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  • The Agency Gap in Work-Life Balance:Applying Sen's Capabilities Framework Within European Contexts
  • Barbara Hobson

Work-life balance (hereafter WLB) is a discursive refrain in European public debate that reflects goals for a more productive workforce: that women and men should be able to be both earners and carers. It is not merely a buzzword in policy circles, however, but mirrors rising expectations of working parents for a better quality of life and the tensions that ensue from these expectations within individual lives, households, work organizations, and policy frameworks. European societies' attitudinal studies reveal that an overwhelming majority of both women and men maintain that WLB is a primary priority when considering job and workplace (Hobson and Fahlén 2009a, 2009b). There is also convincing evidence that most European men would like to reduce their working hours, even with an equivalent reduction in hourly pay (Fagan 2004; Hobson and Fahlén 2009a). Yet, there is a growing gap between attitudes and practices, the ideal and the real, as seen in the rising numbers of individuals who work long hours (Boulin et al. 2006; Guest 2002; [End Page 147] Lee 2004), and the significant proportions of jobs with unsocial hours (Boulin et al. 2006; Perrons et al. 2006). When applied to working parents, WLB is often defined as a lack thereof, i.e., work-life imbalance, or work-life conflict (Guest 2002), which is reflected in international research that shows that individuals most often view work demands as impinging on family time rather than vice versa (Frone 2003).

New rights and policies for WLB have emerged at the European and national levels—including rights to reduce hours, entitlements to care leaves, and flexibility in working times and workplace. However, there is a gap in the capabilities of individual parents to exercise these rights and utilize these options. The extent of this "agency gap" is dependent on how these entitlements are embedded in different national policy frameworks, mediated through firms/ workplaces, and translated into individual lives and households.

In this special issue, we provide a framework and models for analyzing agency and WLB in a complex and multi-layered universe of constraints and possibilities, of rights and capabilities to exercise them, considering different institutional contexts across European societies. This framework is inspired by Amartya Sen's capabilities and agency approach.

Sen's framework of capabilities and agency provides the theoretical space for capturing this growing divide between rising expectations and norms for men and women to become carers and earners and the economic, social, and normative barriers that they encounter. It asks us to consider not only what individuals do but also what their opportunities to be and do are. For Sen, the core issue is not only what individuals choose, but the choices that they would make if they had the capabilities to lead the kind of lives that they want to lead.

The introductory essay provides a conceptual map of the what, why, and how of capabilities for studies of WLB. First, we present the main concepts that are relevant to research on WLB. In the following sections we discuss why a capabilities framework offers new insights into the agency gap in WLB, and finally, the introduction presents how our applications of the capabilities approach represent theoretical and empirical innovations (i) by developing analytical models that adapt Sen's general capabilities framework to gender and social politics in a European context, (ii) by incorporating the firm/work organizational level to studies of capabilities, (iii) by integrating the experiential subjective cognitive level of agency into the capabilities framework through analyses of survey data and qualitative survey data specifically designed for a WLB and capabilities approach. [End Page 148]

Rather than a specified theory, Sen's capabilities approach is a framework of thought (Robeyns 2005; Sen 1992). Most generally, it is an evaluative space to assess well-being and quality of life and the freedom to pursue it. Deciding which capabilities matter is dependent on what aspects of well-being are being evaluated and for whom. In this special issue, WLB is our evaluative space for assessing how polices and their implementation enhance or weaken capabilities for actualizing quality of...

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