Building a Citizenship Argument on Top of the Business Case Argument: A Systemic Perspective on Work–Family Articulation

Abstract

ARIANE OLLIER-MALATERRERouen Business SchoolAs a work–life scholar at a Grande Ecolein France and a former project leader,entrepreneur and Accenture manager, Iagree with Kossek, Baltes, and Matthews(2011) that work–family research seems tobemakinglessofanimpactonpracticethanit should. Making an impact on practice is achallenge in many areas of social sciencesresearch, not only for work–family research(Rynes & Shapiro, 2005). Yet work–familyresearch is a particularly complex areaof research because of its intrinsic cross-disciplinary nature and of the many layersof context it has to embrace. Each one ofus reads and designs research through aset of lenses: the gender lens, the ethnicitylens, the disciplinary lens, and the countryof origin lens, to name only a few. TheKossek et al.’s article is no exception:it is rooted in industrial–organizational(I–O) psychology and proposes typical U.S.centric views. This commentary provides adifferent perspective that, combined withtheir perspective and other scholars’, mayhelp moving the field toward making agreater impact. Specifically, I argue thatto make an impact, work–life research