New book on work-life balance by Professor of Management and colleagues

Professor Stephen Wood from our School of Business is among the editors of a new publication on work-life balance practices during the recent recession.

Employers did not withdraw their work-life balance practices during the post-2008 recession. Yet underneath the continuity in the formal provisions, changes were apparent, most noticeably in the public sector. Analysis of Britain’s Workplace Employment Rela­tions Survey shows that managers became less supportive of employ­ees’ WLB needs and employees, who experienced recessionary actions such as wage or recruitment freezes, were less likely than others to make use of some WLB practices. While case study work in the public sector workplaces shows that in the face of austerity-related financial cuts, homeworking and remote working was enforced on employees to reduce costs and not for work-life balance reasons.

These are some of the findings of the research Professor Stephen Wood and colleagues report in chapters in an edited collection just published: Work–Life Balance in Times of Austerity and Beyond.

The book is a collection of papers based on presentations at an ESRC Research Seminars Series, 'Flexible working, Well-being, and Recession'.