Beyond Work-Family Balance Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance

Everyone who struggles to meet the demands of work and personal-life responsibilities knows how tough it is to do so. This bold new book shows that it is the deeply engrained separation of work and personal life that has limited our ability to deal effectively with the conflict between them. Beyond Work-Family Balance demonstrates why the image of "balance" is outmoded and why a new approach - work-personal life integration - offers greater promise for meaningful change. Providing many examples from action research projects in more than a dozen organizations of different kinds, the authors show how using their method of integrating rather than separating personal-life considerations from the workplace can achieve positive outcomes, not only for workers but also for the work. The method offers a way of looking deeply into the work culture to find inequitable and ineffective work practices that are so embedded and routine that no one thinks to question them - they are just the way things get done. Once identified, these work practices can be changed to achieve what the authors call a Dual Agenda: a more equitable workplace where both men and women can achieve their full potential and a more effective workplace where the needs of the work, rather than gendered and outmoded assumptions, determine what gets done and how.

Rhona Rapoport is director of the Institute of Family and Environmental Research in London. She is the author or coauthor of numerous books including Dual Career Families; Fathers, Mothers and Society; Leisure and the Family Cycle; and Men and Women as Equals at Work. Lotte Bailyn is the T. Wilson Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Breaking the Mold and Living with Technology and coauthor of Working with Careers. Joyce K. Fletcher is professor of management at the Center for Gender in Organizations, Simmons Graduate School of Management, in Boston, and a senior research scholar at the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at Wellesley College Centers for Women. She is the author of Disappearing Acts, which was nominated as one of the year's best management books by the Academy of Management. Bettye H. Pruitt is president of Pruitt & Company, Inc. She is the author of numerous articles and books in organizational history including Timken: From Missouri to Mars.