Warren Tracey
School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham.
Br J Sociol. 2015 Dec;66(4):691-717. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12160. Epub 2015 Oct 21.
The paper was stimulated by the relative absence of the working class from work-life debates. The common conclusion from work-life studies is that work-life imbalance is largely a middle-class problem. It is argued here that this classed assertion is a direct outcome of a particular and narrow interpretation of work-life imbalance in which time is seen to be the major cause of difficulty. Labour market time, and too much of it, dominates the conceptualization of work-life and its measurement too. This heavy focus on too much labour market time has rendered largely invisible from dominant work-life discourses the types of imbalance that are more likely to impact the working class. The paper's analysis of large UK data-sets demonstrates a reduction in hours worked by working-class men, more part-time employment in working-class occupations, and a substantial growth in levels of reported financial insecurity amongst the working classes after the 2008-9 recession. It shows too that economic-based work-life imbalance is associated with lower levels of life satisfaction than is temporal imbalance. The paper concludes that the dominant conceptualization of work-life disregards the major work-life challenge experienced by the working class: economic precarity. The work-life balance debate needs to more fully incorporate economic-based work-life imbalance if it is to better represent class inequalities.
本文受到工作与生活辩论中工人阶级相对缺席的启发。工作与生活研究的普遍结论是，工作与生活失衡在很大程度上是一个中产阶级问题。本文认为，这种基于阶级的论断是对工作与生活失衡的一种特定且狭隘解释的直接结果，在这种解释中，时间被视为困难的主要原因。劳动力市场时间，以及过多的劳动力市场时间，主导了工作与生活的概念化及其衡量。这种对过多劳动力市场时间的严重关注，使得在主流的工作与生活话语中，那些更有可能影响工人阶级的失衡类型基本上变得不可见。本文对英国大型数据集的分析表明，2008 - 2009年经济衰退后，工人阶级男性的工作时长减少，工人阶级职业中的兼职工作增多，且工人阶级报告的经济不安全感水平大幅上升。研究还表明，基于经济因素的工作与生活失衡比时间失衡带来的生活满意度更低。本文的结论是，工作与生活的主流概念化忽视了工人阶级所面临的主要工作与生活挑战：经济不稳定。如果工作与生活平衡辩论想要更好地体现阶级不平等，就需要更全面地纳入基于经济因素的工作与生活失衡。
