In 2005, Suzan Lewis and Carolyn Kagan launched the Community Work and Family Journal. As they reminded us during their introduction speech at the 6th International Community, Work and Family conference in Malmö, Sweden, in May 2016, the original aim of the journal was
to provide a place in which the intersections of community, work and family between research, practice and policy can be explored from multiple perspectives
During the 10 years of existence, the Community, Work and Family Journal and the associated six conferences enabled researchers from diverse academic backgrounds and diverse horizons to share, collaborate and disseminate critical knowledge in the broad field of work-life research. Since the journal’s foundation, knowledge and understanding about the complexity of the interconnections between individual’s three major life domains, i.e. family life, work life and community life, has been enriched. This complexity has been addressed by focussing on the changing nature of each domain but also on the changing nature and roles of its actors. For example, work has been understood as shifts from industrial to service and from employed to self-employed to name few so that research ought to understand how these shifts affect work-life balance, conflict and/or enrichment. Actor-based research mainly explored women’s and employees’ voices but is starting to get interested in fathers and children as well as in social actors in the community. All things considered, there is no doubt that the work-life research field has developed and that theories and models have been developed and empirically researched to describe, understand and explain the interactions and/or interfaces between community work and family. But as Susan Lewis and Carolyn Kagan reminded us during the conference, even after 19 volumes of the Community Work and Family Journal, we are not yet done and we are not yet to be satisfied.
As a matter of fact, Susan Lewis and Carolyn Kagan pointed out several crises, among those economic, demographic, gender, environmental, but also the crises of care and violence in our modern societies creating tensions in the interface between community work and family. The 6th International Community, Work and Family conference somehow aimed at capturing part of these tensions as we coined the theme ‘towards meaningful relationships in space and time’. The 65 papers and the 8 symposiums presented by the 169 authors/co-authors during the conference are surely a sign that countless discussions about these new tensions took place. The engagement of the conference participants made us, the editors of this special issue, realise that even if progress and development in research has been made, some voices are still missing in regard to the crises above. As a matter of fact, current research still focuses largely on high-income countries rather than on people working in substance and informal economies, on employees and less often on managers, on heteronormative families and to a lesser extent on alternative families, on large businesses and rarely on small businesses and on flexible work arrangements but hardly ever on overall HR processes, on traditional employees and on the odd occasion on expatriates or global managers. The list could be made longer. During the conference, some of these voices were represented, the aim of this special issue is thus to raise these hidden voices in the community, work and family research in time and space. Not all voices can however be raised in one issue, but we are proud to present few of them with our selection of five academic papers and two research notes.
The two first papers focus on modern fatherhood in the European context. First, Abigail Locke and Gemma Yarwood capture the voices of fathers using a critical discursive psychology approach. The qualitative method enables to uncover how individual’s stories about gender and parenting are embedded in discourses as culturally and socially located. Second, Elin Kvande Elin and Berit Brandth explore with a migrant perspective, the Norwegian parental leave that includes special quota for fathers. The authors underline that the non-transferability of the leave is perceived as an opportunity for these migrant fathers and is a way to promote dual-earner/carer model to people who had not such model in their home countries.
The two next papers take us in the contemporary organisations in the USA. First, Rachel Pettigrew and Karen Duncan undertake the challenges to ‘poke the bear’ of researching sensitive issues in organisation. Using the example of a research project on parental leave use by male employees and their roles in terms of recruitment, their study reveals that results that we meet in research publication may have some biases due to gatekeepers. Additionally, the paper provides insight on the complex relationships between male parental leave and recruitment. Second, Stephen Sweet, Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes and Jacquelyn Boone James give voice to managers and more specially their attitudes about flexible work arrangements. Using quantitative data collected in an organisational case study, the authors demonstrate among others that positive attitudes are affected by experiences and that training about flexible work arrangements can as well affect managers’ attitudes.
The final paper takes us around the globe beyond time limits to learn about modern global managers. Pamela Lirio in a qualitative research illustrates the tactics that are used by global managers to develop boundaries to navigate their work and family transitions. The author connects International Human Resources Management to work-life interface, which also in itself enables new perspective to grow.
In addition to these five academic papers, which discuss new voices and perspectives in community work and family, two research notes from engaged researchers come in play to defy our research community and lay out potential areas of research. First, attention is paid to the ‘silent voice’ of the context. In her essay, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre raises three major questions in regard to how and why researchers in the Community, Work and Family field should acknowledge the role of different layers of context so that we do no longer consider ‘context’ as given or as a silent voice. In the second research note, Jean-Charles Languilaire and Neil Carey question the presence and relevance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) voices in work-life research as such voices seem neither visible nor on the frontline of work-life research despite their increasingly legitimate presence in organisational and societal discourses.
To close this editorial, as organisers of the 6th Community, Work and Family and guest editors of this special edition, we would like to thank the CWF editorial board and the associated staff at CWF, for their confidence and support. We hope that the conference and this issue further problematise the work-life field and strengthen our research community. Finally, we genuinely wish that they both were as a source of inspiration as the work of Suzan Lewis and Carolyn Kagan, so that we – Community, Work and Family researchers – may address the crises affecting the dynamics between these three domains.