada, ⁹ is influenced by the prevalence of mothers who still take most or all the leave time available to their families in the first year of parenting (Doucet and McKay, 2020). This points to how even a seemingly mundane task like laundry can be connected to wider social networks, to “social, public and cultural narratives” (Somers, 1994: 614), and to gendered social norms that are a part of the stories that people tell.

These stories about cooking and laundry are also about interwoven biographical, generational, and historical time, which is a form of past-present-future time (Adam, 1995). Complex and negotiated histories often shape the reasons for who-does-what-and why. One of the background stories Lilly told was about how before they were married, she would “pick the evenings to start cleaning the house because I knew Billy wasn’t so much of a jerk that he would sit on the couch and watch TV while I literally was like cleaning the floor underneath him. He would get up and help me.” Lilly did this because she did not want to repeat the patterns that she had watched her mother fall into. While Lilly acknowledged that her mother’s life, in the 1970s, was subject to different norms and structural conditions, and that her mother, “bless her heart,” was “very happy in her marriage,” her family background made her “always very vigilant that [she] did not want to be that poor woman who does it all.” For his part, Billy, as they both explained, had grown up with a father who took on a lot of domestic work and this background played into how he fell easily into doing all the cooking and, according to both of them, doing more of the daily care of their sons. As Billy reflected about his father, “growing up, I was aware that he was not the norm kind of thing.”

Community-based responsibilities: Lilly and “keeping track of all the stuff” and “I like to map it out”

Lilly and Billy both agreed that since the boys had begun daycare (around their first birthdays), Billy had done most of the hands-on caring in terms of time. As Lilly put it: “If you look at the number of hours that we spend in the face-to face time with the kids, then Billy wins hands down.” But she had taken on all or most of the planning and orchestrating of the boys’ activities and social lives (including most doctors’ appointments, summer camps, liaising with daycares and schools, and connecting with other parents). “That’s me. All that stuff,” she said, “keeping track of all the stuff.” She is also “the one who scans the horizon” for activities and opportunities.

Building on ethics of care scholar Sara Ruddick’s (1995: 98) idea of the maternal imperative of “fostering growth,” I have termed this work “community-based care responsibilities,” which are aimed at facilitating children’s social, developmental, and physical growth and often connected to moral identities related to social perceptions and expectations of motherhood and fatherhood (Doucet, 2018a). Care responsibilities require, or call for, “cognitive” (Daminger, 2019: 610) skills such as “(1) anticipating needs; (2) identifying options for meeting those needs; (3) deciding among the options; and (4) monitoring the results.” They also involve social, emotional, and relational skills as they involve people other than the immediate caregivers and care receivers and they are made within, make, and sustain community networks and supports for care. As Billy put it: “like you said, Lilly, when you go to the school, it’s all the moms who are organizing the activities and all that stuff.” In short, these are complex processes that do not lend themselves to clock time measurements.

Care tasks, responsibilities, and time: Discussion

From this brief story that I crafted from Lilly and Billy’s interviews, and from my broader research program on paid and unpaid work, I make three points on care tasks, care responsibilities, and time.

A task is not a task is not a task: Relational ontologies

In the literatures on gender divisions of household work and care, there has been a long-held conceptual and practical distinction between household work and childcare (see overview in Sullivan, 2018). Yet, it is useful to view this dividing line as a shifting and porous boundary because, in some contexts, household work can be viewed as an indirect form of care work. Here, I draw on Folbre’s (2006: 187) distinction between “direct care,” which “involves a process of personal and emotional engagement” and “indirect care activities,” which “provide support for direct care.” While there can be urgent temporal dimensions involved in the care of children that do not apply to household work, it is also the case that the “line between direct and indirect care is often blurry, since even seemingly impersonal tasks have personal valence” (Folbre, 2021: 16). It is qualitative research that can discern the location and causes of this blurriness, and its implications and effects. In the case of Lilly and Billy, for example, Billy’s cooking are tasks and responsibilities that constantly supports the direct care of their children.

It is also important to call attention to diverse meanings and experiences of care tasks. Here it is worth noting that childcare tasks are often viewed by researchers as more pleasant than housework tasks. In the 2015 Canadian Time-Use Survey, for example, which included several questions that asked participants to rate an activity, Statistics Canada noted that “it is not surprising to see that time devoted to childcare was considered more pleasant than time spent on housework” (Moyser and Bullock, 2018). When recording their immediate reflections about a task (such as cooking or laundry), respondents were instructed to reflect on a task as something bound by a particular unit of time on a particular day. Yet, from the case study of Lilly and Billy, and the broader qualitative research program that informs this article, a researcher can glean how a person experiences particular tasks over a longer time frame, with varied degrees of satisfaction and dissatisfaction depending on contexts, policy supports, work-family connections, and other reasons. While time-use studies can tell stories of how people spend their time, they cannot capture the dimensions of everyday life that speak to the complexity and flow, the unfolding processes, and the implicit and explicit negotiations between partners.

Measuring a task or activity in a unit of time in a time-use study may also underestimate its generative or cultural meaning. That is, in addition to the complexity of gender in the patterns and negotiations around household work and care, ethnicity and culture can be integral to how household and care tasks are divided in families. Perry-Jenkins et al. (2013: 110) astutely highlight this issue by demonstrating how some behaviors may look like they are simply confirming gendered patterns when, in fact, their meanings may be more culturally embedded. This ambiguity calls for greater conceptual attention to the specific cultural dimensions and meanings of household work and care. They write that, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, for Punjabi and African families, “food work was women’s responsibility” as well as a way “for women to express their cultural and gendered identities.” Perry-Jenkins et al. (2013: 110) argue that while interest in racial and ethnic diversity in time-use studies has increased over the past decade, it remains important to attend to everyday cultural experiences, including “experiences of discrimination, classism, immigration, and acculturation,” as well gendered kin networks that support and constrain household work and care work in diverse populations. These cultural contexts matter to how household work and unpaid care work are lived and narrated and they should be taken into account when coding and writing about time-use data from these communities.

Thinking more widely, I also view these issues of diversity in the meanings, experiences, and enactments of tasks as matters of relational ontologies in that what something is—including any care or task or responsibility—depends on its constitutive contexts and relationalities, as well as the interpretive lenses and conceptual apparatuses of the researchers studying these tasks and responsibilities.

An hour is not an hour is not an hour”: Care responsibilities, clock time, and process time

The managing, organizing, and monitoring of children’s lives and activities varies widely for families across social class, race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, ability/disabilities, and income levels, as well as between Global North and Global South countries. Yet, like the well documented intensification of parenting time (Bianchi et al., 2006), this responsibility work has expanded in the past few decades, especially among middle-class families in the Global North (e.g. Lareau and Weininger, 2008).

These complex activities are enacted outside defined times and spaces: they spread unpredictably across time from the infant to teen years, and sometimes beyond and move between households and other social institutions. These responsibilities can include organizing regular tasks (transporting children to activities or organizing carpooling each week) as well as unpredictable and spontaneous responses (dealing with injuries and disappointments, problem solving sudden schedule changes, soothing fears and feelings of social exclusion, or encouraging and repairing social relationships). They relate more to “direct care” than to “indirect care” because they are about building and strengthening community networks and working towards positive futures for children (see also Milkie, this issue).

On my reading, a good description of the varied dimensions of care responsibilities can be found in Joan Tronto’s (1993, 2013) writing on nested “processes of care.” ¹⁰ These include: (1) caring about—which involves attentiveness and the noticing of unmet needs; (2) caring for—which is about deciding how to best meet these needs; (3) care-giving—which involves the actual care-giving work; (4) care-receiving—is about responsiveness which comes from observing and making judgments about “whether the care given was sufficient, successful, or complete?” (Tronto, 2013: 23) and (5) caring with—which attends to social, political, and collective responsibilities for care and the making of social policies that center and support care.

All of these dimensions are present in the case study of Lilly and Billy. They both claimed that they were each “in tune with the children,” yet parts of their individual and couple interviews revealed that Lilly did most of the noticing work (caring about). In households where men are shared or primary caregivers, fathers can and do notice children’s unmet needs (see Doucet, 2018a), but for varied reasons, “caring about” continues to more often be a maternal responsibility. A combination of personal, cultural, and structural reasons can explain this: more mothers can and do spend more time at home when their children are infants because parental leave policies still prioritize mothers’ time with infants, early parenting worlds remain female-dominated, work cultures are still highly gendered, and social norms and gender ideologies about women as caregivers and men as breadwinners are still resistant to change, to mention only a few. Thus, caring about and caring with are connected here in that the collective responsibilities for care, and policies to support care work (including childcare and parental leaves) are still largely connected, in practice and ideologically, to maternal employment, rather than parental employment.

In terms of the second part of these caring processes, (caring for and ensuring needs are met), Lilly said she is the one who “scans the horizon” to discern the best way to meet the boys’ needs. Lilly enlisted Billy’s help for the third aspect, (caregiving) through Billy’s taking on of a care task: “I messaged him, and I said, ‘We need to book this week in July at this level of camp because I’ve done all the research. Can you execute this?’” Finally, it was Lilly who was monitoring the care-receiving, “observing and making judgements” about care receiving (Tronto, 2013: 22). As she told us: “So I’m the one that’s monitoring their friendships and monitoring their relationships and that kind of thing.”

All of these interconnected practices are not measurable in clock time. These nested care process can, however, be viewed and studied through a different kind of time, “process time” (Davies, 1994). As Karen Davies (1994: 280) wrote more than three decades ago:

… process time is not the same as task-oriented time. The latter tends to stress the task per se and risks separating the activity, at least conceptually, from its context. Process time, on the other hand, emphasizes that time is enmeshed in social relations. Several processes may intertwine simultaneously and the fabric of life is patterned by the multiple criss-crossing chains of these processes... It is impossible to say when relying exclusively on a quantitative yardstick precisely how much time was spent on the action.

Care responsibilities embrace “many complex temporalities—repetitive, cyclical, linear and progressive, productive and maintaining … [and] always inflected with a focus on accumulation signalled through the well-being and growth of the child” (Maher, 2009: 243). They move in relation to children’s constantly changing needs and demands. They can join the past (generational influences and pressures), the present, and the future (children’s social development), all of which fall outside the boundaries of what clock time can capture and measure. “Researchers should not simply assume that ‘an hour is an hour’” (Lareau and Weininger, 2008: 419; emphasis added). Care responsibilities are process time; they can be narrated, but they cannot be measured in fixed units of clock time.

Multiple ontologies: Time multiplicities

In addition to process time, there are other ways of understanding time that challenge the clock time measurements used in time-use studies. Writing from the legacies of trans-Atlantic slavery and European colonialism, Michelle Wright (2015: 41), for example, develops the concept of “Epiphenomenal time,” which challenges the idea of chronological linear time by proposing that time “comprises only the ‘now’—but a ‘now’ that encompasses what is typically labeled the past and the future.” Meanwhile, studies on disabilities and time posit a concept of “crip time,” which “requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies” (Kafer, 2013: 26–27; see also Freeman, 2010).

Indigenous onto-epistemologies also challenge linear notions of time. A large body of evidence spanning decades indicates that some Indigenous populations perceive and live time as “circular,” involving concentric “time circles” (Janca and Bullen, 2003: 41), and as cyclical and relational with all living things (Hanohano, 1999; Watts, 2013). Politically, culturally, and societally, the legacies of colonialism mean that trauma and memories are not resigned to the past, but can be “lasting,” and “continuously felt” in the present, regardless of when and how long they occur in linear time (Janca and Bullen, 2003: 41).

These different articulations of time illustrate ontological multiplicity and the need to think beyond clock time to consider the diverse ways that people live and experience time. In varied ways, they also resist Euro western assumptions about time’s lineal, Newtonian, mechanistic, unidirectional forward movement and the singularity of any concept or practice.

Conclusions: “Time is not time is not time”

This article focuses on care and time as practices, as concepts, and as conceptual configurations. From a larger research program on caregiving fathers and breadwinning mothers, I shared a brief case study that included some of the stories that one couple, Lilly and Billy, told me about how they organized and navigated paid and unpaid work practices across a decade. My longitudinal research program, with its narrative-focused qualitative research and insights from wider literatures on time and care—guided by a feminist ecological instituting social imaginary of knowledge making—led me to develop three key points.

First, I argued that qualitative research studies can complement time-use diaries with thick, rich, and nuanced stories about how people feel about the varied kinds of unpaid work they take on. These stories illustrate negotiations between partners about what, why, and how they do what they do and in what contexts of support and constraint. In the first section of the article, I underlined how the meanings and enactments of tasks vary across time and between diverse populations and emphasized the importance of opening up methodological and epistemological “blackboxes” to attend to the internal complexities involved in how tasks are coded and analyzed as categories in time-use studies (see Charmes, 2019, 2020; Folbre, 2006, 2018, 2020, 2021). I also asserted the need to address the coding implications of porous boundaries, such as those between volunteer work and unpaid care work and, in some contexts, between paid and unpaid work.

In the second section of the article, I attended to relational ontologies in the meaning and makings of what tasks mean in practice. I also brought together my readings of Joan Tronto’s nested care processes and Karen Davies’ process time and highlighted the temporal and spatial complexities of care responsibilities. I argue that their fluidity in time and space means that care responsibilities are best understood through process time and narration, and not through clock time. Process time is a way of studying care responsibilities that stretch across temporal and spatial boundaries. In addition to dominant Euro-western concepts of clock time, it is important to provide space for the ontological multiplicity of time; this includes concepts and enactments of time that are relational, non-linear, and embedded in particular histories, cultures, and diverse onto-epistemological approaches.

I am not proposing a binary opposition between, for example, clock time and process time. Even clock time is an internally diverse kind of time (see Bastian, 2012; Glennie and Thrift, 2009). Rather than emphasize divisions, I aim to highlight relationships and interdependencies within and between different kinds of time. With Adam (1995: 24), I hold to the view that “There is no single time, only a multitude of times which interpenetrate and permeate our daily lives” and that what is needed is a recognition of the “multiple realities that all bear on social life simultaneously, thus forcing an approach that transcends dualisms and dichotomous thinking” (Adam, 1989: 458).

If we move away from “spectator epistemologies” and representational thinking that aims for truth (Code, 2006: 32) towards a reconfigured view of knowledge making as working towards just, co-habitable, and sustainable worlds within “a pluralist knowledge culture (where) the empirical and the normative are mutually interdependent” (Somers, 2008: xiii), it becomes clear that different kinds of time are not only necessary, but strategically and politically important for feminist research and advocacy. This means recognizing that particular concepts, methods, epistemologies, ontologies—and more broadly, social imaginaries of knowledge making—will bring forth different kinds of time and that there can be ethico-political reasons for emphasizing one or more versions of time in relation to particular problematics.

On the one hand, there is an outstanding need to keep counting unpaid work with time-use studies and clock time, the urgency of which is well stated in a 2018 Report by the International Labour Organization on unpaid care work. In its analysis of time-use surveys from 23 countries: “Around the world, without exception, women do three-quarters of unpaid care work. There is no country where women and men take on an equal share of unpaid care work” (Addati et al., 2018: xxix).

On the other hand, we need concepts of time, and methods and measurement apparatuses, that recognize and respond to the relationality and processual quality of care work, especially care responsibilities. Relational and multiple ontologies of both time and care speak from and to longstanding diverse cultural, historical, epistemological, and ontological traditions, and recent COVID-19 pandemic conversations from new generation scholars (e.g., Karjevsky et al., 2020). Guided by a feminist, relational, ecological approach, which is just one of many instituting social imaginaries of knowledge making, this article is part of a growing call for revisioning how we think about, approach, study, and measure care with time, and care-time intra-actions.

ORCID iD

Andrea Doucet https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6000-9029