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Page 1: Work–Life Balance for Fathers in Globalized Knowledge Work. Some Insights from the Norwegian Context

Work–Life Balance for Fathers inGlobalized Knowledge Work. SomeInsights from the NorwegianContext

Elin Kvande*

This article takes as its point of departure the introduction of a new flexibletime regime in parts of working life. There has been increased focus onhow knowledge work in particular is developing into total commitmentorganizations where employees put in more and more time at work. Usingtwo case studies from law and computing companies the article focuses onthe organization of work and the organization of time in globalized knowl-edge organizations, and what effect this has on the time practices of maleemployees who are fathers. In the same period the Nordic countries haveintroduced state incentives and regulations that aim to help fathers achievework–life balance. The article also discusses whether this is a fruitfulpolicy, or whether fathers working in flexible time cultures need morederegulation, individual choice and flexible policy measures.

Keywords: knowledge work, fathers, time cultures, globalized, flexibility,regulation

Introduction

The interplay between institutions like working life, the family and thewelfare state is different in the Nordic countries from that in other

western European countries (Esping-Andersen, 1999). A strong and expan-sive welfare state has contributed to a combination of public and privateinvestments in childcare and other caring and provider policies. When itcomes to the politics that have been developed for working parents, theNordic welfare states have been looked upon as being especially innovativeby some researchers (Saraceno, 1997).

Address for correspondence: *Department of Sociology and Political Science, NTNU, 7491TrondheimNorwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway, e-mail:[email protected]

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The relatively long period of parental leave in all these countries are impor-tant elements in these policies. In the Norwegian context parents have a rightto a year of paid leave and two years of unpaid leave (Brandth and Kvande,2001). In addition the Work Environment Act from 1992 gives parents theright to reduced working hours until the child is ten years old and it alsoenforces strong overtime regulations. The state has also made considerableinvestments in nurseries and kindergartens. The Nordic welfare states havetherefore played a major role in providing parents with opportunities tocombine family and work (Leira, 1992). This is why the Nordic welfare stateshave been labelled ‘women friendly’ (Hernes, 1987). These policies have con-tributed to Nordic countries having a high percentage of women in the workforce combined with high fertility rates. This has attracted attention in a timewhen other European countries are experiencing declining fertility rates. Inspite of these policies, however, only 25 per cent of Norwegian couples withyoung children combine two full-time jobs (Kitterød, 2005).

The work–life balance is concerned with the whole of the life course. In thisarticle, however, the focus is on Norwegian fathers and their use of parentalleave, which is available for the earliest years in the life of a child. Thereasoning behind the Norwegian parental leave scheme, which was intro-duced in 1993, is not only to facilitate the opportunities for women to combinework and childcare. The intention is also to ensure that the benefits andburdens of a working and family life are shared between women and menand to strengthen the father–child relationship. In the book Flexible Fathers(Brandth and Kvande, 2003) this is called the development towards a father-friendly welfare state. The regulations are aimed at helping the work–lifebalance of fathers by providing extensive rights to employed fathers, both bygiving them optional leave and by reserving a part of the overall parentalleave for fathers. Since the introduction of this quota system there has been adramatic change in the proportion of fathers who take parental leave, from 4per cent in 1993 to 90 per cent in 2003 (Brandth and Kvande, 2005a). Thismeans that there has been a normalization of the use of such leave that mustbe considered as an adaptation to the state gendering men as fathers.

If we look at what happens when the fathers stay at home doing the carework, we find that a common characteristic of the histories of these fathers isthe experience that care work means using time (Brandth and Kvande, 2002).They experience that care cannot be carried out in short periods of intenseinteraction, such as playing or reading. By being present for many of theroutine activities concerning children over sustained periods of time, thefathers have adopted a new understanding of their child’s needs and feelings(Brandth and Kvande, 2002). We can therefore say that the welfare state, bythe process of naming men as fathers, also has inspired fathering practices,which implies the use of quantitative time.

The expansion of the parental leave for fathers has, however, occurred at aperiod of great change in working life. The fact that fathers on parental leave

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experience the importance of spending time with their babies stands in con-trast with some important tendencies in working life. We are experiencing theintroduction of a new flexible time regime in parts of the working life. Animportant part of this regime is the pressure to work longer hours. There hasbeen increased focus on how knowledge work organizations, in particular,are developing into workplaces (Kvande, 2002, 2007; Rasmussen, 2002;Sørhaug, 1996) greedy for time use.

This has an effect on the work–life balance of fathers working in globalizedknowledge-based organizations, leading to the question as to whether fathersneed more individual choice when it comes to policy measures provided bythe welfare state. There are strong traditions of welfare state policy regula-tions in Norway and other Nordic countries. Nowadays, however, discus-sions focus on the need to have more deregulation and thereby to introducemore choice and flexibility for parents.

Transnational business masculinities

Over the last 15 years a considerable body of work has been produced inthe field of critical studies of men’s practices (Pease and Pringle, 2001). Thefocus has been on a range of issues, including men as carers of children andmen’s practices in organizations. Connell (1998, 2000) introduced the conceptof hegemonic masculinity, focusing on the division between culturally domi-nating masculinities, which he calls ‘hegemonic masculinities’, and ‘subordi-nated’ or ‘marginalized’ masculinity practices.

Connell is currently preoccupied with researching or understanding howlocal constructions of masculinities are influenced by processes in globalmarkets and multinational organizations, as well as on changes to the labourmarket and in the international media. According to Connell when analysinghegemonic masculinity constructions today we ought to include in our studiesleaders and employees in transnational companies that operate in differentcountries. Connell’s initial enquiries regarding the global transactions whichoccur in processes of masculinity formation have opened up a whole range ofpossibilities for exploration and contestation (Pease and Pringle, 2001). Thesestudies have begun to conceptualize broad transnational categories of men andmasculinities, such as ‘global business masculinity’ (Connell, 1998).

The men in these transnational companies work in ‘total commitment’organizations (Coser, 1974) that occupy all their time. They can have no familyobligations and they need ‘someone else’ to do their housework and carework. Connell (1998) uses the concept ‘transnational business masculinity’in order to describe this. The members of these transnational organizationsrepresent the predominant cultural norms, which also are transmitted todifferent countries as local hybrids, according to Connell. The suggestion isthat ‘thinking about masculinity as a feature of world global structure anddynamics of gender’ will help us to use the findings of ethnographic research

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more adequately. This type of research needs to be able to incorporate locality-oriented approaches while at the same time establishing a contextual frame-work which allows us to link national elements as well as relevant elementsreflecting the globalizing processes (Pease and Pringle, 2001).

In Norway this type of masculinity construction will compete with thepolitical attempt to encourage caring father practices. These reforms havebeen aimed at constructing men as care-givers for young children by helpingfathers to set time limits in their work organizations.

The processes which Connell describes concerns jobs in the knowledgeand service sector. In his ‘grand narrative’ Castells (2000) analysed the majorsocial, economic and political changes at the end of the 20th century, pointingout the way in which work organizations and work conditions are changingwith the rise of the global economy. He also points to the fact that the numberof jobs in information and knowledge production are increasing. In thisarticle I discuss how the local construction of Norwegian male employers asfathers is influenced by processes in global markets and flexible time cultures,based on data from knowledge work and the time cultures that may bedeveloping in this sector.

Knowledge work and boundless flexible time cultures

Generally, knowledge work is defined as work needing a great degree ofproblem-solving and high level of qualifications in its workers. In additionit often requires creativity and non-standardized working conditions(Alvesson, 1995, 2004). As all types of work require, knowledge it is thereforedifficult to find a precise definition of what is meant by knowledge work.According to Alvesson (2004) the concept is used broadly for two types ofknowledge-intensive work: research and development organizations that arebased on scientific knowledge, like biotechnology or high-technology engi-neering; and professional work, such as law and accounting.

In this type of work it is the knowledge of each worker that is the mainresource or capital of the company. This, in turn, requires a certain type ofwork organization that is able to give the employees a great degree ofautonomy in order to use their knowledge in both a creative and an efficientway. This is one of the reasons why we see a growth in new post-bureaucraticforms of organization (Heckscher and Donnellon, 1994), emphasizing looserstructures, dynamic networks and project organization. This form of organi-zation relies on a high degree of employee autonomy because the decentrali-zation process must also give the employees opportunities (Kvande andRasmussen, 1990). They are given a lot of trust and responsibility and theirwork is experienced as interesting and rewarding, thus they are willing tospend a lot of time at work.

This coincides with the rise of networks of transnational companies. Theuse of information technology contributes to the development of a type of

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flexibility that increases employee autonomy as to time and place. All thesefactors contribute to the growth of a new flexible time regime in working life.Researchers (Sennett, 1998) describe how employees in this new time regimeexperience an increasing flexibility of working hours which results in theirspending more time at work and less time with their families. This appliesin particular to ‘high commitment’ activities in knowledge companies. Theformal contract that regulates working hours is being replaced by moralobligations and time norms that demand their total commitment (Epsteinet al., 1999; Hewitt 1993; Hochschild 1997). In sum this leads to the introduc-tion of boundless time cultures.

The focus on the empowerment of the individual employee leads to moredemocratic and rewarding working conditions, but also to more intensifiedwork and longer working hours. This has been described as a double-edgedprocess (Kvande, 2002). The individual worker is responsible for getting thejob done. She is also the one who has to decide on how much time is going tobe used. In other words, she has to bargain with herself. This contrasts withtime organization in the industrial time regime, where the main principle isstandardized working hours with fixed working hours and clear distinctionsbetween work and leisure (Ellingsæter, 2003).

The concept of internalized self-discipline can be used in order to describethe increasing demands that are placed upon employees through the intro-duction of flexible working conditions. This way of transforming employees’subjectivity helps to produce more flexible employers who are prepared tomeet the demands of the new working life.

In what follows I discuss the possible time disciplining effects thatmembers of the flexible work organization experience. My focus is on theorganization of work and on the organization of time in globalized knowl-edge organizations, and what effect this has on the time practices of maleemployees who are fathers.

Data

The data used in this article comes from two different research projects. Thefirst concerned fathers in different work organizations and their use ofthe ‘cash for care’ reform that was introduced in 1998 (Bungum et al., 2001).The reform was intended to give parents a choice between using nurseriesand staying at home with their child. The study was based on case-studyinterviews of parents of small children in different companies about thisreform. It included a knowledge-based company operating globally andbased in several European countries, Brazil, Australia, Malaysia and China.The company is relatively small, employing only 200 people, but describesitself as multicultural. The employees are all graduate engineers and most ofthem are men. The members of the main organization in Norway are offered

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positions abroad and they also have to travel to different countries all over theworld, depending on where the projects were located. The company is part ofthe intelligent transport system sector and they produce technology forcharging road users. In the empirical analyses in this article, I use one father,John, who is employed in this company in order to illustrate more generalprocesses in the company. He is a computing engineer and his wife alsoworks as a graduate engineer. They have two small children.

The second project is an EU project called ‘Culture, Custom, Caring —Men’s and Women’s Possibilities for Parental Leave’ (Einarsdóttir and Peturs-dottir, 2004). The focus in this project was on gendered time practices infamilies with small children, and the role of parents’ work organizations. Oneof the main research themes was fathers’ use of parental leave in the fourparticipating countries, Germany, Spain, Iceland and Norway. The designconsisted of case studies with long interviews in six different companies inknowledge work, service work and the manufacturing industry. The samedesign was used in all four countries.

I have selected one of the knowledge companies in Norway from thisproject to use in this article. This company provides services in accounting,auditing and tax advice. The firm operates in 140 countries and occupies100,000 people. In Norway there are 1100 employees in 30 different branches.The employees are offered permanent positions in the firm, but they do nothave a formal agreement on standard working hours. The firm works oncommission from different customers, who decide the time limits for thedifferent projects. In order to promote a positive organization culture to fostertheir engagement and involvement, all the employees are sent on an intro-duction course at the international headquarters. In addition they have to goto a yearly conference, where they all meet for an annual pep talk.

The wages are decided individually and it is expected that the employeesare willing to put in overtime without extra pay. Some of the lawyers,however, have a special bonus system in addition to their wage.

I use the long interviews with two fathers from this work organization toillustrate more general issues concerning time culture and time practices inthis type of knowledge work. Bendik is one of the employees and he has auniversity degree in law. He is 36-years old and has a little girl who is twoyears old. Bjørn is Bendiks’ manager. He is 56-years old and has grown-upchildren.

Work organization in knowledge companies

In this part I present the organization of work in the two companies that arethe focus of this article. I then discuss what impact this has on fathers’work–life balance.

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Independence and responsibility

John works in a company that is engaged in projects in different parts of theworld and that develops computer systems for road pricing. He has espe-cially been involved in projects in Malaysia and Austria. The organization isproject organized, where they change their job once or twice a year. Johnalternates between being a member of the project team and a project managerwith as many as 15 people working with him. The work organization in hiscompany illustrates the double-edged process often found in this type ofwork, which in this case, means giving the employees independence andresponsibility at the same time. As a result of this the members of the orga-nization often become very involved with their work. John illustrates this:

I am in the type of position where I have a lot of responsibility — and I amvery emotionally involved with my work so I don’t really think much abouthow much time I spend on it.

He continues:

I like doing this — the only thing I think [is that] I should be working less.I am very flexible. And my employer should be the same. I hardly have tomention that I will be taking some time off. I decide on that myself. I amgiven a job to do, and I think I do it pretty well. And then I have the libertyto do other things. But, I do that too seldom!

The point is that he has the independence to decide when he wants to take timeoff, but he never uses this opportunity because, in his own words: ‘there isalways a great deal of work to do’. He sees the paradox of his situation,however, and he feels it is his own fault and that he could be better at takingtime off:

It is because of the amount of work, and the type of work, of course. Muchdepends on me being there, because I have to talk to a lot of people, do a lotof coordination and meetings and stuff. But I think that our employerought to be more flexible and encourage us to think of it as going bothways. If you have flexible employees, then you ought to have flexibleemployers.

He illustrates how autonomy and responsibility go together and create aone-way flexibility. In the end he decides that when he doesn’t use his right toflexibility, it is his own fault: ‘I am not clever enough at using the flexibility,but that is me and not the job’. In other words, boundless work is seen in theend as a problem which it is up to the individual worker to find a solution to.

Teamwork as a disciplining force

The employees in this company are empowered through process-orientatedwork and teamwork. They work in projects that can involve from three up to

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14 people. The teams have a great degree of autonomy, and it is seldom thatany of the managers are involved in the project work. In spite of the fact thatthe work tasks often are individual, the employees are expected to worktogether as a team. Bendik explains this:

We are all instructed to work in teams. Nobody is allowed to lock himselfaway in a room and ‘solve’ the case. The ability to be involved, to delegateand to work in a team is considered to be an important success factor in thecompany. It is nice to be in a collective, and quality assurance begins whenwe have received a commission: how to handle this; how to put together ateam that will secure optimal performance for this particular case.

The employees experience teamwork as very rewarding. They feel it givesthem flexibility both when it comes to working hours and work tasks. This isalso, however, a double-edged sword. The team also functions to control theirtime use, as John has experienced in the computing company. He has mixedfeelings about teamwork, because in principle there is ‘great freedom, peopledecide themselves’. The controlling factor is, however that

there is too much to do all the time. And most of us are very personallyengaged in our work in order to get things done on time. And we are, ofcourse, part of a team, and if one of us says he is going to be away oncompensation time, the reaction will be: ‘Now, in the middle of the project?’You understand, it is a bit like that.

This is also why he does not know what to answer when we ask him whetherhis firm is a family-friendly company:

Basically they are not very family friendly — because of the type of work wehave, project based, and there is a lot to do. We are too few people — thereare many in our company that work a lot.

He points to the fact that he works in projects and this has a discipliningeffect, especially when they are not enough people working on the project.This leads to people working a lot, without knowing exactly how many hoursthey put in. Nobody has to order them to work overtime. It is the type of workand the way the organization works that has this disciplining effect on theemployees. Working long hours is one of the ingredients in what I havelabelled boundless work; the working hours are no longer within the stan-dardized pattern of normal working hour week and regulated overtime.Instead it is becoming so flexible that John and others working in this type oforganization, say that they don’t know how many hours they work.

Here we see how the organization enters into his decision-making in yetanother way. Being a member of a project organization disciplines you to stay

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with your job and get it done. Otherwise you get negative responses fromyour fellow workers. In other words, there is therefore no need for theemployer to control the employee.

Boundless time cultures

In my introduction I discussed the development of greedy organizationswithin the flexible time regime. Often this implies that the employees work intotal commitment organizations, which require that most of the employee’stime is used in the organization. This is especially the case if the organizationsare part of the globalized working life.

Travelling the world

John’s use of time is greatly influenced by the fact that his company hascustomers in different parts of the world. The employees therefore have toadjust to this situation, which leads to extensive travelling to other countriesand other forms of flexible time use. When we ask about the time culture inhis organization, he says he doesn’t really know how many hours he worksduring a week or a month:

I have never counted the hours really, but I feel that I work more thanenough. I travel a lot in my job, and when I’m travelling I just work andwork. When I was working with the Malaysia project, I was away for a weekevery month. You can’t just stay for one day when you go to the Far East.

His wife also works as an engineer in the same type of work and they havetwo small children who have not yet started school. This means that they haveto be taken to the nursery and the kindergarten every morning and thenfetched before four o’clock in the afternoon. The opening hours are notflexible, so that parents must be there on time. This is why many parentsorganize their schedule so that they either take or collect the children frompreschool. This gives the children and the parents less stressful mornings andafternoons. This is also what John and his wife generally do: ‘The last halfyear I have worked early because then I get more time aligned with Malaysian[work hours]: it suits their watches better. So my wife takes the kids to thenursery, while I fetch them.

We see from the quote that it is not only that he has to travel a lot, but alsowhen he is at home it is the watches in Malaysia that decide his own workinghours and his shift in taking care of his children. This is an example of howthe discipline that being part of a globalized working life requires. It regulatesboth his working life and his family life:

I feel this myself: it is difficult to fit everything in, when I travel such a lot.It does not go very well with having kids, all this travelling. At the moment

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I just travel for a week at a time during a month, but the other people on theproject have to stay in Malaysia for two, three or four weeks at a time. Andwith a family, it speaks for itself.

His story illustrates how difficult it is to have a nine-to-five working life whenyou are in this type of organization. The situation of boundless work becomesvery apparent when a project needs to be concluded. All the elements of thegreedy organization become very clear. He tells of when he was ending atwo-year project:

At the end of a project there is a lot of pressure — you are working withtechnology and there is a lot that has to be coordinated. It happens quiteoften that we are not able to keep the time limit — then you are quitestressed out. There is a terrific amount of pressure. You are quite down,psychologically, as a human being in these situations. It is quite unbeliev-able the strain you are under. You work 24 hours a day at the end. The worsttime when I was down in Malaysia: I slept for eight hours, and then I wasup for 48 hours, then I slept for eight hours again. People can’t be meant towork so much. After a round like that you tend to lose your motivation andyou feel that everything is terrible.

There are no regulations or restrictions to prevent him from working 48 hoursin a stretch. It is his individual responsibility to say, ‘Stop’ but this does nothappen because the pressure is too great. John illustrates very clearly thedouble edge in his work situation when he tells us that in spite of the timeculture in his work organization he wants even more responsibility ‘and a jobwhich is even worse!’

Flexible but customer-controlled

In the law firm the time pressure is not as extreme as in the example we havejust been looking at, but employees need to be very flexible when it comes tomeeting the customers’ demands. When we interviewed the managementthey pointed to the fact that the time flexibility works both ways. The lawyerscan work less in slack periods, but they are expected to put in a lot of extratime in order to meet the deadlines that the customers have decided on. Oneof the managers, Bjørn, tells us about this:

Yes, the time pressure has increased over the last years. The job has to bedone by tomorrow. I say to the customers that they can phone any time ofday, they can also phone in the middle of the night.

Bendik, who is not in management confirms this when he says:

The customer decides the time use. As a rule the customer wants immediateanswers or deliveries. We have to satisfy them, and if we cannot do the jobwithin the time limit, we won’t get it. That is why we just have to go for it.

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This means that they cannot control or regulate their working day to fit theirown preferences. They have to give priority to the work that the company hasto get done, and they must organize their private life to fit in with this. Themanager also says that if the company needs its employees to do a job, theyexpect them to organize or to even put off their parental leave.

Being on line all the time

Another ingredient in the boundless time culture is that you carry your workwith you in your mind most of time. The work is internalized and is there allthe time. John also talks about this:

There is another point I want to make about it being a family-friendlycompany — I don’t know if it may only be to do with me as a person, butI tend to get very involved in my work — I worry a lot. I find that this is themost difficult part to combine with having a family. If your head is some-where else and you are tired and worried, you are just halfway to the doorare you not? We have got so much responsibility and that is what makes itso difficult.

He sees this as a problem for himself when he is trying to combine fatheringwith being a responsible employee. At the same time he is not sure whetheror not this is due to his own personality, but he also sees that it has to do withhim having so much individual responsibility. So when we ask if he sees hisjob as boundless he agrees and he starts using this concept when describinghis work:

Yes, and for me it is also very concrete or physically, because wherever I goI always take my PC and my mobile phone. They are always there with me.This weekend, for example, when we were on our Sunday walk in thewoods, someone phoned, and then I had to take out my PC and find outsomething. And with the time difference in Malaysia, which is six actuallyseven hours before us ... it is obvious, isn’t it, it’s boundless.

The boundless work situation disciplines him so that he even works onSundays when he is on the traditional family walk. He sees very clearly howthis situation has a negative impact on his fathering practices,

I have often jokingly said that I should have gone for a job which was moreclearly defined, like working as a shop assistant. Possibly you don’t need tobring the mobile and your PC home with you.

Depending on what country he is working with, he has to adjust his time forfathering. When he was working with Malaysia he lost time with his childrenin the mornings, because he had to be online with their time. When he isworking with Austria the time with the kids in the afternoon and evening has

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to be adjusted to the working hours in Austria. ‘The global clock’ is in hisbody and its disciplining effect regulates his fathering practices.

Family before work or work before family? Discussion

I started out by focusing on how family policies in Norway have been explicitlydirected towards making reproduction work more visible to working life. Theintroduction of what has been labelled a father-friendly welfare state wasspecifically aimed at helping the work–life balance of fathers. The expansion ofthe parental leave scheme, which grants extensive rights to employed fathersboth by giving them optional leave and by reserving a part of parental leave forfathers is an important element in this.

The fathers who have taken fathers’ leave have experienced how importantit is to use time with their children. John, the computer engineer workingin a boundless work organization, is an example of this. He has two smallchildren and he was at home on parental leave for six months with each child.Like others Norwegian fathers he used his rights,. He talks enthusiasticallyabout his experience:

It was fantastic — I say this to all the men I work with: You ought to trythis’. I don’t think that the men have understood how great this really is —and especially when you have the type of job that I have. Just to switch offthe job, it is unbelievable — and you see things very differently — you learnto get your priorities right, family before work.

He tells us that he learned to give priority to his family. The rest of his story,however, illustrates how difficult this can be when you work in an organi-zation belonging to the flexible time regime that often leads to the pressure ofworking longer hours. Knowledge work organizations are more and morebecoming greedy work organizations demanding that employers put in moreand more time. I have discussed how local constructions of fathering prac-tices are influenced by processes in global markets and flexible time cultures.This creates tensions for fathers and forces them to give priority to their workin spite of their wish to follow up their intention to ‘get priorities right,putting family before work’.

The organization of work, with the emphasis on individual responsibilityand team organization, together with the boundless time cultures, representa set of strong structural forces in knowledge work. However, the disciplin-ing processes of empowerment and individualization makes the employeesthemselves the driving force behind the long-hours work culture. The pres-sure for their total commitment in these organizations is reinforced whenthey are globalized, and the members have to adjust to what I have called ‘theglobal clock’ and also to spend long periods of time in other parts of theworld.

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In Norway and other Nordic countries there are now discussions aboutwhether we need more deregulation in welfare state policies, and therebyintroducing more choice and flexibility for parents (Brandth and Kvande,2005a, 2005b; Brandth et al., 2005). This implies that parental leave, includingfathers’ leave could be used more flexibly and employees could negotiateindividually with their employer on how to use the leave. Opening up oppor-tunities for more individual choice, however, does not seem to be the way togo if we want to bring about more work–life balance for fathers. If weconsider the examples from the knowledge organizations that have beenanalysed in this article, introducing more individual choice for fathersworking in boundless time cultures, will probably lead to a situation wherework life ‘wins’ because of the strong structural forces at work in this type oforganization. State regulation through collective, standard solutions has hada positive effect on the work–life balance for fathers in the Norwegiancontext. If it were to be based on individual choice, it would be difficult for theindividual employee to set limits to their work and to mark the bordersbetween work and home or leave.

Parental leave needs to have a boundary setting function, especially inknowledge work with boundless time cultures. This conclusion is in accor-dance with several studies concerning ‘family friendly’ employment policiesin companies (Hochschild, 1997; Epstein et al., 1999) which have shown thatthe different policies are not used to any great extent by parents. As long astaking up family-friendly policies remains an individual option, the employeerisks becoming a time deviant (Epstein et al., 1999) and thus being marginal-ized at work.

The standard, collective solution appears to be the preferred measure forfathers who might need help from state regulations to set limits in workorganizations. In other words, if leave is collectively granted and collectivelytaken, the risks associated with taking it are perceived to disappear. Thiswould provide fathers with the legitimization that might be needed in orderfor them to take parental leave and have a better work–life balance in aflexible time regime.

References

Alvesson, M. (1995) Managing Knowledge-intensive Companies. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter.

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