| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Phyllis Moen, ed., It's About Time: Couples and Careers (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2003)

THIS BOOK demolishes some myths as well as reinforcing a number of widespread assumptions. The major myth that is demolished is that women have to "choose" between a successful career and a successful family life. Rather, this study demonstrates that feeling successful at work predicted feeling successful in respect of family life (indeed, women reported more success in "balancing" the two than men). The major assumption that is reinforced is that couples' employment arrangements, despite the recent and rapid changes in women's employment behaviour, reflect well-defined gender-based work and family roles. Thus the most frequently occurring (practically 40 per cent) couple arrangement found in this study is the "neo-traditionalist," where the husband works long (more than 45) paid hours, but the wife works shorter paid hours.

These findings are outcomes of the Cornell Couples and Careers study, on which all of the chapters in this substantial book are based. Seven organizations in upstate New York (representing manufacturing, utilities, healthcare, and higher education) facilitated the sampling of employees in two-earner families. Almost 1,000 dual-earner couples (both partners) were interviewed by telephone, using a structured questionnaire. All of the initial contacts were middle-class (i.e., salaried). This quantitative data gathering was complemented by qualitative data derived from 14 focus groups and 150 in-depth (telephone) interviews, together with face-to-face interviews with human resources managers in the participating organizations.

The 19 substantive chapters (involving 33 contributors) are organized around 3 broad areas: Time Strategies; Strains, Successes and Subjective Assessments; and Community, Organizational, and Policy Contexts. A central theme of the book is that of linked lives, that is, the importance of the couple, rather than the individual, to social analysis. This emphasis, it should be noted, has implications for wider questions relating to individual level data. For example, whether, in aggregate, hours worked by individuals in the USA have increased or not may be a matter of debate, but what cannot be disputed is that the hours worked by couples, and the consequent pressures on families, have increased. Another central theme of the book is the importance of the life course perspective, and a classification of seven different life stages.

Moen notes the paradox that while dual-earner couples have become the norm, jobs, career paths, community services, and family life reflect structures common to a period when most workers counted on another individual to care for households, children, relatives requiring care, and personal affairs. All of the chapters in this book bear, to a greater or lesser extent, upon this 21st-century conundrum. In a review of this length it is impossible to deal with all of the many issues relating to work-life integration (thus I am not discussing leisure, commuting, household management, new technology, religion, alternative employment, retirement, or same-sex couples, all of which are the focus of specific chapters).

Not surprisingly, couples' work-hour strategies vary by life stage (Moen and Sweet). "High commitment" strategies (both partners working more than 45 hours a week) are most frequent amongst younger and older childless couples, "neotraditionalism" (husband working more than 45, wife shorter hours) is most frequent amongst couples with children (of all ages) at home. This neotraditional strategy represents a modification, rather than a transformation, of the breadwinner-homemaker template and has negative consequences for wives' careers and earnings — although these women reported the highest family satisfaction and most free time. Couples work longer hours than they would prefer, largely because of the requirements of their jobs (Merola and Clarkberg). A third of the couples reported limiting their family size due to the difficulty of combining work with raising children (Altucher and Williams).

Half of the respondents had experienced careers based on a norm of stability, half on a norm of instability (delayed, intermittent, or volatile career pathways). As anticipated, career paths are gendered in that men are more likely to have stable career paths than women. However, a significant minority of women had stable pathways, and conversely, a minority of men unstable pathways (Williams and Han). Younger respondents were not necessarily more "unstable" than older -indeed, educational attainment (and gender) were strong invariant determining forces of career paths. Just over half of the respondents said that the husbands' career had priority (Pixley and Moen), but both education level and gender role attitudes affect decision-making, and the more educated spouse tends to have the prioritized career.

The breadwinner-homemaker model of the articulation of work and family life approached employment and the family as "separate spheres" and indeed, the relationship between the two is still often seen as one of conflict and tension. However, 60 per cent of respondents reported high levels of positive family-to-work "spillover," that is, family life enhances more than it hinders an individual's work life, and the benefits of combining work and family outweigh any drawbacks (Roehling, Moen and Batt). Nevertheless, negative work-to-family spillover is higher among women than men, and associated (for women and men) with long hours working, high workloads, and a lack of autonomy at work.

Indeed, as well as work-life stress, long hours, together with jobs that are pressured and less autonomous, also contribute to a lack of a sense of well-being — although the family tends to "buffer" women more against work pressures than men (Kim, Moen and Min). In three of the organizations generating the sample (in the manufacturing and utility sectors), the employees were experiencing downsizing and layoffs. As the chapter by Valcour and Bart argues, an important dimension of family-responsive workplaces (besides formal policies and their application) is adequate employment and income security, and employees experiencing these insecurities expressed more work-family conflict. Ironically, "family-friendly" policies were being developed in these high-profile companies (two had received public recognition for their excellence) in parallel with downsizing and job losses. As other studies have suggested, in many companies one important strand of contemporary managerialism ("high commitment" management, of which "family-friendly" policies are but one aspect) is at odds with another, that of the "lean organization."

At the workplace, support from supervisors was crucial — particularly in implementing informal flexible scheduling. Organizationally institutionalized (i.e. formal) work-life benefits varied to a considerable extent among the different companies (Strang and Still). Interestingly, the majority of respondents (71 per cent) held inaccurate views about whether or not work-life policies were available -- some respondents claimed to use policies that were not in fact in place, and many were unaware of policies. Not only is there a widespread misapprehension as to the nature and extent of formal policies, but men, in particular, were reluctant to negotiate them in the absence of strong organizational signals as to their legitimacy.

This book has all of the virtues, and some of the vices, of leading edge empirical research. The research design and methodology are impeccable. But the sheer volume of data presented makes for a dense and complex read (efforts have been made not to overload the text by making many of the findings discussed in the book available electronically, rather than in the book itself). Despite the use of core ideas and concepts in common, the disparate topics addressed in the many chapters mean that the book does not entirely come together as a whole. Nevertheless, this book is a major work of reference, and stands as an exemplar for future research into this important topic. Indeed, the authors point the way for future directions in empirical research. In particular, as this study focused only on middle-class couples, as many of the contributors argue, research is badly needed on couples at other points on the social spectrum. However, if the level of difficulties in achieving work-life integration reported by the couples taking part in this study is anything to go by (remember, they are well-educated as well as in relatively high paid and prestige jobs), one cannot but anticipate that the actual extent of work-life disjunction in the USA will be found to be even higher. As Moen concludes, serious policy developments are required if any kind of "balance" in the still gendered, but changing, worlds of work and family life is to be achieved.


Rosemary Crompton City University, London

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.