| In an era when attaining or maintaining middle-class status often requires two jobs, how can busy dual-earner families find time to manage their households and care for their children when so much of their time is spent at work? This study uses data from the Sloan Working Family Study to investigate how married, dual-earner, middle-class families use commodification of household services as a strategy to manage their households and care for their children. I consider five types of services (for children, elders, families, homes, and pets) which can either be performed by household members or outsourced. I conceptualizing service purchasing as a multi-step process which involves identifying the need for a service, locating a service provider, setting up the service transaction, and monitoring and evaluating service delivery. Using both survey and interview data, I identify low-purchasing, moderate-purchasing, and high-purchasing families from a sub sample of 31 mothers drawn from the larger Sloan sample.; I examine the role of four factors in shaping families' outsourcing decisions: resources (money, power, and time), personal values, social network membership, and the costs and benefits of various services. First, I find that financial resources are the most powerful driver of commodification and that temporal resources are unrelated to commodification. Second, I argue that high and low commodifiers hold differing sets of values: low commodifiers are more likely than high commodifiers to learn household skills from their parents, to derive satisfaction from these skills, and to attempt to pass on this mastery of household tasks to their children. Third, I consider membership in a social network. I suggest that women in high-commodifying social networks are more likely than women in low-commodifying social networks to develop favorable views of outsourcing, aspire to a higher level of outsourcing, and to rely on their social network for referrals for service providers. Fourth, I conclude that families' personal preferences with regard to household chores and their comfort with the range of financial, monetary, psychological, and interpersonal costs related to different services influence which services they choose to retain and which they opt to hire out. |
