Does Labor Time Decrease with Industrializa- tion? A Survey of Time-Allocation Studies'

The evolution of human labor is a subject of increasing interest in anthropology today. Its import is evidenced, in part, by theoretical debate whether total labor time per worker increases with industrialization (Harris 1975, Johnson 1978) or whether economic development has led to a large secular decline in the work week (Becker 1965, Galbraith 1958). There is a similar ongoing theoretical debate whether labor intensification per land unit leads to a decline (Boserup 1965) or an increase (Bronson 1972) in labor efficiency. The growing interest in labor studies is also seen in an upsurge in the number of timeallocation studies being conducted each year. Time-allocation studies have their conceptual roots in the study of labor conditions during early industrialization in 18th-century France and England, in particular in the sociological concepts of Frederic Le Play. The burgeoning idea that time could be equated with money (see, for example, Thompson