Metamorphoses of the time budget as a manifestation of temporal transformations of social relations (the US experience)

One of the markers of the transformation of social relations is the change in the structure of the time budget, leading to a revision of the value component of its elements – working, non-working, free and leisure time. The value of each of these elements is determined from economic, sociocultural, anthropological aspects that influence society in general and the working person in particular. The purpose of the research is to substantiate the identification of time budget metamorphoses that reflect the temporal transformations of a part of American society, as well as quantitatively and qualitatively characterize specific changes in the chronological order of work and everyday life. Using the example of a large group of American citizens connected by work and life with high-tech sectors of the US economy, characterized by the maximization of creative (creative, “knowledge”) postmodern social practices, empirical confirmation of the high correlation of macro- and microitems of the time budget was obtained over a long period characterized by a qualitative transition from classical capitalism to its cognitive stage. It is shown that the “withdrawal” from the general fund of an ever-increasing amount of socially useful free time, the combination of leisure and commercial consumption practices, the imaginary freedom of a person to choose the structure of working time, formed the metamorphoses of the time budget. It consolidated the “colonization” of all forms of non-working time and the disorientation of a person through transforming social relations in the “space-time” and “work-leisure” continuums. Not only the socio-economic, but also the anthropological danger of the “decomposition” and “arrhythmia” of the chronological order of a working person is noted. As a biosocial subject – the bearer of “his” time and as an object of exploitation, in which the useful time of the individual, along with his work, is increasingly alienated by subjects of capital with the goal of maintaining the rate of profit.