Work Family Policies And Transitions To Adulthood In Europe

This book analyzes how the current generation of young adults enters the labour market and tries to create their own autonomous household, with or without children, exploring questions such as what does it mean to be a young adult in Europe today and what social policies help them to combine work and family life?

This book analyzes how the current generation of young adults enters the labour market and tries to create their own autonomous household, with or without children, exploring questions such as what does it mean to be a young adult in Europe today and what social policies help them to combine work and family life?

This collaborative study provides a subtle and multi-layered understanding of the transition to parenthood within a cross-national comparative framework.

It is common for European couples living fairly egalitarian lives to adopt a traditional division of labour at the transition to parenthood. Based on in-depth interviews with 334 parents-to-be in eight European countries, this book explores the implications of family policies and gender culture from the perspective of couples who are expecting their first child. Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood: Analysing Gender and Work in Europe is the first comparative, qualitative study that explicitly locates couples’ parenting ideals and plans in the wider context of national institutions.

Across Europe the importance of reconciling paid work and family life is increasingly recognised by a range of diverse government regulations and organisational initiatives. At the same time, employing organisations and the nature of work are undergoing massive and rapid changes, in the context of global competition, efficiency drives, as well as social and economic transformations in emerging economies. Work, families and organisations in transition illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees' experiences of work-life balance in contemporary shifting contexts. Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces carried out in Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK, this innovative book demonstrates the challenges that parents face as they seek to negotiate work and family boundaries. The case studies demonstrate that employed parents' needs and experiences depend on many layers of context - global, European, national, workplace and family. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of organisational psychology, sociology, management and business studies, human resource management, social policy, as well as employers, managers, trade unions and policy makers.

Long-running trends towards increasing inequality between the rich and poor across Europe have been exacerbated by the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath. As employment opportunities for young people diminish and as the welfare state is pulled back, pathways to adulthood change and become more difficult to navigate. Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession consists of a collection of papers by researchers from Britain, Norway, Germany, Portugal, Italy and Greece, locating young people’s transitions to adulthood in their national social, economic and political contexts. It explores young adulthood with reference to generational continuity and change and intergenerational support. With a cross-national comparative framework, this volume highlights the importance of variations in structural contexts for young people’s transitions. Bringing together authors across sub-disciplines such as the sociology of youth, family and kinship, class and inequality and life-course studies, Transitions to Adulthood Through Recession will appeal to academic social scientists as well as final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as political science, sociology, youth studies, social policy, anthropology and psychology; and a wider public readership. Chapter 1 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

This handbook provides a meaningful overview of topical themes within family sociology as an academic field as well as empirical realities in various societal contexts across Europe. More than sixty prominent European scholars’ original texts present the field’s main theoretical and methodological approaches in addition to issues such as families as relationships, parental arrangements, parenting practices and child well-being, family policies in welfare state regimes, family lives in migration, and family trajectories. Presenting cutting-edge research on findings, theoretical interpretations, and solutions to methodological challenges, it is a timely tool for researchers, teachers, students, and family practitioners who wish to familiarise themselves with the state of family sociology in Europe.

This volume addresses the relationship between childbearing, paid work and work-life balance policies across Europe in the 21st century, illuminating the uncertainty and risk related to insecure labour force attachment, the incoherence of women's and men's access to education and employment and the unequal share of domestic responsibilities.