Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance

Amazon.com Price: $6.30 (as of 11/10/2019 06:43 PST- Details)

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Description

Everyone who struggles to meet the demands of work and personal-life responsibilities knows how tough it is to do so. This bold new book shows that it’s the deeply engrained separation of work and personal life that has limited our ability to deal effectively with the conflict between them. Beyond Work-Family Balance demonstrates why the image of “balance” is outmoded and why a new approach — work-personal life integration — offers greater promise for meaningful change.

Providing many examples from action research projects in more than a dozen organizations of different kinds, the authors show how the usage of their method of integrating quite than separating personal-life considerations from the workplace can achieve positive outcomes, not only for workers but also for the work. The method offers a way of looking deeply into the work culture to find inequitable and ineffective work practices that are so embedded and routine that no one thinks to question them — they are just the way things get done. Once identified, these work practices can be changed to achieve what the authors call a Dual Agenda: a more equitable workplace where both women and men can achieve their full potential and a more effective workplace where the needs of the work, quite than gendered and outmoded assumptions, decide what gets done and how.
Beyond Work-Family Balance, by academic researchers Rhona Rapoport, Lotte Bailyn, Joyce K. Fletcher, and Bettye H. Pruitt, grew out of a decade-long search for ways to restructure business life that would “give a boost to organizational effectiveness At the same time as making the workplace more equitable and improving the quality of working people’s lives.” At the same time as few would oppose such goals at face value, their full attainment has nonetheless remained elusive as business pressures increase and unrealistic gender assumptions–like institutional refusal to acknowledge the increasing emergence of women as primary breadwinners–remain entrenched in our corporate cultures, structures, and practices. This book advances a conceptual framework for appropriate organizational change that is tied directly to the dual agenda spelled out in the two-pronged premise of its subtitle: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance. With no one-size-fits-all solution conceivable for such complex issues, the authors draw on related studies in a dozen different workplace settings to instead present a place to begin “so that organizations so inclined and the people in them can embark on a similar journey” of exploration and solution. The result will be of interest to anyone who consents that such change is badly needed and long overdue. –Howard Rothman

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