Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds

What is the relationship between work and family in a world where employment creates endless tensions for families and families create endless tensions for the workplace? This collection of articles broadens this discussion by addressing issues from the perspectives of often neglected populations: from white middle-class women with young children to people of colour, to poor families, to the families gays and lesbians are struggling to construct, to fathers and to older children. To discuss work and family is also to discuss gender. Ranging from California’s Silicon Valley to a remote fishing village, part one shows how new work arrangements have created new expectations for what it means to be a woman or a man, and how slow and uneven the pace of change can be. Nowhere are the tensions of work and family more potent than around childcare. Part two takes up these tensions, showing how various
solutions
to caring for children of all ages (whether infants or teenagers) create problems. Parts three and four turn outward to show how the relationships between families and work are changing the relationships between families and the communities in which they live and generating social policy dilemmas.