För att vara produktiv på sin arbetsplats bör rum för återhämtning finnas där arbete och fritid finner en balans. Denna balans kan vara komplex att finna då krav ställs på individen både på och utanför arbetet och det kan upplevas som ett pussel att få vardagsbitarna att gå ihop. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka upplevelser hos individer i varierande arbetssituationer, hur de uppfattade sin egen balans mellan arbetsliv och fritid samt om det fanns något stöd från arbetsgivare till anställdas fritidsintressen och återhämtning och hur det vidare samverkade med de anställdas prestationer och hälsosituation enligt dem själva. Semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes med fem deltagare och innehållet analyserades med tematisk induktiv analys. Resultatet visade på att återhämtning, motivation och stöd spelade en betydande roll för balans mellan arbete och fritid samt att arbete och fritid hade en samverkan på varandra där förståelse, tillit, respekt, identitet och motivation ansågs ha en inverkan på produktiviteten i arbetet och återhämtning på fritiden. Det diskuterades om arbetstagares vilja att uppfattas som en individ, stressen om att vara tidsflexibel och vikten av stöd på och utanför arbetet i strävan efter en hälsosam situation. Diskussionen berörde även huruvida arbetslivsbalans uppfattades som individuellt och berodde av situation och person. / In order to be productive in the workplace, room for recovery should be made where work and leisure find a balance. This balance can be complex to find when the demands on the individual, both on and off the job are required and it can be experienced as a stressful puzzle to get everyday pieces to go together. The purpose of this study was to examine experiences of  individuals in varying work situations, how they perceived their own balance between work and leisure, and furthermore if it existed support from the employer, related to the employees' leisure activities and recovery and how that in its turn co-existed with employee performance and health status according to themselves. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five participants and the content was analysed through thematic inductive analysis. The result indicated that recovery, motivation and support played a significant role in the balance between work and leisure. It also indicated that work and leisure had an effect on each other where understanding, trust, respect, identity and motivation was considered to have an impact on productivity at work and likewise recovery during leisure hours. The discussion touched the employee's desire to be perceived as an individual, the stress of being time-flexible and the importance of support on and off the job in the pursuit of a healthy situation. The discussion included whether work-life balance was perceived as individual and highlighted that it depended on the unique situation and person.

This thesis focuses on work-life balance policy; one of the key field of EU gender equality policies. The purpose of this study was to analyze most recently proposed policy on work-life balance ‘An initiative to support work-life balance for working parents and carers’ that aims to upgrade existing policy and legal frameworks. The main objective of the study is to identify problem representation(s) of gender equality in the stated policy. The study objectives comprises of problematizing identified problem representation(s) by drawing attention to silences and underplayed issues including its far-reaching implications on various groups. Analysis presented in this thesis is guided by theoretical framework of poststuructural feminism chiefly through discourse analysis methodology. In that endeavor, Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach has been applied for discourse analysis of the policy by employing 3 out 6 postulated questions. The study identifies several problem representations of gender equality in the stated EU reconciliation policy. Among others, childcare responsibility is identified as the most dominant problem representation. Likewise, the study points out silenced issues in the policy. This includes structural challenges affecting accessibility and advancement of women in labour market, the type of work, division of unpaid work besides caring responsibilities, inequalities engendered by intersectional factors, well-being of individuals, family, children, elderly care and commitment from employing organizations. The study finally notes ensuing lived effects on women due to added responsibilities. The study analysis concludes some still present pitfalls in the modernized work-life balance policy.

Denna studie undersöker kvinnliga undersköterskors upplevelser av att kombinera arbetsliv med familjeliv under tiden som de är småbarnsföräldrar. Empirin till studien utgörs av semi-strukturerade intervjuer. Studien har utgått från en fenomenologisk ansats med fokus på att nå respondenternas subjektiva upplevelser kring ämnet. Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkter har tagit fasta på hur samhällets könsnormer och organisationers uppbyggnad påverkar respondenternas upplevelser av att kombinera arbetsliv och familjeliv. Könsnormer är även relevanta utifrån hur fördelningen av det obetalda arbetet i hemmet ser ut och hur de skapar olika förutsättningar av att kombinera förvärvs- och hemarbete. Tillika illustrerar vår studie utifrån krav- och resursmodellen hur respondenterna upplever att de inte har tillräckliga resurser för att möta de krav som ställs från arbetslivet. Studien har även utgått från ett konfliktteoretiskt perspektiv för att kunna beskriva hur undersköterskornas upplevda höga krav från omgivningen skapar konflikter mellan arbete och familjeliv. Resultatet i studien visar att respondenterna upplever svårigheter att kombinera arbetsliv med familjeliv. Obekväma arbetstider blir ett påtagligt problem att kombinera med barnomsorgen.   Därmed blir det sociala stödet de får från sin familj och partner, samt kontroll över arbetstiden centrala faktorer för att respondenterna ska kunna arbeta obekväma arbetstider samtidigt som de är föräldrar. Likaså har ett jämställdhetsperspektiv visat sig vara av betydelse eftersom det skapar olika förutsättningar för undersköterskorna att arbeta samtidigt som de är föräldrar. Män och kvinnor deltar inte på lika villkor i arbetslivet och detta bidrar till att det finns löneskillnader, där män oftast har högre lön. Ekonomin bidrar i sin tur till att det uppstår ojämlikhet då den individ i förhållandet som tjänar minst oftast är den som får ta huvudansvar för barn och hem. Härmed har samhälle och arbetsgivare en betydande roll för hur jämställdheten upprätthålls och vilka förutsättningar som skapas för hur kvinnliga undersköterskor ska kunna kombinera sitt yrke med ett fungerande familjeliv.

The aim of the study was to examine employees' attitudes towards work shifting to the digital space and whether there will still be a need for the physical workplace in the future in relation to the development of information and communication technologies. For this study a survey was conducted to answer the following questions; how is the digital transformation of work affecting the workplace for employees in the Icelandic tech sector, what are the factors that affect the choice of workspace, and how can the choice of office space influence job satisfaction? Literature and theories about workplace development, digitalization, organizational communication and information, and communication technologies were used to gain a broader and deeper knowledge of the field. The study shows that it is likely that there are still some changes to take place in today's workplaces and that increased flexibility is one of those changes as 94.9% of participants in this research thought flexibility was an important feature for the organization to possess to be an attractive workplace. Face-to-face communication is more effective and there is still a need for the physical workplace according to the participants of this study. It is essential for organizations today to stay attractive and become more attractive in the eyes of current and future employees. The workplace needs to be a place where employees feel good and where they prefer to work so that face-to-face communication and relationships between co-workers and managers does not only take place in the digital environment. A balance between the physical and virtual office space needs to be the focus for organizations in the coming years. Subsequently, the results were compared with the theories and previous studies.

Genom digitaliseringen har fler och fler arbetsplatser implementerat någon form av arbetsflexibilitet, dels för att till exempel effektivisera verksamheten och dels för att många människor önskar en större flexibilitet i sitt arbete. Men vad händer egentligen med medarbetarskapet, alltså relationen individen har till sig själv, sitt arbete och sina medarbetare, när en arbetsplats har stor flexibilitet och många kollegor till exempel arbetar hemifrån. En individs balans mellan arbete och fritid påverkas även av möjligheterna att arbeta vart som helst, när som helst. Denna kvalitativa studie har undersökt och studerat två olika enheter i samma organisation. För att få en förståelse för hur arbetsflexibiliteten påverkar medarbetarnas upplevelse av medarbetarskapet har en enhet med flexibilitet och en enhet utan flexibilitet studerats. Vidare syftar studien även till att bidra till en större förståelse för hur dessa medarbetare upplever balans mellan arbete och privatliv. Studiens datainsamling bygger på semistrukturerade intervjuer med två enhetschefer och fem medarbetare. Fortsättningsvis har empirin analyserats och huvudsakligen har tre teman identifierats; engagemang och meningsfullhet, samarbete och gemenskap samt balans mellan arbete och fritid. Några av de främsta slutsatserna som framkommit genom studien var att enheten med mindre flexibilitet har ett betydligt starkare medarbetarskap än den enhet med hög arbetsflexibilitet. Slutsatsen visar även att skapas det en obalans av att ständigt vara tillgänglig för att svara på arbetsrelaterade frågor, vilket i sin tur påverkar privatlivet negativt. Studien framför även de vetenskapliga bidraget som gjorts och förslagen som finns till framtida studier. / Through digitization, more and more workplaces have implemented some form of work flexibility, partly to make the organization more efficient and partly because many people want a better flexibility in their work. But what really happens to the employeeship, the relationship the individual has to himself, his work and his employees, when a workplace has great flexibility and many colleagues, for example, work from home. An individual's balance between work and private life is also affected by the opportunities to work anywhere, anytime. This qualitative study has examined and studied two different units in the same organization. In order to gain an understanding of how work flexibility affects the employee’s experience of employeeship, a unit with flexibility and a unit without flexibility has been studied. Furthermore, the study aims to contribute to a greater understanding of these employees experience balance between work and private life. The study’s data collection is based on semi-structured interviews with two unit managers and five employees. The empirics have been analyzed and three themes have been identified; commitment and meaningfulness, cooperation and community and balance between work and private life. Some of the main conclusions that emerged from the study were that the unit with less flexibility has a significantly stronger employeeship than the unit with high work flexibility. The conclusion also shows that creating an imbalance of being constantly available to respond to work-related issues, which in turn negatively affects private life. The study also includes the scientific contributions that have been made and the proposals for future studies.

Med allt fler individer tillhörande generation Y på arbetsmarknaden så är det centralt för organisationer att få kunskap gällande hur de ska attrahera och motivera dessa individer. Syftet med denna studie är att få en djupare förståelse för vad individer tillhörande generation Y värderar i relation till arbetsrelaterade frågor. Utifrån tidigare forskning definieras arbetsrelaterade frågor utifrån teman som ledarskap, feedback och work-life balance/flexibilitet. För att undersöka detta så genomfördes en kvalitativ studie bestående av semistrukturerade intervjuer med sju individer födda inom åldersspannet för generation Y (1981-2000). Samtliga intervjupersoner är födda och bosatta i Stockholmsområdet och har eller är i slutfasen av en eftergymnasial utbildning. Resultatet visar att de intervjuade ur generation Y är måna om att ständigt utvecklas och ha en god balans mellan arbete och fritid. Detta leder till att de har stora krav på sina chefer gällande att få regelbunden feedback. Generationsbegreppet har kritiserats för att vara komplext och starkt sammankopplat med sociala livshändelser, somliga menar dessutom att det är ålder och erfarenhet som utgör den huvudsakliga skillnaden mellan generationer. Oavsett om generationsskillnader existerar eller inte så är det viktigt att förstå hur unga individer fungerar idag och inom den närmsta framtiden för att organisationer ska kunna attrahera och motivera dessa. Bland studiens intervjupersoner anser dock alla att generationsskillnader i hög grad existerar vilket bland annat uppenbarar sig på olika sätt på deras arbetsplatser. Uppsatsen diskuterar även kring den utmaning som ställs på organisationer vad gäller att hålla generation Y motiverad. Det kan ses som en krävande generation för dagens chefer men både utifrån tidigare forskning och denna studies resultat så tycks generationen bestå av individer med högt arbetsengagemang.

Raising children and taking care of family members, while maintaining a job, and without compromising on economic security, career progression or one’s health and wellbeing, is a difficult task anywhere. In the United States, it comes with a set of additional challenges because of a complete absence or limited reach of supporting work-family policies – policies that are designed specifically to help people manage and reconcile their roles as workers and parents or caregivers – such as paid and job-protected parental leave, publicly provided or subsidized child care, rights to request workplace flexibility or part time work and paid leave to attend to ill or disabled family members. Consequently, workers in the US rely heavily on employer generosity, informal family support, and a patchwork of provisions available from various levels of government and with varying degrees of restrictive eligibility criteria. Researchers have repeatedly pointed to the important role of this duality – major changes in women’s work and family roles against a system of unresponsive social policies – in explaining important markers of women’s progress or paradoxes therein, such as a plateauing of labor force participation rates even as they continued to grow in comparable labor markets, existence of a comparatively higher wage penalty for having children compared to other high income countries and declining subjective wellbeing over a period that saw increasing economic empowerment for women as well as a shift in women’s relationship with employment, with more and more of them considering work to be a fundamental aspect of life satisfaction. In my dissertation, I build on these lines of enquiry to study how such substantial changes in work and family lives, juxtaposed against a comparatively stagnant system of supportive work-family policies, translate into mothers’ performance in the US labor market as well as their subjective wellbeing by family and employment status and what, if any, is the effect of small but important state level policy shifts. The dissertation consists of three related empirical papers. In Paper 1 (co-authored with Prof. Jane Waldfogel), we examine changes in the family wage gap –the difference in hourly wages between women with children and women without children –over 1977-2007. We use data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplements and adjust for selection into motherhood, by estimating ordinary least square models and employing augmented inverse probability of treatment weighting, and adjust for employment using Heckman selection correction. We find evidence of a significant decline in the motherhood wage penalty but only for married mothers. Overall however, there is a persistent 5-8% significant penalty to motherhood in both 1977 and 2007. While Paper 1 sheds light on mothers’ relative economic well-being compared to non-mothers, the results may not provide much information on their overall quality of life, particularly when the policy environment offers few choices for combining work and family. In Paper 2 therefore, I examine patterns in women’s subjective wellbeing by family and employment status. I replicate least squares regression models from key prior studies using new data – the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System annual surveys from 2005 to 2010 and the American Time Use Survey’s Well Being modules, 2012 and 2013 – and additionally estimate inverse probability of treatment weighted models, to adjust for selection. I find evidence of a positive association of being a parent with subjective wellbeing as well as a positive association of being employed with subjective wellbeing. Confirming prior research, I also find no evidence of the combination of these relationships translating into a “double bonus” for wellbeing and instead find a penalty to being an employed parent. In more detailed analysis of specific work and family categories, I further find that women who are working but not raising families and women who are raising families but not working, tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction on average than women who are doing both. These results further point to the challenges of negotiating work and family responsibilities in the present policy environment. While work-family reconciliation policies overall have not caught up to the changing demands of the family and the workplace in the US, a handful of states (California in 2004, New Jersey in 2009, Rhode Island in 2014 and New York, expected from 2018) have made important strides in that regard by implementing paid family leave insurance programs (PFL) – provisions that ensure benefit payments when parents take leave from work on account of childbirth, thereby making the leave more accessible. These policy changes motivate the focus of paper 3 where I examine the effects of New Jersey’s 2009 policy change on women’s subjective wellbeing. Using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) annual surveys and random child selection modules from 2005 to 2012, I identify potentially eligible mothers from individual level variation in month-year of child’s birth and state level variation in parental leave policies, and employ a difference in difference research design. Along with overall life evaluation, I also look at multiple self-reported indicators of wellbeing, such as self-rated general health, physical health, stress, depression and emotional wellbeing and whether adequate social and emotional support is available. I find no evidence of a significant effect of the 2009 policy change in New Jersey on women’s subjective wellbeing overall, but strong evidence of improvements in women’s physical health. I further find variation in effects in subgroup analyses, with significant positive effects on the life satisfaction of employed single mothers and women from lower-middle income families, as well as significant improvements in the experience of stress, depression and emotional wellbeing for groups with such relative socio-economic disadvantages. The dissertation thus explores how the changing nature of work and family lives, juxtaposed against a comparatively stagnant system of supportive work-family policies, affect the quality of women’s lives in the United States, using both standard measures such as wages and newer measures such as subjective wellbeing, and by directly examining how small but important state level policy shifts affect women’s wellbeing. Results highlight the importance of work-family reconciliation in women’s wellbeing in every socio-economic and demographic subgroup, but indicate that the nature of the problem may not be the same everywhere, drawing attention to the need for tailored interventions and policies and cautioning against exclusive reliance on either objective or subjective measures of wellbeing to monitor social progress and evaluate social policies.

AtkinsonThis study explores Work Life Balance (WLB) in two Palestinian organisations. It argues that the nature and content of WLB policies and the reasons for their adoption in many Arabic organisations differ from those in Western organisations. Additionally, research is under-developed concerning the role of line managers in interpreting access to WLB practices, and to what extent such WLB practices are accessed and utilised by individuals. Based on a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews with 49 employees and managers, this study shows that WLB policies involve, particularly for female employees, mainly family support, and financial, social, and religious benefits. These reflect cultural and religious characteristics of an Arab, Islamic country. In addition to identifying the role of government, and the needs of a female workforce, this study develops a new theoretical framework explaining the role of religious and cultural variables, as well as international networking of the organisations, as factors underlying adoption of WLB policies. Line managers often used Wasta, being the political and religious origin of individuals as criteria in granting benefits to individuals. WLB practices are useful for women, but males made less use of these practices, preferring strong ‘breadwinner Arabic cultural norms. A valuable contribution in understanding the extension of WLB policies in Arabic settings is offered, as well as cultural, social and religious reasons for their implementation. The study presents a theoretical model of the adoption and application of WLB policies which can be used in further crosscultural research.

This study explores Working from Home (WFH) as a model of work in a public organisation in London, which operates in the clinical-trials sector. It argues that WFH is used as a strategy that offers benefits both to the organisation and its employees. WFH is offered to all Clinical Research Associates (CRAs) who work as monitors of the whole process of a clinical trial. Based on a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews of 29 CRAs, managers and administrative staff and secondary data, this single-case study focuses on five topics that are part of the CRAs’ everyday life. These are work-life balance (WLB), cost reduction, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) factor, the performance of the CRAs and the management of remote workers. In particular, the study identified that WFH had a positive effect on CRAs’ WLB. Moreover, it argues that WFH may offer significant assistance to organisational budgets and may reduce personal expenses. It found that existing ICT could cover all employees’ technological needs and reduce the requirement of managers to keep them physically present at a centralised workplace. Additionally, this thesis also identified that WFH improved CRAs’ performance, whilst it also highlighted that results-oriented management was the main managerial approach towards employees who work from a distance. The key contribution of the thesis is the examination of the CRA occupation through a contemporary perspective on the WFH phenomenon.

This volume, developed from the public forum What Do Mothers Need? and hosted by the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (mirci) in 2011, examines what mothers need in twenty-first century North American society in order to adequately care for their children while living full and purposeful lives. The contributors to the volume include representatives from various motherhood organizations Ontario/Canadian Native Women s Association, Hip Mama, National Excerpt: Association of Mother Centres, Mothers & More, Mocha Moms, Welfare Warriors as well as the leading motherhood scholars including Paula Caplan, Amber Kinser, Barbara Katz Rothman, Pamela Stone, and Judith Warner. The twenty-six chapters, organized into six sections Redefining Motherhood, Empowering Mothers, Mothers, Children and Families: Health and Well-Being, Mothers, Education and Social Change, Mothers, Partners and Parenting, and Mothers and Work explore what changes are needed in public/social policy, health, education, the workplace, maternal support/advocacy, and the family in order to afford full and lasting gender equity for mothers in the twenty-first century.