Abstract
Reshaping the Work-Family Debate is an important book for several reasons. First, it is accessible and engaging in ways that many sociological books are not, despite being theoretically sophisticated and empirically sound. Second, it is addressed to multiple audiences for whom the work-family issues it analyzes are exceptionally important. Third, it draws from an astounding range of multi-disciplinary findings to pinpoint with laser accuracy what is wrong with current debates and past approaches to work-family policy. Finally, it offers solutions that are practical and possible, if we could only bridge the political divides it outlines.
This is a book few sociologists could write, but one that most will find is based fundamentally on the key insights of our discipline. Perhaps because she is a law professor and not an academic sociologist, Joan Williams is able to integrate findings from sociology with those from social psychology, political science, economics, and other disciplines without getting caught up in methodological minutiae or ideological turf wars. As a legal researcher, she is able to draw on case material, testimony, union arbitrations, judicial decisions, and related evidence to describe current work-family dilemmas in graphic terms. This approach allows the reader to glimpse the daunting personal struggles when workers balance commitments to family with the often unbending demands of the workplace. In a chapter entitled “One Sick Child Away from Being Fired,” Williams highlights the deep human impacts of workplace inflexibility. This compelling material, in turn, sets up her analysis of how we should think about the integration of work and family, and allows her to propose solutions that could be implemented if public discussions took better account of social class and interrogated notions of the ideal worker.
Three key observations underlie this book’s approach to analyzing how work and family might be better integrated, and Willams pulls no punches in describing them. (1) We need family-friendly policies: “The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world, and changing that situation will require reshaping American politics in some basic ways” (p. 3). (2) Masculine workplace norms are the problem: “[A]lthough work-family conflict traditionally is associated with women, a prime mover of work-family conflict is masculinity. Inflexible workplaces have proved so hard to change, in significant part, because of the intertwining of masculinity with work schedules and current understandings of work commitment” (p. 33). (3) Class matters: “Understanding the alienation of the white working class is not only about race and religion but also about class—about a deeply patterned series of class conflicts between socially conscious progressives and working-class whites. These conflicts, expressed as cultural differences, have fueled ‘culture wars’ that have cemented a long-standing alliance between working-class whites and business elites” (p. 152). Williams suggests that focusing on class-based masculinities and understanding working-class men’s family lives can help us prepare for building coalitions that will pass better work-family policies in the future.
According to Williams, white working-class men, heavily Democratic in party affiliation until roughly 1970, have abandoned the party because of anxiety over their declining ability to be “real men”—that is to be breadwinners and earn a family wage. Williams suggests that class-based masculinity has played a big part in working-class men voting Republican, but she also attributes this shift to progressives abandoning their traditional posture of respect for the working class. Williams hopes to turn around the political dynamic that has made family supports so hard to enact in this country by helping the professional-managerial class better understand and appreciate working-class culture, especially as it relates to family life. She does this through discussion of class-linked family practices that have been illuminated by sociologists including “commitment to work,” “hard living,” “fear of falling,” “concerted cultivation,” “food preferences and family meals,” “kinship networks,” “family rituals and obligations,” “respect for religion” and “family first moral values.” Ultimately, Williams suggests we should reframe work-family policy debates away from the language of business regulation to the language of promoting family values in order to capture the support of the working class. As a first step she suggests instituting the same kind of taboo against insulting white workers as now exists against using racial innuendo and insults. Other steps include acknowledging and recognizing class privilege and identifying aspects of non-elite culture that offer useful insights for the upper-middle class. In so doing, Williams hopes to shift “the poisonous political dynamic of the last forty years” and lay the groundwork for building coalitions that can pass serious workplace reforms.
Reshaping the Work-Family Debate also addresses several important topics of general interest to sociology researchers and students, including the insight that masculine norms underlie the social structures within which both men and women negotiate their daily lives. An excellent chapter on reconstructive feminism illustrates the author’s broad theoretical reach and her grounded approach: “The question is not whether physical, social, and psychological differences between men and women exist. It is why these particular differences become salient in a particular context and then are used to create and justify women’s continuing disadvantage” (p. 128). In another chapter, Williams reviews four basic patterns of workplace gender bias: “the maternal wall,” “double standards,” “double binds,” and “gender wars among women.” This is where Williams is at her best, and she is indeed one of the most articulate and incisive critics of workplace gender inequities writing today. She shows how these pervasive, yet often unintentional, patterns of interaction serve to police women out of good jobs and men out of caregiving, as well as limiting business productivity. Williams argues against the conventional wisdom that work-family conflict stems from women’s failure to bargain effectively within the family and instead argues for changing workplace assumptions that the ideal worker is a man without domestic responsibilities. Because of its engaging style and sound scholarship, this is a great book for both undergraduate and graduate sociology classes touching on inequality, work, gender, families, feminist theory, policy, politics, law, or social change.