The disarticulated family: The new constraints of the schedule.

Summary Early in the morning, late in the evening, three hours in the middle of the day and four in the late afternoon, at night, on Sundays: the working days of a growing number of French people are changing. This book draws on the large-scale time-use surveys conducted by INSEE to sketch the complex and contrasting landscape of the daily lives of today's dual-income couples. Between a growing desire for shared leisure activities and unevenly controlled external constraints, this book shows that, far from being a choice, the desynchronization of couples' working hours is very often simply the result of atypical working hours imposed on precarious employees, blue-collar workers, and service and commercial workers. The deregulation of working hours since the end of the 1970s and the new methods of work organization have weakened the family ties of couples who are also dissatisfied with their work and unstable in their jobs, to the point of rupture represented by the disarticulated family, which is no longer able to reunite as a whole. The author draws up a precise and quantified inventory of the organization of the time of bi-active couples on a daily basis and of the possible preservation of the family bond in the face of the deregulation of working hours.