- Title
- Work/life balance through a critical ‘gender lens’ : A cross-country comparison of parental leave provisions and take-up in Australia and Sweden
- Creator
- Zacharias, Nadine
- Date
- 2007
- Type
- Text; Thesis; PhD
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/36960
- Identifier
- vital:1092
- Abstract
- Work/life balance researchers have documented the low take-up rates of corporate work/life balance policies at the same time as there are reports of persistent work/life pressures. This research aims to provide more comprehensive explanations of the phenomenon of low policy take-up than those currently available in the work/life balance literature which focus on organisational and individual factors. The research project is based on a critical review of the work/life balance literature which focuses on organisational solutions and starts from the assumption that the organisational approach to researching and addressing work/life conflicts is inherently limited, mainly because it does not theorise gender as a social structure and does not take into consideration the social and political context in which work/life arrangements are negotiated but focuses, instead, on individual employees and organisations. I integrated my critical review of the organisational work/life balance literature with concepts in the feminist literature, most importantly the gendered public/private divide, to create an explicit ‘gender lens’ which guides the interpretations of my findings. I applied this gender lens to Habermas’ model of societal evolution to operationalise it as an analytical tool for this research. From this theoretical basis, I designed a comparative research project, using Australia and Sweden as country case studies, which compares the approaches to work/life balance in the two countries. The focus of the analysis is on parental leave as one important example of work/life balance policies. The data for this research includes the parental leave legislation, public documents released by governments and associated bodies as well as national surveys on the take-up of parental leave provisions in both countries. This material is analysed in the light of the conceptual framework. [...]; Doctor of Philosophy
- Publisher
- University of Ballarat
- Rights
- Nadine Zacharias
- Rights
- Open Access
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- Work/life balance; Australia; Sweden; Parental leave; Australian Digital Thesis
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