Time for Housework and Time for ‘Oshigoto’

Abstract

This article investigates the time use and consciousness of a group of housewives working for Maple, a Japanese network business organizing 200,000 housewives all over Japan. The three years of fieldwork show that the invisible time organization of the housewives has been a vital obstacle to their business success. However, the article argues their time organization does not derive from static gendered time consciousness but it is rather produced and reproduced at the local level, through ideologies, discourses and practices.