Is Your Occupation Also Your Preoccupation? Let’s face it. With all the demands of the workplace and all the details of a family it’s only a matter of time before one bumps into the other. And many of us end up cheating our families when the commitments of both collide. In this practical book, Andy Stanley will help you... • establish priorities and boundaries to protect what you value most. • learn the difference between saying your family is your priority and actually making them your priority. • discover tested strategies for easing tensions at home and at work. Watch as this powerful book transforms your life from time-crunching craziness to life-changing success. Includes a four-week discussion guide Previously released as Choosing to Cheat
Everyone who struggles to meet the demands of work and personal-life responsibilities knows how tough it is to do so. This bold new book shows that it is the deeply engrained separation of work and personal life that has limited our ability to deal effectively with the conflict between them. Beyond Work-Family Balance demonstrates why the image of "balance" is outmoded and why a new approach--work-personal life integration--offers greater promise for meaningful change. Providing many examples from action research projects in more than a dozen organizations of different kinds, the authors show how using their method of integrating rather than separating personal-life considerations from the workplace can achieve positive outcomes, not only for workers but also for the work. The method offers a way of looking deeply into the work culture to find inequitable and ineffective work practices that are so embedded and routine that no one thinks to question them3/4they are just the way things get done. Once identified, these work practices can be changed to achieve what the authors call a Dual Agenda: a more equitable workplace where both men and women can achieve their full potential and a more effective workplace where the needs of the work, rather than gendered and outmoded assumptions, determine what gets done and how. Beyond Work-Family Balance offers an approach that achieves what "family friendly" policies, "mommy tracks," and so-called flexibility programs cannot. Such programs address the symptoms of the problem. This book offers a way of changing the everyday work practices and norms that are at the root of the problem.
This brief and accessible title integrates contemporary scholarly research with compelling vignettes to make it appealing to both instructors and undergraduate audiences. While focused on the United States in respect to its target audience and emphasis, it contains considerable international data that compares and contrasts social policies adopted in Europe and elsewhere. In so doing, it shows both the strengths and the limitations of the approaches used in the U.S. This title is the only single source that summarizes the origins of work–family concerns, the diversities of needs and experiences, the impact of tensions on the family front, the consequences of tensions for employers, and different types of policies that can make meaningful differences not only in the lives of employees, but also potentially in job quality and national productivity.
In today's industrialized societies, the majority of parents work full time while caring for and raising their children and managing household upkeep, trying to keep a precarious balance of fulfilling multiple roles as parent, worker, friend, & child. Increasingly demands of the workplace such as early or late hours, travel, commute, relocation, etc. conflict with the needs of being a parent. At the same time, it is through work that people increasingly define their identity and self-worth, and which provides the opportunity for personal growth, interaction with friends and colleagues, and which provides the income and benefits on which the family subsists. The interface between work and family is an area of increasing research, in terms of understanding stress, job burn out, self-esteem, gender roles, parenting behaviors, and how each facet affects the others. The research in this area has been widely scattered in journals in psychology, family studies, business, sociology, health, and economics, and presented in diverse conferences (e.g., APA, SIOP, Academy of Management). It is difficult for experts in the field to keep up with everything they need to know, with the information dispersed. This Handbook will fill this gap by synthesizing theory, research, policy, and workplace practice/organizational policy issues in one place. The book will be useful as a reference for researchers in the area, as a guide to practitioners and policy makers, and as a resource for teaching in both undergraduate and graduate courses.
A breakthrough guide for fathers, mothers, and businesses on managing one of the major stresses on both families and organizations. Based on extensive research conducted by Levine's DaddyStress Seminar for corporations, this book shows how getting it right at home actually contributes to productivity on the job, and how making the workplace "father friendly" will yield enormous benefits to working mothers.
Work-life integration is an increasingly hot topic in the media, social research, governments and in people’s everyday lives. This volume offers a new type of lens for understanding work-family reconciliation by studying how work-family dynamics are shaped, squeezed and developed between consistent or competing logics in different societies in Europe and the US. The three institutions of "state", "family" and "working life", and their under-explored primary logics of "regulation", "morality" and "economic competitiveness" are examined theoretically as well as empirically throughout the chapters, thus contributing to an understanding of the contemporary challenges within the field of work-family research that combines structure and culture. Particular attention is given to the ways in which the institutions are confronted with various moral norms of good parenthood or motherhood and ideals for family life. Likewise, the logic of policy regulation and gendered family moralities are challenged by the economic logic of working life, based on competition in favour of the most productive workers and organizations. Demonstrating different aspects of what is behind and between the logics of state regulation, morals and market, this innovative volume will appeal to students, teachers and researchers interested in areas such as family studies, welfare state studies, social policy studies, work life studies as well as and gender studies.
The question of how best to combine work and family life has led to lively debates in recent years. Both a lifestyle and a policy issue, it has been addressed psychologically, socially, and economically, and conclusions have been hotly contested. But as Neil Gilbert shows in this penetrating and provocative book, we haven’t looked closely enough at how and why these questions are framed, or who benefits from the proposed answers. A Mother’s Work takes a hard look at the unprecedented rise in childlessness, along with the outsourcing of family care and household production, which have helped to alter family life since the 1960s. It challenges the conventional view on how to balance motherhood and employment, and examines how the choices women make are influenced by the culture of capitalism, feminist expectations, and the social policies of the welfare state. Gilbert argues that while the market ignores the essential value of a mother’s work, prevailing norms about the social benefits of work have been overvalued by elites whose opportunities and circumstances little resemble those of most working- and middle-class mothers. And the policies that have been crafted too often seem friendlier to the market than to the family. Gilbert ends his discussion by looking at the issue internationally, and he makes the case for reframing the debate to include a wider range of social values and public benefits that present more options for managing work and family responsibilities.
At the Heart of Work and Family presents original research on work and family by scholars who engage and build on the conceptual framework developed by well-known sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. These concepts, such as "the second shift," "the economy of gratitude," "emotion work," "feeling rules," "gender strategies," and "the time bind," are basic to sociology and have shaped both popular discussions and academic study. The common thread in these essays covering the gender division of housework, childcare networks, families in the global economy, and children of consumers is the incorporation of emotion, feelings, and meaning into the study of working families. These examinations, like Hochschild's own work, connect micro-level interaction to larger social and economic forces and illustrate the continued relevance of linking economic relations to emotional ones for understanding contemporary work-family life.
Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.