Becker's Theory Of Working Time And The Consumption Of Time

The neoclassical economic approach assumes that working time is perceived in terms of time allocation and related choices taken by a rational actor with regards to the consumption of time. Thereby, time is considered as a scarce resource, as a day is limited to 24 hours and therefore the main aim of the rational actors is to achieve a maximization of personal time utility (Sirianny & Negrey, 2000). This implies that the actors act in order to achieve their individual preferences and this consequently presupposes a utility-maximizing rational mind-set (Hermann, 2015). In line with this assumption, it is argued that the time devoted to domestic and care activities depends on the amount of time each individual has left, which is widely known as …show more content…
Thereby, his theory is based on the question how much time an individual should devote to paid work on the labour market and how the remaining time could be combined with the purchasing of goods in order to realize a maximization of welfare levels. According to Chiappori and Lewbel (2015) Becker’s model of time allocation was especially ground-breaking, as households hitherto were mainly considered as consumers and not as producers, which implies that households seek to maximize their profits by maximizing the utility of time devoted to different tasks and activities. Becker’s (1965) theory assumes in line with the neoclassical economic school that the members of a household make rational choices regarding the transformation process where market goods and time are combined to produce basic commodities to achieve a utility …show more content…
Time for example is considered as scarce resource and therefore the time allocation gets a central issue in his model, i.e. whether the individual member of the household should devote more time to paid market work or unpaid housework in order to achieve efficiency and the maximum of utility. The importance of time is expressed by Becker (1993) as follows: “Different constraints are decisive for different situations, but the most fundamental constraint is limited time” (Page, 496). Furthermore, Becker’s (1965) time allocation theory can be considered as a unitary model of time allocation, because it is assumed that all members of a household have either identical preferences or that an altruistic head of the household coordinates the intrafamily distribution of resources. Consequently, he treats the household as maximising single utility function, which implies that intra-household allocation issues are ignored (Beblo, 2000). Within the specific context of this work, this assumption represents a difficulty to draw any conclusion on the gendered time allocation patterns, as gender relations within the household are not considered. Instead, Becker’s (1965) theory is based on Ricardo’s (Jahr) trade theory, proposing that members of the household should specialize on those activities which provide them a comparative advantage in competing time uses.