SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WORK AND FAMILY

Jennifer Glass
Department of Sociology
University of Iowa

Prepared for the NICHD/Sloan Foundation conference on Workplace/Workforce Mismatch:

Work, Family, Health, and Well-Being” June 16-18, Washington, D.C.
 SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WORK AND FAMILY

Sociologists have been concerned with institutional friction between work and family

systems in the industrialized West as far back as the 1960's, when Lewis and Rose Laub Coser

(1974) first labeled both the family and workplace as “greedy institutions” that monopolized

individuals’ time and energy. Although the problem has been framed in different ways at

different times and places, the essential sociological insight that ties them all together has been

that the personal difficulties individuals face in trying to fulfill both family and paid work

responsibilities are socially patterned and somewhat predictable given the competing logics of

industrial production and family reproduction.

Two primary research questions associated with work and family issues have dominated

the literature in sociology -- (1) what determines the division of domestic labor among

heterosexual couples (especially when children are present) and why is it so stubbornly resistant

to change, and (2) what are the causes of the male/female wage gap and why has it been so slow

to close despite rapid increases in women’s labor force participation? These problems have

assumed such importance because the persistence of the sexual division of labor within both

families and workplaces has major consequences for the material wealth and well-being of

women and children. The different sociological approaches to these problems are derived from

the major theoretical schools of thought within sociology itself, ranging from social

psychological concepts of identity formation and role commitment to macrosociological conflict

and functionalist paradigms. In this chapter, I will focus on four principal frameworks –

symbolic interactionism/ identity theory, ecological/family systems theory, life course dynamics,

and power exchange/conflict theory; exploring how each has been used to identify and explain
friction between work and family systems. I begin with symbolic interactionism, since it is the

intellectual precursor of theories of role enactment and role commitment that have dominated

work and family research and have evolved most recently into cultural or ideological

explanations of gender role persistence.

I. THE SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST TRADITION

Symbolic interactionism is rooted in the notion that social order is accomplished through

the routine enactment of constellations of behavior known as social roles. These social roles

endure across time and space for the individuals who occupy them, and while enacted by

individuals, their requirements transcend any one individuals’ needs or abilities. Most prominent

among these roles are those relating to gender, marriage, and parenthood, which pattern and

make predictable relations between the sexes and the tasks of reproduction and child care. The

constellations of behavior appropriate to social roles are determined culturally and learned

through childhood socialization. In one variant of symbolic interactionism, the dramaturgical

perspective, the enactment of social roles are performances staged for the purpose of making

interaction orderly and predictable among a wide range of individuals. These performances,

necessary for maintaining social order and accomplishing routine tasks, are taken for granted

parts of our existence and are only thrown into relief when they are violated by actors who

deviate from culturally sanctioned scripts (think of male nurses or women who refuse to care for

their infants as examples). Role deviance can result in social responses ranging from mild

confusion in interaction to extreme social ostracism or even physical/legal punishment.

During the course of 19th century industrialization, dramatic transformations of the social

roles of adult men and women occurred. Masculinity was recast as the pursuit of money outside
the home, while responsibility for the education and moral development of children was

relinquished to mothers. Wage labor became the province of men, while the role of

“housewife” was created and defined as the most suitable role for adult women. These

redefinitions of appropriate gender “roles” came about in part as a response to the removal of

productive labor from the home and the emergence of new systems of mass production. Their

cultural diffusion gained momentum with the advent of mass media and eventually produced the

system of complementary gender roles known as “separate spheres” for women and men.

Existing social institutions – educational systems, businesses, political and judicial systems,

health care systems, etc. adapted their operations around these new definitions of masculine and

feminine areas of social and familial responsibility. This latter point is extremely important in

role theory – institutions themselves became embedded with gendered codes of behavior based

on the roles typically assumed by women and men outside those institutions, or as Joan Acker as

stated (1990), institutions themselves became “gendered.”

As a result, the constellations of behaviors in the social roles of employee and mother (as

embedded in gendered work and family institutions) were contradictory and impossible to

simultaneously fulfill by the beginning of the 20th century. Employees were expected to devote

long hours and expend a great deal of energy on the tasks assigned by employers in a geographic

location distant from home and neighborhood. Interruptions were not tolerated, tardiness and

absences were discouraged, and work rules ensured minimal employee autonomy over the

schedule of work shifts. Workers did not expect to be fed, housed, clothed, or cared for at the

workplace, nor did their dependent family members – those tasks of daily reproduction were to

occur off-site in the “home.” Wives and mothers saw their roles defined primarily as the

provision of such care for workers and future workers – feeding, clothing, housing, and
otherwise caring for family members. As long as gender remained the principle guiding the

allocation of individuals to social roles, such contradictions could be sustained. As gender

eroded as the basis of allocation over the course of the 20th century, whether for pragmatic or

principled reasons, contradictions in the performance expectations of major social roles could no

longer be ignored.

From this dramaturgical perspective came many concepts that have filtered into popular

discourse about work-family issues– role conflict, role strain, role overload, role scripts, to name

just a few. An employee who is supposed to attend an important meeting at the same time as a

daughter’s birthday party experiences role conflict; a breastfeeding mother who must use her 15

minute breaks at work to pump in an unheated closet is experiencing role strain; a single parent

who must work overtime to provide for two children and still perform all domestic labor for the

household is experiencing role overload, while a father who provides primary care for his infant

while his wife work is violating a role script. Much research on employed mothers’ and fathers’

mental health, happiness, and effectiveness as parents has been based on role theory (Thoits,

1983; Barnett, Marshall and Pleck, 1992; Lennon, 1987) and the twin notion that successful role

enactment produces positive mental and physical health benefits for individuals while deviance

or role failure produces stress and social censure or punishment that negatively affects well-

being.

More sophisticated renditions of role theory have posited both positive and negative

health consequences for successful role performance, pointing out that some social roles (e.g.

professional worker) provide more opportunities for material and social reward than others (e.g.

housewife; see Gove and Tudor, 1973; Bernard, 1981 for elaboration). Theorists have also

recognized that role performances always occur in a particular context. Sometime those
circumstances are conducive to success but often they are not, leading to what researchers have

labeled poor “role quality”. A hostile supervisor or noxious work conditions may limit the

positive impact of employment on health, just as a temperamental or disabled child or a distant

cold spouse might limit the positive impact of familial roles (Barnett, Brennan and Marshall,

1994; Lennon, 1994). Additional work has focused on role constellations (particular

combinations of roles), arguing that multiple roles can both provide multiple opportunities for

self-enhancement and act as buffers to offset the inadequacies of any single role performance

(Marks, 1977; Sieber, 1974; Barnett book), in contrast to the oft-theorized negative outcomes of

role overload or conflict. Finally, theorists note that social roles differ in their salience, or the

level of commitment an individual brings to a particular social role. Stronger role commitments

produce stronger potential impacts on well-being. Increasingly in the 19th and early 20th

centuries, gender became the organizing principle for role commitments to family and work.

Applying role theory to perennial questions about couples’ division of domestic labor

and the gender wage gap has resulted in explanations that focus on the primacy of the work role

for men and the primacy of family roles for women. If women receive stronger negative

sanctions for failing to perform domestic roles while men receive stronger sanctions for failing to

provide materially as workers, then each gender will focus more intense energy and commitment

on that role that provides the most gender congruent rewards. Hence men will only reluctantly

engage in domestic labor though they may love their children, while women will commit less

time and energy to career enhancement even though they may work for pay and enjoy their jobs.

Role theory has been criticized on numerous fronts - mostly for its failure to produce

clearly articulated hypotheses about the sources of continuity and change in the behaviors

associated with social roles, its inability to predict either individual or aggregate role behavior as
social conditions change, and its reflexive motivation for performance (to avoid social censure

and receive social rewards). Why do individuals continue to perform in accordance with social

roles that are obsolete or do not meet individual needs or goals? Are social pressures for

conformity really so strong that they explain gendered role performances in both work and

family that result in less material wealth and worse health outcomes for women and men?

For these reasons, modern heirs to the symbolic interactionist paradigm have shifted their

focus to the social psychology of role commitments. Both cultural sociologists and self/identity

theorists have abandoned the strict dramaturgical perspective and attempted to explain how

individuals’ internalize role prescriptions so that social control is unnecessary. In self/identity

theory (Stryker and Burke, 2000 ; Burke, 1991 ), individuals through both social learning and

direct experience develop commitments to core identities over time which then direct and control

behavior in situations that activate those identities. Core identities may include occupation or

profession, motherhood or fatherhood, religious affiliation, etc. Role performances that are

successful can stimulate the development of meaningful identities; but are not always necessary

for strong role commitments to develop. Cultural ideologies can also stimulate commitment to

core identities –being a good mother, for example, can be important to a woman who has never

before experienced parenthood.

Within the literature on work-family issues, these notions of core identities and

ideological commitments have been used by several prominent scholars to explain the seemingly

intractable nature of the gender division of labor. Hochschild (1989), for example, used the

notion of “deep ideologies” of gender to explain why women continued to perform the vast

majority of housework and child care despite either their economic independence from their

husbands or their own exhaustion from the “second shift” of domestic labor following a long
work day. Similarly, the notion of core identities can explain why men may limit their

involvement in family life despite their attitudinal support of feminism and belief in the justice of

equal sharing of domestic labor and child care. Brines (199?) uses such notions to explain why

un- or under-employed men are particularly likely to eschew greater involvement in housework

and child care despite their availability to do so. Hays (1996) uses the idea of dominant

ideological commitments to explain why both employed and nonemployed mothers adhere to a

single standard of deeply “involved motherhood” and try to justify their employment or lack

thereof within the framework of children’s best interests. Psychologist Francine Deutsch (1999)

uses a similar framework of ideological commitments to explain why many couples at some

point “choose” a path that results in stronger work involvement for husbands and stronger

domestic involvement for wives, and then justify that choice post-hoc as economically rational.

Use of self/identity theory can also be seen in the numerous studies that show the greatest

psychological and health benefits of work and family roles when behavioral preferences and

practices match, irrespective of what those preferences might be (traditional or egalitarian). For

examples, see Ross, Mirowsky and Huber (1983), and Burke and Greenglass (2000). Within this

framework, it is not the actual roles that individuals fill that enhance or detract from well-being,

but the congruence between the core identities forming an individual’s sense of self and the roles

routinely enacted in everyday life. Thus, the mere fact of a mother’s employment says little

about how it will affect her own or her family’s well-being, but the ability of a given job to

facilitate the level of work and family involvement that a mother desires is quite important.

The twin notions that cultural ideologies are important sources of information for the

development of individual’s core identities, and that identities once formed structure behavior

even when adherence leads to material or emotional deprivation, are still widely used to explain
work-family behavior and the impact of such behavior on health and well-being (Perry-Jenkins

and Crouter, 1990; Simon, 1995; Tang and Tang, 2001).

II. ECOLOGICAL/ FAMILY SYSTEMS THEORY

While role theory provided a useful rubric for understanding tensions between work and

family life, it focused on single individuals rather than embedding social action within systems

of cooperating individuals. Ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner,1989) and family

systems theory (Broderick, 1993) broadened the focus from individual action and outcomes to

the larger context within which individuals operate as part of a systemic division of labor within

families, workplaces, and communities. Ecological systems theory is based on the notion that

individual development, including health and well-being, are determined by the interplay of

systems within which individuals are embedded.

Such systems have both temporal and spatial dimensions. For example, families are

systems within which individuals both receive care and provide care at different points in time.

A static measurement cannot reveal how the individuals within it are positioned to give and

receive care across time. Mothers may provide care and social support for young children to the

detriment of their own physical and mental health, yet find their children and family members

are resources and social supports in later life that fathers may lack. Communities are spatial

locations within which certain amenities, e.g. jobs, schools and child care centers, playgrounds,

stores, and churches, are either present, easily available, and high quality, or not. Communities

provide the opportunity for actions that can facilitate health and well-being, reduce conflict and

strain across social roles, or exacerbate them. The roles that individuals will undertake, their

level of commitment, and their performance are all explained in large part by the context in
which individuals find themselves. For example, a single mother in an urban low-income

community would have a much more difficult time finding a high-paying job and reasonably

priced, high quality child care than a well educated married suburban mother. Committing to a

job and basing one’s identity on successful job performance is therefore a less likely outcome for

the urban single mother than the married suburban mother.

Within ecological systems theory, individual characteristics form a resource set that can

either create opportunities for role involvement or foreclose them. Some individual

characteristics are internally determined (such as temperament, physical appearance, and

cognitive ability) but many others are socially derived (level of education, social capital, family

wealth, health status). Others are ascribed characteristics (age, race, class, and gender) that vary

cross- culturally in their meaning, but are almost invariably used either directly or indirectly to

structure opportunities for involvement in work, family , and community systems. For example,

in cultures where patrilineal residence and inheritance are practiced, the education of sons may

matter more to parents than daughters, leading to higher educational attainment, better job

placement, and better health among adult men than women. In modern industrial societies,

social class and ethnicity often determine both residential location and access to safe

neighborhoods with good schools and jobs.

Family systems theory is related to ecological systems theory, but focuses more

specifically on the interplay between the activities of family members. Rarely can the actions of

individuals be explained or their effects on well-being understood without seeing how those

actions fit within the larger family system. For example, the effects of maternal employment on

the well-being of family members depends upon the work activities of other household members

as well. Is the mother employed because her partner cannot find work or cannot find enough
work to support the family? When the mother is at work, are children well cared for or left to

their own devices without supervision? Are domestic tasks picked up by a spouse or older

children or paid help, or is the mother expected to perform a second shift of housework and

home management after work? Is the mother’s work schedule compatible with the school and

leisure activities of children or does it interfere with family time together?

By understanding the family context within which behavior occurs, analysts can better

understand some of the contradictory or ambiguous findings of research on work and family

involvement. For example, early research showed that wives’ employment enhanced their own

but actually reduced their husbands’ mental health. Later work showed that this result occurred

only for husbands who failed to pick up any of the housework and child care (Ross, et. al., 1983;

Rosenfield, 1992). Husbands who failed to perform any domestic labor may have had fatigued

or resentful wives that lowered husbands’ quality of life, while those who shared domestic labor

with their employed wives received appreciation and respect in return.

Systems theories have given us analytic concepts such as work-family balance and work-

family fit to describe the homeostatic nature of work-family systems. In systems theories, the

behavior of individuals is often motivated by system goals, and the maintenance of smoothly

functioning systems determines the activities of system members. Individuals seek the quantity

and type of roles needed to mesh with the actions of other family members in achieving family

goals. Individuals avoid whenever possible those activities that destabilize the smooth operation

of daily life within work, family and community systems; when these activities cannot be

avoided they produce conflict and lower the well-being of system members.

The intellectual precursor of systems theories was structural functionalism and the

underlying causal explanation of why work, family, and community systems operate as they do
tends to be functionalist. The “separate spheres” gender role system was the result of systemic

pressures on the older system of family household production as the industrial revolution moved

production out of the household and into a system of employer-controlled wage labor. Given the

choice between sending mothers or fathers into wage labor, fathers gradually won out both

because of the health hazards of industrial work and the greater wages they could command in

the competitive world of industrial capitalism. Without fathers in the fields or barn all day to

supervise the activities of mothers and children, mothers needed to take on a stronger

management role in child care and community volunteerism. Thus, the separate spheres model

enabled the work-family system to function efficiently in both generating revenue and producing

healthy, educated children.

As long as the system of separate spheres solves the quandary of how to look out for

dependent children in an economy organized around adult wage labor, the sexual division of

labor within families will prove stubbornly resistant to change. As well, the wage gap between

men and women will persist and appear to be the result of rational choices to maximize the

family system’s material wealth by putting the wage earner with the highest growth potential

(husband) in the labor market for the longest number of hours, and sheltering him from

housework and child care that might hinder career growth.

Although change in work, family, and community systems can be either evolutionary or

cataclysmic (in response to sudden external jolts to the system, e.g. death of a family member,

political revolution), systems theories tend to view change as evolutionary, occurring in response

to external historical changes in the operations of major social institutions. Hence, information

technology, the globalization of economic production, medical engineering, etc. are all modern

exogenous forces that will slowly alter work arrangements, the timing of marriage and fertility,
the division of domestic labor within households, etc. as work and family systems accommodate

to external change (Moen and Wethington, 1992). This accommodationist approach to social

change suggests that current work-family conflicts and pressures will gradually result in system

changes within both work and family systems that produce homeostasis once more, whether that

be increases in part-time employment, temporary labor force withdrawals for family caregiving,

increased numbers of work/life programs in business organizations, etc.

While fewer empirical studies explicitly use a systems framework than a role-theoretic

framwork (but see Grzywacz and Marks, 2000) systems concepts are frequently invoked in

empirical research on work-family issues. Coverman and Sheley (1986) used a systems-based

“time demands and time availability” hypothesis to explain variation in the amount of child care

and housework performed by husbands and wives in dual-earner households. Becker and Moen

(1999) used a family systems approach to look at married couples joint work-family strategies,

while Pittman (1994) looked at “work-family fit” as the mediator through which work

conditions affect marital quality. Gareis and Barnett (2002) used an implicit systems framework

to understand why mothers’ reduced work hours may result in lower marital quality if it leads to

reassignment of stressful household responsibilities.

The problems with system theories are those of functionalist explanation more generally.

Systems theory cannot really explain the origins of any particular system logic or why one rather

than another evolved to cope with historical changes in human environments. It can only provide

a post-hoc analysis of how the status quo in cultural and economic arrangements serves

functional needs. Systems theories as well as role theory tend to ignore resource differentials

among individuals and power dynamics as explanations of behavior, tending to subsume

individual interests into group interests. The emphasis on system maintenance and homeostasis
as explanations for behavior misses the complexities of individual negotiations in families and

workplaces, and the hidden costs of compliance with systems arrangements that benefit certain

individuals more than others. Nevertheless, systems theories are important for emphasizing the

social and cultural contexts of behavior, and encouraging causal models that move beyond

individuals as the unit of analysis.

III. THE LIFE COURSE PERSPECTIVE

The life course perspective expands upon systems theories by paying particular attention

to temporal variations in individual’s activities over the life course (Marks, 1996), individual

change over time, and path dependencies between early life course events and later life outcomes

(Cooksey, Menaghan, and Jekielek, 1997). Life course dynamics became important within

sociology in the study of family life cycles and individual work careers. Analyses of life course

patterns revealed that early adult decisions and activities regarding work, marriage, and fertility

have cumulative consequences that can magnify disparities in material and emotional well-being

among individuals ( Marini, Shin, and Raymond, 1989). For example, early labor force

withdrawals among women to bear and raise children may result in cumulative disadvantages

within both the labor market and family. By setting an early precedent for a gendered division of

family work, mothers may fail to garner the work experience and backstage familial support

necessary for career success later in life. Moreover, the timing of labor force withdrawals that

typically occur during the prime career building years of the twenties and thirties may subject

mothers to age discrimination when they try to reenter competitive labor markets as their

children get older. As a result gender differences in earnings between women and men become

larger over the life course, with attendant shifts in the gender composition of the elderly poor
population.

Because early life course decisions often create path dependencies that limit options and

create greater inequality later in life, the transition to adulthood is particularly important in life-

course research. Many empirical studies focus on factors related to the completion of schooling,

entrance into the labor market, first unions or marriages, and the timing of first births , as well as

the interrelationships between these transitions (Upchurch and McCarthy, 1990; Rindfuss, 1991).

Family life cycle research has focused more on the changing nature of family priorities

and needs as families age (Sussman, Steinmetz, and Peterson, 1999). Young couples without

children have a less pronounced household division of labor, time and energy for paid work and

community pursuits, fewer obligations to kin but fewer economic resources as well. As children

arrive, young families are faced with generating both more income and more caregiving time,

often resulting in a more extreme sexual division of labor in which mothers pull back from wage

earning to attend to young children while father accelerate their work effort to make up for lost

income from their wives. When children get older, many families’ need for additional income

outweighs the need for child caregiving, so mothers intensify their work efforts as well. In later

life, couples still together after children have left home may experience a renewal of intimacy

and greater sharing of domestic tasks. The important insight in this typification of nuclear

family life is that individual behavior changes across the life course as family needs change,

which static cross-sectional designs may miss in trying to understand the impact of work and

family obligations on adult well-being.

Life course researchers also concentrate on how period specific events differently impact

individuals at different life stages (Elder, 1974 ). Unemployment or layoffs from periodic

economic crises or long-term industrial transformation affect young unattached workers

differently from families raising young children. While the former may postpone or avoid

marriage and parenthood during bad economic times (Oppenheimer, Kalmijn, and Lim, 1997)

the children of young families facing the same economic crisis may suffer cumulative lifelong

disadvantages because of their poverty while their parents increase their risk for divorce, mental

health and substance abuse problems (Yeung and Hofferth, 1998; Duncan, Yeung, Brooks-Gunn,

and Smith, 1998).

Life course and family life cycle perspectives are more sensitizing frameworks than

theories, however. Other than drawing methodological attention to path dependencies and

lagged impacts of events and chronic life stressors on later behavior, these perspectives have not

led to the development of general theories of how historical changes lead to life course changes,

or how varying work and family structures consistently produce particular outcomes later in life.

While life course analysis does explicitly model the development and persistence of inequality

by race, class, and gender, the origins of ascriptive systems and the embedded nature of

inequality within social institutions (work organizations, schools, and families, for example) are

not explained.

IV. SOCIAL EXCHANGE/CONFLICT THEORIES

Social exchange and conflict theories explicitly focus on the resource and power

differentials actors face in interaction with others in their environment (Blau, 1964). Social

exchange theories focus on strategic action at the level of individual behavior within social

structures, while conflict theories focus on how social institutions become structured in ways that

favor dominant classes of actors. For conflict theorists, existing institutional arrangements are

seldom the only possible alternatives for getting social needs met. Rather, social institutions
become structured as they are as the outcome of struggles among competing interests with

different sources of power and influence.

Social exchange theory has been widely used to explain marital behavior and the

division of housework and child care among heterosexual couples. The principles of social

exchange are quite similar to the principles of market exchange, except that transactions are not

limited to goods and services (and money). Social exchange can cover intimacy, sexual

gratification, prestige, emotional or physical care, and companionship as well. Actors will

engage in exchanges involving this broad array of resources whenever they need or desire

resources that others can provide and can arrange satisfactory terms of exchange. Note that

satisfactory does not mean fair or equal - as in economic market exchanges, actors will seek the

best terms from their available alternatives but there is no guarantee that the best terms will be

nonexploitive. Efficiency, rather than fairness, largely determines whether actors will enter into

exchange relationships with others or not.

Social exchange theorists have gone beyond economic models of behavior, however, in

trying to understand individual and group variation in the subjective value of resources that are

exchanged in familial or work relationships. In other words, the goal is to understand individual

and group preferences for resources, as well as how resource exchanges are patterned among

individuals.

The tenets of social exchange theory can be easily seen in theories of marriage timing,

duration, and decline. Empirical research has attended to both the subjective utility of marriage

for men and women of various age, social class and ethnic groups and the effects of those

preferences on the number and duration of marriages formed (South, 1992). The metaphors of

marriage “markets” and marriage “squeezes” are used to depict the relative plentitude or scarcity
of marital partners for individuals looking for different resources. For example, black women

(particularly educated black women) find few economically stable black men available for long

term marital partnerships, often leaving these women with the choice of remaining single or

partnering with a man with fewer resources and lower earning potential than themselves

(Lichter, McLaughlin, Kephart, and Landry, 1992). Economically stable black men, seeing

relative plenty in their choice of partners, may view commitment to one partner in marriage as

less attractive than retaining their social and economic resources for themselves. These factors

help explain the decline of marriage, rising cohabitation, out-of-wedlock births, and higher

divorce rates among African-Americans despite their relatively conservative attitudes about

sexual behavior and family formation (Anderson, 1990).

Social exchange theory can also help explain the changing distribution of marriage

among women. While women with poor earnings prospects were long thought to have greater

motivation for marriage and greater willingness to sacrifice work for family under a

“specialization and trading” model of marriage, recent marriage trends have actually favored

more educated women (Oppenheimer, 1997b). This may have occurred because men now seek

partners with greater economic resources, given the stagnation of male wages over the past 30

years, and are less willing to provide lifelong support for a dependent wife and children. Serial

cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing are actually more concentrated among

economically poor women than among women with the financial resources to be independent of

marriage (Schoen and Owens, 1992)

A similar use of social exchange theory explains the persistence of the sexual division of

housework and child care within couples. In a marriage market where women outnumber men

and divorce is readily available, and a labor market where most men outearn most women,
women are placed in a disadvantageous bargaining position when trying to negotiate more

domestic work by husbands. Tests of social exchange theory have found varying levels of

support for the hypothesis that husbands do more housework when wives are relatively more

powerful (have stronger earnings contributions to the household or greater education) (South and

Spitze, 1994; Brines, 1994).

The continued gender gap in earnings between women and men has also been explained

in terms of social exchange, particularly as the result of a “specialization and trading”model of

marriage in which married women make career sacrifices in order to take on responsibility for

organizing and providing care for family members. In return, married men are free to invest

heavily in labor market opportunities, including the expectation that wives will provide support

services for men’s careers and follow them in residential moves designed to maximize male

career growth. Thus, each gender specializes in one form of work, agreeing to let the other

partner benefit from their work, whether in the household or labor market. Empirical research

has shown that the continuing gender gap in earnings stems more from the impact of marital

status and children on women’s earnings than from deficiencies in women’s training, effort, or

direct discrimination on the part of employers (Waldfogel, 1997).

Social exchange theory has also been used to explain the social organization of work and

links between working conditions and the division of labor at home. The labor market is

structured around exchanges and implicit contracts between employers and employees. As a

market, it operates on efficiency considerations – for employers, that means getting the most and

best work done for the lowest total cost, while for employees it means getting the highest wages

and best working conditions possible for their effort. While neoclassical economic theory has

much to say about the wage and productivity side of this exchange, less has been said about
working conditions, particularly managerial perogatives to set hours, schedules, work rules, and

leave policies. Such considerations could be safely ignored when workplaces coexisted with

traditional marriages in which workers were relieved of responsibility for social reproduction.

However, the declining popularity of separate spheres marriages and the rise in women’s labor

force participation has created new pressures on employers to accommodate worker’s family

needs in the design of work environments and work rules. Social exchange theory would predict

that, in the absence of coercion from unions or the state, employers would first provide

accommodations for those workers who have the most bargaining power (are most valuable to

the firm and who are least replaceable with alternative personnel), not necessarily those with the

greatest need for family accommodations. Empirical work on organizational provision and

employee use of workplace policies has mostly supported this prediction (Glass and Fujimoto,

1995; Blair-Loy and Wharton, 2002; Dietch and Huffman, 2003; Golden, 2001).

While social exchange theory attends to the microsociological exchanges in everyday

life, conflict theory more generally tries to explain the origin of social structures that generate

inequality in the distribution of resources and define the possible social exchanges that

individuals can make. From a conflict perspective, the important goal for work-family research is

to explain why paid work became separated from family reproduction in the first place, and why

certain forms of “work” are materially rewarded and privileged (private and public sector wage

labor) while other forms of work are disparaged, underrewarded and ignored by political and

economic systems (family care and domestic work). Conflict theorists have focused heavily on

the biological exigencies of reproduction, the power of male unions, and the extreme wealth and

political power of early industrial capitalists to explain why women with children were slowly

squeezed out of wage labor (Brenner and Ramas, 1984 ; Hartmann, 1976) and employers were
left free to determine working conditions and work rules that left little time for childbearing and

family care (Hunnicutt,1989).

Other conflict theorists focused on why the work-family system of “separate spheres”

ultimately decayed over the course of the 20th century (Davis, 1989; Bernard, 1981; Ehrenreich,

1984), leaving both women and men increasingly dependent on wage labor for their subsistence,

and resulting in the decline of fertility and marriage. Empirical research has documented how

conflicts over this slow erosion of family stability have been played out in the political realm

(Burstein, Bricher and Einwholer, 1995) and in controversies over welfare state spending,

abortion, public provision of day care, and no-fault divorce . Conflict theorists have also paid

special attention to the comparative-historical analysis of capitalist welfare states, seeking to

understand why various state interventions to socialize the costs of reproduction occurred in

particular Western capitalist democracies (Skocpol, 1996; Gornick, Meyers, and Ross, 1997).

Conflict theories eschew notions of systems equilibrium and evolutionary change,

viewing social change as the outcome of competing social groups with varying degrees of

political and economic power. Work and family conflict is not inevitable, but is the result of

socially constructed decisions about how to organize economic production and social

reproduction, educate future workers, and care for dependent elderly and disabled family

members (England and Folbre, 1999, Skocpol, 2000) . Inequality between husbands and wives,

ethnic categories, and social classes is also not inevitable, but the outcome of legal, social, and

institutional restrictions on who can attend schools, live in certain neighborhoods, travel without

obstruction, receive health care, and participate in democratic decision-making.

CONCLUSION
 This chapter has reviewed four different sociological approaches to the study of work-

family issues: symbolic interactionism, ecological and family systems theory, life-course

analysis, and social exchange/conflict theory. Each approach brings its own strengths and

weaknesses to the study of contemporary work and family life. The symbolic interactionist

tradition, with its emphasis on social roles and identity structures, examines the internalization of

behavioral expectations based on cultural norms and institutional practices. This approach

highlights the role of cultural and subcultural definitions of appropriate work and family roles for

men and women, even in the face of rapidly changing material realities. Systems theories, in

contrast, draw attention to the group needs and goals of families and workplaces, viewing

individual behavior in its group context as a product of both internal motives and contextual

factors relating to the resources and constraints of other group members. Life-course analysis

draws attention to the temporal patterning of work and family involvements, showing how early

life course decisions about education, work, marriage and fertility under given historical

circumstances create path dependencies that either permit or constrain future activities. Social

exchange/conflict theories bring awareness of the roles that differential power and material

wealth play in the social construction of work and family arrangements in any given society.

Given the routine everyday conflicts between paid work obligations and family

caregiving that exist for a broad swath of the American middle classes, social exchange/conflict

theories seem best poised to answer the challenging questions of how these institutional

arrangements came into being, why they seem so stubbornly resistant to change, and what policy

options might best relieve ongoing work-family stresses. Yet the social psychological

approaches do more to help us understand how larger institutional realities are experienced by

individuals who must decide how to behave on a daily basis in the face of these institutionally
structured opportunities and constraints.

Future work that addresses the interface between institutional structures and individual

action is needed in the work-family area, particularly work that can help us understand the

conditions under which working families adapt and conform to existing institutions and the

conditions that encourage mobilization and resistance. Political and cultural struggles over who

should care for children and who should bear the costs of reproducing the next generation are

likely to intensify over time as globalization proceeds and more nation states are incorporated

into a global wage labor market. The costs of conformity to existing institutional arrangements

on population health and well-being need to be carefully monitored to develop a more coherent

sense of when intervention is likely to be politically supported and substantively effective in

reducing work-family stress.

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