This article explores how employers portray themselves as supporters of work—life balance (WLB) in texts found on 24 websites of 10 different companies. With a theoretical framework based on a critical reflection on strategic HRM, feminist studies of organizational culture and hegemonic power processes, we examine implicit and explicit messages of work, life, and WLB support. We study the cultural norms that can be distilled from these articulations, including the concepts of the ideal worker and the ideal parent and discuss the possible (unintended) effects of the implicit and explicit messages. Our analysis shows the ambiguity of the different messages conveyed on WLB support. In contrast to the explicit supportive messages, implicit messages present WLB-arrangements as a privilege. The majority of websites reproduce traditional cultural norms regarding ideal workers and parents and the power of hegemony is not broken. Apparently, WLB support does not always signify support.
2005, 275 pp., £40.70First, given the apparent benefits of national coordination in wage setting, why is it so rare? Second, why might some countries move away from such systems? Those are the key questions posed by the author in Rationality at Work: Logics of Collective Action in the Labor Market. Doralt takes a micro-foundationalist view of the underpinnings of collective wage bargaining: adopting the economic doctrine that macro-level phenomena are determined by the behaviour of individual agents.The book contends that two 'rationalities' are at play. The first of these, as the title of the book suggests, is an Olsonian view of rational choice. Olson's logic suggests that groups of rational, self-interested members will fail to achieve their common interest, unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless coercion or some other selective incentive induces them to do so. Applied to the issue of the emergence of national wage-setting institutions, the author argues that such arrangements will not arise without compulsion. The second rationality, 'self-reinforcing effects', implies that if an 'event' takes place in a social system, it increases the likelihood that it will happen again; as in winner/loser effects in a competitive setting. Thus, the emergence of wage-bargaining arrangements may be triggered by a small number of highly interested individuals who will bear heavier costs than later contributors in terms of initiating, organising and succeeding with collective action. Increasing returns to scale may lead to 'critical mass' effects and to the development of large social movements.The book comprises five substantive chapters that move from a detailed consideration of these two 'rationalities' through the centralisation of wage setting, the actors in collective bargaining and the evolution of centralised bargaining systems in a selection of European countries. The author concludes that policy makers 'should resist the temptation of trying to re-invent the whole system, to which firms, workers and their representatives have adjusted over long periods of time' (p. 244). Put differently, attempts to establish national systems of coordination in wage setting or to engineer their dismantling may prove counter-productive as labour market institutions are inherently path-dependent.For Doralt, rationality constrains collective organisation and action, whereas selfreinforcement promotes the same. These two 'rationalities', which are ontologically and epistemologically discrete, are collapsed into nation-specific, historical and political economy contingencies, and employed to illustrate and explain variation in the extent of centralisation and the macroeconomic performance of different countries over time.
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