an icon showing a delivery van Shulph delivers to United Kingdom.
Book cover for Flexible Work and the Family, a book by AnjaKristin Abendroth, Laura Lkemann Book cover for Flexible Work and the Family, a book by AnjaKristin Abendroth, Laura Lkemann

Flexible Work and the Family

2023 ᛫


Building upon the recent global escalation of the remote work phenomenon, Flexible Work and the Family provides timely insights into flexible work’s implications for the increasingly blurred work-life divide.

Powered by RoundRead®
This book leverages Shulph’s RoundRead system - buy the book once and read it on both physical book and on up to 5 of your personal devices. With RoundRead, you’re 4 times more likely to read this book cover-to-cover and up to 3 times faster.
Buy Book + eBook £112.50
Add to Read List


Instant access to ebook. Print book delivers in 5 - 10 working days.

Summary


National strategies with the aim of facilitating a better work-family balance have increased pressure on work organizations to offer arrangements that are more family-friendly. Flexible work, such as telework or flexitime, has been argued to facilitate a better integration of work and family responsibilities, and to provide protections from career penalties to care. The spread of digital technologies has further facilitated the flexible execution of work tasks, a phenomenon that has escalated more recently due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.


Within this context, where flexible work has become more widespread than ever before, Flexible Work and the Family provides a wide range of insights into current developments in the study of flexible work. Demonstrating both the facilitators and the barriers to a positive work-home environment, chapters delve into the relationship between working from home and family in light of the pandemic, as well as gender, parenthood, and status-specific patterns of the interrelation between flexible work and the family. Finally, studies from a linked-lives perspective show how flexible work impacts employees’ partners and parenting behaviour.


Building upon the recent global escalation of the remote work phenomenon, Flexible Work and the Family provides timely insights into flexible work’s implications for the increasingly blurred work-life divide.

Table of contents

  • Chapter 1. When home becomes workplace: Work-life balance experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic; Samantha Metselaar, Laura den Dulk, and Brenda Vermeeren

  • Chapter 2. Working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Lessons learned about the relationship between flexible work and work−family conflict; Mareike Reimann
  • Chapter 3. Working remotely during the COVID 19-pandemic: work and non-work antecedents of work-life balance development; Liisa Mäkelä, Heini Pensar, Samu Kemppinen, and Hilpi Kangas
  • Chapter 4. Does Telework Mediate the Impact of Occupational Status on Work-to-Family Conflicts? An Investigation of Conditional Effects of Gender and the COVID-19 Pandemic; Antje Schwarz, Ayhan Adams, and Katrin Golsch
  • Chapter 5. Does Working from Home Improve the Temporal Alignment of Work and Private Life? Differences between Telework and Informal Overtime at Home by Gender and Family Responsibilities; Alexandra Mergener, Ines Entgelmeier, and Timothy Rinke
  • Chapter 6. Individual and Cross-Partner Transitions to Flexitime and Teleworking and Cognitive Subjective Well-being; Aneesa F. Qadri
  • Chapter 7. Workplace Flexibility, Work-Family Guilt, and Working Mothers’ Parenting Behavior; Melissa Rector LaGraff and Heidi E. Stolz

About the authors



Anja-Kristin Abendroth is Junior Professor of Technical and Social Change, Bielefeld University, Germany.

Laura Lükemann is Research Associate in the field of social structure analysis, Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany.