Work, Family, and Community: Exploring Interconnections - by Patricia Voydanoff

Abstract

Work, Family, and Community: Exploring Interconnections. Patricia Voydanoff. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2007. 196 pp. ISBN 0-8058-5620-X. $59.95 (hardback). ISBN 0-8058-5621-8. $29.95 (paperback). In 1987, when Patricia Voydanoff wrote Work and Family Life, the worlds of work and famUy looked different than diey do today. With more women working outside die home, the ending of welfare as we know it, the increasing diversity of family structures, and other changes in family and work life, researchers have increasingly focused on the interaction between work and family. Twenty years after publishing Work and Family Life, Voydanoff adds to this effort with Work, Family, and Community: Exploring Interconnections. In this latest book, Voydanoff builds on the earlier book and adds community as a new dimension to a model of how work and family affect individuals. By integrating community into the model, Voydanoff provides readers with a more complete portrait of how work, family, and community can intersect to affect how people fare in their roles in the workplace, home, and community. The book is organized into eight chapters. Voydanoff first presents a conceptual model of the interconnections between work, family, and community using an ecological systems approach. This approach demonstrates the interconnections by examining how the environment affects people at different levels of interaction. Attention focuses primarily on the interactions at the mesosystem level, which is the level that links together the experiences a person has across domains, such as work and family or work and community. The author then discusses problems with the worker-earner role, which center around the difficulties of maintaining stable employment and earning sufficient income. This discussion is followed by an examination of the demands and resources both within and across the work, family, and community domains. The author shows how demands and resources affect the work-family fit, which in turn affects the balance between work and family and has consequences for role performance and quality and well-being. A discussion of aspects of the model that need additional research and the implications of the model for policies and programs conclude the book. One of the strengths of this book is its recognition of the role played by communities in work and family life. Oftentimes, the study of community is distinct and separate from that of work and family. Instead of being studied independently from work and family, community warrants inclusion as a context that affects how well people function within the workplace and home. Community includes the local community, the smaller geographic neighborhood, and friends who provide nonfamily interaction. The community can drain resources through the time spent volunteering in organizations and associations and helping friends and neighbors, as well as produce strains from neighborhood problems and excessive requests from friends for help. …