In the second decade of the 21st century, research on work and family from multiple disciplines flourished. The goal of this review is to capture the scope of this work–family literature and to ...highlight both the valuable advances and problematic omissions. In synthesizing this literature, the authors show that numerous scholars conducted studies and refined theories that addressed gender, but far fewer examined racial and class heterogeneity. They argue that examining heterogeneity changes the understanding of work–family relations. After briefly introducing the broad social, political, and economic context in which diverse work–family connections developed, this review uses this context to address the following three main themes, each with subtopics: (a) unpaid work including housework, parenting as work, and kin work; (b) paid work including work timing and hours, money (i.e., motherhood penalty, fatherhood bonus, marriage bonus, kin care penalty), relationships (i.e., coworkers, supervisors), and work experiences (i.e., complexity, autonomy, urgency); and (c) work–family policies (i.e., scheduling and child care). Given the breadth of the work–family literature, this review is not exhaustive but, rather, the authors synthesize key findings on each topic followed by a critique, especially with regard to the analyses of differences and inequalities around gender, race, ethnicity, and social class.
Unequal Time Clawson, Dan; Gerstel, Naomi
07/2014
eBook
Life is unpredictable. Control over one's time is a crucial resource for managing that unpredictability, keeping a job, and raising a family. But the ability to control one's time, much like one's ...income, is determined to a significant degree by both gender and class. InUnequal Time, sociologists Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel explore the ways in which social inequalities permeate the workplace, shaping employees' capacities to determine both their work schedules and home lives, and exacerbating differences between men and women, and the economically privileged and disadvantaged.
Unequal Timeinvestigates the interconnected schedules of four occupations in the health sector-professional-class doctors and nurses, and working-class EMTs and nursing assistants. While doctors and EMTs are predominantly men, nurses and nursing assistants are overwhelmingly women. In all four occupations, workers routinely confront schedule uncertainty, or unexpected events that interrupt, reduce, or extend work hours. Yet, Clawson and Gerstel show that members of these four occupations experience the effects of schedule uncertainty in very distinct ways, depending on both gender and class. But doctors, who are professional-class and largely male, have significant control over their schedules and tend to work long hours because they earn respect from their peers for doing so. By contrast, nursing assistants, who are primarily female and working-class, work demanding hours because they are most likely to be penalized for taking time off, no matter how valid the reasons.
Unequal Timealso shows that the degree of control that workers hold over their schedules can either reinforce or challenge conventional gender roles. Male doctors frequently work overtime and rely heavily on their wives and domestic workers to care for their families. Female nurses are more likely to handle the bulk of their family responsibilities, and use the control they have over their work schedules in order to dedicate more time to home life. Surprisingly, Clawson and Gerstel find that in the working class occupations, workers frequently undermine traditional gender roles, with male EMTs taking significant time from work for child care and women nursing assistants working extra hours to financially support their children and other relatives. Employers often underscore these disparities by allowing their upper-tier workers (doctors and nurses) the flexibility that enables their gender roles at home, including, for example, reshaping their workplaces in order to accommodate female nurses' family obligations. Low-wage workers, on the other hand, are pressured to put their jobs before the unpredictable events they might face outside of work.
Though we tend to consider personal and work scheduling an individual affair, Clawson and Gerstel present a provocative new case that time in the workplace also collective. A valuable resource for workers' advocates and policymakers alike,Unequal Timeexposes how social inequalities reverberate through a web of interconnected professional relationships and schedules, significantly shaping the lives of workers and their families.
This article addresses two central debates in the scholarship on black families: the disorganization versus superorganization debate and the culture versus structure debate. Focusing on kin support ...as a measure of family integration and using the National Survey of Families and Households (1992-1994), this article challenges the assumptions about black and white families in both debates. It shows that blacks and whites have different patterns of kin support involvement. Whereas blacks are more involved in practical support (help with transportation, household work, and child care), whites report greater involvement in financial and emotional kin support This article also shows that gender is crucial for understanding racial differences. Black men and white men are very much alike, whereas there are many significant differences between black women and white women. Furthermore, in understanding kin support, diversity within racial groups appears to matter more than race itself. Social structure explains most of the racial differences in kin support, though cultural differences between whites and blacks do exist and help to explain kin support.
An extensive and long-standing literature examines the amount of time people spend on their jobs and families. A newer literature, including this review, takes that older literature as background and ...focuses on the social processes that shape our schedules: how we manage our time, accepting, negotiating, or contesting our shifting obligations and commitments. Research shows that time management is increasingly complex because unpredictable schedules are pervasive, and that gender, class, and race inequalities influence our ability to manage and control them. That lack of control and the unpredictability that accompanies it not only affect individual workers but also spread. A change in one person's schedule reverberates across a set of linked others in what we call a web of time. This review surveys and integrates research on hours and schedules of both jobs and families and concludes with attention to the policies that seek to address these issues.
This article addresses a debate about the relationship of singlehood and informal ties—singlehood as isolating versus integrative—and evaluates structural explanations for this relationship, focusing ...on life course characteristics and socioeconomic resources. Using the National Survey of Families and Households (1992–1994) and the General Social Survey (2000, 2004, 2006, 2012), we examine ties to relatives, neighbors, and friends among U.S. adults. We find that single individuals are more likely to frequently stay in touch with, provide help to, and receive help from parents, siblings, neighbors, and friends than the married. These differences between the single and the married are more prominent for the never married than for the previously married, suggesting that marriage extends its reach after it ends. Being single increases the social connections of both women and men. Overall, much of the positive relationship between singlehood and social ties remains even when we take into account structural explanations. We conclude that instead of promoting marriage, policy should acknowledge the social constraints associated with marriage and recognize that single individuals have greater involvement with the broader community.
Using a survey, interviews, and observations, the authors examine inequality in temporal flexibility at home and at work. They focus on four occupations to show that class advantage is deployed in ...the service of gendered notions of temporal flexibility while class disadvantage makes it difficult to obtain such flexibility. The class advantage of female nurses and male doctors enables them to obtain flexibility in their work hours; they use that flexibility in gendered ways: nurses to prioritize family and physicians to prioritize careers. Female nursing assistants and male emergency medical technicians can obtain little employee-based flexibility and, as a result, have more difficulty meeting conventional gendered expectations. Advantaged occupations "do gender" in conventional ways while disadvantaged occupations "undo gender." These processes operate through organizational rules and cultural schemas that sustain one another but may undermine the gender and class neutrality of family-friendly policies.
Although a focus on marriage and the nuclear family characterizes much sociological research and social commentary, this article suggests that this focus ignores the familial experiences of many ...Americans, particularly those on the lower end of the economic spectrum for whom extended kin are central. African Americans and Latinos/as are more involved with kin than whites, but class trumps race in this regard: African Americans, Latinos/as, and whites with fewer economic resources rely more on extended kin than do those more affluent. The emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family may actually promulgate a vision of family life that dismisses the very social resources and community ties that are critical to the survival strategies of those in need. In contrast to those who have argued that marriage is the foundation of the community or even, in that overused phrase, the "basic unit of society," this article suggests that marriage actually detracts from social ties to broader communities just as an emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family, to the exclusion of the extended family, distorts and reduces the power and reach of social policy.
Although some emphasize the integrative character of marriage, others argue that marriage undermines relations with extended kin, including aging parents. Utilizing NSFH data (N = 6,108), we find ...that married women and men have less intense intergenerational ties than the never married and the divorced: The married are less likely to live with parents, stay in touch, and give or receive emotional, financial, and practical help. These differences hold even when we control for structural characteristics, including time demands, needs and resources, and demographic and extended family characteristics. We conclude that marriage is a greedy institution for both women and men. Given the inadequacy of structural explanations, we suggest that cultural explanations for this greediness should be explored.
Using a multimethod approach (including a survey, interviews, and observations), this article examines the link between class and masculinities by comparing the way two groups—professional men ...(physicians) and working-class men (emergency medical technicians, or EMTs)—practice fatherhood. First, the authors show that these two groups practice different types of masculinity as they engage in different kinds of fatherhood. Physicians emphasize "public fatherhood," which entails attendance at public events but little involvement in the daily care of their children. In contrast, EMTs are not only involved in their children's public events but also emphasize "private fatherhood," which entails involvement in their daily care. Second, the authors suggest that these differing types of involvement can be explained by the contrasting employment conditions of each group as well the gender order of their families, especially the divergent labor market positions of spouses and the division of parenting. The authors conclude by arguing that these working-class fathers are "undoing gender" while professional fathers reproduce the conventional gender order.
Although many recognize that families shape the likelihood of getting into college, few examine variation in families’ involvement during college or its implications for sustaining inequalities. ...Using interviews with 51 Black and 61 Asian American college students, our analysis reveals that class and race jointly shape students’ perceptions of the financial assistance that they receive from and give to family—whether in the short term (during college) or their plans for the long term (post-college). Advantaged students across race receive more and provide less assistance than disadvantaged students. Both disadvantaged Black and Asian American students share future intentions of support, but only disadvantaged Black students give their families money during college. Race and class affect students’ framing of family and designation of the particular family members (whether parents, siblings, extended kin, or fictive kin) included in these exchanges. Lastly, we analyze the ways these different forms of assistance shape students’ college struggles; Black students experience the most strain due to their working and giving back during college. Drawing on and developing theories addressing the models and practices of familial diversity, this paper shows how class and race intersect to shape family assistance and its consequences for the persistence of inequality.
PDF
