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Making an explicit link between people's personal needs and business goals can be a catalyst for changing work practices. In the end, both the company and the employees benefit. At [...]

An afterword to the "New England Quarterly" is presented.

HUMAN RESOURCE PROFESSIONALS ARE OFTEN CAUGHT BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL DEMANDS AND EMPLOYEE CONCERNS. To HANDLE THESE COMPETING pressures, they tend to develop elaborately structured and tightly controlled systems for managing people. [...]

Many technically-trained managers become stranded halfway up the corporate chain of advancement at mid-career. This article discusses efforts companies may take to open new pathways for these individuals. (Author/RE)

In reflecting on Joan Acker's legacy and her influence on us, we had the dialogue we reproduce here. We hope it shows our admiration and gratitude for her work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of people to deal constructively with the needs of work and of family depends on the kind of work they do; the organization that employs them; and the economic, social, and national context in which they live. This article compares the responses to this issue in the United States, Britain, and Sweden. In the United States, the effort has been to allow women to meet male work demands. In Britain, the emphasis has been on providing flexible arrangements for mothers who work. In neither case has there been any attempt to change the rules for career success or to deal with gender roles in the family. Sweden, however, has made the effort to try to equalize gender roles. This makes many aspects of life easier, hut women still are seldom found in top positions. These differences in national context determine the kinds of responses that organizations can make to the family needs of their employees. Their implication for the United States response is discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article distinguishes between "strategic autonomy" (the freedom to set one's own research agenda) and "operational autonomy" (the freedom, once a problem has been set, to attack it by means determined by oneself, within given resource constraints). The article argues, and presents some preliminary corroborating data, that technical careers in the R&D lab should start lower on strategic than on operational autonomy, that operational autonomy should show initial fairly rapid increase, which should be followed by increases in strategic autonomy, and that thereafter a number of different career paths should be available for technical employees. Most labs, however, seem to espouse a philosophy of strategic autonomy combined with operational controls, which creates dilemmas and contradictions in the technical career, particularly at its start. It is proposed that these two aspects of autonomy can usefully be thought of as a two-dimensional grid. Different positions on this grid seem to fit with different orientations and different tasks, and require different strategies for career management. The article ends with a discussion of these managerial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has become essential and urgent that significant actors in the management field of research become aware of the current rejection of previously accepted philosophical caricatures. The unrealistic though “tidy” paradigmatic dichotomy, positivism/quantitative/deduction versus interpretivism/qualitative/induction, is being rejected. Instead, a growing and “untidy” consensus is emerging that helps to position grounded theory (GT) in the research landscape. This growing consensus includes perspectives that range from nomothetic to idiographic and highlights data-driven exploratory approaches in opposition to theory-driven confirmatory approaches. While the foundational pillars of GT (emergence, theoretical sampling, and constant comparison) have to be respected when conducting a GT study, there certainly is plenty of room for creativity in the implementation of a data-driven exploratory GT approach. GT is not limited to an all-encompassing method for qualitative or interpretive research: It is much broader and may be applied from various philosophical perspectives that range from nomothetic to idiographic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded theory (GT) is taught in many doctoral schools across the world and exemplified in most methodological books and publications in top-tier journals as a qualitative research method. This limited view of GT does not allow full use of possible resources and restrains researchers’ creativity and capabilities. Thus, it blocks some innovative possibilities and the emergence of valuable theories, which are badly needed. Therefore, understanding the full reach and scope of GT is becoming urgent, and we brought together a panel of established grounded theory scholars to help us in this endeavor through a reflective conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a series of intervention projects in the conditions and design of work geared to increasing gender equity in organizations and the ability of employees to integrate their working lives with their personal lives. It shows that approaching work with a work-family lens tends to lead to changes in the temporal conditions of work, in what has come to be known as flexibility in the workplace. With a gender lens, more nuanced aspects of the institutions governing the workplace come into sight allowing the possibility of greater actual change in the way that work is designed and accomplished, thus leading to a better fit between the current workforce and the workplace. Although such intervention projects are being done in multiple countries, the discussion is most relevant to the USA, with its limited - almost non-existent - national support for the reconciliation of work and family needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues that gender comes first in the hierarchy of strangeness and a female academic is the real transgressor. She mentions that foreigners in the academy may be strangers, but they are not strangers in the same way as women. She discusses the relation between womanhood and foreignness. She also cites some stories of successful women in the academia.

This article deals first with the temporal patterns of everyday career activities - time in careers - and then with the life-long career line - careers in time. in the formen it introduces the concept of grand- mother time and uses telecommuting as an example. In the latten it builds on the concept of a life-stage responsive career and uses the academic career as an example. The article argues that the accepted notions of time in both daily activities and the life course need serious modification if people are to be productive in the public professional-occupational world as well as in the private world of family and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for an understanding of work-family integration that brings employees' family and other personal concerns explicitly into the work design process. It builds on work design efforts that have previously brought unexpected factors together as well as on the newer research that shows how closely these domains are linked. By an extended case study on legal services it shows both the possibilities and the difficulties of effecting such a change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a tribute to honor the career and memory of sociologist Susan C. Eaton. Positions held during her affiliation with Harvard University and other organizations; Career experiences as a feminist alternative to the Harvard Crimson; Efforts made in field interviewing of workers, union leaders and managers to understand the essence of labor-management partnership.

This article describes the experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after the publication of its report A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT. It starts by describing aspects of the academic career that make it difficult for women, or anyone with responsibilities outside of their academic work. It then outlines three definitions of gender equity based on equality, fairness, and integration, and probes the reasons behind persisting inequities. The MIT results fit well into the first two definitions of gender equity, but fall short on the last. Finally, the article analyses the factors that came together at MIT to produce the outcome described and indicates the lessons learned and those still to be learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of women in technical/scientific careers is still very small worldwide. The aim of the present paper is to understand how women who are already pursuing technical careers experience and reconcile the demands of their professional and private lives in two different national contexts. Participants in the study were 453 women in two countries with different socioeconomic, political, and cultural backgrounds: the United States and Israel. The cross-cultural perspective is employed here in order to better understand the universal aspects of the phenomenon, is opposed to those that are tied to a particular situational or cultural context. Women in both countries face a practical dilemma in combining career and family as well as a femininity dilemma related to their identity as women. These dilemmas differ according to the life stage of the women, but the effects vary by national culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the effect of increasing number of women entering careers on traditional family/work patterns. Correlation between early job challenge, high work involvement and organizational success; Concept of two-person careers; Organizational solutions to the dilemma of decreasing man's ability to meet traditional business requirements.

The article reports on a cross-cultural comparison of American, Israeli and Greek women pursuing technical and scientific careers. The American data were collected by mail during 1985/6 from active members of the Society of Women Engineers and the MIT Alumni Association--all living in the Boston area. The Israeli participants were approached during 1987/8 via the personnel departments in a variety of organizations throughout the country by means of university Alumni mailing lists and by a "call for volunteers" advertised in professional magazines. The collection of the Greek data began in 1989 and is still going on. Participants are being drawn from the large population of active members of the Technical Chamber of Greece, in the greater area of Athens. The women in the American sample, in comparison to the other groups, have less children and a higher percentage of them hold high-level jobs, including management, which in US ideology is the 'success' position. In contrast to the Greek and the Israeli women, these U.S. professionals seem to compete some-what more successfully in the work arena, but at the expense of the family.

This article compares male and female engineers in terms of their attitudes toward technical expertise. There are two significant differences between men and women that are relevant to their experience of technical work. One major difference lies in the expressed self-confidence of these two groups and the second difference relates to the importance attributed to having a job that allows one to develop one's technical expertise. The self-confidence of technical competent women is lower than that of men and one strong reason for this is the pattern of women's lives. Investigators have identified a pervasive myth children, and scientific work of high quality are incompatible. The self-confidence of these women engineers is strongly tied to their success outside of work. Analysis of questionnaire data from male and female pairs of engineers show that even these pairs share similar orientations to the role of work in their lives, the women have a more ambivalent attitude toward technical expertise and the reasons for this relates to singular, more masculine way that technical work is defined.

The article introduces several studies on the social effects of television. Leo Bogart describes some of the characteristics of American commercial television and reviews the knowledge about television's audience and the role it plays in the American home. A more speculative analysis of the importance of television in America is given by Gilbert Seldes. Two articles are concerned with television in Great Britain. Raymond Williams discusses the development and present state of British television in relation to some problems of British society. Hilde Himmelweit summarizes the principles that can be derived from British research on the effects of television. Finally, two articles deal with educational television in America.

The article discusses the effects of a year's experience in the United States on the self-image of Scandinavians. It deals particularly with the process by which a change in a person's self-image comes about when he is placed in a new environment. There are many meanings that a trip to another country may have for a visitor. People differ in the goals that they pursue by means of such a trip, in the ways in which the trip fits into the course of their lives, in the use to which they put the trip. The central purpose of the study is to identify and analyze some of these distinct patterns and to relate them to a theoretical framework for the study of change. The study examines what each individual brings to his American stay.

The article discusses career and family orientations of husbands and wives in relation to marital happiness. The role of the educated married woman has been the subject of much debate in the past few decades. People concerned with the economy and the professions have urged trained women with families to enter the labor market and women have responded, though their participation in the highest job levels is still limited. Some family experts, on the other hand, have warned about the possible disintegration of the family that would result if women forsook their traditional roles, though research findings, on the whole, have not supported this fear. Only recently have some writers begun to analyze the process by which men achieve an integration of family and their own work, and there has virtually been no study relating to married women's work patterns that deals simultaneously with husbands and wives. The hypothesis under investigation in this study is that an educated, married woman's resolution of the career- family dilemma cannot be adequately evaluated without knowledge of her husband's resolution.