Jeff Hyman

Lacking balance? Work-life employment practices in the modern economy

The UK has operated a lightly regulated approach to help employees balance their work and domestic obligations, an approach which employers have welcomed and which they and Government consider to be successful. On the basis of empirical studies this paper challenges these assumptions and outcomes. Apart from definitional difficulties, seven major problems associated with current UK practice over work‐life balance are identified. The first problem concerns unevenness of adoption across different sectors and organisations. The second is a lack of formalisation of policies at organisational level, with largely untrained line mangers having discretion over policy application. Third, there is restricted employee voice over the introduction and implementation of policies. Fourth, policies are introduced primarily to meet business needs, rather than those of employees. Fifth, there is no evidence of reductions in working hours. Sixth, tangible and intangible work intrusions into domestic life have been identified. Finally, domestic responsibilities are still conducted primarily by women irrespective of their employment status. The researchers conclude that many employees continue to face difficulty in reconciling their work and domestic responsibilities.

Work-Life Imbalance in Call Centres and Software Development

The paper evaluates the centrality of work to employees in two growing employment sectors, call-centres and software development. It then examines evidence for extensions of work into household and family life in these two sectors. Extensions are identified as tangible, such as unpaid overtime, or intangible, represented by incursions imported from work, such as exhaustion and stress. The study finds that organizational pressures, combined with lack of work centrality, result in work intruding into non-work areas of employee lives, though intrusions manifest themselves in different ways according to type of work, levels of worker autonomy and organizational support.

Work and life: can employee representation influence balance?

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of different forms of organisational representation on the provision of work‐life balance employment policies.Design/methodology/approach – The article uses on‐site semi‐structured interviews with employees, HR and line managers and trade union representatives in four case studies as well as survey responses from a total of 17 institutions in the financial services sector.Findings – Employees do influence work‐life balance issues in the financial services sector, and work‐life balance initiatives had greater breadth, codification and quality where independent unions were recognised. In all cases however, the extent of departure from minimal statutory levels of provision was not great.Research limitations/implications – The nature of the study and its focus on Scotland may limit the generalisability of the findings into other sectors or regions.Practical implications – In light of the evolving work‐life balance legislative framework, this art...

Daddy, I don't like these shifts you're working on because I never see you: coping strategies for home and work

Recent evidence confirms that many working people, full-time as well as part-time, also carry significant caring and domestic responsibilities (Dex, 1999). With political and economic pressures exerted on people, including mothers, to enter into and remain in paid employment (Taylor, 2002), workers with caring responsibilities are faced with the need to develop strategies to organise their lives in order to negotiate between the demanding pressures of both home and work. This chapter examines the interplay between home and workplace pressures faced by employees and the sort of strategies that staff working in four call centres are adopting to cope with these compound pressures in order to maintain this precarious balancing act. Call centres were chosen for this study as representative of fast-growing ‘new work’ service sectors, increasingly typified by shift and seven-day working, integration with new communicative technologies and populated by high proportions of women operatives and team leaders, often working to tight performance targets (see e.g. Frenkel et al., 1999; Taylor et al., 2002).

Forms of Ownership and Control: Decision-Making within a Financial Institution

Recent literature suggests that control of corporations has shifted from individual capitalists to financial institutions. The article, based on original research, examines the relationship between ownership and control in relation to one set of financial institutions, namely pension funds. Focusing particularly on the role of employee representatives on trustee boards of pension schemes, the authors first suggest that the notion of ownership is even less clearcut in the case of pension funds than it is for public corporations. Recognition of pensions as deferred pay implies that the funds should belong to the scheme members, but ownership rights are severely circumscribed. Turning to the control issue, the authors report first on the recent increase in employee representation; they look at the content of decision-making, focusing specifically on three areas: investment, information and the selection of professional staff; and then examine the structure of decision-making, looking both at institutional features (e.g. the relation between participation and collective bargaining) and financial practices. They conclude by stressing the diversity of types of influence exercised, suggesting the presence of complex and multiple relationships between ownership and control.

Back to the Future? Change and Continuity at Work

The original title for this book was ‘Should life all labour be?’ Tennyson’s evocative summation of the duality that work has always represented in our lives: recognized for its sustaining necessity but at the same time resented for its dominance. It could be argued that, historically, the prevailing work ethic in society has striven to enhance the former meaning and diminish the latter and, in the introduction to this book we noted that, in recent government economic and social policy, we can discern the constituents of a new work ethic for our time. The repeated theme that full citizenship and personal fulfilment are only attainable through participation in paid work has elevated the concept of work centrality, the philosophical importance in people’s lives of the work they do, beyond the somewhat confined circles of academic discourse and into the area of policy.

Women and Men

A little-discussed component of the knowledge society model has been the predicted eradication of the gendered inequalities that have been a feature of industrial capitalism. Castells (1996), for example, claimed that information and communication technologies would reverse the relegation of women to deskilled or menial jobs as historical stereotypes were replaced by the demand for an autonomous, skilled labour force. As relatively new employment sectors, we might expect call centre and software work to demonstrate this convergence between men and women. Yet, they already represent horizontally segregated occupations with female-dominated (call centres) and male-dominated (software) workforces, and are often presented as examples of distinctively women’s and men’s work. Our data is also suggestive of vertical segregation: women were underrepresented at management levels in call centres despite their numerical dominance within the occupation, and in software, our findings showed a tendency for women to be located in less technical, lower-level roles.

The Pressures of Commitment: Taking Software Home

The current era has seen a number of academic and policy debates over the claimed increase in the porosity of the boundary between the work and domestic spheres of social activity (Baldry et al., 2007; Houston, 2005; Warhurst et al., 2008). The causes of this have been identified variously as the shift to more “flexible” forms of employment (Department of Trade and Industry, 2004), an increasing rate of female participation in the labour market with consequent demands on child-care resources (Cousins and Tang, 2004; Crompton, 2002), the intensification and extensification of the labour process in time of heightened competition (Cousins and Tang, 2004) or economic crisis and the enabling qualities of IT which have made possible an increase in both mobile work (Hislop and Axtell, 2009) and teleworking at home (Haddon and Brynin, 2005).

Class and Status

This chapter examines whether the influential analyses of the changing patterns of social class and perceptions of class identity amongst employees, symbolized by the ‘death of the working class’ thesis, are verified in our two leading new economy sectors, namely, software and call centres. These analyses concern the assumed disintegration of Marxist-inspired class analysis, the fragmentation of class structure and their replacement by other organizing criteria of social groups, such as voluntarily chosen identities. The claimed emergence of the information or network society has added a further dimension to the extant sociological debates concerning the existence and basis of class.

Organizational Life: The Management of Commitment

One of the research goals was to evaluate whether, after twenty years of the HRM agenda as the new orthodoxy, work had been elevated to a more central position in employees’ lives, as measured by stated levels of organizational commitment. Despite the stated aim of integrating employment practice to company business strategy (Storey, 1992; Guest, 1989), HRM theory is often strangely de-contextualized, apart from token references to globalization and an enhanced competitive environment. For the purposes of HRM, the company is often treated as semi-autonomous capsule, isolated from the rest of society, and this narrow focus on the workplace is, ironically, mirrored in many critical studies of control in the work organization, whether undertaken from a labour process or Foucaultian perspective. Yet movements and changes in the operation of the capitalist economy, such as market turbulence and relations between units of capital (financial and industrial), often have a direct influence on all members of work organizations and on the employment relationship at the level of the firm (Hyman, 1987; Thompson, 2003). Thus we would argue that a major reason for the oft-observed disjunction between the HRM rhetoric and the experienced reality (Legge, 1995; Thompson, 2003) lies in the particular political-economic context within which organizations are located at any point in time and to which they must respond.