Work-Life Advantage

Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation

Al James

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781118944837, 9781118944844
• eBook ISBN: 9781118944813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Work-Life Advantage analyses how employer-provision of 'family-friendly' working arrangements - designed to help workers better reconcile work, home and family - can also enhance firms' capacities for learning and innovation, in pursuit of long-term competitive advantage and socially inclusive growth. 

• Brings together major debates in labour geography, feminist geography, and regional learning in novel ways, through a focus on the shifting boundaries between work, home, and family
• Addresses a major gap in the scholarly research surrounding the narrow 'business case' for work-life balance by developing a more socially progressive, workerist 'dual agenda'
• Challenges and disrupts masculinist assumptions of the "ideal worker" and the associated labour market marginalization of workers with significant home and family commitments
• Based on 10 years of research with over 300 IT workers and 150 IT firms in the UK and Ireland, with important insights for professional workers and knowledge-intensive companies around the world

Chapter One
Inclusive Regional Learning?

Introduction

The fruits of a rapidly growing economy based on innovations and hard work are patently obvious. Less obvious are the costs absorbed by individuals as they take on the attributes required to succeed … Sustaining the new economy means building a new set of social institutions to support it.

(Carnoy 2002: x)

‘It’s important that people talk about these work‐life challenges. There are a lot of women, like myself, who are just so busy getting on with it, just so busy just trying to stay quiet. This type of material, it needs to be fed back, people need to stop and think about it’. Software Business Development Manager, female, two young children, 3‐day work week, IT MNC, Dublin

Over the last two decades, the shifting spatial and temporal boundaries between work, home and family that have accompanied the transition to the so‐called ‘new economy’ have been hotly debated. As firms reorganise work in response to globalisation and new technological opportunities, ‘flexibility’ for many workers has come to mean increased workloads, less predictable work schedules and more unsocial work hours as firms demand they work longer and harder to minimise labour costs. Simultaneously, household life has also become more complex as female labourforce participation rates continue to grow and an ever‐increasing proportion of workers are part of dual‐earner households. These problems are reinforced by the decline of the extended family, increasing lone‐parent households and greater eldercare responsibilities through increased life expectancy. Simultaneously, the neoliberal attack on social provisioning has transferred the burden of care down to the ‘natural’ level of home (Bakker and Gill 2003) where most women retain the major responsibility for the ‘messy and fleshy’ components of domestic and family life (Katz 2001; Crompton and Brockmann 2006). The overall result is a complex, gendered, multi‐variable balancing act between the competing demands of paid work and responsibilities, commitments and life interests beyond the workplace, for which workers have only ‘finite resources in terms of time and energy’ (Cooper et al. 2001: 50).

In response, the desirability and means of achieving an appropriate ‘work‐life balance’ (WLB) has received widespread attention from governments, managers, trade unions, academics and the media. At the individual level, WLB refers to ‘the absence of unacceptable levels of conflict between work and non‐work demands’ (Greenblatt 2002: 179). While encompassing earlier family‐friendly perspectives, the work‐life balance term was intended to broaden the debate beyond working mothers to include all workers, and hence a wider diversity of personal life needs, interests and responsibilities such as religious attendance, sports, hobbies, and community and charity work. Alternative WLB monikers include work‐life reconciliation, work‐personal life integration, work‐personal life harmonisation and work‐life articulation. But whatever the label used, the societal and moral significance of the successful integration of paid work with other meaningful parts of life is profound. Study after study has documented how a lack of work‐life balance can result in increased stress, deleterious effects on psychological and physical well‐being, and increased family and marital tensions (e.g. Burchell et al. 1999, 2002; Frone et al. 1994; Lewis and Cooper 1999; Scase and Scales 1998). Moreover, given persistent gender variations in work‐life stress as women make the greatest compromises to fit paid work around family (Moen 2003; McDowell et al. 2005), studies have also highlighted the importance of work‐life provision by employers as a means for improving gender equity in market employment and household caring (Wise and Bond 2003; World Economic Forum 2005). The labour movement has also emphasised the social importance of WLB as a means of improving workers’ quality of life and combating the increasing work pressures that are destabilising households and societal integration.

Employer‐provided WLB arrangements are typically split across four categories, in terms of those providing workers with greater temporal flexibility of work, greater spatial flexibility of work, reduced total work hours and childcare assistance. But despite government efforts, evidence of progress in employers providing comprehensive suites of work‐life arrangements remains uneven, resulting in continuing hardship for many workers and their families. Indeed, these problems have also been exacerbated in the aftermath of the ‘global’ economic downturn which created new gendered work‐life demands through rapid and dramatic labour market change, heightened fears of job loss, increased workloads and understaffing (e.g. Fawcett Society 2009; TUC 2009). With employers keen to effect cost savings, workplace arrangements designed to help reconcile workers’ competing commitments around work, home and family have not been immune (Galinksy and Bond 2009). At the heart of this disjuncture, many scholars argue that employers are simply unlikely to implement meaningful WLB arrangements unless they can identify bottom‐line economic advantages that arise from doing so (e.g. Healy 2004; Hyman and Summers 2004; Dex and Scheibl 1999; Dex and Smith 2002). Importantly, this ‘WLB business case’ also lies at the heart of UK, Irish and US government policy interventions in this area, with employer benefits from WLB provision widely touted by policy‐makers as improved recruitment, retention, morale and productivity, and reduced stress, absenteeism and costs. Yet despite its popularity, there remains a relative dearth of empirical evidence to support these claims in practice (Beauregard and Henry 2009). In addition, ‘few scholars have demonstrated the mechanisms through which such [WLB] policies function (or do not) to enhance firm performance’ (Eaton 2003: 145–146).

Work‐Life Advantage takes issue with this major knowledge gap and its negative social consequences for workers and their families, whose collective labours are ultimately responsible for (re)producing and sustaining some of the world’s most high‐profile high‐tech regional economies. In so doing, the book develops a new analytical approach that connects the burgeoning research agenda on gendered labour geographies of work‐life balance, social reproduction and care with an equally expansive research agenda on regional learning and innovation. Importantly, both agendas ultimately respond to the emergence of ‘flexible’ production processes in the wake of Fordism from the late 1970s onwards: one then exploring the territorial forms of flexible production (firm‐centric focus), and the other, dramatic changes in the organisation of flexible paid work and working times as experienced by workers and their families (workerist focus). Yet despite these common roots, these two research agendas remain oddly disconnected. In seeking to bridge them, the hybrid analysis developed in this book answers four major research questions. What are the common, everyday experiences and outcomes of gendered work‐life conflict amongst knowledge workers and their families in high‐tech regional economies? What kinds of employer‐provided WLB arrangements do different cohorts of knowledge workers find most useful in overcoming those conflicts? How does the uptake of these worker‐preferred WLB arrangements enhance (vs. constrain) the kinds of intra‐firm and cross‐firm learning and innovation processes widely identified as enabling regional advantage? And do those WLB learning outcomes vary both within and between regional economies, particularly as a function of national welfare regimes? In so doing, the book responds to earlier calls by Lewis et al. (2003) to develop a ‘dual agenda’ that moves beyond either/or thinking to consider both business and social imperatives in pursuit of optimal work‐life balance outcomes, set within a regional learning framework.

This analysis is developed through a case study of information technology (IT) workers and firms in Dublin, Ireland and Cambridge, UK prior to and after the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. Crucially, both regions have figured prominently in regional learning and innovation studies to date, and are recognised as important European clusters of IT growth of interest to policy‐makers elsewhere. Additionally, IT represents a knowledge‐intensive industry at the vanguard of new working practices, in which firms compete to bring new products to market quickest and in which ‘work’ and ‘life’ are significantly blurred. Work‐life balance has also come to assume a strong national significance in both Ireland and the UK, as a function of long average work hours relative to other EU member states. The book builds on 10 years of research, including an ESRC‐funded research project (2006–2009): The Impacts of Work‐Life (Im)Balance on Innovation and Learning in Regional Economies (RES‐000‐22‐1574‐A). Its critical analysis draws on a rich, multi‐method evidence base comprising two regional surveys of IT employers (150 firms with combined local employment of 8,068 workers); 68 in‐depth interviews with female and male IT workers, HR managers and labour organisers; and a WLB/labour mobility survey of 162 female IT workers (conducted through a number of women’s IT networking organisations: Girl Geek Dinners, Women In Technology, WITS Ireland). It also draws on recessionary data from a second survey of 139 female IT workers conducted in December 2010.

This introductory chapter continues with some vivid examples of the daily realities of gendered conflicts between work, home and family that I have documented amongst IT workers in the UK and Irish contexts, with varying levels of employer support. These examples are juxtaposed against an increasingly abstract and firm‐centric regional learning and innovation literature in which workers are treated ‘not as social agents capable of making landscapes in their own right but, rather, as simply an aspect of capital’ (Herod 2001: 22). Consequently, these studies have paid almost zero attention to how workers’ gendered identities, varied responsibilities of care and personal‐life interests beyond the workplace unavoidably shape their (non‐)participation in the relational networks and communities of practice widely theorised as enabling regional learning and innovation.

This chapter also outlines the book’s wider contribution to an enhanced interdisciplinary conversation between economic, labour and feminist geography, as part of an ‘intellectual trading zone’ (Barnes and Sheppard 2010) to develop richer, pluralistic understandings of how regional economies function – explored through the everyday work‐lives of the engineers, scientists and technologists whose collective labours are ultimately responsible for (re)producing and sustaining them. The wider policy significance of this push for ‘engaged pluralism’ is also introduced as part of a holistic regional development agenda (Pike et al. 2006), which integrates mainstream economic concerns around competitiveness, growth and productivity with normative questions around labour market inclusion, gender equity, worker well‐being and social reproduction (see also Rees 2000; Perrons 2001; Blake and Hanson 2005). The final section sets out the structure of the book on a chapter‐by‐chapter basis.

Unlearning Regional Learning? (Or why economic geographers need to get out more)

It is now widely accepted that fundamental changes within advanced capitalist economies since the 1970s herald a new era of capitalist economic development, whose geographical form is marked by a decisive reagglomeration of production and the rise of regions as the salient foci of wealth creation (Martin and Sunley 2003). Characteristic in their high rates of technological learning and innovation,¹ the workings of these ‘industrial agglomerations’ or ‘clusters’ have become a fixation for successive cohorts of economic geographers ever since. Newcomers to this literature are now confronted with an overwhelming plethora of territorial innovation models and concepts used to unpack the learning advantages of ‘being there’ (Gertler 2003). In a nutshell, this ‘regional advantage’ (Saxenian 1994) is understood as emergent from enhanced access to external information flows and knowledge spillovers between co‐located firms, research organisations and public agencies; rooted in networks of repeated face‐to‐face interaction, the cross‐firm mobility of talent and through processes of new firm formation and spin‐off. Geographers have also analysed differences in firms’ ‘absorptive capacities’ (Cohen and Levinthal 1990), understood as the distinctive sets of ‘shared’ socio‐cultural norms and conventions upon which actors routinely draw to assimilate and apply externally derived information and knowledge within the firm to develop new products or services, new technological capabilities and/or new ways of organising production processes and service delivery.

Without doubt, this literature has yielded important insights into the socio‐cultural foundations of regional economic advantage, fundamentally shaped the content and focus of regional economic development policies worldwide and become a major cornerstone of economic geography as a sub‐discipline. Yet (as I explore in Chapter 2), the international research agenda around regional learning and innovation continues to suffer from a series of peculiar blindspots, emergent from: reductionist treatments of labour as passive inputs to firms’ innovation activities; repeated analytical exclusions of female workers; and an overriding tendency to artificially divorce networks of knowledge production from extra‐firm networks of social reproduction. And all this despite a high‐profile call‐to‐arms over a decade ago:

Neither of the NEGs [New Economic Geographies] pays any attention to questions in the immediate sense of the social division of labour between different kinds of paid work and between paid work and caring, or the wider sense of establishing sustainable regional development. Yet these dimensions are central to understanding the well‐being of people within ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Inclusive Regional Learning?
• Chapter Two: Recentering Regional Learning
• Chapter Three: Work‐Life Balance and its Uncertain ‘Business Case’
• Chapter Four: Researching Labour Geographies of Work‐Life and Learning in Ireland and the UK
• Chapter Five: Juggling Work, Home and Family in the Knowledge Economy
• Chapter Six: Overcoming Work‐Life Conflict and the Gendered Limits to Learning and Innovation?
• Chapter Seven: Work‐Life Balance, Cross‐Firm Worker Mobility and Gendered Knowledge Spillovers
• Chapter Eight: Conclusions
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement