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Abstract
This research compares perceived organizational support to work–family balance measures and policies in various work environments to determine whether the organizational context can be a mediating variable or whether the social economy sector, with its mission and management approach (participatory decision-making) might have an influence on organizational support to work–family balance. We studied the social economy sector and compared findings with three other sectors in the public service that have a public service mission but not the same democratic or participatory management mode: a metropolitan police service, social work, and nursing, all in the same city. Our research identifies many significant differences between the four sectors, essentially owing to the characteristics of the social economy sector. In addition to our quantitative research, we conducted interviews (36) in the sector and results indicate that the specificity of the social economy sector, i.e. mission and management mode, explain the overriding concern for work–life balance in the social economy sector.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay is Professor of labour economics, innovation and human resources management at the Télé-université of the University of Québec à Montréal, Canada; she has been appointed Canada Research Chair on the socio-economic challenges of the Knowledge Economy in 2002 (http://www.teluq.uqam.ca/chaireecosavoir/) and renewed in 2009, and has also been appointed Director of a CURA (Community-University Research Alliance) on the management of social times and work-life balance in 2009 (www.teluq.uqam.ca/aruc-gats). Email: [email protected].
She has been invited Professor at Université de Paris I, Sorbonne, Université de Lille I, Université d'Angers, Université de Toulouse, Institut d'administration des enterprises of Lyon 3, LEST-Aix en Provence, all in France, and Université de Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium, University of Social Sciences of Hanoi (Vietnam) and at the European School of Management. She has published many articles and books, amongst which include a Labour Economics textbook, a Sociology of Work textbook, four books on Working time and work-life balance issues. She has published in various journals such as New Technology, Work and employment, the Applied Research on Quality of Life, Social Indicators Research, the Journal of work innovations, the Canadian Journal of Urban Research, International Journal of Technology Management and International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management.
Notes
I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers who made extremely interesting and supportive comments on the paper.
Note that in Québec, in 2001, women were predominant in the health sector in general (79 percent) as in the public sector (62 percent), but over 90 percent in nursing and social work. They are only 34 percent in the police sector in the city studied (Census data for 2001, last available).
We need to mention that there are different forms of flexibility: flexible jobs (which enable employees to adjust to family responsibilities) and flexible employees (which make it possible for employers to impose flexible or variable—the term often used to distinguish the two—schedules on employees, and the latter are definitely not family friendly.
Note that in Québec, educators in childcare now need a college degree (Cegep) in order to be hired. About two-thirds of daycare workers now have this degree, since it was not required before 1997. The pay level and status of the job are also quite good in Québec, since they are unionized and have public funding. The great majority of workers in the formal childcare sector work full time and there is not automatically more work–family support since the sector is also submitted to formal state-imposed rules as to the number of educators who have to be present for a given number of children; this is followed very strictly, since a childcare center could lose its permit if this was not respected. While theoretically it may appear reasonable to assume that people who work in childcare believe that children's needs are very important, it cannot be assumed that the childcare centers and directors (often male) would be spontaneously more supportive of work–family issues just because they are working in childcare, given the important organizational constraints to which they are submitted in terms of opening hours (7 am to 6 pm usually), number of educators per number and age of children, as well as the requirements of the educators' collective agreements regarding working hours, holidays, etc. Also, while the government covers a good part of the budget (a fixed amount per child), the childcare centers have rather tight budgets, especially in recent years, as there has not been a steady increase in relation to inflation. Finally, while one might think childcare workers are sometimes able to enroll their own children at their workplace, many do not do so because should they leave this employer, they would also have to take their child out, as they had access as an employee not because it was “their turn on the list.
See Lortie-Lussier and Rinfret (Citation2007), and other articles in that issue of Télescope on women in the public sector, in terms of management and leadership.
Comité sectoriel de main-d'œuvre, de l'économie sociale et de l'action communautaire. www.chantier.qc.ca (accessed 3 September 2010).
Data cannot be perfectly representative of the gendered aspect of the sector since Statistics Canada does not run a survey on such specific issues. We had to obtain the collaboration of the workplaces for this study, and therefore have slightly different percentages in respondents vs the labor force in terms of gender in the police sector. In other sectors, we are quite close to the gendered distribution, but the center of interest here is rather the management support; another article has analyzed the gender dimension, taking into account all four sectors together and comparing men and women.
At the conclusion of the online questionnaire, participants interested in meeting with us were invited to provide their contact information; we were then able to proceed with the second phase of the research in face-to-face interviews.
The Wilcoxon tests are created specifically to calculate the differences between groups for ordinal variables and they also allow calculation of the importance of a particular effect. The level of significance is not sufficient to qualify a difference between groups as small, medium, or large, especially with a large sample size. The results of the analysis are based on the variance explained by the relations between the variables. It is thus possible to differentiate the importance of two significant differences. Consequently, using the effect size, this analysis takes into account the number of respondents and offers an opportunity to better qualify the differences as small, medium, or large.
We also conducted interviews in the other sectors, but will concentrate here on the social economy since it definitely presents some specificities according to our interviewees. We woul like to thank Josée Boisvert, research assistant, who conducted these interviews and contributed to this part on the characteristics of the social economy sector. We also wish to thank A. Chabot for the statistical work.
Here, “managers” include directors, coordinators, and persons who sit on the board of social economy enterprises, since the latter are the ones who “manage” the directors and coordinators in many cases.