A time for renewal: developing a sustainable community, work and family interface

This special issue provides a selection of papers presented at the 7^th Community Work and Family Conference, which was held in Milan, Italy, on May 24-27, 2017. More than 160 scholars from various disciplines and from different countries all over the world gathered at the Conference to engage in a discussion on the development of a sustainable community, work and family interface.

The concept of sustainable development has gradually come to the forefront of policy debate since the late 1980s/early 1990s, against a backdrop of rapidly increasing global ecological challenges (WCED, 1987). Even though a straightforward and commonly agreed definition still does not exist, sustainable development has soon become a popular term and a prominent policy goal. Based on the recognition of the limits and threats to the environment of the prevalent modes of production and consumption, the concept has evolved over time around the necessity of a paradigm shift, which could prevent the depletion and loss of resources and reconcile economic growth with environmental protection and human well-being (UNDP, 2011, 2013). In these terms, promoting and achieving sustainable development requires creating and maintaining a set of resources so that the quality of the environment, in both its ecological and human dimensions, could be ensured and preserved, for present and future generations. Accordingly, the conventional notion of sustainable development encompasses a few primary concerns, that range from safeguarding the environment to satisfying basic human needs and promoting inter- and intra-generational equity (Holden et al., 2014).

The principles and goals of the sustainable development model may be used to investigate the community, work and family interface. That implies studying the capacity of the community, work and family ecosystem to enable people meeting their fundamental needs and thriving in different life domains and to secure social equality between and within generations in terms of resources and opportunities (e.g. Eurofound, 2015; Kossek et al., 2014; Lewis and Cooper, 1999; Van Engen et al., 2012). Previous research has clearly shown that welfare state reforms, demographic challenges, changing family and household structure, the shifting nature of work and the workplace are serious threats to individual, family, and community well-being. In fact, if not properly managed, these overarching trends may adversely affect the development of meaningful relationships between work and non-work domains, hamper organizational effectiveness, spread inequalities, threaten social cohesion, and lead to an overconsumption of economic and human (i.e. individual, family and social) resources. Therefore, recasting work, family and community settings, as well as their interface, in a sustainable manner is a serious challenge. The papers within this special issue address this challenge from different theoretical standpoints and using different methodological approaches. They raise questions about what policy initiatives, at both national and workplace level, may be introduced to best support the development of a sustainable community, work and family interface. They also lay the groundwork for future research on the issue of sustainability and its constitutive social, economic, political and ethical aspects, from a multi-stakeholder perspective.

As noted above, the notion of human needs is a cornerstone of the sustainable development concept. Building on the capability approach, Jean-Michel Bonvin, who gave a keynote speech at the Conference, and Francesco Laruffa discuss in their article a multidimensional conception of the human beings, who are simultaneously “receivers” (i.e. vulnerable beings in need of support), “doers” (i.e. actors able to contribute to society), and “judges” (i.e. political beings with aspirations, values and desires). This comprehensive anthropological conception, which is at the core of the capability theoretical framework, leads the authors to examine the ambiguities of current welfare policy and also to reflect upon the multiple resources – for material well-being, agency and participation – that social protection systems should generate and distribute in order to sustain people’s capability to lead a valuable life and combine in a sustainable way employment, family life and active citizenship.

Like Bonvin and Laruffa, who argue that the real freedom that people have to lead the kind of life they have reason to value is also a function of the socio-economic and institutional settings and not just of individual resources, Cristina Solera and Letizia Mencarini in their article assess cross-country differences in the effect of the transition to parenthood on the gender division of housework. Using panel data from the first two waves of the Gender and Generation Survey collected in Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands, the authors find confirmatory evidence that the birth of the first child is a pivotal event triggering, with the mediation of partners’ educational pairings, a more traditional division of household tasks. However, the paper also highlights country-specific differences in the effect of parenthood, which Solera and Mencarini explain in terms of differences in gender and welfare regimes.

Drawing on the same dataset, Maike Van Damme and Pearl Dykstra investigate how and to what extent partners’ absolute and relative resources at the couple level – here expressed as earnings, education and occupational status – have an effect on relationship satisfaction and thoughts about divorce for both men and women in eight European countries. Fixed effect regression models, which also contribute to disentangle the moderating effect of both gender and income inequality measures at national level, show that absolute resources matter most for satisfaction with the relationship for both males and females, especially in less egalitarian countries. Furthermore, analyses corroborate earlier findings on women’s relative economic resources, which are a proxy for female bargaining power in the couple, as a key predictor of relationship satisfaction and thoughts of divorce, mainly in more egalitarian countries.

The importance of the context in which agency and resources are embedded is explored further in the article by Yvonne Lott and Christina Klenner. Their qualitative study, based on interviews with 95 male and female employees that were carried out in a sample of public and private organizations in Germany, reveals how gendered assumptions about part-time work and parental leave are still widespread at the workplace level. However, the authors also note that the reform of the national leave policy and the broader availability of workplace work-family arrangements have had positive consequences, with both women in higher occupational status groups and fathers in middle-level occupations being more entitled to make use of family-friendly policy measures. Nonetheless, Lott and Klenner emphasize that, under the business case rationale, the requirements of work and the workplace may tend to reinforce traditional norms about the “ideal worker” and therefore hinder organizational culture change.

Turning to social equity, which is another pillar of the sustainable development framework, Cordula Zabel and Eva Kopf study the intergenerational effect of active labour market policies in Germany. More in detail, the authors use advanced statistical methods (i.e. entropy balancing methods) to estimate the impact of parents’ further vocational training on their children’s apprenticeship, pre-vocational training and employment outcomes. This is a rather specific but nevertheless interesting research question, particularly relevant to policymaking on sustainable work and on the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Further vocational training is indeed a precondition for employability and job quality, which make work sustainable over a lifetime; besides, as the authors highlight, parents’ improved employment situation and working conditions are likely to positively affect their children’s education performance, employment and other psychosocial outcomes in the long term.

The last two articles of this special issue bring to our attention sustainable care-giving and care-work, namely their main features and outcomes. Lisa Stewart, Hannah Stutz and Walter Lile advance our understanding of care responsibilities of adult workers. Their theoretical paper proposes a specific and innovative framework that models dependent family care – a concept embracing care demands, resources and strategies – on a continuum handling both typical care over the life course and caring for dependents affected by disabilities or chronic illness, here defined as exceptional care. In addition to identifying a few key concepts and variables that may contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the experience of informal caregiving for a family member, the authors also discuss the implications of their theoretical propositions for future research and practice.

Finally, Anna-Lena Almqvist and Kitty Lassinantti explore the processes and patterns of inclusion of young people with both mental health and social problems. In particular, their qualitative study, which was conducted on a small sample of professionals working in psychiatric care and social services in two Swedish municipalities, examines the extent to which health care and social work practices may best support people with multiple and intersecting needs and their families. In this regard the authors argue that interventions grounded on a holistic, empowerment- and relationship-oriented perspective are more likely to predict successful treatment outcomes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.