Where’s the community in community, work and family? A community-based capabilities approach

Abstract

Community is a key dimension in the work-family interface as highlighted by the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Yet it is critically understudied by much work-family scholarship. We highlight and address crucial barriers preventing the integration of the community concept, developing an interdisciplinary communitybased capabilities approach. This approach conceptualizes three components of community: local relationships, local policies and locality (place, space and scale). Local relationships include formal and informal relationships, networks, and a sense of belonging. Dependent on the broader socioeconomic context, local policies and services can provide important resources for managing these relationships and work-life situations more generally. These relationships and policies are embedded in specific geographical localities, shaping and being shaped by social action. This interdisciplinary conceptualization of community allows relational, spatial, structural and temporal aspects of community to be integrated into a more broadly applicable conceptual approach. We base this approach on the capability approach, which allows for a pluralistic work-life framework of what individuals value and do. We further argue for a conceptualization of family as community, moving towards a work-community interface. The resulting conceptual approach is useful for explaining work-life processes for individuals with and without care responsibilities, and offers a new framework for studying the social trends intensely and rapidly highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Misery loves company? Linkages between actual vs. Desired couple work arrangements and women’s mental health

“…This study recognizes other structural-level and community resources are implicated as well with potential to benefit rural areas overall. This includes policies promoting availability and continuation of well-paying jobs, local policies and services, and strengthening community ties (Yerkes et al, 2020), as these would impact farm families as well. The potential benefits of further understanding of how to promote opportunities and individual capabilities for achieving desired roles (Yerkes et al, 2020) and associated impacts in the mental health of farming and rural communities in general may be particularly exigent in response to the social and economic crises, current and ongoing, of COVID-19 (Fisher et al, 2020;Ramgopal, 2020).…”

When Does Expanded Eligibility Translate into Increased Take-Up? An Examination of Parental Leave Policy in Luxembourg

“…However, with half of its population being foreign nationals, non-native Luxembourgers' limited access to parental leave raises questions concerning the capacity of the policy to reach all parents in such a multinational society. It may indicate that foreign national parents are more likely to have a scarcity of resources or lack an established community (Yerkes, Hoogenboom, & Javornik, 2020) to enable them to be in the labour market and provide care for their children concurrently. The arguable inclusivity of the parental leave policy in Luxembourg resonates with Sainsbury's examination of the Swedish case, "expansion of services does not necessarily benefit vulnerable groups" (Sainsbury, 2018, p. 223).…”

Communicating across the borders: managing work-life boundaries through communication in various domains

“…Second, a broader network of relational others could provide an even more nuanced picture of boundary negotiations across borders. As the study by Yerkes et al (2020) suggests, a community-based approach could offer new avenues to conceptualize the role of broader networks and communities and to study the role of community in the work-family interface. In this study, we asked journalists to identify a person with whom they usually talked about work-related issues outside of working hours or a person with whom they talked about their private lives at work.…”