Eric Tranby

Changing Workplaces to Reduce Work-Family Conflict: Schedule Control in a White-Collar Organization.

Work-family conflicts are common and consequential for employees, their families, and work organizations. Can workplaces be changed to reduce work-family conflict? Previous research has not been able to assess whether workplace policies or initiatives succeed in reducing work-family conflict or increasing work-family fit. Using longitudinal data collected from 608 employees of a white-collar organization before and after a workplace initiative was implemented, we investigate whether the initiative affects work-family conflict and fit, whether schedule control mediates these effects, and whether work demands, including long hours, moderate the initiative’s effects on work-family outcomes. Analyses clearly demonstrate that the workplace initiative positively affects the work-family interface, primarily by increasing employees’ schedule control. This study points to the importance of schedule control for our understanding of job quality and for management policies and practices.

Changing Work, Changing Health: Can Real Work-Time Flexibility Promote Health Behaviors and Well-Being?

This article investigates a change in the structuring of work time, using a natural experiment to test whether participation in a corporate initiative (Results Only Work Environment; ROWE) predicts corresponding changes in health-related outcomes. Drawing on job strain and stress process models, we theorize greater schedule control and reduced work-family conflict as key mechanisms linking this initiative with health outcomes. Longitudinal survey data from 659 employees at a corporate headquarters shows that ROWE predicts changes in health-related behaviors, including almost an extra hour of sleep on work nights. Increasing employees’ schedule control and reducing their work-family conflict are key mechanisms linking the ROWE innovation with changes in employees’ health behaviors; they also predict changes in well-being measures, providing indirect links between ROWE and well-being. This study demonstrates that organizational changes in the structuring of time can promote employee wellness, particularly in terms of prevention behaviors.

The Welfare State, Family Policies, and Women’s Labor Force Participation: Combining Fuzzy-Set and Statistical Methods to Assess Causal Relations and Estimate Causal Effects

In Why We Need a New Welfare State (2002), four long-time male scholars of the twentieth-century welfare state — Gosta Esping-Andersen, John Myles, Anton Hemerijck, and Duncan Gallie — argue that the welfare state of the twenty-first century requires “comprehensive redesign.” The twenty-first-century welfare state must be redesigned around not just government-market relations and the life-course patterns of men, but also work-family interactions and the life-course patterns of women. Similarly, as Myles and Quadagno (2002) argue in their recent review of literature on social policy and the welfare state, gender relations, family forms, and women’s employment are central to contemporary welfare state restructuring in a way that they were not during the “golden age” of welfare expansion.

Jobs with Equality

can tolerate views and practices that are different from their own, especially when a society promotes individualism. The book excels in its examination of individualism in multiple areas and its engagement with multiple literatures. The most revealing studies examine how individual persons and institutions, particularly hierarchical and symbolic ones, contend with the contemporary ethos of individualism. The book would benefit from a concluding chapter that discusses the implications of its chapters’ findings, such as apparent rifts among citizenry or the present or anticipated destabilization of institutions such as organized religion. Moreover, such a conclusion could have proposed a cohesive agenda for future inquiry, rather than relegating these to the end of chapters. Alternatively, a conclusion could have shown how concurrent lines of inquiry in various subdisciplines help us to understand individualism in increasingly heterogeneous societies seeking to meld multiple interests. In particular, complementary research includes neoinstitutionalist studies of how individuals and institutions adjudicate between the individual and the larger collective, as well as work and occupations studies about how the New Economy has intensified conceptions of careers in individualistic and entrepreneurial rather than collective terms. At times, additional contextual details in the substantive chapters could have helped readers who are less familiar with the Netherlands. For example, when referring to the impact of the 1960s counterculture in Chapter One, more explication and references could help readers understand to what extent these were similar to shifts in their own countries. Students in specialty courses in culture, consumption, media, technology, religion, political sociology, and deviance may benefit from the chapters’ findings and discussion of the research methodologies used, including interviews, focus groups, survey data, and content analysis. Some may find the book appropriate for introductory courses about the relation between individuals and society or a graduate-level class in theory. The book can also inform discussions comparing other texts about the rationalization of society, such as George Ritzer’s (2000, 2005) works on McDonaldization. Overall, readers will find this book’s assortment of studies helpful for understanding individualization in several areas of society. These findings can help unpack curious puzzles elsewhere, such as the afore-mentioned Tea Partiers’ simultaneous disdain and embrace of government, as well as their scapegoating of immigrants, as opposed to business interests, for economic woes. The concept of individualism can unpack simmering tensions in cultural beliefs that conceive of individuals as self-reliant and selfexpressive versus embedded in a larger collective.