Suchergebnisse

Work-life balance, or the reconciliation of work and family, has been discussed recently as a "new social risk" in comparative research on the welfare state. According to this discussion, the social security systems of traditional welfare states were built after World War II in order to protect (male) breadwinners against the "old social risks" such as the loss of income due to old age, sickness, accident, or unemployment. Scholars have argued, however, that these postwar policies have been inadequate for dealing with the new types of risks that resulted from complex changes in employment practices and family life. This article reflects critically upon the conceptualization of work-life balance as a new social risk by focusing on one of the Nordic countries, which have come to be known for their policies that combine (female) parenthood and paid work. In particular, it analyzes the problematization and governance of work-family reconciliation in twentieth-century Finland. Overall, the article argues that social scientific knowledge played a key role in the ways in which work-life balance was rendered intelligible and manageable as a social policy issue.

Drawing on the 'usages of Europe' approach, this paper examines the Europeanisation of work/family reconciliation policies in Finland, an EU member since 1995. More specifically, the paper analyses the ways in which EU resources have been used by national actors to shape reconciliation policies. The empirical materials consist of Finnish policy texts on the topic published between 1980 and 2009. It is argued that, while Europe has rarely been referred to in the revision of already-established reconciliation policies, i.e. childcare services and family leave benefits, Europe has played an important role in the emergence of new, labour market-oriented reconciliation policies. Although the cognitive and normative inspirations for the shifting of reconciliation to the domain of labour market policy may have come from various sources, the financial and legal resources of the EU have provided Finnish actors with a concrete means of introducing new policy instruments, such as work/family projects in organisations and incentives for the more equal use of parental leave, as well as new economic policy goals. Overall, the goals, domains, instruments, and timing of Finnish reconciliation policies have followed those of the EU.

For LGBQ employees, the disclosure and management of sexual identity in the workplace are likely to cause additional identity work. In this paper, we explore how such identity work is undertaken collectively by gays and lesbians on internet forums. Drawing on the literature on discursive identity work and social media affordances, we conduct a netnographic study of two internet forums, and analyse the ways in which these forums enable gay and lesbian employees' identity work and guide their identity management processes. Overall, our study advances knowledge on sexual identity disclosure and management in three main ways. First, by shifting the focus from the identity disclosure accounts of individual gay and lesbian employees to online peer discussions around the topic, it sheds light on the broader context of identity management beyond the workplace. Second, our findings elucidate particular types of collaborative identity work – consulting, legitimating and questioning identity work – enabled by the affordance of interactivity of internet forums that inform and guide gays and lesbians' identity management practices in organisations. Third, we identify and elaborate on specific discursive identity threats – the 'falsehood', 'incoherence', 'exaggeration' and 'outdatedness' of identity – which gay and lesbian employees are likely to encounter when reflecting on and performing specific identity management strategies, such as concealing or revealing their sexual orientation at work.

In the contemporary conditions of neoliberal governmentality, and the emerging 'gig economy,' standard employment relationships appear to be giving way to precarious work. This article examines the mechanisms of biopower and techniques of managerial control that underpin—and produce consent for—precarious work and nonstandard work arrangements. Based on an ethnographic study, the article shows how a globally operating direct sales organization deploys particular techniques of government to mobilize and manage its precarious workers as a network of enterprise-units: as a community of active and productive economic agents who willingly reconstitute themselves and their lives as enterprises to pursue self-efficacy, autonomy and self-worth as individuals. The article contributes to the literature on organizational power, particularly Foucauldian studies of the workplace, in three ways: (1) by building a theoretical analytics of government perspective on managerial control that highlights the nondisciplinary, biopolitical forms of power that underpin employment relations under the conditions of neoliberal governmentality; (2) by extending the theory of enterprise culture to the domain of precarious work to examine the mechanisms of biopower that underpin ongoing transformations in the sphere of work; and (3) by shifting critical attention to the lived experience of precarious workers in practice.

Are organizational projects for refugee and migrant inclusion always trapped with the logic of exclusion and inequality that they seek to dismantle? Existing literature on critical diversity and inclusion studies has demonstrated how the "doing" of inclusion in organizations tends to come with paradoxical effects: well-intended efforts to include migrants and refugees construct them as vulnerable, non-autonomous subjects who need help, within a hierarchical order that is taken for granted. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how three civil society organizations (CSOs) navigate these paradoxical effects and the unduly constraining power relations involved through practices that we theorize as counter-conduct against the pastoral government of a national refugee and migrant integration regime. The analysis identifies three practices of counter-conduct through which organizations "do inclusion differently": contesting constraining categorizations, problematizing hierarchical power relations, and questioning the assimilationist goals and principles of the integration regime. We argue that through continuous critique and renegotiation of the ways in which boundaries of inclusion/exclusion are drawn within the integration regime, organizations work toward conditions in which power relations remain fluid and allow for strategies to alter them.