Juliet Schor, a professor of women's studies at Harvard University and author of The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline in Leisure, will give a free and open lecture titled "Time, for a Change" on Tuesday, Feb. 1, at noon in the Faculty Commons of Martha Van Rensselaer Hall on the Cornell University campus.

Sponsored by the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute, the lecture will cover the acceleration of daily life, the causes behind it and alternative life-styles. Schor will meet with Careers Institute faculty and postdoctoral and predoctoral fellows during her one-day visit.

In her 1992 book, the Harvard-based economist found that between 1969 and 1987 the hours American workers put in on the job jumped the equivalent of more than a month's worth of labor per worker per year. Schor found this trend among both men and women and among both professionals and low-paid workers. That rise in hours reversed a century-long trend of declining hours spent in paid labor. Unlike workers in other every other industrialized Western nation, we are "choosing" money over time, she says.

Schor also is the author of the recently published book, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downsizing and the New Consumer, which examines American consumerism and its links to work patterns, savings rates and social expression.

The Careers Institute was created in 1997 as one of the first Sloan centers for the study of working families. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the institute is multidisciplinary in its approach to work and family research and charged with a mission to better understand the dramatic and interdependent changes in two fundamental social institutions: work and family. Phyllis Moen, the Ferris Family Professor of Life Course Studies in the Department of Human Development, directs its research, teaching and outreach activities.