Work Life Balance

6967 Words28 Pages
Perspectives on the Study of Work-Life Balance A Discussion Paper Prepared for the 2001 ENOP Symposium, Paris, March 29-31. by David E Guest The Management Centre King’s College, London Introduction The aim of this background paper is to introduce the topic of work-life balance, to explain why it is of contemporary interest, to identify some of the key conceptual and empirical issues and to open up the topic for debate. It is not intended as a comprehensive review of the literature. Why the interest? Work-life balance has always been a concern of those interested in the quality of working life and its relation to broader quality of life. In the early days of the industrial revolution in Europe (and today in some parts of the developing world) a primary concern was with the impact of child labour. In times of recession and again today in parts of Europe, the concern is with lack of employment and its consequences, graphically illustrated in the early work by Jahoda (1992) at Marienthal and studied in many contexts up to the present day. Yet work-life balance has come to the fore in contemporary debates largely because in affluent societies the excessive demands of work are perceived to present a distinctive issue that needs to be addressed. It is only some twenty-five years ago that pundits were warning that advances in technology would lead to the threat of mass unemployment - or the promise of a life of increased leisure for most in western (post-) industrial society. So what has changed? It is possible to identify a set of factors that have brought the issue of work-life balance to the forefront of policy debates. These are familiar but are briefly summarised, since an assessment of their significance will have a bearing on the questions that are worth researching and on judgements about the policy agendas that requite attention. Three broad
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