Interest in researching flexible working arrangements has been growing as such practices have been heralded as the way to reconcile or balance the increased pressures of work and family life. Relatively little attention has been paid to the experiences of flexible working arrangements in small and medium sized enterprises. We report the findings of empirical work on ten small and medium-sized enterprises and four larger organizations. The reasons for introducing particular flexible working arrangements in SMEs were explored. Our findings show that business case reasons were used when introducing flexible working arrangements in both SMEs and larger organizations, although in different ways. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2001.

Pressures on work-life balance have grown in modern British society. Concern mounted in the 1990s as more strains arose from job insecurity, work intensification, marital breakdown, a large increase in lone parenting, and demands for parents to be more involved in their children's education (Burchell et al., 2002;Dex, 1999). Employee absence was costed at £4 billion per year by the Department of Trade and Industry, and employee stress and turnover were also recognized as large business and social costs (DTI, 2000). In 1997 the newly elected Labour government started to formulate family policies to cope with these problems, one being encouragement to employers to adopt more flexible working arrangements. The Work-Life Balance Challenge Fund (DfEE, 2000) offered employers money for consultancy costs to cover plans to introduce flexible arrangements. Britain also adopted the EU Working Hours Directive from 1998, limiting weekly hours to 48, although a large proportion of employees were allowed to opt out. However, it is not clear what measures of success for these interventions should be applied. Work-life balance should provide one criterion, indicating in turn a set of appropriate measures.In the next section we summarize the work-life balance literature at the turn of the 21st century. The report of field research that follows it describes a checklist measure for employees' work-life balance, analyses data collected using this instrument from a selection of employees in eight organizations, and draws clear conclusions from the analysis. Work-life balance literatureEmployers' work-life policies have been researched using many methods; for example, (a) large-scale nationally representative sample surveys to document 627 Work, employment and society

"In this paper we make use of the panel aspects of the German GSOEP, the Swedish HUS and the British BHPS data...[to analyze] labor force transitions triggered by child births of different birth orders.... We find that German and British women have even higher full-time labor force participation than Swedish women 12 months before the birth of the first child. The difference is more pronounced for second and third births than for first births. We suggest that these differences are caused by different family policy regimes where Germany can be characterized as a breadwinner regime and Sweden a regime oriented towards equal role sharing of father and mother. Our results on determinants of being in the labor force both after and before the birth of a child as well as determinants of the tempo of entering the labor force after birth show that women's own human capital is important both in Germany and Great Britain, whereas in Sweden also less educated women have entered the labor force by the time the child is 2 years old."

The dynamics of women's labour supply are examined at a crucial stage of their lifecycle. This paper uses the longitudinal employment history records for the 3,898 33‐year‐old mothers in the Fifth Sweep of the 1958 National Child Development Study cohort in the United Kingdom. Models of binary recurrent events are estimated, which correct for unobserved heterogeneity, using SABRE software. These focus on women's first transition to employment after the first childbirth, and on the monthly transitions from first childbirth until censoring at the interview. Evidence of a polarization is found between highly educated, high‐wage mothers and lower‐educated, low‐wage mothers.

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