In today's industrialized societies, the majority of parents work full time while caring for and raising their children and managing household upkeep, trying to keep a precarious balance of fulfilling multiple roles as parent, worker, friend, & child. Increasingly demands of the workplace such as early or late hours, travel, commute, relocation, etc. conflict with the needs of being a parent. At the same time, it is through work that people increasingly define their identity and self-worth, and which provides the opportunity for personal growth, interaction with friends and colleagues, and which provides the income and benefits on which the family subsists. The interface between work and family is an area of increasing research, in terms of understanding stress, job burn out, self-esteem, gender roles, parenting behaviors, and how each facet affects the others. The research in this area has been widely scattered in journals in psychology, family studies, business, sociology, health, and economics, and presented in diverse conferences (e.g., APA, SIOP, Academy of Management). It is difficult for experts in the field to keep up with everything they need to know, with the information dispersed. This Handbook will fill this gap by synthesizing theory, research, policy, and workplace practice/organizational policy issues in one place. The book will be useful as a reference for researchers in the area, as a guide to practitioners and policy makers, and as a resource for teaching in both undergraduate and graduate courses.

Work-family researchers have had much success in encouraging both organizations and individuals to recognize the importance of achieving greater balance in life. Work and Life Integration addresses the intersect between work, life, and family in new and interesting ways. It discusses current challenges in dealing with work-life integration issues and sets the stage for future research agendas. The book enlightens the research community and informs the public debates on how workplaces can be made more family sensitive by providing contributions from psychologists, sociologists, and economists who have not shied away from asserting the policy implications of their findings. This text appeals to both practitioners and academics interested in seeking ways to create meaningful lives.

Developments in IT and communication technology, coupled with the global 24 hour market, have led to boundaries between work and personal life becoming ever more blurred, while work/life policies and practice struggle to keep up. This book aims to challenge traditional thinking on work life balance, and to explore different ways of promoting change at many levels. It provides a historical overview of the topic, critiques contemporary approaches and offers creative ideas for integrating work and personal life in local, national and global contexts.

This innovative study confronts the similarities and differences in womenês and menês work_life experiences. Individual and organizational solutions to work_family conflict and strategies for work_life enrichment are explored. It will strongly appeal t

The majority of university students in the US and around the world are women (Economist, 2006). This recent increase in the education of women has allowed their employment rate to inflate, leading to an influx of issues surrounding the work-life balance. The era surrounding World War II led to an amplified presence of women seeking opportunities for a career, which in turn led to tensions at home and in the workplace as women try to balance the roles of family with a career. Many women have joined men in the provider role and the dual earner family has now become the norm (Gornick and Myers 2003). Traditional roles have shifted as women and men are both parents and workers. The picture of the career women and mother is divided and multi-faceted in existing research findings and opinions. Commonly assessed issues include the social implications of the dual roles of females, cultural norms, workplace policies with attention to female-specific hurdles, and marital satisfaction in gender roles. Various research studies suggest that marital relationships have become more egalitarian (Bielenski and Wagner, 2004), while others find that a large number of well-educated women have left careers for full-time motherhood (Belkin, 2003; Warner, 2005). In 2009, a research group was formed at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology to explore the competing narratives of women’s lives as they balance their work activities with the demands of marriage and motherhood. The ultimate goal of this project was to understand the work-life balance issues of women in the workforce. This work is now known as the Digital Women’s Project (Weber, 2011) and has collected over 400 interviews of women to explore themes around work-life balance. This phenomenological analysis utilizes a narrative life-course framework created by Giele (2008) to explore identity, relational style, drive and motivation, and adaptive style in order to understand the work-life balance of women. Women in Leadership and Work-Family Integration brings together the findings of this research group.

Everyone who struggles to meet the demands of work and personal-life responsibilities knows how tough it is to do so. This bold new book shows that it is the deeply engrained separation of work and personal life that has limited our ability to deal effectively with the conflict between them. Beyond Work-Family Balance demonstrates why the image of "balance" is outmoded and why a new approach--work-personal life integration--offers greater promise for meaningful change. Providing many examples from action research projects in more than a dozen organizations of different kinds, the authors show how using their method of integrating rather than separating personal-life considerations from the workplace can achieve positive outcomes, not only for workers but also for the work. The method offers a way of looking deeply into the work culture to find inequitable and ineffective work practices that are so embedded and routine that no one thinks to question them3/4they are just the way things get done. Once identified, these work practices can be changed to achieve what the authors call a Dual Agenda: a more equitable workplace where both men and women can achieve their full potential and a more effective workplace where the needs of the work, rather than gendered and outmoded assumptions, determine what gets done and how. Beyond Work-Family Balance offers an approach that achieves what "family friendly" policies, "mommy tracks," and so-called flexibility programs cannot. Such programs address the symptoms of the problem. This book offers a way of changing the everyday work practices and norms that are at the root of the problem.

Work-life integration is an increasingly hot topic in the media, social research, governments and in people’s everyday lives. This volume offers a new type of lens for understanding work-family reconciliation by studying how work-family dynamics are shaped, squeezed and developed between consistent or competing logics in different societies in Europe and the US. The three institutions of "state", "family" and "working life", and their under-explored primary logics of "regulation", "morality" and "economic competitiveness" are examined theoretically as well as empirically throughout the chapters, thus contributing to an understanding of the contemporary challenges within the field of work-family research that combines structure and culture. Particular attention is given to the ways in which the institutions are confronted with various moral norms of good parenthood or motherhood and ideals for family life. Likewise, the logic of policy regulation and gendered family moralities are challenged by the economic logic of working life, based on competition in favour of the most productive workers and organizations. Demonstrating different aspects of what is behind and between the logics of state regulation, morals and market, this innovative volume will appeal to students, teachers and researchers interested in areas such as family studies, welfare state studies, social policy studies, work life studies as well as and gender studies.