Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home (review)

Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home. Edited by Rosanna Hertz and Nancy L. Marshall. University of California Press, 2000. 389 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $19.95.

People live their lives in multiple settings. Such settings are not self-contained, and individual experiences within these settings are unlikely to be independent of each other. Despite this reality, social research often views individual lives atomistically, as a multitude of different experiences and roles in a variety of contexts occurring simultaneously yet somehow divorced from each other. The home and the workplace are, of course, two prominent settings in human life, but researchers tend to focus on one or the other rather than on the intersection, overlap, and reciprocal influence of the two. Sociology, psychology, and related disciplines have witnessed a movement away from such atomism in recent years, and Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home reflects this slow but important evolution.

This collection, edited by Rosanna Hertz and Nancy L. Marshall, grew out of a national conference, "Work and Family: Today's Realities and Tomorrow's Visions," sponsored by Wellesley College, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Business and Professional Women's Foundation. This conference brought together the academic and business worlds in an effort to advance our understanding of the interface between work and family life. The chapters in this collection, empirical studies mixed with a few thought pieces, fulfill this broad goal. The chapters are collected into four theoretically meaningful sections: "Changing Families," centering on the transformations in personal and family life that have work-related consequences; "Changing Workplaces," examining how work is and is not adapting to the changing family demands of workers; "Gendered Views from Within," focusing on work-family conflict and balance on the part of individuals, families, and employers; and "Children's Experiences," investigating how children fare in the work-home nexus.

As observed above, this collection is significant in that it examines how work and family come together. The literatures on these two institutions recognize how much they assume about each other. The pieces of this collection, taken as a whole, help to inject substance into these underlying assumptions by exploring how changing work roles have affected family life, how gendered ideas influence work, family, and the balance between the two, how employers contribute to and alleviate conflict within each context, and how the boundaries between the family and work systems have broken down and evolved.

Beyond this conceptual value, the greatest strength of this collection is its breadth, measured in myriad ways. It is multidisciplinary, drawing on sociology, psychology, social work, and economics, and incorporates academic and business perspectives. It crosses multiple levels, moving from population-level structural analyses to micro-level interactional foci, and uses demographic, statistical, and ethnographic methods. It also takes the point of view of various members of the family (husband, wives, and children) and examines various social locations, as defined by social class and race. The diversity of research surveyed in this collection mirrors the diversity of work and family pathways in contemporary American life.

At the same time, this diversity of approaches and perspectives is only the first step. The editors have brought many types of researchers, with many different interests, into the same arena. For this, I applaud them. I would like to have seen, however, a real dialogue among these different researchers, not just disparate studies side by side in the same volume but different researchers collaborating and learning from each other. How could our understanding of the work-family interface be advanced by the pairing of sociologists and psychologists, for example, or a multimethod study, the crossing of conceptual levels, or the simultaneous appraisal of multiple voices (e.g., different family members, worker and employer). Moreover, the various pieces in this collection focus, for the most part, more on how work and family influence each other, but more investigation of how the intersection of the two structures the human life...