The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.
Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).
INTRODUCTION
Organizational structures are commonly neglected in the analysis of work-life balance opportunities (with important exceptions, such as Lambert, Waxman, & Haley-Lock, 2002). These factors, often in the background, interact with the more typically identified factors such as attributes of individual workers and the work-life policies and strategies adopted by a firm and its managers. Our ongoing research examines the interrelationship among structural changes in industries and firms, managerial strategy, and jobs. We focus on internal labor markets and implications for the quality of jobs, particularly the changes in lower-skill and lower-wage jobs, and for opportunity or mobility. In this chapter, we extend that framework to consider implications for work-life integration opportunities as well.
Our Analytical Framework
A key element in the structure of "work-life opportunities," as Lambert and Haley-Lock (2004) put it, is workplace flexibility. We consider two elements of flexibility: schedule flexibility and career flexibility. Flexibility can be employer-driven or employee-driven. In the arena of schedule flexibility, for instance, employers who are capricious in their flexibility requests of employees mark the extreme of employer-driven flexibility; Lambert, Waxman, and Haley-Lock (2002) suggest the term instability rather than flexibility to describe this situation. At the other extreme are employees who come and go without making an effort to notify supervisors or to try to cover their shifts. It is certainly possible to combine employer- and employee-driven flexibility, asin the case of employees who need flexibility to respond to their life events and family and who will work cooperatively with supervisors and other workers to maintain staffing, and employers who have work practices that allow flexibility within the constraints of maintaining needed-staffing levels. Similarly, where career tracks are concerned, in some cases the employee must do all the adapting: Companies demand geographic relocation and total devotion to the company as a condition of upward mobility, or they simply offer no avenues for promotion within the company, requiring the employee to rely on his or her own devices to move up. But in other cases, businesses accommodate employees' needs for stability and/ or flexibility.
Our study tracks how the organizational structure of opportunities and constraints shapes these aspects of flexibility in case studies of 36 firms in four industries: electronics manufacturing, food service, financial services, and retail sales. Our theoretical perspective is that work-life outcomes emerge through a recursive process among various factors including organizational structure, trends in the broader industry and the economy as a whole, managerial strategy, and worker preferences. Contrary to frequent argument, a single factor such as technology or managerial dictates does not determine work-life outcomes, nor are work-life outcomes fixed at a single point. We focus not only on the managerial strategy as originally conceptualized but also on how it evolves during and following implementation (interacting recursively with the environment, often yielding unintended consequences). Our perspective challenges a rational-choice view that policies and practices are the outcome of planned, strategic initiatives that reflect corporate decision making in a straightforward or deterministic manner. Akin to bounded rationality theories (Simon, 1976), we propose that decision makers do not consider all possible options, and furthermore, we propose that even the bounded rational choices that are made in constructing strategy will be transformed through the process of implementation (Weick, 1995; Ortmann & Salzman, 2002). Moreover, there is variation in outcome, within and between firms. Firms, and even sites within firms, can pursue disparate strategies for long periods of time, even when operating under similar
environmental conditions (e.g., in the same markets). Practice may diverge from official policy.
From at least the 1930s, most large U.S. businesses have organized work in internal labor markets: long-term jobs with predictable wage progressions and opportunities for upward mobility. During the 1990s, much analysis of corporate restructuring depicted the dissolution of such internal labor markets and of workplace commitment in general (Cappelli, 2001). The outcome was thought to be a nomadic workforce that moved from firm to firm, changing career, skills, and employment conditions every few years. In this scenario, accommodation of work-life issues are mediated by the market and presumable outcomes depend on whether it is a seller's or buyer's market at any given time. In earlier work based on case studies that overlap with the ones reported on here, we questioned these commonplace sweeping assertions of the decline of internal labor markets (Moss, Salzman, & Tilly, 2000, 2002). We found, consistent with our theoretical suppositions, that corporate restructuring is highly iterative, consisting of a long series of large reorganizations and small adjustments rather than a small number of decisive changes. Moreover, although businesses did replace long-standing internal labor markets with more market-mediated relationships, they subsequently rebuilt internal labor markets in a variety of ways. We replicate these findings, based on a larger sample of firms, in this chapter.
The implications for work-life integration are mixed. Given the current balance of forces between businesses and workers in the United States, it is not surprising that we find employer-driven flexibility predominated in the 1990s, at the expense of employee-driven flexibility. Consonant with this business domination of the terrain of flexibility, we also find that shifts in either kind of flexibility are, for the most part, incidental to firms' pursuit of other goals. However, in our sample, businesses are about as likely to move in the direction of flexibility that benefits workers as in the opposite direction. Recent restructuring has neither broadly expanded nor radically narrowed workers' degree of choice or control over flexibility. In a more global view, it could be argued that by providing service outside of standard work hours, firms require some workers to sacrifice standard or predictable work schedules to provide flexibility, or at least convenience, to other workers in their lives as consumers.
Focus and Outline of the Chapter
Out of the many possible directions of restructuring, we focus on two: outsourcing of functions from the firm and the creation of remote facilities—in particular, call centers. Most of our case studies center on large, leading-edge firms. We supplement these core firm case studies with studies of suppliers to selected core firms and, in a few cases, to smaller competitors. Our sample may not represent the full spectrum of current corporate practice but it represents both emerging trends in core firms that are likely to be emulated and some of the variation within our chosen industries.
Our research focus is on restructuring and, in particular, on the path and process of restructuring over time. In our discussion, however, we have embedded business restructuring strategy as one element in a broader analytical framework. In this framework, we look at the impact of two more static structural factors: industry and occupation. We also examine labor supply, which in reality interacts with business strategy in fairly elaborate ways, but we largely limit our attention to the point-in-time effects of differences in labor supply. The idea of the broader framework is both to verify and begin to explore the importance of these other structural dimensions and to peel them back or control for them in order to demonstrate that restructuring has an independent effect on work-life balance.
In what follows, we start by presenting our methods and sample. We then report first on schedule flexibility outcomes and then on career flexibility; in each case we march through differences by industry and occupation, labor supply effects, and finally the iterative pathways of corporate and managerial strategy. Our goal is to contribute to work-life integration research by examining the
changing nature of the stage (organizational structure and strategy) on which specific, firm-level policies and practices about work-life integration are developed and by examining the new job structures as they affect work-life integration.
Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).
Latest Research
Browse by Topic:
PDF
Printer-friendly summary
