Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th-Century Jobs for a 21st-Century Workforce

Preface

vii Preface The rise of dual-earner households, as well as single-parent, single-earner households and older couples facing joint retirements, has significantly changed the relationship between work and family life in the U.S. and other nation states. No longer dominant is the family in which one parent goes out to work and one stays home. Yet even in the early 1990s, these demographic changes eluded the attention of scholars and public policymakers. In 1994 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation chose to address explicitly this major social and economic sea change. The foundation sought to understand what was happening within working families at all stages in their lives, as well as within the workplaces in which they were employed. In focusing on the workplace, Sloan was interested in learning to what extent American employers were responding to this increasingly diverse workforce, in terms of both their business objectives and the organizational structure of the workplace, including provisions related to time and space. Sloan chose to develop funding strategies that would have the potential to affect how our society navigates these major social and economic changes by identifying what steps might be beneficial for the future. The Sloan Foundation’s vision was articulated by Kathleen Christensen, who was recruited to spearhead and direct a program on workers and their working conditions. She established four principles to guide Sloan’s grantmaking in the area of working families and the workplace. These principles are: (1) supporting the production of high quality, multidisciplinary research to identify the critical issues faced by workers and their families over the course of their lifespans; (2) communicating these research findings beyond the academy to business leaders , policymakers, and the media to increase public understanding of problems faced by workers, particularly their need for workplace flexibility; (3) forming a viii PREFACE coalition to launch and execute a national initiative to make workplace flexibility a compelling national issue and the standard way of working; and (4) funding parallel tracks for achieving success by increasing voluntary employer practices and building bipartisan support for a national policy on workplace flexibility. The resulting funding model is one of the few philanthropic efforts committed to an integrated program that supports collaborative work in three arenas: research, private sector practices, and public policy. Informed by these principles, Christensen supported more than four hundred grants totaling $120 million over the course of more than a decade. The results of the program are significant in three distinct areas: producing work-family scholarship , improving media understanding of work-family issues, and executing the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative. This book is a culmination of these efforts and addresses each of these areas, not only from a U.S. perspective but from a global one as well. The intent is to interface issues of policy and practice with research as a way of understanding how to achieve workplace flexibility across the life course. The origins of the book came from a conference that was held at the University of Chicago’s Center on Parents, Children, and Work, which was a Sloan Center on Working Families and for which Barbara Schneider was a cofounder and director. The chapters in this book reflect the strategic principles that Christensen developed for the Sloan grantmaking program. Specifically in the area of work-family scholarship, Sloan grants supported the publication of over six hundred peerreviewed articles, over a third of which are in the top journals of their respective disciplines, and over one hundred scholarly and commercial books. Through Sloan’s establishment of six Centers on Working Families, each of which had a strong training component, the first generation of work-family scholars was created , with over 180 completed doctoral degrees and 70 post-doctoral fellowships. Nearly 60 percent of these scholars now hold tenure-track positions or tenured lines, ensuring subsequent generations of researchers focused on work-family issues . Through its grantmaking, Sloan has been instrumental in building infrastructure for the community of work-family scholars and practitioners. Much of the work from the research program has been collected and is now available through Boston College’s Sloan Work and Family Research Network, widely recognized as the premier online destination for current, credible, and comprehensive research and information on work and family issues, which serves a global community of academics, human resources practitioners, and state legislators. One of the four pillars of Christensen’s model, the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative, has as its overarching goal to promote workplace flexibility as a compelling...