This paper assesses some of the implications of one of the major social changes to have taken place in the West during the second half of the twentieth century — that is, the increased employment of women, together with normative changes in gender relations and in women's expectations. These changes have been linked to an increase in individualism, which itself is associated with the transcendence of ‘first modernity’. Thus it is suggested that new approaches to social analysis are required (Beck). Here it is argued that, rather than develop completely new approaches in order to grasp the changes that are under way, the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ (that is, employment and the family) should be seen as intertwined, rather than approached as separate phenomena. Past debates in feminism, changes in the family, and flexible employment are critically examined. The growing tensions between employment and family life are discussed. It is argued that these changes are associated with the intensification of capitalist development, rather than reflecting a fundamental transformation of society. Existing approaches to the analysis of social change, including Polanyi's analysis of the development of ‘counter-movements’ against the ‘self-regulating’ market, will, therefore, still be relevant to our enquiries. In the concluding section, a programme of research that would examine these changes is outlined.
#1Berit Brandth(NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology)H-Index: 23
#2Elin Kvande(NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology)H-Index: 14
The expansion of the parental leave scheme in Norway, which now grants extensive rights to employed fathers, has occured in a period of great changes in working life. The equality politics of the welfare state have been explicitly focussed on bringing reproduction more into the open in working life by allowing mothers and fathers the right to stay at home on leave when they have children. To have working life adapt to family life is, however, in contrast with the new trends in working life where...
In The Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies (Oxford University Press, 1999) Gosta Esping-Andersen presents a classic example of an empirically grounded historically materialist analysis of welfare capitalism, in the tradition of Polanyi, Marshall and others. He argues that its architecture needs to be re-thought because of the changing nature of postindustrial economies and that this requires us to think in terms of'welfare regimes' comprising the market, the state and the family. When...
#1Oriel Sullivan(BGU: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)H-Index: 29
This paper addresses two important questions in the area of the division of domestic labour. Firstly, what change is observable in the patterns of men and women's time spent in domestic labour over the past twenty years, when taking into account structural factors such as employment patterns and social class? Secondly, among which groups of the population of couples can change be identified? One of the problems of this area of research has been that relatively few studies have systematically ana...
The continuing expansion of women's employment has increasingly focused attention on the question of how the caring work traditionally carried out by unpaid women will be accomplished. In particular, how can caring responsibilities be combined with a long-term career? In this paper, we assess the significance of the national context through a comparison of the biographies of career bank managers, male and female, in Britain and Norway. We find that although the (considerably) more family-friendl...
This paper adopts a regulation framework to chart the emergence of neo-Fordism as a flexible accumulation regime and mode of social regulation. Neo-Fordism relies on old Fordist principles as well as incorporating new models of emergent post-Fordisms; old and new social relationships, in their particular combination, specify the trajectory of national variants. I argue that Fordist bargains institutionalized the terms of a compromise between labour, capital and the state. These bargains embedded...
#2Wendy Bottero(University of Southampton)H-Index: 17
This paper explores recent arguments about the marketization of female labour, in the context of a wider analysis of the role of concepts like 'the market' and 'individualization' in sociological accounts of change in employment relations. It will be argued that within sociology there has been a tendency for rapid, large-scale changes in employment relations to be characterized as the breakdown of social influences or structures and as the emergence of atomized, individuated market forces. In th...
Current social and political theory is sceptical of the future of welfare states in the face of global markets. Their moral claims, too, have been challenged by the neo-liberal association of market capitalism and individual freedom and by an implicit acceptance of that critique - of the welfare state as bureaucratic - by left-wing commentators. This article offers a defence of the national welfare state as the guarantor of `complex freedom'. This defence is derived from the theoretical contribu...
A growing body of social science literature has examined the organizational innovations and staffing practices comprising new flexible forms of work. Researchers have investigated the depth and scope of these changes and questioned how they affect diverse groups of workers in the United States. Reviewing the research on this transformation reveals a model of combined and uneven flexibility, characterized by the opening of opportunities that are differentially distributed across different groups ...
Women’s entrance into the labor market in large numbers has exacerbated incompatibilities between employer and family interests. Research reveals that conflict between paid work and family responsibilities has been linked to decreased employee productivity as well as decreased family functioning. In this review, we explore the nature of job/family incompatibility, organizational interests in family responsive policies, and the current prevalence of various policies within work organizations. We ...
#1T. M. Arun(Indian Institute of Management Rohtak)H-Index: 1
#2Rojers P. Joseph(Indian Institute of Management Rohtak)H-Index: 4
Last. Manzoor Ul Akram(Indian Institute of Management Rohtak)H-Index: 2
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This study, at the intersection of gender, entrepreneurship and innovation, investigates the impact of women leadership (vis-a-vis men) on innovation by SMEs in an emerging economy context. Drawing...
Labour-market deregulation may have generated more unstable and complex employment life courses. As exposure to highly volatile early-career trajectories has long-lasting consequences for the working lives of individuals, it is especially important to consider how these processes have affected younger workers in countries like Italy. Here, deregulation ‘at the margins’ of the labour market has been characterized by a strong age divide and has exacerbated the separation between insiders and outsi...
This article examines the impact of the neoliberal restructuring of health services on female nurses in Turkey. It provides a qualitative analysis of work–family conflict, establishing that not onl...