Reconceptualizing Part-Time Employment

Abstract

Part-time employment has expanded rapidly among women in many industrialised countries, particularly since the 1960s. The cause of this dramatic increase is often discussed in terms of demand and supply, or pull and push factors. The increasing demand for women workers and their wish for more flexible work arrangements, together with the growth of service industries has drawn into the workforce married women who need to combine domestic commitments and paid work. Concomitantly, the implications of participation of a large number of women in part-time employment have been extensively and controversially debated, parti cularly in relation to the question of whether or not this development has contributed to the improvement of the position of women in the labour market and/or the family. The above two books discuss the relationship between the rise of this particular pattern of employment among women and changes in the position of women in the labour market and in society more generally, while approaching these issues in very different ways. May Tarn deals with the situation of part-time women workers only in Britain, while the collection edited by Hans-Peter Blossfeld and Catherine Hakim employs a comparative approach, covering the state of part-time work in various European countries and in the USA. Despite this obvious difference, each work aims to explore an alternative perspective on part-time work by analysing not only structural elements and employers' needs, but also factors related to individual workers and their points of view, analyses of which are still relatively rare. This approach underlines the complex nature of part-time work among women, which as the titles of both books indicate cannot be understood as a straightforward 'either/or' approach. Tam explores part-time work from two perspectives as a bridge for women to combine family and paid work and as a trap holding them in the secondary workforce, and points out the shortcomings of both approaches. Blossfeld and Hakim argue that part-time work should not be regarded simply as a means of either equalisation or marginalisation of women in the labour market and/or the family. The clear recognition of the complexity of the situation surrounding part-time women workers is a strength of both works leading the authors to search for an alternative perspective on this phenomenon, and especially to reconsider the way in which part-time work is conceptualised. May Tam adopts 'a quantitative, secondary analysis of survey data' (43) as her research method and analyses the data provided by the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative, which contains information collected from both employers and employees in six localities in Britain, including such matters a$ work attitudes and histories of individual women part-time workers. From her