Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter contrasts and compare organisational change as it affects working parents in social services and finance consultancy. It shows how a consultancy company abided by general labour laws and had no specific workplace policies for working parents, but followed an informal policy of flexible hours. In practice, these were taken up to keep up with the large volume of work and because of the seasonal nature of the work. Policy interpretation in the public sector was much stricter. Another theme that forms the focus of this chapter is on the asymmetries in terms of age, education, access to refresher training, and qualifications, with resulting effects on pay and job insecurity. Although such asymmetries were found in both organisations, the private company had a more highly qualified workforce as compared to the case in social services.
This chapter is divided in two parts, with a central focus on parents’ need for flexible working arrangements in order effectively and efficiently to manage their everyday lives. The first part of the chapter discusses organisational change in public sector social services and in private sector for-profit companies. The discussion in the first part takes as its point of departure some of the aspects of change in the social services case studies in the book. These receive comparative attention and a ‘secondary’ analysis of these highlights some of the pitfalls of assuming cross-national similarity within a single sector. The second part of the chapter explores private sector organisations, with reference to how issues raised by this sector’s more exposed position in the global market affects working parents’ experiences of both national and workplace policies.
Across Europe the importance of reconciling paid work and family life is increasingly recognised by a range of diverse government regulations and organisational initiatives. At the same time, employing organisations and the nature of work are undergoing massive and rapid changes, in the context of global competition, efficiency drives, as well as social and economic transformations in emerging economies. This book illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees’ experiences of ‘work-life balance’ in contemporary shifting contexts. Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces carried out in Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK, this book demonstrates the challenges that parents face as they seek to negotiate work and family boundaries. The case studies demonstrate that employed parents’ needs and experiences depend on many layers of context — global, European, national, workplace and family.
This chapter aims to create a comparative analysis of the findings from all the cases studies presented in the book with respect to one of the key questions addressed in the book: how do public policy and workplace policies interplay in practice in parents’ lives in the different layers of context in which they live? The chapter also explores some of the broader implications of the findings discussed in this volume for current and future reconciliation of employment and family life.
This chapter discusses the rights of employed parents in a recently partly privatised finance company in Slovenia. It explores the ways in which these rights bequeathed under a former Socialist regime are played out in the changing context of Slovenia’s transformation to a market economy. The case study demonstrates how the legacy of paternalism from the former Socialist regime contributes to the continued construction of work-family issues as individual and state responsibilities rather than employer concerns or business issues. In this context, parents, specifically mothers, bear the impact and burden of political and organisational changes associated with the transition to a market economy and increased global competition.
This chapter discusses support available to parents of small children working in a state agency for social assistance in a city in Bulgaria, drawing on a social capital perspective. The core of this chapter is on the informal and formal practices of social workers and other social service workers in balancing professional and family responsibilities, and the rationale behind why working parents are concerned about improving legal provision since they have no access to formal employer support. In practice, most parents rely on informational help from line managers, colleagues in the team, wider family and public nurseries for their children.
This chapter compares a private sector company and a social services organisation in Norway. The chapter illustrates the significance of developing a grounded approach in understanding the experience of change within specific organisations as a basis for exploring parents’ gendered experiences of reconciling work and family life. The chapter also demonstrates that the discourses of change tend to be individualistic in a private sector organisation in contrast to the more relational focus in social services. In the study of the private company, the chapter draws out a number of subsidiary themes concerning the way the organisation influences and impacts on working parents.
Across Europe the importance of reconciling paid work and family life is increasingly recognised by a range of diverse government regulations and organisational initiatives. At the same time, employing organisations and the nature of work are undergoing massive and rapid changes, in the context of global competition, efficiency drives, as well as social and economic transformations in emerging economies. This book illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees’ experiences of ‘work-life balance’ in contemporary shifting contexts. Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces carried out in Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK, this book demonstrates the challenges that parents face as they seek to negotiate work and family boundaries. The case studies demonstrate that employed parents’ needs and experiences depend on many layers of context — global, European, national, workplace and family.
Across Europe the importance of reconciling paid work and family life is increasingly recognised by a range of diverse government regulations and organisational initiatives. At the same time, employing organisations and the nature of work are undergoing massive and rapid changes, in the context of global competition, efficiency drives, as well as social and economic transformations in emerging economies. This book illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees’ experiences of ‘work-life balance’ in contemporary shifting contexts. Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces carried out in Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK, this book demonstrates the challenges that parents face as they seek to negotiate work and family boundaries. The case studies demonstrate that employed parents’ needs and experiences depend on many layers of context — global, European, national, workplace and family.
This chapter discusses the research design and methods of the study, providing insights that contextualise the discussions in the subsequent chapters. In this chapter, the logic of the different phases and stages of the Transitions study is outlined, with particular attention being given to the organisational case studies. Although data from these case studies provide the key empirical material for the book, this phase must be seen within the methodological design and framework of the whole Transitions study. What sets the Transitions study apart from similar studies of how parents negotiate work and family boundaries is the interplay of the different layers of context in which fathers’ and mothers’ lives are embedded and shape the ways in which individuals and families arrive at choices and decisions. This particular design thereby allows for a grounded and contextualised analysis of the different data collected in this study.
