The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison

Abstract

understanding of work-life balance. As noted earlier, the final section, ‘‘Digital and Visual Methods,’’ contains projects using novel methodologies that allow researchers to examine work-life balance in mostly unobtrusive ways. Using data collected through a mobile phone app, Julia Cook and Dan Woodman (Chapter 15) explore how young couples organize and manage time together. They followed this data collection with indepth interviews to clarify issues and deepen their understanding of challenges along the way. In Chapter Sixteen, Caroline Gatrell discusses a netography project on the lives and concerns of pregnant and breastfeeding employees. The final chapter, by Marjan De Coster and Patrizia Zanoni, uses visuals to challenge the gendered binary nature of much work-life balance research by allowing participants to step outside of the normative scripts of work-life and gender. Overall, this collection shows the breadth and depth of work-life balance research and methods. It engages an international group of authors using a wide variety of methods and touches on the challenges and opportunities created by the COVID-19 pandemic. The volume also encourages ways to think about work-life in understudied populations. While the inclusion of research on fathers and older adults shows the expansion of work-life research outside of the focus on mothers and traditional populations, it also highlights the continuing heterosexual and parenting focus of much work-life research. Yet the studies and newer methodologies point to ways that work-life among non-heterosexual, non-parenting, and non-partnered individuals could be studied. The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison, by K. C. Carceral and Michael G. Flaherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 320 pp. $35.00 paper. ISBN: 9780231203456.