Work-Life Advantage: Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation

By Al James

Work-Life Advantage analyses how employer-provision of ‘family-friendly’ working arrangements - designed to help workers better reconcile work, home and family - can also enhance firms’ capacities for learning and innovation, in pursuit of long-term competitive advantage and socially inclusive growth. 

• Brings together major debates in labour geography, feminist geography, and regional learning in novel ways, through a focus on the shifting boundaries between work, home, and family
• Addresses a major gap in the scholarly research surrounding the narrow ‘business case’ for work-life balance by developing a more socially progressive, workerist ‘dual agenda’
• Challenges and disrupts masculinist assumptions of the “ideal worker” and the associated labour market marginalization of workers with significant home and family commitments
• Based on 10 years of research with over 300 IT workers and 150 IT firms in the UK and Ireland, with important insights for professional workers and knowledge-intensive companies around the world

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Oct 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781118944813

Book preview

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

List of Figures

List of Tables

Series Editor’s Preface

Preface and Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Chapter One: Inclusive Regional Learning?

Introduction

Unlearning Regional Learning? (Or why economic geographers need to get out more)

Extending the Feminist/Labour/Economic Geography Trading Zone

Advancing the Holistic Regional Development Agenda

Work‐Life Advantage: Building the Argument

Chapter Two: Recentering Regional Learning

Introduction

Theorising Regional (Dis)advantage

Unlearning Regional Learning? Three Analytical Blindspots

Blinkered Economic Geographies – How Did It Get To This?

(Re)gendering Regional Learning and Innovation

Towards a Socially Inclusive Regional Learning and Innovation Agenda

Chapter Three: Work‐Life Balance and its Uncertain ‘Business Case’

Introduction

Rise of the Work‐Life Balance Agenda: Why Now?

Work‐Life Balance as a Contested Concept

Why All the Fuss? Evidencing the Multiple Negative Outcomes of Work‐Life Conflict

Enabling Work‐Life Balance in Practice? Uneven Geographies of Policy (Non‐)intervention

Unpacking the WLB Business Case and its (Dis)contents

Advancing the WLB Dual Agenda: Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation

Chapter Four: Researching Labour Geographies of Work‐Life and Learning in Ireland and the UK

Introduction

Work‐Life Legislative Provision (and Ongoing Challenges) in Ireland and the UK

Placing High‐Tech Regional Worlds of (Re‐)Production in Dublin and Cambridge

Researching Work‐Life Geographies of Regional Learning and Innovation in Practice

Chapter Five: Juggling Work, Home and Family in the Knowledge Economy

Introduction

Populist Portrayals of High‐Tech Work Life: Genius Warriors, Go‐To Guys, and Boys’ Own Heroes

Back to the Future: When the Silicon Cowboys Hang up their Spurs…

Back to the Future II: Silicon Cowgirls and Challenges of Girl Geek Motherhood

Sources of Work‐Life Conflict Beyond Working Parents?

Painful Outcomes of Work‐Life Conflict in IT (on the Need for Work‐Life Provision)

Work‐Life Conflict, in What Sense a Regional Problem?

Varied Worker Preferences for Employer‐Provided Work‐Life Arrangements

Fruit Bowls for ‘Girl Friday’: Uneven Work‐Life Provision, Stubborn Barriers to Positive Change

‘Struggling with the Juggling’ in the Wake of Recession

Chapter Six: Overcoming Work‐Life Conflict and the Gendered Limits to Learning and Innovation?

Introduction

Improving the Work‐Lives of IT Workers and their Families (Mutual Gains, part I)

Enhancing Firms’ Innovative Capacities through Work‐Life Provision (Mutual Gains, part II)

WLB Provision Creating New Challenges for Everyday Learning and Innovation

Work‐Life Provision Rollback as Learning Disadvantage in the Aftermath of Recession?

Chapter Seven: Work‐Life Balance, Cross‐Firm Worker Mobility and Gendered Knowledge Spillovers

Introduction

Embodied Knowledge Spillovers and Regional Competitive Advantage: The Story So Far

Zero Drag Labour Mobility as Regional Learning Advantage? The Limits of Previous Analyses

Gendered Labour Market (Im)mobility: Insights from Beyond the Regional Learning Boys’ Club

Recentering the Regional Learning and Innovation Research Agenda

Reconsidering Cross‐Firm Embodied Knowledge Spillovers

Chapter Eight: Conclusions

Introduction

Taking Back Work(‐Life)?

Making Space for Female Worker Agency

Connecting Regional Worlds of Production to Regional Worlds of Social Reproduction

Work‐Life Balance as Regional Learning Advantage?

Exposing the Gendered Foundations of Regional Knowledge Spillovers

Uneven Geographies of Work‐Life Balance

Future Research Possibilities

Spreading the Word (in a language that can be heard)

Postscript: Bringing It Home? From Work‐Life Geographies to Geographers’ Work‐Lives

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 02

Table 2.1 Grounding regional learning and innovation theories: illustrating the scope of empirical research.

Table 2.2 Building cross‐firm female communities of practice in high technology.

Chapter 03

Table 3.1 Labourforce participation rates by sex: UK, Ireland, EU, OECD (1990, 2000, 2013).

Table 3.2 Women’s employment by age: UK, Ireland, EU, OECD (1990, 2000, 2013).

Table 3.3 Multiple ‘definitions’ of work‐life balance.

Table 3.4 A typology of employer‐provided work‐life balance arrangements.

Table 3.5 Evidencing the business benefits of employer‐provided work‐life arrangements.

Chapter 04

Table 4.1 Comparing national WLB provision/welfare regimes: Ireland and the UK.

Table 4.2 Whatever happened to the UK Silicon Cowboy? IT workforce demographics.

Table 4.3 Whatever happened to the Irish Silicon Cowboy? IT workforce demographics.

Chapter 05

Table 5.1 Lived experiences of work‐family conflict: working mothers in the IT sector.

Table 5.2 Employer provision of (formal) WLB arrangements, Dublin and Cambridge IT firm sample (2008).

Chapter 06

Table 6.1 Employer provision and worker take‐up of (formal) work‐life arrangements, Dublin and Cambridge IT firm sample (2008).

Table 6.2 Consistency of manager‐perceived WLB learning benefits with measured improvements in firm performance (2004–2007).

Table 6.3 Everyday mechanisms of work‐life/learning advantage.

Chapter 07

Table 7.1 Analysing regional knowledge spillovers I: influential/founding studies.

Table 7.2 Analysing regional knowledge spillovers II: extending the debate in economic geography.

Table 7.3 Dublin and Cambridge IT employer provision of (formal) work‐life arrangements (2008).

Table 7.4 IT worker mobility in response to uneven work‐life provision by employers (Dublin and Cambridge, N = 162).

Table 7.5 Evidencing the quality of female ‘embodied knowledge’ in Dublin and Cambridge (n = 115).

List of Illustrations

Chapter 02

Figure 2.1 Unpacking the regional learning and innovation agenda: key concepts/objects of study.

Figure 2.2 Engendering the regional learning agenda – a visual metaphor. Illustration by Tim O’Brien, inspired by a well‐known cartoon by Alain (1953) originally published in The New Yorker magazine.

Chapter 03

Figure 3.1 Documenting the exponential growth in WLB research.

Chapter 04

Figure 4.1 Map of Greater Dublin region and key IT sites.

Figure 4.2 Map of Greater Cambridge region and key IT sites.

Chapter 05

Figure 5.1 Lived experiences of work‐life conflict: IT worker survey (2008).

Figure 5.2 Dublin and its commuter environs.

Figure 5.3 What are workers’ preferred types of employer‐provided work‐life arrangements? IT worker survey (N = 162, 2008).

Figure 5.4 What are workers’ preferred types of employer‐provided work‐life arrangements in the wake of recession? IT worker survey (N = 147, 2010).

Chapter 07

Figure 7.1 Unevenness of total suites of work‐life provision across IT employers (Dublin and Cambridge 2008).

RGS‐IBG Book Series

For further information about the series and a full list of published and forthcoming titles please visit www.rgsbookseries.com

Published

Work‐Life Advantage: Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation

Al James

Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics

Steve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham, John Allen and Simon Carter

Smoking Geographies: Space, Place and Tobacco

Ross Barnett, Graham Moon, Jamie Pearce, Lee Thompson and Liz Twigg

Rehearsing the State: The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government‐in‐Exile

Fiona McConnell

Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System

Nick Gill

Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations

John Pickles and Adrian Smith, with Robert Begg, Milan Buček, Poli Roukova and Rudolf Pástor

Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin

Alexander Vasudevan

Everyday Peace? Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India

Philippa Williams

Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa

Stefan Ouma

Africa’s Information Revolution: Technical Regimes and Production Networks in South Africa and Tanzania

James T. Murphy and Pádraig Carmody

Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding

Andy Pike

In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads

David Matless

Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy

Merje Kuus

Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba

Marisa Wilson

Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline

Andrew Barry

Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy

Maureen Molloy and Wendy Larner

Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007

Linda McDowell

Dunes: Dynamics, Morphology and Geological History

Andrew Warren

Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey

Edited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter

The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia

Alex Jeffrey

Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage

Colin McFarlane

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption

Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke and Alice Malpass

Domesticating Neo‐Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post‐Socialist Cities

Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz Świątek

Swept Up Lives? Re‐envisioning the Homeless City

Paul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen

Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects

Peter Adey

Millionaire Migrants: Trans‐Pacific Life Lines

David Ley

State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere

Mark Whitehead

Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850–1970

Avril Maddrell

Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South India

Jeff Neilson and Bill Pritchard

Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town

Andrew Tucker

Arsenic Pollution: A Global Synthesis

Peter Ravenscroft, Hugh Brammer and Keith Richards

Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter‐Global Networks

David Featherstone

Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies?

Hester Parr

Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability

Georgina H. Endfield

Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes

Edited by David J. Nash and Sue J. McLaren

Driving Spaces: A Cultural‐Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway

Peter Merriman

Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy

Mustafa Dikeç

Geomorphology of Upland Peat: Erosion, Form and Landscape Change

Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton

Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities

Stephen Legg

People/States/Territories

Rhys Jones

Publics and the City

Kurt Iveson

After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial Change

Mick Dunford and Lidia Greco

Putting Workfare in Place

Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel

Domicile and Diaspora

Alison Blunt

Geographies and Moralities

Edited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith

Military Geographies

Rachel Woodward

A New Deal for Transport?

Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw

Geographies of British Modernity

Edited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short

Lost Geographies of Power

John Allen

Globalizing South China

Carolyn L. Cartier

Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 Years

Edited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee

Work‐Life Advantage

Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation

Al James

logo.gif

This edition first published 2018

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Al James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

Registered Office(s)

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Office

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.

The information, practices and views in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty

While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: James, Al, author.

Title: Work‐life advantage : sustaining regional learning and innovation / Al James.

Description: Hoboken : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2017. | Series: RGS‐IBG book series |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026665 (print) | LCCN 2017040536 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781118944820 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118944813 (epub) |

ISBN 9781118944844 (hardback) | ISBN 9781118944837 (paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Flextime. | Women–Employment–Psychological aspects. |

Work and family. | Organizational learning. | Organizational change. |

BISAC: SCIENCE / Earth Sciences / Geography.

Classification: LCC HD5109 (ebook) | LCC HD5109 .J36 2017 (print) | DDC 306.3/6–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026665

Cover Image: Photograph © Al James, 2016

Cover Design: Wiley

For friends and colleagues at QMULGeography

(who always enjoyed a good bottle of workahol)

List of Figures

List of Tables

Series Editor’s Preface

The RGS‐IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The Series places strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterise the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS‐IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.

For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:

www.rgsbookseries.com

David Featherstone

University of Glasgow, UK

RGS‐IBG Book Series Editor

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is about the everyday struggles of knowledge workers to juggle competing activities of paid work, home and family. It is about making visible the gendered networks of social reproduction and household divisions of labour which unavoidably shape the differential abilities of workers to perform as ‘human capital’ inputs to firms’ knowledge production processes on a daily basis. It is about demonstrating the considerable benefits that can accrue to employers if they are willing to provide ‘alternative’ working arrangements for workers, to help them and their families achieve a better work‐life balance. And it is about exploring the possibilities for more socially inclusive forms of regional learning, innovation and growth, and challenging the marginalisation of workers with significant caring responsibilities and personal life commitments.

Set against the backdrop of an increasingly abstract, self‐referential and firm‐centric regional learning and innovation research agenda, the book examines the everyday work‐lives of over 350 information technologists in two high‐profile high‐tech clusters (Dublin and Cambridge). It documents how the everyday workplace practices so widely celebrated by economic geographers as supporting regional learning and innovation can also be socially damaging, with multiple negative outcomes for workers’ careers, health, well‐being and quality of life. In response, it also identifies the kinds of employer‐provided work‐life balance arrangements that different groups of workers and their families find most useful in seeking to reduce those work‐life conflicts – and the ways that those arrangements can simultaneously enhance firms’ capacities for learning and innovation, in pursuit of long‐term sustainable competitive advantage. Ultimately, the analysis exposes and disrupts a series of taken‐for‐granted assumptions and masculinist economic universals within economic geography’s flagship regional learning and innovation literature. This includes the role of gendered work‐life conflict and uneven work‐life provision in motivating and constraining the cross‐firm job‐to‐job mobility of workers and the skills they embody – this in a manner that makes those knowledge spillovers much more complex than economic geographers have previously been able (and indeed willing) to recognise. It also explores the spatial variability of these high‐tech work‐lives and gendered learning dynamics within and between different regional economies as a function of different urban infrastructures of care and national welfare regimes.

This book began in 2006 and, 11 years on after a couple of brief intermissions, owes a lot to a lot of people. I want to thank the 350 plus technologists, programmers, software architects, CEOs, managers, network specialists, marketing professionals, HR managers and industry watchers who took time out from their busy lives to take part in this research through the interviews, surveys and other interactions in Ireland and the UK – but who necessarily remain anonymous in the analysis. Particular thanks also to Noreen Fitzpatrick at the Irish Work‐Life Balance Network, Larry Bond at the Irish Equality Authority, Damien Thomas at Ireland’s National Centre for Partnership and Performance, Paul Butler at Nexus Research, Barbara Keogh at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Eileen Drew at Trinity College Dublin, Rosheen Callender at the Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU), Karlin Lillington at The Irish Times, Mary Doolley at the Irish National Framework Committee on Work‐Life Balance, Sarah Blow and Nicole Mathison at GirlGeek Dinners, and Maggie Berry at Women in Technology. All of them had a major hand in helping me to get the fieldwork up and running, and in shaping the direction and scope of the earliest phases of the analysis. And later down the line, thanks to Kerry Cable at BusinessFriend for undertaking all the interview transcription, and Martina O’Callaghan in the Labour Market Analysis Section, Ireland Central Statistics Office, for generating special Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS) data extracts on the demographic and household situations of the IT workforce in Ireland.

This research received funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (RES‐000‐22‐1574‐A), and was also affiliated to the ESRC Gender Equality Network (GeNet, RES‐225‐25‐2001) led by Jackie Scott. I am grateful to geography colleagues at Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and Newcastle for providing the encouragement/support/sabbatical space to write this. Special thanks also to Diane Perrons. During the Irish fieldwork I was kindly hosted by Trinity College Dublin. And during the writing up stage I was hosted in Geography and Economic History at Umeå University, Sweden.

These ideas also evolved through interactions with successive cohorts of students at Cambridge, QMUL and Newcastle who took the Working in the New Economy, Spaces of Uneven Development and Geographies of Working Lives modules. Invited seminars were given at the Universities of Nottingham, Limerick, Umeå, Birmingham, Bristol, Stavanger, Turku, Glasgow, QMUL and the Institute for Education, alongside papers at various annual conferences of the American Association of Geographers, Irish Geographers, Nordic Geographers, Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, and the European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy. I would like to thank audiences at all those events for critical comment and encouragement on earlier versions of the final analysis presented here. Thanks also to Neil Coe and then Dave Featherstone as RGS‐IBG book series editors, the book series editorial team and two anonymous reviewers (although I think I know who you are!).

The author gratefully acknowledges permissions to reuse and extend ideas contained in three previously published single‐authored papers: Journal of Economic Geography (Oxford University Press, 2014), 14(3): 483–510; Gender, Work and Organization (Wiley, 2014), 21(3): 273–294; and Gender, Place and Culture (Taylor and Francis, 2011), 18(4/5): 655–684. Permission to reproduce Tim O’Brien’s cartoon in Chapter 2 was obtained from CartoonStock.com. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and we apologise for any errors or omissions in these acknowledgements.

Al James

Forest Gate, East London

March 2017

List of Abbreviations

BIS UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills BLS US Bureau of Labor Statistics CBI Confederation of British Industry CEO Chief Executive Officer CSO Central Statistics Office Ireland CSS Cascading Style Sheets (document mark‐up language) CTO Chief Technology Officer DfEE UK Department for Education and Employment DTI UK Department for Trade and Industry (subsequently BIS from 2007) DWP UK Department for Work and Pensions EEDA East of England Development Agency (ended March 2012) EHRC Equality and Human Rights Commission (UK) EMEA Europe, Middle East and Africa (business/market areas) ESRC Economic and Social Research Council (UK) ESRI Economic and Social Research Institute (Ireland) EU‐OSHA European Union information agency for occupational safety and health F2F Face‐to‐face FTE Full‐time employee IBEC Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation ICT Information and communications technology ICTU Irish Congress of Trade Unions IER Institute for Employment Research ISA Irish Software Association IT Information technology LLM Local labour market LMI Labour market intermediary MD Managing Director MIS Management information system MNC Multinational corporation MSI Microsoft installer package file format used by Windows NAICS North American Industry Classification System NCPP National Centre for Partnership and Performance (NCPP) Ireland NEG New economic geography QA Quality assurance SET Science, engineering and technology SIC Standard Industrial Classification SIPTU Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union (Ireland) SMEs Small and medium‐sized enterprises STEM Science, technology, engineering and mathematics TUC Trades Union Congress (UK) VPN Virtual private network WERS Workplace Employee Relations Survey (UK) WITI Women In Technology International WITS Women In Technology and Science WLB Work‐life balance

Chapter One

Inclusive Regional Learning?

Introduction

The fruits of a rapidly growing economy based on innovations and hard work are patently obvious. Less obvious are the costs absorbed by individuals as they take on the attributes required to succeed … Sustaining the new economy means building a new set of social institutions to support it.

(Carnoy 2002: x)

‘It’s important that people talk about these work‐life challenges. There are a lot of women, like myself, who are just so busy getting on with it, just so busy just trying to stay quiet. This type of material, it needs to be fed back, people need to stop and think about it’. Software Business Development Manager, female, two young children, 3‐day work week, IT MNC, Dublin

Over the last two decades, the shifting spatial and temporal boundaries between work, home and family that have accompanied the transition to the so‐called ‘new economy’ have been hotly debated. As firms reorganise work in response to globalisation and new technological opportunities, ‘flexibility’ for many workers has come to mean increased workloads, less predictable work schedules and more unsocial work hours as firms demand they work longer and harder to minimise labour costs. Simultaneously, household life has also become more complex as female labourforce participation rates continue to grow and an ever‐increasing proportion of workers are part of dual‐earner households. These problems are reinforced by the decline of the extended family, increasing lone‐parent households and greater eldercare responsibilities through increased life expectancy. Simultaneously, the neoliberal attack on social provisioning has transferred the burden of care down to the ‘natural’ level of home (Bakker and Gill 2003) where most women retain the major responsibility for the ‘messy and fleshy’ components of domestic and family life (Katz 2001; Crompton and Brockmann 2006). The overall result is a complex, gendered, multi‐variable balancing act between the competing demands of paid work and responsibilities, commitments and life interests beyond the workplace, for which workers have only ‘finite resources in terms of time and energy’ (Cooper et al. 2001: 50).

In response, the desirability and means of achieving an appropriate ‘work‐life balance’ (WLB) has received widespread attention from governments, managers, trade unions, academics and the media. At the individual level, WLB refers to ‘the absence of unacceptable levels of conflict between work and non‐work demands’ (Greenblatt 2002: 179). While encompassing earlier family‐friendly perspectives, the work‐life balance term was intended to broaden the debate beyond working mothers to include all workers, and hence a wider diversity of personal life needs, interests and responsibilities such as religious attendance, sports, hobbies, and community and charity work. Alternative WLB monikers include work‐life reconciliation, work‐personal life integration, work‐personal life harmonisation and work‐life articulation. But whatever the label used, the societal and moral significance of the successful integration of paid work with other meaningful parts of life is profound. Study after study has documented how a lack of work‐life balance can result in increased stress, deleterious effects on psychological and physical well‐being, and increased family and marital tensions (e.g. Burchell et al. 1999, 2002; Frone et al. 1994; Lewis and Cooper 1999; Scase and Scales 1998). Moreover, given persistent gender variations in work‐life stress as women make the greatest compromises to fit paid work around family (Moen 2003; McDowell et al. 2005), studies have also highlighted the importance of work‐life provision by employers as a means for improving gender equity in market employment and household caring (Wise and Bond 2003; World Economic Forum 2005). The labour movement has also emphasised the social importance of WLB as a means of improving workers’ quality of life and combating the increasing work pressures that are destabilising households and societal integration.

Employer‐provided WLB arrangements are typically split across four categories, in terms of those providing workers with greater temporal flexibility of work, greater spatial flexibility of work, reduced total work hours and childcare assistance. But despite government efforts, evidence of progress in employers providing comprehensive suites of work‐life arrangements remains uneven, resulting in continuing hardship for many workers and their families. Indeed, these problems have also been exacerbated in the aftermath of the ‘global’ economic downturn which created new gendered work‐life demands through rapid and dramatic labour market change, heightened fears of job loss, increased workloads and understaffing (e.g. Fawcett Society 2009; TUC 2009). With employers keen to effect cost savings, workplace arrangements designed to help reconcile workers’ competing commitments around work, home and family have not been immune (Galinksy and Bond 2009). At the heart of this disjuncture, many scholars argue that employers are simply unlikely to implement meaningful WLB arrangements unless they can identify bottom‐line economic advantages that arise from doing so (e.g. Healy 2004; Hyman and Summers 2004; Dex and Scheibl 1999; Dex and Smith 2002). Importantly, this ‘WLB business case’ also lies at the heart of UK, Irish and US government policy interventions in this area, with employer benefits from WLB provision widely touted by policy‐makers as improved recruitment, retention, morale and productivity, and reduced stress, absenteeism and costs. Yet despite its popularity, there remains a relative dearth of empirical evidence to support these claims in practice (Beauregard and Henry 2009). In addition, ‘few scholars have demonstrated the mechanisms through which such [WLB] policies function (or do not) to enhance firm performance’ (Eaton 2003: 145–146).

Work‐Life Advantage takes issue with this major knowledge gap and its negative social consequences for workers and their families, whose collective labours are ultimately responsible for (re)producing and sustaining some of the world’s most high‐profile high‐tech regional economies. In so doing, the book develops a new analytical approach that connects the burgeoning research agenda on gendered labour geographies of work‐life balance, social reproduction and care with an equally expansive research agenda on regional learning and innovation. Importantly, both agendas ultimately respond to the emergence of ‘flexible’ production processes in the wake of Fordism from the late 1970s onwards: one then exploring the territorial forms of flexible production (firm‐centric focus), and the other, dramatic changes in the organisation of flexible paid work and working times as experienced by workers and their families (workerist focus). Yet despite these common roots, these two research agendas remain oddly disconnected. In seeking to bridge them, the hybrid analysis developed in this book answers four major research questions. What are the common, everyday experiences and outcomes of gendered work‐life conflict amongst knowledge workers and their families in high‐tech regional economies? What kinds of employer‐provided WLB arrangements do different cohorts of knowledge workers find most useful in overcoming those conflicts? How does the uptake of these worker‐preferred WLB arrangements enhance (vs. constrain) the kinds of intra‐firm and cross‐firm learning and innovation processes widely identified as enabling regional advantage? And do those WLB learning outcomes vary both within and between regional economies, particularly as a function of national welfare regimes? In so doing, the book responds to earlier calls by Lewis et al. (2003) to develop a ‘dual agenda’ that moves beyond either/or thinking to consider both business and social imperatives in pursuit of optimal work‐life balance outcomes, set within a regional learning framework.

This analysis is developed through a case study of information technology (IT) workers and firms in Dublin, Ireland and Cambridge, UK prior to and after the onset