悉尼大学 The University of Sydney:论述规划在工作与生活平衡的工作的相关内容
时间:2013-06-13 16:23:04 来源:www.ukthesis.org 作者:英国论文网 点击:120次
Working out the work in work-life balance
That work can have a debilitating effect on life is not new. Although not framed as such, work-life balance featured in earlier debate about the hidden injuries of work and the effects of these injuries on workers’ lives. Studs Terkel’s (1972, p. xiii) influential US book Workin gstarts thus: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. ...The scars, psychic as well as physical, brought home to the supper table and the TV set, may have touched, malignantly, the soul of our society.” More recent, and similarly influential, analyses echo this theme. Australian Barbara Pocock (2003, p. 153), for example, picks up on the moodiness at home that results from working excessively long hours, the guilt that parents feel for not attending their children’s “significant events” at school and the fraying of community fabric as workers’ time to run local clubs disappears: “Grumpy people do not make great lovers, fathers, mothers, drivers, neighbours or golfers ” she states.
What are different now are the context and the solutions to these perceived problems. In the past, from the human relations school of the 1930s to the behavioural psychology interventions of the 1950s to the socio-technical systems of the 1970s, solutions to debilitating work were sought in job redesign and better management that aimed at “humanising” the workplace. Despite claims that work is not just ruling our lives but ruining our lives, workplace practices feature remarkably little in current work-life balance debate. Instead, the solution is said to be rolling back work in order to provide remedial opportunity for workers to recover from work.
However, a slight of hand occurs at this point because the most common policy prescription by government and practice offered by employers is not to shorten working hours but to provide employees with more flexibility in their working hours, for instance by part-time working or flexi-hours. Two indicative examples from two anonymised British supermarket chains are provided by Nickson et al.
Employers have their own interest in flexible working hours (Wiseet al. in this issue; see also Schneider et al. 2006). Having to service a 24/7 economy, employers need to deviate from the 9 to 5 work day. Flexible working hours schemes are offered as work-life balance allowing employers to appear employee-friendly whilst meeting business needs. Other useful work-life balance provisions, such as cre` ches, are a more expensive option for employers and are less prevalent. In Schneider et al.’s (2006) research, 83 per cent of employers in German Rheinland-Pfalz offered flexible working hours and only 30 per cent other types of work-life balance provision. The perception of employer-employee win-win may well therefore be a one-sided gain. As Wise et al. note, the flexibility needs being met tend to be those of employers rather than employees.
As the above examples also reveal, flexible working arrangements have a common theme – workers having caring responsibilities. The common premise is that work-life balance provisions are introduced to help employees reconcile what they want to do (care) with what they have to do (work). However, there is ambiguity here. Current public discourse aimed at the prime targets of work-life balance programmes (young working mothers) promotes, even idealises, work. In lifestyle magazines, TV drama and “Yummy Mummy” novels aimed at affluent, suburban 30-something females, work features as a place of intellectual expression and personal achievement as opposed to the loving but intellectually stultifying and socially under-appreciated
This experience raises a key point. Not only do work-life balance programmes pay little attention to deleterious work per se, they also ignore the possibility that work can be a source of satisfaction and self-fulfilment. As Isles (2004, p. 23) states, “work can make a major contribution – for somethe major contribution – to overall life satisfaction” (emphasis in the original). Two-thirds of both UK men (66 per cent) and women (68 per cent) are satisfied or very satisfied with their current job according to Introduction Isles, who even argues that around 8 per cent of the UK workforce or 2.4m workers prefer work to home, suffering “work-lust”.#p#分页标题#e#
Thus, premised on negative and reductionist assumptions about work, the work-life balance debate fails to capture more varied employee attitudes to and engagement with work. This can be counter-productive, for, as Moore points out in her contribution to this issue, whether work-life balance is achieved can depend more on employee work attitudes than on employer work-life balance provisions. |