This paper draws on the capabilities approach as a framework for examining the impact of the global economic crisis and austerity on quality of working life and work-life balance. Our paper focuses on Greece, an extreme case of a country in economic crisis, characterized by a weak institutional basis. We build on the work of Barbara Hobson and colleagues who first applied the capabilities approach to explore work-life balance capabilities. Our study contributes to the development of theory by emphasizing the sense of entitlement concept within the capabilities approach and by proposing a modified conceptual framework that encapsulates the link between capabilities, agency, and the sense of entitlement, where the latter acts as a cognitive 'filter' that enhances or weakens an individual's perception of her/his agency to enact on her/his capabilities. Drawing on the accounts of twenty Greek professional and managerial workers, we illustrate how the crisis and austerity measures have eroded working conditions and thus the sense of entitlement, leading to the weakening of our participants' agency and capabilities to achieve quality of working life and work-life balance.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the work-life (WL) experiences of live-in women migrant domestic workers (MDWs), who represent a significant proportion of migrant workers globally. MDWs play a key role in enabling the work-life balance (WLB) of others, namely the middle-class households that employ them. Yet, their experiences have largely been invisible in mainstream WL literature. The authors draw on an intersectional approach to frame the WL experiences of this marginalized group of women at the intersection of being secondary labour segment workers, with significant legal and employment restrictions as migrant workers, who work and live in the same place as their employers. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative interviews were conducted with 13 women MDWs from Indonesia and the Philippines working in Malaysia. The women talked about the meaning of work as MDWs, how they maintain familial connections whilst working abroad, and how they negotiate their WLB as live-in workers. Thematic analysis of the interviews focused on the intersection of the women’s multiple dimensions of disadvantage, including gender, class and temporary migrant-foreigner status, in shaping their accounts of the WL interface. Findings Three thematic narratives highlight that any semblance of WLB in the MDWs’ lived experience has given way to the needs of their employers and to the imperative to earn an income for their families back home. The themes are: working as MDWs enables the women and their families back home to have a life; the co-existence of WL boundary segmentation and integration in relation to “real” and “temporary” families; and the notion of WLB being centred around the women’s ability to fulfil their multiple duties as MDWs and absent mothers/sisters/daughters. Research limitations/implications The study is based on a small sample of live-in women MDWs in Malaysia, intended to promote typically excluded voices and not to provide generalizable findings. Accessing potential participants was a considerable challenge, given the vulnerable positions of women MDWs and the invisible nature of their work. Practical implications Future research should adopt a multi-stakeholder approach to studying the WL experiences of women MDWs. In particular, links with non-governmental organizations who work directly with women MDWs should be established as a way of improving future participant access. Social implications The study underscores the existence of policies and regulations that tolerate and uphold social inequalities that benefit primary labour segment workers to the detriment of secondary labour segment workers, including women MDWs. Originality/value Extant WL literature is dominated by the experiences of “the ideal work-life balancers”, who tend to be white middle-class women, engaged in professional work. This study offers original contribution by giving voice to a taken-for-granted group of women migrant workers who make other people’s WLB possible. Moreover, the study challenges WL research by underscoring the power inequities that shape the participants’ marginal and disadvantaged lived experience of work, life, family and WLB.

This paper explores the use of focus group methodology as part of a life course approach building on Julia Brannen's pioneering work in these two areas. Much life course research uses individual interviews, including biographical interview techniques. It is less usual to find focus groups used within the life course perspective. This paper draws on a PhD study of young British and Asian adults' experiences of the transition from university to full-time employment, using focus groups as part of a multi-method approach, within a life course perspective. The study drew explicitly on Julia Brannen's approach to life course transitions. Three focus group excerpts are presented and discussed to illustrate how focus group data can further understanding of the ways in which a group of peers discusses the transition to work and especially future work-life balance. We show how focus group discussions about individual choice for future work and "life" or "lifestyle" can highlight shared assumptions of this birth cohort group as well as areas of disagreement and contention, rooted in both individual experiences and societal and socio-cultural expectations. We relate this to Julia Brannen's conceptualisation of the three different modalities which young people draw on to talk about the future.

This paper orchestrates alterethnographical reflections in which we, women, polyphonically document, celebrate and vocalize the sound of change. This change is represented in Kamala Harris's appointment as the first woman, woman of color, and South Asian American as the US Vice President, breaking new boundaries of political leadership, and harvesting new gains for women in leadership and power more broadly. With feminist awareness and curiosity, we organize and mobilize individual texts into a multivocal paper as a way to write solidarity between women. Recognizing our intersectional differences, and power differentials inherent in our different positions in academic hierarchies, we unite to write about our collective concerns regarding gendered, racialised, classed social relations. Coming together across intersectional differences in a writing community has been a vehicle to speak, relate, share, and voice our feelings and thoughts to document this historic moment and build a momentum to fulfill our hopes for social change. As feminists, we accept our responsibility to make this history written, rather than manipulated or erased, by breaking the mold in the form of multi‐layered embodied texts to expand writing and doing research differently through re/writing otherness.

This paper contributes to debates in the broad area of generational differences at work. Specifically, we locate this study within the literature of the work values and expectations of the 'Millennial generation', also known as 'GenMe' (Twenge, 2006; 2010). Much has been made in the media and popular practitioner literature about how the latest generation of workers have a 'sense of entitlement' and therefore expect more from the workplace than previous generations. In this paper, we argue that this mainstream view of the sense of entitlement as a concept is problematic and requires a more critical examination. We consider two divergent bodies of literature on the sense of entitlement in relation to generational differences at work-a manageralist approach, which conceptualises sense of entitlement to work-life balance (WLB) as a negative trait, and a second body, based on the seminal work by Sue Lewis and colleagues, that treats sense of entitlement as a situated process rather than an internal characteristic. We use data from a study of young adults leaving university in the UK, inspired by Sue's work. Our analysis challenges the notion of today's younger workers as more 'entitled' than previous generations. This study extends existing research by providing a contextualised analysis of young people's situated accounts of sense of entitlement at work.