The origin of this special issue stems from a preconference held in conjunction with the 2009 International Community Work and Family Conference. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Judi Casey (Director, Sloan Work and Family Research Network) and I organized a panel of leading scholars, policy experts, and representatives of the business community to consider the anticipated and unanticipated consequences of work-family policy. The intent of the panel meeting was to identify variations in work-family policies among countries, the forces that shape these variations, as well as the extent that these policies meet the needs of working families, their employers, and national economies.
The panelists presented many compelling observations concerning work-family policy, including the unresolved challenge of reshaping men's participation in care, unevenness in women's integration into the paid labor force and career prospects, new patterns in the timing of reproduction, tensions that result from rigid work/career designs in a 24/7 economy, and the logistics of implementing multinational corporate work-family programs in the context of varied (and sometimes contradictory) national work-family policies. At the conclusion of the meeting, the panel considered how to move its observations to a broader public consciousness, identifying a special issue of this journal as one means of accomplishing this goal.
To create this special issue, I disseminated an open call for papers, as well as invited select participants of the panel to compose articles that focus on work-family policy from an international comparative lens. It is important to note that the conclusions reached by authors in this issue are primarily based on comparative analyses of policies as they have been formulated and implemented in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and, thus, there is much more to be gained by advancing additional comparative analyses of countries in the emerging economies of the global system (not addressed in this issue).
Ultimately readers will want to know if specific ‘family friendly’ policies are achieving their intended effects. The articles in this volume offer consistent affirmative support for advancing and expanding resources for working families both in the opportunity to provide care, as well as to remain integrated in the workforce. However, the articles offer qualifiers, explaining why some effects are not as strong as might be hoped for and why effects are sometimes restricted to particular classifications of workers or families. The need to consider ‘gender arrangements’ – the dynamic institutional, economic, and cultural factors that are outside of family policies but within which policies are designed and implemented – resonates throughout the analyses in this issue.
It is apparent that when different societies implement similar policies, they do not necessarily do so with the same intended outcomes, and usage is mediated by how policies are received by employers and workers. For example, breaks from work may be intended to facilitate care work, but they may not necessarily be manifestly intended to decrease gender inequalities. And even when a universal or comparable work-family policy support is provided, take-up can vary considerably among members within a society and between societies. When policies are established, the outcomes can be uneven when considered in respect to social class, gender, parental status, age, and other individual or family level factors. As a consequence, a work-family policy may appear to have a mixed impact on a society, but when specific groups of workers/caregivers are disaggregated, stronger positive results can be observed within subgroups of the society. The articles in this issue also indicate that subtle and not so subtle variations in the ways specific policies are formulated (i.e., length/availability of leave, universality, monetary compensation, etc.) can have a significant impact on outcomes. These findings focus attention on why resources extended through a policy may be under-utilized, as well as the points at which diminishing returns are identifiable.
Clearly, in comparison to where the work-family field was a few decades ago, we are better situated to know the consequences that result from the formulation of work-family policy, as well as the consequences of failing to respond to the needs of a changed workforce. The articles in this issue speak to the merits of international comparative analysis in identifying the strategies, challenges, and the benefits of providing resources to workers and their families.
I am immensely grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the journal editors, the authors, and the numerous reviewers who made this special issue possible.
Stephen Sweet
Special Issue Editor
Email: [email protected]
Notes on contributor
Stephen Sweet is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Ithaca College and is a Visiting Scholar at the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College. He has published widely on work-family concerns in the following journals: Marriage and Family, Family Relations, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Generations, and Community, Work & Family. He served as co-editor of the Sloan Work and Family Encyclopedia and his books include Changing Contours of Work and The Work and Family Handbook: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Methods and Approaches. His current research focuses on the intersecting concerns of job security, talent retention, and the aging of the workforce.