Abstract
Research on the relations (and tensions) between work and personal or family life continues to accumulate. Worklife Balance: The Agency and Capabilities Gap seeks to add a new perspective to the mix. This edited volume is organized around the broad and interrelated themes of “capabilities” and “agency.” Based on a perspective developed by Amartya Sen, capabilities represent people’s ability to conceive and imagine possibilities for living in ways that add meaning and value; agency is the ability to realize these possibilities. Hobson and other contributors to this volume recognize that what constitutes a valuable and meaningful life is highly context-specific. Their book is premised on the normative claim that worklife balance is one central ingredient in achieving this goal. From a societal perspective, balance is achieved when women and men have the capacity to participate fully in paid employment and caregiving. Participation increases well-being and enables the pursuit of activities that enhance the quality of life. The book deliberately eliminates the hyphen in “worklife” to underscore the interconnectedness between these realms and repudiate the idea that there is an optimal way to align them.
Hobson and the book’s other contributors argue that worklife balance has become an entitlement. Working parents in Europe desire and increasingly expect to be able to participate in paid work, provide care for their families, and participate in civil society. Policies at the state and firm level have (in greater or lesser degrees) responded to these hopes and demands. At the same time, possibilities for achieving balance remain constrained, and people’s capacity to enact change is limited. The volume’s central objective is to examine the agency and capability gap in worklife balance as it is reflected in families, firms, and nation-states across Europe (with the exception of one paper that focuses on Japan).
The book is the product of a multiyear collaborative effort among the contributors, and this effort has paid off. Unlike many edited volumes in which papers cohere around a subject area but not so much on the conceptual or theoretical front, the capabilities and agency perspective is the guiding framework for all of the papers in this collection. This commitment to a common framework is relatively successful in focusing readers on a core set of questions as they engage each densely packed, empirically based chapter. In addition to the concepts of capabilities and agency, this framework relies on other distinctive terms, such as “functionings” (p.130), “conversion factors” (p.58), or the notion of a “capability set” (p.14). These concepts are employed throughout the book to inform research questions and analyses and to make sense of empirical findings. This sustained engagement with a shared conceptual scheme not only helps to unify the contributions, but also gives readers an opportunity to assess the value of the capabilities framework.
In the book’s introduction, Hobson argues that understanding the agency and capabilities gap requires a methodological approach that captures the continuous interplay between individual perceptions, institutional cultures and contexts, and societal and organizational policies and practices. How these factors align in any particular household, firm, or nation-state will determine the possibilities for worklife balance and the factors that promote or impede people’s ability to realize these possibilities. Gender operates at all societal levels and thus figures highly in the book’s eight substantive chapters. While recognizing the multilayered nature of the capability and agency gap, four chapters examine this gap through the lens of individuals and households and four take up this issue from the perspective of firms and workers. Almost all of the chapters present empirical findings based on cross-national survey data or data from sources such as the Office of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). A couple of chapters rely on qualitative data or case studies.
Some of the book’s conclusions with respect to worklife policies will be generally familiar to work-life scholars with knowledge of European societies. For example, Susanne Fahlen (Chapter 2) shows that women’s ability to combine paid employment and motherhood is more constrained in countries that lack policies to support mothers’ employment and/or are more culturally conservative with respect to gender roles. While the impact of policies and cultural norms on women’s ability to combine paid work and motherhood varies across societies, men’s possibilities for more involvement in fatherhood are more uniformly limited. Further, several chapters find that the potentially supportive effects on worklife balance of societal and workplace policies are heavily dependent on how (and if) these policies are implemented.
Research on worklife policies in the United States tends to focus on organizations, while state policies receive much of the attention from researchers studying Europe or other developed economies. A valuable contribution of the chapters contained in Part II is their attention to the relations between worklife policies at the organizational (firm) level and national laws or policies in the worklife domain. Motivating this focus is the question: “In what contexts do working parents have the most capabilities to achieve WLB” (p.163)? The short answer is that organizational- and state-level policies both matter and are generally reinforcing of one another. For example, firms are more likely to allow employees to adjust their work hours (such as shifting to or away from part-time work) in countries that have strong legislation granting employees the right to request such adjustments (see Colette Fagan and Pierre Walthery, Chapter 7).
Along with its focus on policies, Worklife Balance explores people’s preferences and sense of entitlement with respect to worklife balance. This exploration of what people want and expect from their workplace and society is especially worthwhile in the context of the book’s cross-national focus. These chapters remind us that identifying “what people want” is impossible without taking social context into account. The ability and willingness to act on worklife preferences is also shaped by institutional context. For example, working parents in Hungary and Sweden both faced time deficits, yet Swedish parents were more likely to challenge practices and assert their rights (see Hobson et al., Chapter 3). Other chapters show how public and workplace-level discourses can foster (or diminish) expectations and a sense of entitlement.
In her conclusion, Hobson reminds readers that the capabilities framework is intended to “look beyond what individuals do, to consider what they would do if they had other alternatives” (p.270). Consistent with this perspective, the book is less about the state of worklife balance than it is about opportunities for achieving it and realizing its benefits. Its attention to the uneven and unequal distribution of these opportunities makes this volume distinctive and relevant. Readers who engage the book with these concerns in mind will gain new insights into the ways that individual, organizational, and societal factors restrict and create agency and possibility in the worklife domain.