WORK–LIFE BALANCE IN EUROPE: A RESPONSE TO THE BABY BUST OR REWARD FOR THE BABY BOOMERS?

ABSTRACT

The academic analysis of work–life balance (WLB) has too often followed the public policy debate without sufficient reflection on its origins, the accuracy of the assumptions it tends to make, or the analytical adequacy of the concepts it uses. This paper suggests that what are usually assumed to be the causes of the debate (longer hours and greater stress at work, along with the collapse of the male breadwinner division of parenting and employment responsibilities within couples) are nothing of the sort. Rather the debate's origins lie in states’ concerns about demographic trends, especially low and falling fertility, which they fear threatens the future of the labour supply and viable dependency ratios between those in work and those dependent upon them. The WLB debate can thus be seen as part of a specifically liberal discourse about ‘population ageing’ that seeks to legitimate the rolling back of a welfare state by arguing that current levels of support cannot be sustained in a globalising world. This analysis reveals two new features of WLB policies. First, most are quite contradictory. What makes them popular (such as enabling the ‘baby boomer’ generation to withdraw from work on favourable terms) also makes them unlikely to address their goal of specifically supporting parenting and avoiding a ‘baby bust’. Conversely effective support for parenting may require far more fundamental change than most WLB policies envisage. Second, demographic change has heightened the importance of the inter-generational transfer of resources between those now retired from employment, those currently in it, and those yet to enter it. This reveals a key feature of WLB policies to be how far these transfers are socialised or left to the family.

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the Generalitat de Catalunya Departament d'Universitats Recerca i Societat de la Informació for the research reported in this article.

Notes

¹. Norms that contemporary sociology was unfortunately content to codify in, e.g., Parsons’ sociology of the family (Parsons 1956).

². Author's calculations from Eurostat SEEPROS data.

³. All figures from author's calculations of data weighted by employed population of EU15 countries.

⁴. In England all manner of social ills and annoyances were attributed to the Norman Invasion of the eleventh century, life prior to this event being portrayed as Utopian and idyllic.

⁵. Data excludes Sweden.

⁶. Davis's article is central to the intellectual history of sociology, not least because it appears to have provoked Parsons to elaborate his own theory of the family in industrial society, which came to dominate the sociology of the family for at least the next generation.

⁷. I am grateful to Ms Julia Creed at ROH, Covent Garden for supplying details on historical ticket prices. The cost in 1849 was £35. I have adjusted this by per capita GDP 2000/ per capita GDP 1849.

⁸. Centro de Investigaciones Sociologicas Survey no 2552. Author's analysis, based on sample of 1,532 women aged 20–45.