Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Wei-Jun Jean Yeung, Asia Research Institute, Centre for Family and Population Research, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Increased understanding of the social costs of poor job quality has focused attention on physical and social environments at work as well as institutional, historical and societal factors that impact job quality and its changes over time. A slogan ‘Not just more jobs but also better jobs’ embodied the shift in European Union policy objectives as the issue of job quality and quality of working life has become an explicit goal in the Employment Strategy 2001. Among the groups of indicators for monitoring employment quality is also “work organization and work-life balance”. This indicator acknowledges that the challenge of balancing paid employment and private life plays an increasingly important role in the well-being of workers, and the opportunity for individuals to balance their home and work lives is a central component of a good job.

As work and family issues are only recently beginning to gain attention in Asian societies, this seminar addresses various conceptual approaches and theoretical frameworks in the work-life balance literature. Recent research has extended the initial conflict perspective to a more balanced view by also including a positive side of the work-family interface. A number of research outcomes from empirical studies conducted by the speaker will be presented. Some unexpected results, such as a positive association between work autonomy and work-home interference, call for the need to integrate new theoretical insights into the research field. This can be particularly important in Asian societies, where the pressure of rapid social change, including the rising female labor force participation, is compounded by the long-hours work culture.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sonja Drobnic is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bremen, Germany, and Vice-Dean at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. She has completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She received an MA degree at Syracuse University and holds a PhD from Cornell University. She is a member of the consortium that conducts the German Family Panel (pairfam), which is a multi-disciplinary, multi-actor longitudinal study of intimate relationships and family dynamics in Germany. Her areas of research are in the fields of social stratification and inequality in life-course perspective, with focus on family, household, and gender, using cross-national comparative perspective and longitudinal research methods. Her research has recently focused on quality of life and work as well as work-life balance. Another emerging research area involves family policy in the global perspective.

REGISTRATION

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