Director of the Research Center ‘Contemporary P@thways of Career, Life and Learning’ at Rouen Business School, France

In the midst of heated debates around a number of prominent employers’ decisions to cancel telework arrangements (e.g. Yahoo) and pioneering initiatives such as Results Only Work Environments (e.g. Best Buy), and of the vivid discussions on Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, I’d like to go back to the classics.

One of the most eye-opening books I have ever read is Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Work and Family in the United States. I read the first chapter and suddenly there was light. There was light and I was able to make sense of my observations regarding work and life during ten years of business consulting.

In this book 35 years ago, Kanter drew on a well-documented historical analysis to explain why employers were having such a hard time with their employees wishing and needing to balance their work commitments with other life commitments. It’s all about loyalty: employers want to secure employee’s total commitment and are reluctant to endure competing loyalties such as the ones represented by families.

Work and family, in the eyes of employers at least, have been competing since the beginnings of the second industrial revolution. Employers have first used families to discipline and socialize newcomers, and then have either tried to swallow it up in paternalistic programs or to ignore it – the famous myth of the separation between the work and family spheres that leads employers to pretend people can leave their personal life and identity at the door and behave in a strictly professional way.

It seems that we haven’t done much progress since then. And that makes sense given the increasing loyalty demands of workplaces that need employees to be available and reactive around the clock in a globalized and competitive world.

What most employers seem to not be getting, however, is that work and life don’t have to be competing. Yes, daily schedules are often in conflict, and yes families and communities provide alternative places to the workplace that people can belong to. But work and family also enrich each other, as Nancy Rothbard has demonstrated in her research, and as Stew Friedman has shown in Total Leadership. Work and family nurture each other on a daily basis and on a life-time horizon. Win-wins are possible, when employers trust employees.

Why does this matter? It matters, obviously, for those employees who will or will not be given the gift of autonomy over the time and place that they work. This is well known and I want to highlight instead the invisible and un-discussed side of work-life balance. In that same seminal book, Kanter brought forward the invisible stakeholders of the work and family debate. She argued that employers’ demands on employees, and the supports they provide, impact not only employees’ health and well-being, but also employees’ families and communities.

An employer may have 100 persons on their payroll, and see only these 100 persons. Yet the scope of their influence expands to the children, partners and elderly parents of those 100 persons. It expands to the communities of those 100 persons. Whether or not employers and managers enable their employees to craft the combinations of work and life that will meet business demands and work for them impacts whether those 100 people will be able to spend time to invest in their children’s future, to care for their partner and loved ones, and to contribute to their communities. Kanter concluded that employers should include a “Family responsibility report” when they prepare their work-life balance and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports.

So Kanter had a vision. One that broadens otherwise narrow individualistic discussions of work-life integration, one that contextualizes work-life integration and carries hope for invisible stakeholders who are rarely centerpiece (for notable exceptions, see Ellen Galinsky’s Ask the Children and Friedman and Greenhaus on “children as the unseen stakeholders at work” in Work and Family — Allies or Enemies?).

Is this vision out of reach for us? I’d like to point to recent discussions I have had with PhD candidates who examine a new breed of organizations that make social responsibility the heart and core of their business strategy, instead of doing what they usually do and having on-the-side CSR initiatives. I would hope that these organizations would understand the scope of their responsibility in a broad way.

I’d also like to point to a paper that as a special issue editor I have just accepted for publication in the European Management Journal (see reference below): this paper by Sharon Lobel discusses poverty alleviation efforts of private sector companies in Brazil. She argues that some companies hold an “in-group CSR” view in which they develop poverty alleviation programs targeted to their employees and immediate stakeholders (e.g. suppliers), whereas other companies embrace a “universalist CSR” view in which they extend their programs to the local communities and beyond. This in my view truly reflects the spirit of Kanter’s vision and leaves me hopeful for the future.

As individuals and as managers, how you view work-life integration, how you view employee loyalty, has the power to change your life – and the life of many visible and invisible stakeholders.

Lobel, S. Forthcoming. Predicting organizational responsiveness to poverty: Exploratory models and application to comparison of Brazil and the United States. European Management Journal, Special Issue National Context in Work-Life Research edited by A. Ollier-Malaterre, M. Valcour, L. den Dulk and E. Kossek.

This post is an invitation to the members of the Wharton Undergraduate Class of 2012 who participated in our study and to anyone else who might be interested in our findings and what they mean for individuals, organizations, and society. Welcome, and please comment.

In our extensive survey of the Class of 2012, we asked questions about career prospects and progression, personal values, family, views on the relationship of work with the rest of life, health and religion, civic engagement, and Wharton. We also asked these questions of the Undergraduate Class of 1992 20 years ago and then again in 2012.

If you are a member of the Class of 2012 and participated in our study you should have received via email a copy of your report by now, with your classmates’ responses to all the questions. We also included what the Undergraduate Class of 1992 said in response to the same questions, back in 1992 and again in 2012. We welcome your comments in response to these questions below or on other reactions and ideas you might have.

• To what did you react most strongly in this report?
• What was most surprising to you?
• What would you like to say to your classmates about what you read?

If you aren’t a member of the Class of 2012, here are two links with information from this study:

• The Table of Contents and selected data from the Class of 2012 Report.
• A brief analysis of some comparisons between the perspectives of the Class of 1992, gathered in 1992, and the Class of 2012, gathered in 2012.

We’ll be posting more on the findings and implications of this research here and in other media in the future, so please subscribe to this Forum for more to come.

You’re invited to share your ideas and questions by commenting here in our Forum.

W/LIP Co-Hosts Slaughter Lecture

Slaughter Talks to Friedman

Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of The Atlantic article that shook the world — “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” — spoke  at Wharton today in the Authors@Wharton series, co-sponsored by the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project and Wharton Women in Business.

An interview with Professor Slaughter was videotaped today for Knowledge@Wharton and her Huntsman Hall talk was also videotaped.  Subscribe to this forum to be alerted when these videos become available.

You are invited to post your ideas, reactions, and questions about Professor Slaughter’s remarks in the Comments section for this post.  Let’s keep the conversation about this important topic going!

Forty years and two generations after the social revolution that opened countless doors for women, “work-life” conflicts remain raw and painful.  As the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project’s research shows, there is an increasing body of knowledge on ways to make our institutions more responsive to the problem.  Innovations like the Total Leadership approach offer excellent tools for creating “four-way wins…at work, at home, in the community, and for the private self.”

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic article — and the storm of reactions to it —reveal a sharp individual longing, alongside the call for systemic change.  Individuals need assistance with the high-wire act of managing their own competing priorities through the life course.  They need models to help them identify meaningful alternative pathways, and evaluate the rewards and risks of each.  They need stories that help them imagine satisfying futures that feel achievable over the long term.

The following excerpts are adapted from one chapter in a study of women’s adult development that I conducted in an effort to respond to these needs.  The study focuses on a generation of women who embarked on careers in large numbers in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a group now old enough to know pretty much how their choices about family, career, and lifestyle have worked out.  Their perspectives and their experience offer valuable lessons for both men and women, at any stage of life.   The full chapter, “Having it all, having too much, having too little: How women manage trade-offs through adulthood” can be accessed as a Yale Working Paper here.  An excerpt follows:

It’s a fine line whether I have it all or everything’s off.  Some days, I feel I’ve really got it all.                       

             — Eileen (pseudonym), Family Business Owner and President, at age 54

What could be more reasonable than to aspire to a good standard of living, meaningful work, and a personal life that includes nurturing relationships with family and friends?  But for women, and increasingly for men, this set of desires is described in unreasonable-sounding terms as “having it all.”  The question so many women ask themselves, “Can I have it all?” implies a need to confront trade-offs:  If I commit deeply to any one choice, what will I have to sacrifice?  If I postpone family to launch my career—or the reverse—what am I risking?  Will I lose my chance to have both?  Exactly how am I going to make this work?  And how am I going to feel, in the long run, about the trade-offs I’m making now?

Such questions were particularly formidable for the corporate executives, artists, social service agency directors, and family business owners interviewed for this study.  Born between 1945 and 1955, their girlhoods were spent in a society which insisted the ideal for women was to marry, have children, and live happily ever after.  They would take jobs if necessary–significant numbers of women have always combined work outside the home with marriage and motherhood—but they would not strive for careers.  Their husbands would devote themselves to succeeding in the work world, while they took care of home and family.  Two (full-time) halves were supposed to make an unassailable whole, and “work-life conflict” was not part of the culture’s vocabulary.  In this world-view, the meaning of “All” was simple.  No woman whose husband provided her with children and a nice home could legitimately question whether she had it.

But the participants in this study embarked on adulthood just as that ideal started to fracture.  Betty Friedan’s revolution-making Feminine Mystique (1963) dared to describe housewives’ “problem with no name”: a longing for more.  The women’s movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 heralded a wave of change that forced doors open—a crack.  A generation of young women were challenged to reconcile traditional responsibilities and taboos with vast new opportunities.  They did not know how or whether they could make it work.  Their task was no less than to re-invent adult womanhood.

As the stories here attest, these women created a wide spectrum of responses to their new choices, and discovered richly satisfying lives in the process.   Because of them and many others like them, our culture has changed profoundly.  Women have amassed decades of experience pursuing careers that were once tightly closed to them.   Men are more involved at home and more concerned about juggling work and family than ever before (see Galinsky et al).  Why, then, are young women and men still asking whether they can have it all?  Why is “How does she do it?” not just a cliché, but a truly urgent question?

This study uses the tools of social science to begin answering that question.  It examines the lives of 40 women from four occupations and a wide range of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.  It shows how they managed the trade-offs of adulthood from late adolescence into their forties and fifties, creating lives that were far richer than their girlhood gender roles ever led them to expect.

Understanding how these women dealt with trade-offs was not easy.  Patterns were initially difficult to see amid all the variation in their lives.  The categories suggested by existing paradigms—whether they put family, career, or both-at-once first—simply did not work.  Moreover, major trade-offs were not confined to work and family.  Other factors, such as lifestyle (i.e. money, preferences about where and how to live), often entered forcefully into the equation.  Looking literally at who did what, in what order, was bafflingly uninformative about how women fared.

Finally, I realized that such “objective” observations were misleading.  Choices that looked the same on the outside held different meanings for different women, meanings that very much influenced how their paths unfolded.  The order within the chaos finally emerged from the women’s descriptions of their subjective experience with trade-offs.  Their personal answers to two questions went to the heart of the matter: “Can I have it all?” and “How have my choices about trade-offs worked out over time?”

In a nutshell, study participants described three divergent and highly consequential answers to the core question, Can I have it all?:

“No, I cannot have it all, but I can have what is most important to me,”

“Yes, I can have it all but not all at once,” and

“Yes I can have it all, by delegating some responsibilities to others.”

Each answer implies a distinct strategy for managing trade-offs, with its own set of requirements for success and its own trajectory over time.  There was no one best way; each answer worked well for some women, into middle age.  For each answer, there were women who made successful changes when it no longer suited them, and some who ended up with regrets.  The study fleshes out the character and internal logic of each answer and strategy, illustrating with case examples in women’s own words.

There are no super-women in these pages.  The findings offer accessible models, and show that although there are no standard or easy formulas, women and men can craft trade-offs that serve them well.

This post is an invitation to the members of the Wharton Undergraduate Class of 1992 who participated in our study and to anyone else who might be interested in our findings and what they mean for individuals, organizations, and society. Welcome, and please comment.

In our extensive survey of the Class of 1992, we asked questions about career prospects and progression, personal values, family, views on the relationship of work with the rest of life, health and religion, civic engagement, and Wharton.  We asked these questions in 1992 and again in 2012.

If you are a member of the Class of 1992 and participated in our study you should have received a copy of your “Personal Time Capsule” by now, with your data and your classmates’, gathered in1992 and in 2012.  We also included what the Class of 2012 said in response to the same questions.  We welcome your comments in response to these questions below or on other reactions and ideas you might have.

• To what did you react most strongly in this report?
• What was most surprising to you?
• What would you like to say to your classmates about what you read?

If you aren’t a member of the Class of 1992, here are two links with information from this study:

• The Table of Contents and selected data from the Personal Time Capsule.
• A brief analysis of some comparisons between the perspectives of the Class of 1992, gathered in 1992, and the Class of 2012, gathered in 2012.

We’ll be posting more on the findings and implications of this research here and in other media in the future, so please subscribe to this Forum for more to come.