Expanding Conceptualizations of Work/Life in Higher Education: Looking Outside the Academy to Develop a Better Understanding Within

Abstract

Over the last two decades, work/life balance has come to occupy an increasingly important place in the higher education literature. Research has focused on policy development and usage, demographic shifts, and cultural acceptance of faculty efforts at both the meso and macro organizational levels to maintain a balance between work and family. Research in higher education has developed alongside work/family research in other disciplines, sometimes incorporating important tenets, but leaving others out. In particular, the literature has yet to integrate new frameworks from organizational studies and psychology or adopt a critical stance promoted in the literature on gendered organizations. Additionally, faculty parents remain the primary target of work/life research, neglecting the concerns of non-parenting faculty as well as all staff and students. The purpose of this chapter is to present and critique the work/life literature in higher education, introducing literature from organizational studies and psychology to illustrate how the field has built upon research from other disciplines as well as overlooked critical areas of scholarship. The chapter concludes with a set of recommendations to push the boundaries of work/life scholarship forward to generate new insights and help create a more equitable academy for all who populate it.

Recruiting and retaining women to the professoriate remains a critical issue in contemporary higher education . Beginning in the late 1960s, women entered higher education in undergraduate and, eventually, graduate programs in larger numbers, resulting in a healthy pipeline of women with the degree and experiential qualifications for faculty roles. Women accounted for only 33.2 % of all faculty in 1987, increasing to almost half in 2013 (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2015). The aggregate numbers of faculty by gender identify equal representation of women but also mask the inequities across disciplines and employment contracts. In terms of rank, national statistics indicate that women remain concentrated in nontenure-track roles at 54 % and fewer women seek promotion to full professor with only 32 % women (NCES, 2015). In part, the overrepresentation of women in lower status positions in the professoriate is related to the lack of family-friendliness in the academy. In addition, women faculty remain segregated into specific disciplines with few changes over time. Hill, Corbett, and St. Rose (2010) found that women “made up less than one-quarter of the faculty in computer and information sciences (22 percent), math (19 percent), the physical sciences (18 percent), and engineering (12 percent)” (p. 15). More recent data from the National Science Foundation reports that women make up only one-fourth of full professors in science, engineering and health (NSF, 2015). And, as Hill et al. point out, even in the biological sciences, which is widely assumed to have achieved gender parity, women represent just 34 % of faculty . These statistics suggest that the academy is not yet gender equitable. Scholars have found that particular disciplines may be more hostile to women than others. One manifestation of this hostile, or unwelcoming, climate is a lack of concern for work/life balance.

Yet, work/life issues run rampant through the academy, carrying differential consequences for women and men navigating parenthood. According to the 2013–2014 HERI Faculty Survey, 43 % of all faculty have at least one child under the age of 18 in the home. Disaggregating by gender reveals that 44 % of men and 41 % of women are parents to at least one child under the age of 18 while 48 % of men and 38 % of women have children over the age of 18 (Eagan et al., 2014). These statistics suggest that more senior women faculty were less likely to have children in the home than their male colleagues. While men and women are approaching parity in parenting status, navigating parenthood and an academic career remains fraught with difficulties for both genders. Mason and Goulden (2002) noted that women doctoral and postdoctoral students opt out of the professoriate due to a belief that childrearing is incongruent with the expectations of tenure review. Often, the tenure-track coincides with a woman’s proverbial biological clock and a man’s optimal time for childrearing, 30–40 years old, leaving many to think having a family and an academic career are incompatible goals.

However, faculty —both men and women—continue to combine work and family, though utilize multiple strategies for doing so. For example, Armenti (2004a) noted that many women aim to have “May babies,” timing pregnancies to coincide with summer leave, thus not requiring any maternity leave during the academic year. Some women hide their pregnancies out of fear of colleagues’ expectation around productivity (Armenti, 2004a; Monroe, Ozyurta, Wrigleya, & Alexander, 2008). Still others engage in bias avoidance behaviors , such as not using available institutional leave to avoid calling attention to their parental status (Drago et al., 2006). Policy usage remains quite low; several studies note that few faculty , both men and women, utilize policies for stopping the tenure clock or taking leave (Bunton & Corrice, 2011; Mason, Goulden, & Wolfinger, 2006; Pribbenow et al., 2010; Quinn, 2010; Williams, Alon, & Bornstein, 2006).

Work /life challenges are a concern for women and men alike. As we detail in this chapter, studies have found that men are likely to minimize the use of leave, fearing challenges not just to their careers, but to their identities as men (Sallee, 2014). Other studies identify the challenges that different constituent groups—faculty across institutional types, graduate students , and staff members—face navigating work/family issues¹. Navigating family concerns is a pervasive issue across institutional types and all employee contracts. Despite their existence, institutional policies seem to do little to support change.

The majority of our discussion thus far has focused on issues that individuals face navigating work and parenthood. However, work/life extends far beyond the confines of parenthood; work/life concerns include those contending with elder care issues to those dealing with their own illnesses to single people who do not want work to occupy all of their time. Yet, scholarship and accompanying policy implications, particularly in higher education , has tended to focus exclusively on the needs of individuals navigating parenthood. Our review focuses predominantly on work/family concerns as related to parenting, reflecting the state of current scholarship. However, this is a limitation of the literature and one to which we return in the implications section at the end of the chapter.

Work /life is a concern beyond just the academy, but transcends all aspects of society. Scholars across multiple disciplines have been increasingly concerned with the notion of work/life, identifying relationships across a complex set of constructs including demographics (gender, socioeconomic status), organizational dynamics (turnover, job satisfaction , absenteeism), and individual consequences (role conflict, productivity shifts). While a “sticky” concept to define, work/life is generally considered as conflict across the roles between life and work domains. The literature on work/life spans multiple disciplines to include education, sociology, social work, organizational studies, and psychology. This is not a surprise given the complex nature of work/life, which includes, but is not limited to, the relationship between family life and responsibilities and social expectations; practices, policies and norms within organizations; relationship between job satisfaction and productivity ; well-being and health; and leadership training. While this list is not exhaustive, the layers of influence on work/life are vast, spanning across disciplinary considerations.

Despite the pervasiveness of work/life research broadly and within higher education specifically, challenges still remain. The extensive knowledge across decades of research in organizational studies and psychology has done little to support larger scale interventions to address work/life balance, a concept that newer generations of workers, including faculty , desire, nor has it provided detailed evidence of how to address work/life within a higher education context. Recent surveys find that while previous generations of faculty desired work/life balance, new generations are more concerned with better work/life integration, which focuses on ways to combine the demands of the two realms, rather than keep them separate (Trower, 2010). What is needed is a thorough and comprehensive review of the work/life literature across multiple disciplines that includes a discussion of how this knowledge is applicable to the higher education enterprise and what research is needed to inform practice, such as work/life programs, institutional policies, and programs. Important to this chapter are three areas of inquiry, which have the greatest influence on and implications for the research on work/life in college and universities: higher education , organizational studies, and psychology literature. These areas overlap in their use of conceptual definitions, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies, which are all highlighted in this chapter.

As a note on our method for choosing articles to review, we initially looked across the fields of sociology, organizational studies, psychology, social work, nursing, and education, finding that the major bodies of work were in the three disciplines included in the study. Organizational studies and psychology tend to provide the conceptual foundations for many other disciplines. For example, scholarship in nursing might add contextual differences, such as changing the context of inquiry to the hospital, but the scholarship did not provide significant new insights to be included in this review. Additionally, we chose to focus on the organizational studies literature rather than the sociology literature for three reasons. First, length limitations preclude us from devoting a thorough treatise to the literature in all disciplines. However, second, the organizational studies literature has interdisciplinary roots and tends to draw on sociological and economics concepts, among others, to inform its study of work/life, thus ensuring that relevant concepts are included from both disciplines. Third, although both disciplines have contributed to the advancement of work/life concepts, organizational studies occupies a dominant position in the work/life field and has influenced higher education scholarship on the topic.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, we seek to review a vast amount of literature from organizational studies, psychology, and higher education research to provide a thorough understanding of the major theoretical and conceptual frameworks within and across those disciplines. We identify the definitions of work/life including how those definitions impact methodological considerations and ultimately research findings. These areas generally underpin much of the existing research on work/life in higher education and thus serve as a review of theoretical and methodological assumptions of current research. Second, we seek to identify major assumptions that limit the understanding of work/life and propose additional areas of inquiry framed by new theories or application of existing theories and methodologies. We seek not just to identify the gaps for future studies but to suggest that collective understanding of the concept of work/life, the interventions needed, and the relationship across specific demographics (i.e., gender and socioeconomic class) needs new theoretical conceptualizations and methodologies.

We begin this chapter with a discussion of the definition of work/life with attention to how work/life has evolved over time. The next major section reviews theoretical frameworks and concepts in organizational studies and psychology that have been used to study work/life. We pick up on those theoretical frameworks in the next section, a lengthy examination of the work/life scholarship in higher education . After reviewing the major trends that have informed scholarship in the field, we consider how higher education scholars have utilized theories from organizational studies and psychology as well as introduced theories from other disciplines to push work/life scholarship forward. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of implications for future research, providing suggestions for the ways in which higher education researchers can continue to push work/family scholarship forward. Overall, we argue that work/life research across multiple disciplines and as applied to the higher education context has yet to fully capture the complexity of work/life, instead tending to focus on narrow populations (faculty ) navigating narrow issues (childbirth and rearing), thus leaving out a significant portion of the campus community and those navigating other work/life concerns. Furthermore, the higher education scholarship has tended to draw from the same narrow base of theoretical concepts, often replicating findings rather than expanding to generate knowledge informed by new theories and approaches.

Definition of Work /Life

The definitions of work/life across the disciplines share a similar etiology; the concept of work/life in organizational studies and psychology, including the operational definition, has evolved over time. Beginning in the 1980s work/life was seen as unidimensional construct and often examined separately (Bedeian, Burke, & Moffett, 1988; Cooke & Rousseau, 1984; Kopelman, Greenhaus, & Connolly, 1983). Early studies measuring work/life, for example, were concerned with either satisfaction in the context of the workplace or the home, not the relationship across those domains. It was not until later studies that a bi-directional relationship was measured, such as how work and family interface or impact one another. Importantly, the measures were self-reported and worded to address how satisfied an individual was in their work or home domain and how levels of satisfaction in these work/family domains related to job and global job satisfaction . Changes in the number of women entering the workplace, technological advances that made work and workers accessible at home, and a need for more dual-earner households resulted in researchers examining work/family together, understanding that work and life may interface with one another.

Coming out of the focus on work/life is a focus on work/life or work/family conflict, which Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) famously defined as “a form of inter-role conflict in which the role pressures from the work and family domains are mutually incompatible in some respect” (p. 77). In short, Greenhaus and Beutell’s definition underscores that work/family conflict is simply a particular type of role conflict in that individuals are navigating conflict between roles in the workplace and in the home. Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) defined three forms of work/family conflict: time-based conflict, strain-based conflict, and behavior -based conflict. Time-based conflict is based on the premise that time spent devoted to activities in one role cannot be spent on activities associated with another role. Strain-based conflict arises when strain associated with the pressures of one role affects performance in another. Finally, behavior -based conflict suggests that expectations for behavior in one role may conflict with expectations for behavior in another role. For example, a mother who is nurturing to her children may find that she has to adopt different behaviors in her work as a prison guard.

In addition to identifying different types of work/family conflict, research also differentiates between the direction of conflict: work/family conflict (WFC), also referred to as WIF (work interfering with family) conflict, is distinct from family/work conflict (FWC), or FIW (family interfering with work) conflict (e.g., Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1992a, 1992b; Kelloway, Gottlieb, & Barham, 1999; Williams & Alliger, 1994). As Frone, Russell, and Cooper (1992) pointed out, each type of conflict has different antecedents and consequences and therefore deserve separate attention. Although Frone et al. suggested that previous research tended to focus exclusively on WFC, many of the studies that we review focus on both types of conflict (see for example, Allen & Finkelstein, 2014; Blanchard, Tremblay, Mask, & Perras, 2009; Nohe, Meier, Sonntag, & Michel, 2015; Rantanen, Mauno, Kinnunen, & Rantanen, 2011). We will discuss these types of conflict and their antecedents and consequences in later sections.

In the organizational studies literature, a more fundamental definitional shift occurred when empirical studies consistently found a unidirectional nature to spillover; conflict is more likely to occur from work to family as opposed to family to work (Aryee, Luk, Leung, & Lo, 1999; Bellavia & Frone, 2005; Netemeyer, Boles, & McMurrian, 1996). A meta-analysis of research on work/family conflict found that family interfering with work resulted in more negative work performance and attitudes than work-to-family (Kossek & Ozeki, 1999). In addition, conflict between work and family, regardless of direction, is “associated with higher turnover intentions, care-related absences, and lower commitment to organizations and careers” (Kossek & Ozeki, 1999, p. 25). The lack of boundaries associated with family life creates the potential for more conflict from family to work. These conflicts are more pronounced with families that have younger, pre-school aged children (Byron, 2005). The major assumptional definition resulting from these studies is that individuals need to achieve some sort of balance between time spent in work and family domains. Yet what was found in empirical studies testing this assumption of balance is that individuals who spent more time with family had higher reported quality of life, despite the fact that they were imbalanced (Greenhaus et al., 2003).

Contemporary studies are beginning to identify the impact of individual perceptions of work/life. Greenhaus and Allen (2011) introduced the notion that how individuals perceive compatibility between work and family roles may be a more accurate measure of whether or not work/life balance is occurring. They define work/life balance as “the extent to which effectiveness and satisfaction in work and family roles are compatible with an individual’s life values at a given point in time” (p. 174). Odle-Dusseau, Britt, and Bobco (2012) examined the relationship between desired and actual hours spent in the work and family domains and found similar results to other studies – fit between number of hours desired to spend and actually spent in the family domain was significantly related to work/family balance, well-being , and intent to leave. While research began with rather simplistic notions of work and family in separate and discrete domains, more contemporary literature is grappling with the overlapping and individualized articulations of how one balances work and life. These definitional changes are reflected in the literature on organizational studies and psychology and align with empirical findings, methodological decisions, and theoretical orientations.

Work /Life Research in Organizational Studies

The focus of research on work/life in organizational studies is the relationship between individual and organizational contexts and the impact on job performance. Much of the research concludes with recommendations of how organizations can and should address the growing conflicts employees experience across work and life. Importantly, most studies have focused on life in relationship to childbearing and parenting, more aligned with the dichotomy of work and family as opposed to work and life. The vast empirical record in organizational studies attempts to build sophisticated models to predict work/life conflict. These studies have largely relied on a few theoretical and conceptual frameworks such as role conflict, spillover, and boundary theory . The major assumption is that when work and life spill over into one another, the resulting conflict will lead to decreased satisfaction, performance, well-being , and the like. The desire is to find models that help workers to achieve the ostensible work/family balance and to assist organizations in identifying effective programs, policies and practices to support employees in finding a balance (Odle-Dusseau, Britt, & Bobco, 2012). A major assumption and point of critique in the literature is the assumption that balance can and should be achieved. Much of the literature has relied on qualitative, self-report survey methodologies with little attention to the critique, development, and articulation of theoretical frameworks. This is not to suggest that theoretical frameworks were not applied; rather, the explicit articulation of the relationship between the individual study findings and the frameworks were lacking. The result is that the theoretical frameworks continued to be used across multiple decades with minor changes and additions (Eby, Casper, Lockwood, Bourdeaux, & Brinley, 2005). As we argue in this chapter, the research on work/life balance in higher education has relied heavily on organizational studies, which consequently is impacted by similar critiques.

Methodological Approaches

Work /life balance in organizational studies has been examined using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The vast majority of the studies have been conducted with survey methods and multivariate analysis procedures. In a review of the industrial organization/organizational behavioral literature from 1980–2002, Eby, Casper, Lockwood, Bordeaux, and Brinley (2005) found that “the overwhelming majority of studies predicted specific relationships between work and family variables (n = 170, 89%) as opposed to posing exploratory research questions (n = 20, 11%), reflecting an orientation … toward predictive rather than exploratory research” (p. 133). Hypothesis testing was more common than exploratory studies noted in the Eby et al. (2005) meta-analysis, arguably due to a more quantitative tradition in the discipline. While important to examining very specific research questions to provide empirical support for future inclusion of such variables, these studies also predetermine the mix of factors and thus preclude any previously unknown or unmeasured factors. Complementary qualitative and exploratory studies, for example, may lead to the identification of other unknown and unmeasured constructs that have a direct impact on work/life. In addition, the questioning of assumptions identified in application of theoretical frameworks would also assist in complicating existing measures. For example, assumptions about the egalitarian nature of organizational life preclude attention to differential experiences across race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality to name a few. The design of these studies and their prominence in the literature calls for more exploratory studies, reflection on assumptions underpinning theoretical frameworks, or usage of alternative frameworks.

Survey research is very common in the organizational studies literature. These surveys are largely self-report data with samples of individuals working in industry. Large scale studies, more common in European countries, have several prominent and consistent features. In an examination of large scale surveys, Pichler (2009) found that most surveys include indicators of work/family fit, balance, and conflict from work to family and family to work (e.g. Crompton & Lyonette, 2006; Noor, 2003; Wallace, 2005). Pichler noted that surveys measure the relationship between working conditions measured by strain, interference, and adaptation across life and work roles as well as the extent that family responsibilities impact work duties. Very few studies examine the integration of work and family.

Survey research on work/life balance has several important critiques worth noting. First, as Pichler (2009) argued, the very abstractness of the terms work and life provide little specificity in measurement. Work is often defined in surveys as paid work, for example. Other forms of volunteer or care work are not included in the measure, despite the fact that they can have a high impact on individual perceived balance. Eikhof, Warhurst, and Haunschild (2007) further argued that framing work as a single entity that creates conflict with life distorts the reality that work can also be a source of satisfaction. Life is an even more abstract variable; “current measurements do not account for this [abstraction], instead they partly put ‘life’ into a black box: life means everything else than work, from cleaning, care work, leisure, family, to social life” (Pichler, 2009, p. 461). A number of concerns arise from this slippage. First, life is often framed in studies as care responsibilities that women continue to enact at rates greater than men (Eikhof, Warhurst, & Haunschild, 2007). Second, many of the single item measures in commonly used work/life balance scales presume causality. Pichler pointed out survey items such as “jobs prevent” or using “from work” presume that there is a negative connection between work and life (p. 461). Third is a concern about a disconnect between the conceptualization of work/life balance and well-being (Pichler, 2009). The work/life literature assumes that work/life balance will create increased satisfaction and well-being ; yet, the correlations in Pichler’s analysis reveals weak associations with work/life balance. Pichler stated

from the literature we could have expected that WLB is a core component of the good life but the proposed measurement in the ESS [European Social Survey] does not support this interpretation. In measurement-theoretical terms, this finding indicates a poor criterion validity as the measurement does not reveal associations with other relevant and similar constructs. (p. 464)

These arguments add up to an important critique of the design of large scale surveys to measure work/life and suggest a need for refinement in measurement and theoretical assumptions.

Few qualitative studies are found in the organizational studies literature that address work/life. In fact, the Eby, Casper, Lockwood, Bordeaux, and Brinley (2005) literature review did not include qualitative studies, thus signaling their lack of prevalence in the field. The few qualitative studies are case study- and interview-based and often contain some mixed-methods design. For example, Gholipour, Bod, Zehtabi, Pirannejad, and Kozekanan (2010) interviewed and sent a questionnaire to female entrepreneurs who engage in job sharing to examine perceptions of job sharing as a viable mechanism to support work/life balance. Their interview findings were supported by statistical analysis of the questionnaire. Similar case studies with a mixed methods approach are found throughout the literature (Takahashi, Lourenço, Sander, & Souza, 2014). The studies that only use qualitative methods utilize a case study design and often focus on one specific occupation. Harris and Giuffre (2010), for example, interviewed women chefs to understand the complexity of work/life in a male-dominated profession and to identify strategies the chefs used to attempt to achieve balance. The few qualitative case studies conducted in organizational studies, or those mixed methods studies that have major qualitative data collection processes, focus on higher education institutions (Damiano-Teixeira, 2006; Takahashi, Lourenço, Sander, & Souza, 2014; Rani Thanacoody, Bartram Barker, & Jacobs, 2006; Woodward, 2007). This is an important observation as studies in the higher education discipline also rely heavily on qualitative methodologies. Gaio Santos and Cabral-Cardoso (2008) conducted in-depth interviews with faculty at a Portuguese university and found results similar to U.S.-based studies – the academy is not family-friendly with significant traditional gender norms that create tensions between work and family for women academics. Similar results are found across other studies that focus on women faculty across multiple institutions and countries.

Theories and Conceptual Frameworks

Despite the vast number of articles and books on work/life balance in organizational studies, very few theoretical or conceptual frameworks have received extensive treatment. Eby, et al. (2005) found that little attention has been paid to developing theoretical frameworks. Much of the literature focuses on hypothesis testing with theories used to articulate potential relationships across variables or constructs. This is a criticism clearly articulated by Pichler (2009) in the previous section. Therefore, the focus of this section is on the few theoretical frameworks that assist in conceptualizing the relationship across a variety of variables commonly found in the work/life research in organizational studies.

Role Theory

The most prevalent theoretical framework is arguably role theory , which proposes that human behavior is shaped by individual expectations as well as those of others (Hogg, Terry, & White , 1995). The expectations for behavior are related to the roles (i.e., mother, father, friend, employee) that individuals play in their daily lives. Within each role, an individual has an identity that is related to social roles, social attributes, stigmatizing characteristics, biographical categories, and social types (Thoits, 1991). These role identities emerge in significance and importance based on salience – how important and committed one is to that role (Stets & Burke, 2000; Wiley, 1991) and generally have a hierarchy based on salience. Salient role identities provide a sense of self and lead to individuals acting in a manner confirming that identity.

To explain the hypothesis that a potential conflict exists between work and life, researchers adopted role conflict theory, a derivation of role theory . Role conflict proposes that ambiguity or conflict within or between roles will result in an undesirable state (Bruck, Allen, & Spector, 2002). Due to competing demands, multiple roles often create conflict as it is difficult to sustain and perform in each role successfully. Biernat (1997) explained that role conflict exists when role expectations are incompatible. “Role strain or difficulty in meeting role demands is inevitable” (p. 9), and a person “must continually make role decisions and bargains in order to meet role requirements” (p. 9). Conflict theory states that work and family territories are irreconcilable due to their different tasks and norms (Bayron, 2005) and individuals may experience work interfaces with family – when confusion about work duties and family responsibility arises and prevents balance between them (Byron, 2005; van Daalen, Willemsen, & Sanders, 2006). Figure 8.1, adapted from Greenhaus and Beutell (1985), summarizes work/life conflict with attention to the separation of the work and family domains and the resulting conflict inherent in role conflict theory. As shown on the work domain side, when time, hours work, and inflexible work schedules increase, there is a higher likelihood of role conflict and ambiguity. Similarly, as time, family structure (i.e., number of children, spouse employment , and large families) increase, so does role strain and family conflict. The result is role pressure incompatibility with role strain or difficulty in completing the demands of either the work or family domain.

Fig. 8.1

Work/Family Role Pressure Incompatibility (Source: Greenhaus and Beutell 1985:78)

Another modification to role conflict theory is role balancing or the process of experiencing interrole facilitation and enhancement. For role balancing to occur, facilitation and enhancement need to exceed conflict and depletion (see Frone, 2003). In a study of academic parents , Comer and Stites-Doe (2006) argued that balancing is not a state of ideal equilibrium between roles but coordination to “foster harmony while diminishing dissonance” (p. 498). Essentially, when individuals are participating in activities that create positive emotions, they experience interrole enhancement while the reverse is also true – unfulfilling tasks lead to negative emotions and interrole depletion. Their study found that faculty women, often due to a lack of institutional support, are more likely to experience interrole depletion. Other researchers utilized role theory alongside other complementary theories when examining specific populations and constructs. Budworth, Enns, and Rowbotham (2008) argued that role theory focused exclusively on the individual and does not account for shared identity among dual-career couples. They conceptualize a new theoretical model that introduces interdependence theory (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959) to examine the interactions between a dyad, such as a dual-career couple, suggesting a more complex set of interactions, conflicts, and identities. Research is needed to test this model. Judge, Ilies, and Scott (2006) introduced emotions, specifically guilt and hostility, finding that conflicts between home and work, and in both work interfering with family (WIF) and family interfering with work (FIW), are associated with feeling guilt and hostility, suggesting additional areas of research to fully examine the outcomes of work/life conflict.

Research on role theory has dominated the research on work/life and has a number of notable and consistent findings. Consistently, individuals are found to experience role strain from conflicting responsibilities between work and home and in both directions – work interfering with family (WIF) and family interfering with work (FIW) (Greenhaus & Allen, 2011). In studies across organizational contexts, in multiple countries, and with varied populations, women tend to experience work/life conflict. Other studies assume that this conflict occurs focusing on the antecedent and moderators or the structural elements that may reduce work/life conflict. While the list is quite exhaustive (see Eby, Casper, Lockwood, Bordeaux, & Brinley, 2005 for a full review), many studies focus on the general areas of situational variables (e.g., family domain, work domain, job satisfaction ), dispositional factors (e.g., personality), and outcomes (e.g., well-being , job satisfaction , WIF, FIW, absenteeism). Greenhaus, Ziegert, and Allen (2012), for example, found that family-supportive supervision reduces feeling of work/life conflict suggesting that individual supervisors play a crucial role in promoting balance. Other studies note the utility and promise of alternative work arrangements (Gholipour, Bod, Zehtabi, Pirannejad, & Kozekanan, 2010).

Boundary theory

Another theory applied to the research on work/life in organizational studies, and related to role theory , is boundary theory – a continuum of ways that individuals erect temporal and spatial boundaries between roles (Nippert-Eng, 1995). The continuum represents the various ways that individuals enact boundaries, such as keeping roles completely separate, or segmentation, or allowing them to intermingle, or integration (Ashforth, Kreiner, & Fugate, 2000). Often individuals chose to engage in segmentation or integration to reduce difficulty in enacting roles (Ashforth et al., 2000). The boundaries can also be weak (permeable) or strong (impermeable) (Ashforth et al., 2000). Kreiner, Hollensbe, and Sheep (2009) identified a series of tactics that individuals use to create boundaries to include: behavioral (i.e., leveraging and allowing differential permeability); temporal (i.e., controlling work time); physical (i.e., manipulating physical space) and communicative (i.e., setting expectations and confronting violators). Use of these tactics is mediated by age, gender, and other individual characteristics.

Boundary theory places increased emphasis on individual agency , a criticism of general role theory . Bourke, Pajo and Lewis (2010) argued that

boundary theory is an especially useful heuristic device as it places emphasis on the agentic, negotiated and socially constructed nature of efforts to differentiate, and to manage transitions between, various role domains. Boundary theory directs attention to how individuals attribute meaning to their various roles, how they negotiate with others to delineate domains, and the highly dynamic and situated nature of this process. (p. 20)

Studies using boundary theory often focus on people’s individual agency in attempting to create boundaries across various roles. In their study of women managing eldercare, Bourke, Pajo and Lewis (2010) found that participants actively sought to create boundaries between their work and elder care responsibilities but often struggled due to the unpredictable nature of caring for an elder parent, resulting in feelings of frustration and guilt. Rothbard, Phillips and Dumas (2005) found that individuals who desire segmentation or integration react differently to work/life policies :

The findings indicate that for segmenters the presence of an incongruent policy (i.e., onsite childcare) decreased satisfaction and commitment, even when they had high access to a congruent policy (i.e., flextime). However, for integrators, simultaneous high access to both congruent (i.e., onsite childcare) and incongruent (i.e., flextime) policies did not substantively decrease satisfaction and commitment. (p. 253)

A more recent study on the role of mobile technologies concludes that these new devices allow workers to engage in temporal flexibility, to work in areas outside their office, to achieve goals in both work and family domains (Cousins & Robey, 2005). In the same study, the mobile devices allowed individuals to engage in segmentation and integration in different ways at different times depending on the needs of their roles leading to more successful boundary management. Together, these studies suggest that individuals desire agency to choose the tactics that they want to engage to manage boundaries, suggesting that work/life policies need to be diverse.

Feminist Approaches

Starting with the article “Hierarchies, Jobs, and Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations,” Joan Acker (1990) brought together several distinct areas of inquiry (see Ferguson, 1984; Kanter, 1977; MacKinnon, 1979; Martin, 1985) that all examined gender, but previously had not been synthesized in one cohesive and systematic model to explore the ways in which organizations are gendered. As Acker explained, “to say that an organization, or any other analytic unit, is gendered means that advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine” (p. 146). According to Acker (1990), gendering occurs through five interacting processes: (a) construction of divisions along lines of gender; (b) construction of symbols and images; (c) production of gendered social interactions; (d) creation of gendered components of individual identity; and, (e) implicit and fundamental creation and conceptualization of gendered social structures. A prominent concept derived from Acker and Williams (1989) is that of the ideal worker defined as:

the male worker whose life centers on his full-time, life-long job, while his wife or another woman takes care of his personal needs and his children. While the realities of life in industrial capitalism never allowed all men to live out this ideal, it was the goal for labor unions and the image of the worker in social and economic theory. (Acker, 1990, p. 149)

Williams (2000) more recently defined the ideal worker as “someone who works at least forty hours a week year round. This ideal-worker norm, framed around the traditional life patterns of men, excludes most mothers of childbearing age” (Williams, 2000, p. 2).

The research on work/life in organizational studies that has applied Acker’s (1990) theory focused on the structural and cultural dimensions of organizational life that create the role conflict and inability to achieve any form of balance. In their study of women chefs, Harris and Giuffre (2010) concluded that

women who were most able to accomplish this task included those who had worked their way up the kitchen hierarchy so that their position afforded them the luxury of relative flexibility. However, women are only able to attain such positions after years of near-total commitment to their work. Even obtaining high level positions did not eliminate work–family conflict. (p. 46)

Other studies that apply gendered organizations to work/life have similar results, supporting the incongruence between women and the ideal worker, which is essentially a precursor to the ability to achieve any balance. Women continue to take on the lion’s share of domestic work resulting in an inherent conflict with being an always-available worker.

Ecological Systems Theory

While only recently gaining traction in the work/life literature, ecological systems theory has promising future applications and, therefore, is important to briefly review. Ecological systems theory, theorized by Bronfenbrenner (1989), argues that individuals exist in interactive nested levels of systems composed of microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and a macrosystem. The microsystems are the most immediate environment in which an individual exists, such as the family and work. When two or more microsystems network or link, they create a mesosystem. The exosystem relates to those contexts that impact an individual, but that the individual does not have immediate control over, such as a change in policy at work. Finally, the exosystem relates to societal culture and other sociological settings. In the work/life literature, work and family are conceptualized as microsystems that create the work/family mesosystem (Voydanoff, 2002). Adaptive strategies between work and family impact the relationship across work and family characteristics, conflict, fit, and outcomes. The promise of this model is that is allows for more expansive definitions of work, as it places work and family in multiple levels of one’s ecosystem, and not as discrete categories, as role theory does. In a study of dual earner couples who shared a 60 hour work week, Hill et al. (2006) found that the couples experience satisfaction in both microsystems of work and family, suggesting that job-sharing policies, indicative of the exosystem, may be effective in the workplace. Conceptualizing work and family in a more nested model has promise in examining the more complex interaction of societal expectations of parenting and domestic work, organizational policies and culture, and individual strategies and tactics to find balance. More applications of ecological systems theory are explored in the implications section. In sum, the literature in organizational studies carries a strong bias toward quantitative research and has introduced a number of important concepts and theories, including role conflict, boundary theory , gendered organizations, and ecological systems theory. The introduction of these concepts and theories has not been extensively or systematically discussed or critiqued, resulting in a limitation in the theoretical contribution and development of work/life research. As we discuss later, some of these concepts have informed the higher education scholarship on work/family while other concepts are still waiting to be applied.

Summary of Organizational Studies Literature

The organizational studies literature has been largely concerned with why individuals experience work/life conflict and how those conflicts impact organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction and productivity . The initial and dominant frameworks applied focus squarely on the assumption that individuals conceptualize their lives in a series of discrete roles. The work/life equation holds work on one end of the proverbial balance and life on the other, with the scale tipping based on spillover or strain among those domains. This work draws heavily on quantitative methodologies that help to measure time spent on activities, stress, spousal support, and other demographics, such as the number of children an individual has. The use of these methodologies helps to perpetuate a more separated view of work/life with those variables feeding into a discrete equation. The conceptualization and assumptions create a discrete view of work/life among employees, which has been shown to be murkier in practice. Individuals experience more overlap and permeability across work and life that changes due to life and career stage, belief in individual agency within one’s job, and societal expectations related to gender, race/ethnicity, and culture. The organizational studies literature takes a more reductionist assumption of how to address work/life conflicts; this conflict can be mediated by organizational policies to support flexibility, supervisor behaviors , and beliefs to allow for usage of those policies, whether formal or informal.

It is from this last point that an important critique emerges and is introduced by Acker (1990) and Williams (1989). The assumption of role strain and related theories is that organizations are generic – nongendered, nonsexed, and without any sociological influence. The relationship between family dynamics, for example, is only hinted at in the findings that women experience more conflict, which is often due to greater home responsibilities. The work by Acker, however, identified a complex set of interacting principles in gendered organizational theory that underscores the deep and pervasive gendered expectations that disadvantage women in the workplace and create this strain. This is an important distinction as the literature had not acknowledged that deeply held assumptions about the nature of work need to be questioned. For example, if the literature suggests that supervisors can address role strain and conflict among employees, how do the gendered biases of supervisors impact that level of support and to whom? These are crucial questions that can only be addressed if adopting, formally or informally, the assumptions of more feminist approaches to organizations and work/life.

Moreover, boundary theory , also aligned with role theory , introduces individual agency to managing conflict by actively engaging in strategies to erect boundaries between the tasks and identities associated with those roles. While boundary theory introduces more complexity by suggesting that discrete roles (and scales) do not exist, the assumption is that individuals have the power to enact their agency. Again and as suggested by Acker (1990), individual agency is truncated by the presence of an ideal worker trope that makes any worker who is not always available deviant and thus women or any other groups with significant, and often sociologically driven, outside work responsibilities unable to resolve or mediate work/life conflict. Additionally, the research using a more ecological lens helps to embed organizations and workers in a larger sociological context, building increased evidence that relying on discrete notions of strain, spillover, and boundary management is inappropriate, even unrealistic, for research on work/life balance.

Work /Life Studies in Psychology

As in organizational studies, work/life research has a long history in psychology. Most often using quantitative measures, psychology studies tend to focus on how an individual experiences work/family conflict (WFC) and ways that organizations might improve working conditions to lessen that conflict. Although the literature is too vast to review in its entirety, we begin by briefly reviewing the various methodological approaches that psychology studies take. We then highlight three theories – self-determination theory , conservation of resources, and subjective well-being – that are oft-cited in the psychology literature, but have yet to receive much attention in higher education studies of work/life. As we discuss later, this absence from the higher education literature may be due to higher education scholars’ tendency to draw from the organizational studies literature, focusing on broader organizational aspects that influence work/family conflict as opposed to individual and psychological factors.

Methodological Approaches

Nearly all the psychology studies reviewed used quantitative methods. Such a trend should not come as a surprise as traditionally psychology has embraced quantitative research. Studies varied in their use of a one-time survey versus longitudinal studies and the degree to which they relied on self-report or report by others. Research in psychology also frequently reports multiple studies by one author in the same article . Further, though studies tried to measure WFC, they often relied on different measures to do so, pointing out that work/family conflict is not a monolithic construct, but instead composed of a variety of factors. As we discuss in this section, the use of quantitative designs brings both benefits and drawbacks.

Many studies in psychology rely on one-time surveys. For example, Blanchard et al. (2009) administered a one-time survey to a population of nurses (in Study 1) and a population of employees of a health services agency (in Study 2). Allen and Finkelstein’s (2014) findings are drawn from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, a one-time random sample of individuals in the U.S. workforce . Although the data collected through this study were via interviews, all of the results reported in Allen and Finkelstein’s work used fixed item responses. One-time surveys are a popular approach favored by researchers, including in higher education . However, one-time surveys capture a snapshot of individuals at a particular point in time, and do not allow researchers to fully understand the dynamics of individuals’ lives, including how work/life conflict might fluctuate over time.

However, other studies have sought to measure WFC over a sustained period of time (Grant-Vallone & Donaldson, 2001; Kinnunen, Geurts, & Mauno, 2004; Matthews, Holliday Wayne, & Ford, 2014; Sheldon & Niemiec, 2006), allowing researchers to capture changes in respondents’ lives. For example, Kinnunen et al. (2004) sent two surveys to a random sample of Finnish people one year apart. Similarly, Matthews and colleagues administered surveys at four time points: the initial survey date, one month later, two months after initial survey, and eight months after initial survey. In their study on the relationship between subjective well-being and work/family conflict, although Matthews and colleagues initially found a negative relationship between work/family conflict and well-being , measurements taken at later time points suggested that there was a positive relationship between work/family conflict and well-being . In other words, experiencing work/family conflict at an earlier point in time led to greater well-being later. While we will return to the importance of the content of these findings later, what we mean to underscore here is the gains offered by using a longitudinal study design.

While there are some variations in the degree to which research has relied on one-time versus longitudinal design, most studies of work/family conflict have relied on the use of self-reports. Individual survey takers are asked to report on their feelings related to work/family conflict (e.g., Blanchard et al., 2009; Kinnunen et al., 2004; Matthews et al., 2014). The problem with such a design, at least from the quantitative and positivist perspective, is that it is subjective. Are feelings meaningful indicators of work/family conflict? In an effort to reduce subjectivity, some studies have taken to asking others to evaluate an individual on a variety of measures. In Grant-Vallone and Donaldson’s (2001) study on the relationship between work/family conflict and well-being , researchers queried individuals as well as an individual’s co-worker to try to obtain reliable data about well-being . Others have used similarly innovative methods to study work/family conflict, such as Liu, Wang, Chang, Shi, Zhou, and Shao’s (2015) research that relied on the use of a daily diary research design to study the relationship between FIW conflict, emotional exhaustion, and aggression. As this brief review suggests, researchers have used a number of methodologies to try to understand work/family conflict, each bringing with them their own benefits and drawbacks. Some of the designs, particularly those that are longitudinal in nature and those incorporating alternate modes of investigating WFC, such as the use of daily diaries, might be of use in higher education scholarship, which has typically not gone beyond one-time surveys or interviews.

Researchers have similarly used a variety of measures to study the different factors that influence work/family conflict. For example, Senécal, Vallerand, and Guay (2001) used measures of feeling valued by partners and employers as well as measures of motivation toward work and family in addition to the work/family conflict scale. Kinnunen et al. (2004) used indicators of satisfaction and well-being along with a work/family conflict scale while Liu et al. (2015) measured perceived managerial support, workplace interpersonal conflict, emotional exhaustion, and displaced aggression in conjunction with a work/family conflict scale. The list of different potential measures is nearly endless as are the important findings that have come out of psychology. Of note, few of these measures have appeared in the higher education scholarship. Putting aside the fact that most higher education scholarship on work/life issues is qualitative in nature, research in higher education tends to focus on workplace variables (supervisor support) as well as feelings of work/family conflict. However, as the psychology studies point out, work/family conflict is a complex variable that is comprised of multiple factors. Perhaps higher education scholars’ broad application loses some of the particularities of the individual components of the construct. Other constructs that comprise work/life issues, such as well-being and emotional exhaustion, are ripe for exploration in higher education scholarship.

All of the studies reviewed in the psychology literature have relied on quantitative methods. Although quantitative methods allow researchers to gather data quickly and from a large population, our concerns remain the same as those articulated in the previous section; by identifying concepts and constructs a priori, researchers limit the scope of what they might find. Additionally, quantitative designs do not allow researchers to understand the nuances of daily life and the lived experiences of those grappling with work/family conflict.

Despite our concerns with the lack of qualitative studies on work/family conflict in psychology, the literature offers significant benefits in the wide range of designs employed, including one-time surveys, longitudinal designs, and the use of time-diary studies. While we recognize the larger cost that comes from longitudinal designs, they allow researchers to gather a more complete understanding of participants and the ways in which various constructs and experiences change over time. Further, time diary studies offer an objective measure of how people spend their time, which can be useful for determining relationships with work/family conflict, satisfaction, and other measures. Additional diversity in study design comes in the use of self-reports versus querying others. Higher education scholarship has not used many of these approaches to study work/life issues and could benefit from the use of longitudinal designs, time-diary studies, and querying others to provide additional approaches to the study of work/life in the discipline. In addition to benefiting from the wide range of methods used in psychology research, higher education literature might also profit from adopting some of the theoretical approaches that psychology researchers use to inform work/family scholarship.

Theories

Although work/family conflict has been examined through a variety of perspectives, we highlight three theories that have been used in psychology, yet received little attention in the higher education literature: self-determination theory , conservation of resources, and subjective well-being . These theories offer the potential to push higher education scholarship in new directions. We provide an overview of each theory and briefly discuss some empirical studies that illustrate how they inform work/family research. Although each theory also brings benefits, we also raise concerns about each.

Self-Determination Theory

A theory of motivation , Ryan and Deci’s (2000) Self-Determination Theory (SDT) seeks to identify both individuals’ needs and organizational conditions that facilitate growth. The authors suggest that three needs are essential for facilitating an individual’s growth and well-being : autonomy, competence, and relatedness. An autonomous person is not one who is independent, but rather one who feels that she or he is making choices out of free will. In other words, autonomous people make their own choices. Competence refers to an individual’s capabilities to perform a task or successfully navigate a particular environment. Finally, relatedness refers to individuals’ inherent need to belong to a group and connect with others.

Self-Determination Theory also seeks to understand the ways in which different types of motivation are related to a variety of outcomes including work performance and well-being . Ryan and Deci (2000) suggest that motivation might be best characterized on a continuum, from amotivation on one end to intrinsic motivation on the other. Those who are intrinsically motivated are “highly autonomous and [represent] the prototypic instance of self-determination” (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 72). However, SDT suggests that not all behavior is intrinsically motivated, but rather much behavior , particularly that required by the workplace, is extrinsically motivated. The continuum also differentiates between different degrees of externally motivated behavior , ranging from externally regulated behavior , in which an individual’s behavior is best regulated through rewards and punishments, to integrated regulation, in which an individual has assimilated external regulations into their sense of self. An individual whose motivation is characterized by integrated regulation has adopted the organizational values and needs as their own. The sole difference between this state of motivation and intrinsic motivation is “they are done to attain separable outcomes rather than for inherent enjoyment” (p. 73). Figure 8.2, taken from Ryan and Deci (2000), illustrates the different types of motivation and regulatory styles:

Fig. 8.2

The self-determination continuum showing types of motivation with their regulatory styles, loci of causality, and correspnding processes (Source: Ryan and Deci (2000), reprinted with permission)

The figure above catalogues different types of motivation -amotivation, extrinsic motivation , and intrinsic motivation -along with how those behaviors might be regulated. Of particular note, there is little difference between integrated regulated extrinsic motivation and intrinsically regulated intrinsic motivation . Note that the relevant regulatory processes are similar in that a person who is extrinsically motivated comes to adopt particular behaviors as being congruent with themselves while one who is intrinsically motivated performs behaviors out of inherent satisfaction; there is little difference between the two. As we elaborate shortly, these minute differences suggest that organizations and supervisors can help create conditions to help employees come to perceive a match between their needs and those of the organization.

Internalization and assimilation of regulation contribute to an individual’s autonomy (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Indeed, each of the three needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—are related to internalization and motivation . For example, internalizing extrinsically motivated activities is related to competence. As Ryan and Deci (2000) suggested, “people are more likely to adopt activities that relevant social groups value when they feel efficacious with respect to those activities” (p. 73). In other words, a person who enjoys math is more likely to pick a career as a budget manager than someone with an aversion to numbers. Additionally, relatedness is a key condition for internalization of values. A person who feels connected to others is more likely to support and adopt their values as their own. In turn, an individual whose needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met are more likely to adopt self-determined behavior .

The theory is highly influential and widely cited in psychology; a May 2016 Google Scholar search noted over 16,000 citations of Ryan and Deci’s (2000) foundational article . The theory has received limited documented critique, instead becoming widely accepted in psychology. Some concerns arise from the articulation of the theory. First, some may wonder why competence, autonomy, and relatedness are the only needs related to self-determination. Earlier work, such as Maslow’s (1954) hierarchy of needs, suggested that individuals needed to have a variety of needs met, including such basic physiological and safety needs, to reach self-actualization. Perhaps such needs are implicit in self-determination theory . Second, actions performed out of extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation may not allow an individual to engage in self-determined behavior . Am I truly self-determined if I am performing a task because someone else told me that I am required to? However, the theory suggests that individuals may be encouraged, through the actions of supervisors and others, to adopt behaviors that ultimately lead to self-determination. Simply stated, an individual does not have to be intrinsically motivated to reach self-determination.

Some of the literature on self-determination theory includes the ways in which SDT might be useful in considering motivation in the workplace and work/family conflict. As Ryan and Deci (2000) argued, organizational conditions matter. And, as many have found, supervisors play a key role in creating conditions to facilitate self-determination and autonomous behavior (Baard, Deci, & Ryan, 2004; Deci, Connell, & Ryan, 1989; Senécal et al., 2001). For example, in their three-year study of employees at a major corporation, Deci et al. (1989) found a significant relationship between managers’ support for self-determination and employees’ attitudes, particularly related to satisfaction. Those employees who perceived their supervisors as supportive of self-determination as well as were satisfied with the quality of feedback given and ability to provide input into organizational processes—all tasks that support self-determination—had higher levels of general satisfaction.

Additional studies further underscore the important role that the workplace can play in facilitating self-determination. In their study of 528 employees of one corporation, Baard et al. (2004) found a relationship between individuals’ workplace performance and the satisfaction of their needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Those who had their needs satisfied had higher work performance and adjustment. Additionally, those who perceived their managers as being autonomy-supportive also experienced greater need satisfaction. Finally, the same study found that satisfaction of the need for relatedness predicted higher performance evaluations (Baard et al., 2004). Plainly stated, self-determined employees experience greater satisfaction and perform better in the workplace. These studies underscore that it is in the workplace’s best interest, from a productivity standpoint, to find ways to facilitate employees’ competence, autonomy, and relatedness. As these studies suggest, organizations can facilitate self-determination by giving employees agency in determining their work tasks and soliciting input on organizational processes as well as creating an environment that facilitates trust among all employees.

Finally, one study focused on the relationship between a supervisor’s support for self-determination, an individual’s motivation , and work-family conflict. Echoing the findings of others, Senécal et al. (2001) found that employees with autonomy-supportive supervisors experienced an increase in their own self-determined motivation . Those who experienced more self-determined motivation experienced lower levels of exhaustion and therefore lower levels of work/family conflict. Although this study is just one to specifically focus on work/family conflict, the body of literature on Self-Determination Theory underscores the benefits to the workplace in helping employees develop competence, autonomy, and relatedness. While long neglected by higher education scholars, SDT offers tremendous potential for studying the worklives of faculty and staff. In particular, its focus on crafting environments that help employees reach their full potential has significant implications for reducing work/family conflict.

Conservation of Resources

A second theory that offers a helpful approach to understanding work/family conflict is Hobföll’s (1989) Conservation of Resources theory (or, COR), which suggests that individuals strive to accrue and maintain resources and consequently experience stress when they lose these resources, or perceive the threat that they may. Resources can include tangible objects, characteristics, conditions, or energies that are valued by an individual; one individual might value money (objects), another might value skill at math (characteristic), and another might value having free time (energy). Occasions can arise that can threaten an individual’s resources, thus leading to stress. When an individual experiences stress in one area, she may try to offset the loss by drawing upon resources from another area. For example, a working mother who has an upcoming deadline may work late nights at the office, thus taking time away from her children at home. However, the theory suggests that loss spirals may develop, if an individual does not have enough resources to offset the loss. Returning to the same example, if the mother is not able to spend extra time at work because of demands on her time at home, she is likely to experience further loss (or loss spirals) in both domains.

Conservation of Resources offers a benefit in that it focuses on how individuals might experience stress and burnout in all domains of their lives, both work and home. In contrast, other theories that we have reviewed focus primarily on the workplace. However, the basic premise of this theory is that work and family domains are naturally in opposition to one another, and do not have the opportunity to operate in harmony via integration, as some theorists have suggested (Barnett, 1999). Under COR, a gain in one realm is necessarily a penalty in another, thus creating a no-win situation for those navigating responsibilities in multiple domains.

Conservation of Resources is used in work/family conflict research, both in isolation and through incorporation of other theories, like Subjective Well-Being that we soon discuss. Nohe, Meier, Sonntag, and Michel (2015) investigated the relationship between work/family conflict and strain to understand the role of loss spirals. In a meta-analysis of 30 articles that used strain as a variable of study, the authors found that research overwhelmingly suggests that WIF and strain mutually predicted each other; WIF predicted strain and strain predicted WIF. This finding reinforces the notion of loss spirals; an individual who experiences strain in one area is likely to experience strain in another. COR offers a complement to existing theories of role conflict and role strain, frequently found in the organizational studies literature, and might be used to understand the ways in which faculty and staff balance their home and work responsibilities. Conservation of Resources underscores that individuals only have so much time to give to each role; when one role becomes burdensome, this necessitates drawing additional resources (be they time, money, or other resources) from the other role. However, our cache of resources is finite and overtapping resources from one domain may lead to overtapping resources in other domains (the concept of loss spirals). COR might be particularly useful to investigate the concept of burnout among faculty who are torn between work and family, and feel as if they are underperforming in both domains. This notion of strain and resources is evident in theories of subjective well-being , another foundational theory used in work/family studies in psychology.

Subjective Well-Being

Broadly speaking, subjective well-being refers to an individual’s evaluation of whether they are happy and living a worthwhile life. Evaluations of subjective well-being are both affective (or, based in emotion) and cognitive (Diener, 2000; Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). As Diener (2000) argued, subjective well-being can be further separated into a number of components, including “life satisfaction (global judgments of one’s life), satisfaction with important domains (e.g., work satisfaction), positive affect (experiencing many pleasant emotions and moods), and low levels of negative affect (experiencing few unpleasant emotions and moods)” (p. 34). In short, while some theories utilize objective measures for evaluation , SWB is by its very nature (and name) a subjective and individual evaluation of life and satisfaction.

An individual’s personality plays a pivotal role in determining subjective well-being . In fact Diener et al. (1999) suggested that personality is “one of the strongest and most consistent predictors of subjective well-being ” (p. 279). Individuals who are happier are more likely to report higher levels of SWB. As Diener (2000) argued, the percent of time that an individual reports being happy is a better predictor of SWB than positive emotional intensity, or being intensely happy. Although personality plays perhaps the most critical role in determining SWB, the role of the environment is also important. To gain a more nuanced understanding of SWB, researchers would do well to study the interactions between personality and the environment, as particular personality traits will likely interact with environmental traits in different ways (Diener et al., 1999). In the higher education environment, for example, some individuals may have greater SWB in a community college or liberal arts college, where the focus is on teaching while others may have greater SWB in a research university. Similarly, individual department or unit culture makes a difference; some individuals will have greater SWB in a fast-paced environment in which they are constantly interacting with others (such as many student affairs units) while others find greater SWB in a quiet environment that depends on solo work, such as many faculty members’ work. While underexplored in higher education scholarship, studies using SWB can help to explore how individuals interact with the environment, and the implications this might have for work/life conflict.

Subjective well-being is dependent on the degree to which an individual reaches his or her goals. Diener et al. (1999) suggested that individuals work toward a variety of goals and their happiness (or unhappiness) is related to their ability (or failure) to attain those goals. A faculty member employed at a research university who repeatedly fails to have publications accepted to journals will likely have lower SWB than those who succeed in getting manuscripts published. As several authors argued (Diener, 2000; Gröpel & Kuhl, 2009), resources play a critical role in helping individuals reach their goals. Having resources related to obtaining particular goals better predicts SWB than having resources unrelated to those goals. Returning to the previous example, a faculty member who receives support from the institution related to conducting research and writing and submitting journal articles , perhaps in the form of research funds or editorial assistance, will be more likely to have SWB than a faculty member with different resources available (such as those related to teaching ). The resources available must be congruent with the goals.

Goals are subject to change, particularly when individuals are confronted with new situations. Thus, another key component of SWB focuses on adaptation in which individuals learn to respond to setbacks to their goals (Diener et al., 1999; Matthews et al., 2014). When confronted with a setback or stressor, an individual will initially experience a decline in SWB, though research suggests that SWB will later rebound after a period of adjustment. In one study, Suh, Diener, and Fujita (1996) found that individuals generally rebounded from a stressor (such as being fired) after three months. Individuals who are able to adapt and alter their goals are therefore more likely to achieve greater SWB. The faculty member who is unsuccessful in publishing might decide to seek employment at an institution in which research is not given primacy. Thus, while the faculty member might initially experience a decline in SWB, adapting to the situation leads to greater SWB.

There are, of course, concerns that arise from the constructs that compose subjective well-being . First, it suggests that people who are happy and satisfied have greater SWB. Yet, how can one objectively measure happiness and satisfaction; might one person’s happiness be qualitatively different than another’s? Second, given that personality plays the most central role in determining SWB, this creates concerns for an organization’s ability to help employees achieve greater SWB. If one person has higher levels of negative affect and low levels of positive affect (both contrary to the definition of SWB), what steps can an organizational reasonably take to help an employee achieve SWB and ultimately reduce WFC? If personality traits are fixed, what hope does an organization have of helping its employees?

Although this theory is underused in higher education , studies in psychology have interrogated the relationship between subjective well-being and work as well as work/family conflict. Diener (2000) suggested that happier people are more productive in the workplace and Diener et al. (1999) suggested that happier people are happier in the workplace. Given that SWB suggests that individuals will be happiest when working toward personally meaningful goals, organizations might find it mutually beneficial to help employees find satisfaction in their work. And, indeed, studies have confirmed that a positive relationship exists between subjective well-being , need fulfillment, and work/family balance. In their study of 79 people, Gröpel and Kuhl (2009) found that subjective well-being was positively related to need fulfillment. Additionally, the study found that work/life balance was also positively related to subjective well-being and need fulfillment. In brief, people whose goals were being met were happier and had greater levels of work/life balance.

Additional research also suggests a negative relationship between work/family conflict and subjective well-being . In their study of 488 people over an 8-month period, Matthews et al. (2014) found that work/family conflict was associated with a short-term decrease in levels of subjective well-being . However, over time, individuals who experienced work/family conflict at the initial survey time point later evidenced higher levels of subjective well-being , thus illustrating adaptation as a key tenet of SWB. Those who experienced conflict (a stressor) were able to adapt their goals and, as a result, experienced higher levels of SWB. This study has implications for faculty who arguably are under considerable stress, particularly in the pre-tenure period. Might they experience similar adaptation in the face of work/family conflict, and ultimately greater SWB? Matthews et al. (2014) also found that individuals with greater SWB also experienced reduced work/family conflict. In short, the causal relationship operates in both directions between SWB and WFC. Those who experience WFC are likely to have reduced SWB in the short-term, but greater SWB in the long-term. This greater SWB likely serves as a buffer to reduce WFC. Given that work/family conflict can have numerous individual and organizational consequences, organizations might find ways to help their employees achieve greater SWB, for both the good of the individual and the organization.

Summary of Psychology Literature

The work/life literature in psychology offers a number of possible avenues for exploration for higher education scholarship while also bringing a number of cautions. We have highlighted three theories here—Self-Determination Theory, Conservation of Resources, and Subjective Well-Being—that have received little attention in the higher education scholarship. Applying each of these theories to the higher education setting would provide new ways of addressing work/life issues. Self-Determination Theory and Subjective Well-Being, in particular, call attention to the importance of workplace environments for facilitating worker satisfaction and reduced work/family conflict. Both theories suggest that workers will thrive when certain conditions are met; achieving autonomy, competence, and relatedness, in the case of SDT, and subjective well-being will ultimately allow workers to be more productive in the workplace. These theories are particularly important to the study of work/life in that, as we soon discuss, typically higher education scholarship examines policy interventions, such as the kinds of leave policies available for faculty and staff, as a measure of the way that organizations attend to work/life issues. What these theories suggest, however, is that by paying attention to all aspects of the work environment, organizations can help employees be more engaged in the workplace as well as experience more satisfaction and less work/family conflict. Examining policy availability is not enough; all aspects of the organization matter.

However, as we have pointed out, the theories are not without weaknesses. SDT suggests that only three needs—competence, relatedness, and autonomy—must be met for an individual to achieve self-determination, skimming over basic physiological needs. People who are employed in low-wage jobs, not earning enough to pay their bills, will have a difficult time satisfying these needs, regardless of how supportive the workplace is. COR naturally sets work and family domains in opposition with one another; demands of the workplace necessarily interfere with demands in the home. COR does not leave space for individuals to find ways to satisfy the demands of both realms at the same time. And yet, many parents do just this—bringing their children into the office on occasion or performing work from home. Finally, by its very definition, SWB is subjective and impossible to objectively measure. Furthermore, it relies on happiness as a construct and leaves little space for organizations to maneuver to attend to the needs of those employees who are, by the very nature, unhappy people.

In addition to the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the theories, psychology research’s reliance on quantitative methods brings both benefits and drawbacks. Quantitative methods allow for greater ease in surveying larger populations than qualitative populations. Many studies reviewed here employed a longitudinal design, which allow researchers to gain an understanding of how work/life changes over a period of time. Higher education scholars might be encouraged to adopt longitudinal designs in their own work to understand the ways in which work/life changes, over both short and long periods of time. However, the use of quantitative methods and pre-existing constructs limits potential findings in determining the types of topics researchers explore. Qualitative studies allow for the nuances of daily life to emerge. Such nuances and close attention to individual experiences characterize much of the higher education scholarship on work/life.

Literature on Work /Life in Higher Education

The literature on work/life in higher education follows some of the theoretical and methodological traditions outlined in the sections on organizational studies and psychology, though authors tend to apply the concepts in different ways. While the focus in organizational studies and psychology emerged from an area of scholarly inquiry, the higher education literature appears to have emerged due to changing institutional contexts that led to significant issues around work/life. For example, the higher education literature on work/life began from an economic human capital perspective on productivity, sparked by the emergence of more women in faculty roles and the identification of stark salary inequities. Later research incorporated role theory to examine the relationship between academic parenting and the professoriate in response to a professoriate with more women raising children. However, perhaps fitting for its status as an interdisciplinary field of study, higher education scholars have also pushed the study of work/life issues by incorporating concepts and theories from sociology and gender studies as well. The primary focus of the higher education research has been largely concerned with how work/life conflict impacts the professoriate, focusing specifically on tenure-line faculty , with attention to contextual differences, such as the role of institutional and disciplinary cultures. Still other work has focused on policy existence and use as well as relationships between productivity and work/life.

Summary of Historical Influences

The work/life scholarship in higher education can be broadly divided into four topical areas: (1) productivity (as measured by research output); (2) the use of institutional policies; (3) work/life challenges of specific identity groups (e.g., women, men, students ); and (4) contextual differences in work/life issues, such as studies focusing on the role of organizational culture. The topics above have been published in chronological succession: the earliest scholarship tended to focus on productivity while more recent scholarship has shifted to contextual differences in work/life issues. In what follows, we provide a brief overview of the historical progression of work/life scholarship before turning to a more detailed discussion of the scholarship on each topical area.

The research on higher education tracks closely with the historical trends of women entering the professoriate and socio-historical gender bias . While women were entering the professoriate decades prior to the 1970s, the first formal acknowledgement of work/life came by way of the 1977 AAUP statement on pregnancy. The initial articles on work/life emerged around that same time as the AAUP policy and were primarily concerned with proving that women faculty having children and a spouse did not deter from productivity . These studies often relied on the assumptions, whether explicitly stated or not, of human capital theory, suggesting a relationship between productivity (i.e., number of articles published) and investment or detraction from jobs due to family status (i.e., number of children). For example, the early article by Hamovitch and Morgenstern (1977) sought to address the argument that pervasive salary differentials between men and women were due to lower productivity among women. Their findings echoed similar studies that found that women have slightly lower levels of productivity than men but experience no negative effect due to childrearing. The questions of productivity did not get resolved in this early work despite the consistency in results; rather, the bias continued within the academy, building a need for additional empirical and more robust evidence. Articles in subsequent decades by Cole and Zuckerman (1987), Perna (2001), and Sax, Hagedorn, Arredondo, and Dicrisi (2002) continued to address productivity among women faculty with more sophisticated analysis with results showing little to no difference across men and women. Essentially, the arguments around productivity took a defensive stance, maintaining that women can be productive members of a faculty in ways similar to men and that their historic role as caretakers of the home sphere, including childcare, would not deter from their faculty work. Implied in many of these articles is a more complex gendered environment that is seemingly incompatible with family responsibilities. As Sax, Hagedorn, Arredondo, and Dicrisi (2002) stated at the end of their article ,

In sum, while our findings characterize many faculty women as overextended, managing to balance the demands of home, children, and a productive academic career , this study suggests that family-related factors do not interfere with scholarly productivity . Nevertheless, there continues to be a widely held assumption that family responsibilities do stand to compromise a faculty member’s career , and prevailing myths continue to affect the recruitment and retention of women faculty . (p. 438)

The studies on productivity laid the groundwork for conversations being held in organizational studies on gender bias in organizations and helped to establish a more robust set of studies on the relationship between childrearing and faculty work. These studies also started the conversation around productivity and childrearing, leaving out research on single faculty , faculty without children, and other work/life conflicts, such as caring for aging parents. This focus on parenting and the absence of all other life responsibilities is reflected throughout decades of research on work/life (or work/family) in the higher education literature.

Following on the heels of scholarship concerned with comparing productivity levels of men and women faculty came scholarship focused on policy use, specifically the development and use of programs and policies that seek to promote more work/life balance. Some studies catalogued the existence of policies (e.g. Hollenshead, Sullivan, Smith, August, & Hamilton, 2005) while others sought to examine the use of these policies. Many of these studies arose out of large-scale surveys, such as the work of Mason and Goulden (2002), which identified specific work/life factors that lead to the lack of retention and recruitment of women in the professoriate. For example, Mason and Goulden found that women with children were far more likely to leave the professoriate than men, suggesting that institutions need to address a perception of incompatibility between childrearing and faculty work. Resulting from this research and others was a national movement sparked by private foundations , federal funding agencies, and system-wide adoption of new programs and policies for work/life. Important research questions emerged about the use of policies, the relationship between policy use and department or university climate, and the effectiveness of such policies.

Emerging diversity in the professoriate helped to push forward a more explicit set of research studies specifically on work/life. The sheer increase in the number of women, more women faculty with children, and new generations of men and women faculty desiring more work/life balance all helped to influence the salience of work/life as an issue in need of research and intervention. These studies largely drew on the prevalent theories related to role theory , such as role conflict, identifying if there is role strain among faculty who seek work/life balance. The work of Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2004), for example, drew attention to role identity development among academic mothers, identifying a complex relationship where individuals find synergy and conflict in childrearing and faculty work. Other studies around the same time took a more critical stance providing evidence of the conflict between motherhood and faculty roles (Armenti, 2004a) and pervasive gender bias in the academy (Drago et al., 2006).

The studies related to faculty productivity and work/life began to identify a complex set of organizational dynamics operating on multiple levels – among faculty peers in departments, during faculty hiring, discourse by leaders, and so on – that suggest a need to more deeply understand and develop work/life in higher education . A more focused area of research developed on organizational dynamics, often relying on the assumptions of gendered organizations established by Acker (1990) and Williams (1989). These studies focused on expectations related to the ideal worker and how those expectations place women and men at a disadvantage. For example, Gardner (2013) identified undue service expectations placed on women to support an institution striving to increase research productivity . These expectations were aligned with the socio-historical notions of women in service and support roles (i.e., secretaries). Further complicating the research on work/life was an acknowledgement of the need to disaggregate and contextualize faculty work across institutional types, faculty contracts, and career stage. Research by Ward, Wolf-Wendel, and Twombly (2007), for example, focused on community college faculty while Sallee (2014) interviewed men faculty .

In the following, we review the higher education scholarship on the four primary topical areas: productivity , policy use, demographic changes , and contextual differences that follow the general trajectory of work/life research starting in the 1970s. Each section presents the literature noting the impact of theoretical and methodological assumptions that shape the focus and findings of the studies. As will become clear, the changing professoriate, such as the increase in the number of women and contingent faculty , plays a role in the focus of work/life research in higher education . More importantly, the reliance on specific theories in organizational studies and psychology has left many areas of inquiry unexamined, leaving major questions about the ways in which work/life functions in colleges and universities. Many critical questions remain that we address following this section.

Productivity

As noted, the first major area of research on work/life related issues was concerned with examining the relationship between productivity , often defined by number of publications , and gender among faculty . The research in this area addressed the pervasive assumption that childbearing and rearing were incompatible with faculty work; women faculty with children could not be productive. At the same time, more national studies emerged identifying a lack of equity in terms of salary and promotion (i.e., tenure and promotion) between men and women faculty . These studies tend to rely on the assumptions of human capital theory, which posits that “an individual’s status and rewards in the academic labor market are determined primarily by his or her productivity ” (Perna, 2001, p. 588). In this regard, productivity is defined by the investments that an individual makes to improve current and future job prospects to include: education; professional development and training; physical health, motivation ; and geographic mobility. As individuals continue to invest in themselves, such as through increasing levels of education, their human capital increases. In higher education , many studies rely on the notion of human capital to justify the need for continued education as more education tends to increase lifetime earnings.

The research studies on productivity directly or indirectly suggest a human capital framework and are primarily quantitative using existing data, such as the Carnegie-American Council on Education data (Hamovitch & Morgenstern, 1977), National Study of Postsecondary Faculty administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (Bellas & Toutkoushian, 1999), and faculty surveys (Finkel & Olswang, 1996) and Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) faculty survey (Sax, Hagedorn, Arredondo, & Dicrisi, 2002). A few of the more recent studies use qualitative methods, primarily case studies or individual interviews across different sectors of higher education (Cole & Zuckerman, 1987; Sallee, 2014). The quantitative studies define productivity in a myriad of ways making it difficult to compare across studies; yet, the studies consistently find no effect of childrearing on women faculty productivity . Hamovitch and Morgenstern (1977) used number of publications and a more qualitative measure of peer-assessed ranking of faculty research quality. Comparing the productivity of women with children to those without children, the authors concluded that “we find no evidence of a diminution of academic productivity , measured by quantity of publications or by peer assessment, associated with the presence of children in the household” (p. 634). These findings were confirmed several decades later by Sax, Hagedorn, Arredondo, and Dicrisi (2002) who found that family-related commitments had no or very little effect on faculty research productivity . What did emerge as significant were professional variables defined by academic rank, salary, recognition, and research orientation.

Many studies, as cited by Perna (2001), also examined other academic variables and suggest that family status and responsibilities reduce human capital by limiting opportunities in education, mobility, and participation in the job market . Structural characteristics are related to human capital in that they account for the social inequities by accounting for the relationship between organizational attributes and human capital. A classic example is the reality that women make on average 80 % of the salaries of men, controlling for experience, education, and other pertinent factors. Within higher education , women faculty account for just 29 % of full professors but 49 % of assistant professors (NCES, 2015), suggesting that significant barriers exist that prevent women from attaining promotion to the highest ranks. Findings from Perna’s (2001) study generally align with the theories of structural characteristics as, “even after controlling for differences in race, family responsibilities, human capital, and structural characteristics, women are more likely than men to hold full-time, nontenure positions, positions of lower status in the academic labor market hierarchy” (p. 603). Marital and family status were found to be associated with odds of holding a nontenure eligible position for women, thus supporting the use of human capital theory. Half a century earlier, Hamovitch and Morgenstern (1977) noted that

another alleged cause of the lower rewards for women is that women professionals are, on the average, less productive than men. It has been argued that this difference in productivity can be at least partially accounted for by the heavy demands of child rearing on many women in our society. (p. 634)

The timing of these articles is not surprising given that women entered the professoriate in larger numbers in the 1970s and 1980s and tenure-line probationary years often coincide with childrearing years. Concerns with women faculty retention took hold in the 1990s with data suggesting that women leave the professoriate because they see faculty work as incongruent with childrearing (Finkel, Olswang, & She, 1994).

Other studies of productivity compare across men and women and find that overall, women produce fewer publications (Long & Fox, 1995) and that married men publish more than unmarried men (Bellas, 1992). In a qualitative study based on interviews with 120 scientists combined with measures of their publication rates, Cole and Zuckerman (1987) found that marriage and childrearing had no negative lasting effect on research productivity . Married women with children published on average as many papers as single women. The cyclic, almost roller-coaster visual, nature of paper publications existed for married women with children and single women (see Fig. 8.3). Finkel and Olswang (1996) focused on examining why women assistant professors do not receive tenure at the same rates as men by examining the perceived impediments and pressures that women faculty experience. Their findings indicate that women faculty postpone childbearing for fear that time required to raise a child or children would interfere with their ability to achieve tenure. These findings were echoed the following decade by Armenti (2004a).

Fig. 8.3

A Comparison of Publication Rates of a Man and Woman Scientist (From Cole & Zuckerman, 1987). Reproduced with permission. Copyright ©(1987)Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved

Challenging publications as the only means to measure faculty productivity , other studies have looked at the relationship between time spent on a multitude of activities and faculty characteristics (i.e., gender and race). Bellas and Toutkoushian (1999) defined productivity in terms of traditional measures to include books, journal articles , and patents but also included creative works and non-referred publications . Their results indicate that increases in time spent on teaching and service activities results in lower research productivity and that women have lower research productivity overall. Marriage for men and women had a positive impact on research productivity as well as number of dependents. These findings continue to challenge the assumption that life responsibilities interfere with work productivity . In somewhat contradictory findings, Ludlow and Alvarez-Salvat (2001) focused on the potential spillover effect for work and family by honing in on the relationship between marital status and work performance, measured by student evaluations over time. Consistent with spillover theory, their results indicate that “both models tested the hypothesis that teaching evaluation ratings would suffer during the period of divorce, and then improve with remarriage” (p. 117), suggesting that marriage has a positive spillover, or impact, on productivity . By all measures and for both men and women, productivity is enhanced by marriage and family; yet, there needs to be some acknowledgement that spillover can have a temporary negative impact.

Other scholars have addressed the issue of productivity from the perspective of employee retention or, in the case of tenure-line faculty , achieving tenure. These studies are consistent with human capital theory, suggesting that organizations need to be attentive to losing their human capital in the form of faculty attrition. These studies also add to the literature social and cultural institutional norms that appeared initially as somewhat generic structural characteristics in need of more in-depth study. In their study in the University of California system, Mason and Goulden (2002) found that babies matter – those faculty who have babies within five years of receiving their doctoral degree are less likely to achieve tenure. There are some differences across gender where men who have early babies are more likely than women who have early babies to achieve tenure. Mason and Goulden posit that the reason for this substantial gap stems from the fact that

women with early babies often do not get as far as ladder-rank jobs. They make choices that may force them to leave the academy or put them into the second tier of faculty : the lecturers, adjuncts, and part-time faculty . (p. 25)

Their choices, however, are not simply due to individual preference but a systemic cultural problem where women are unable to balance the increasing demands of faculty work and life responsibilities. Other studies document that implicit biases that women faculty with children experience (Drago et al., 2006). Moreover, women faculty continue to report that they spend more time on domestic responsibilities than men (Sax, Hagedorn, Arredondo, & Dicrisi, 2002), suggesting that the family structure has not dramatically altered and that women are still considered to be primarily responsible for household chores and childcare.

Research on productivity and work/life balance among faculty generally agrees that women produce fewer publications than men but that family responsibilities are not the primary driver of reduced productivity . In fact, those male and female faculty who are married with children tend to be more productive than their within gender single or no children counterparts. These findings are consistent with different measures of productivity (i.e., student evaluations and other research products) with some indication that major life events, such as divorce, temporarily impact productivity .

There are several critiques of this area of literature worth noting. Across the several decades of research and many different datasets, researchers tended to rely on somewhat crude measures of productivity , mainly number of publications . While publications have continued to be the gold standard of productivity at research universities, faculty are often judged by different and more complex productivity measures, particularly at comprehensive and community colleges and across their career stage. Number of credit hours taught, number of students advised, committee assignments, and other service obligations could measure productivity . There is also some evidence that gender is related to service obligations (Park, 1996), suggesting that more analysis is needed that takes into account individual demographics and identities. These studies also did not have a longitudinal design, which limits the ability to see in more depth the peaks and valleys of productivity that naturally occur over faculty career stage. The research on mid-career faculty , for example, identifies difficult in producing publications post-tenure due to advising and academic departmental management/leadership roles. The impact of work/life events may be more diverse; childrearing may have a different impact than caring for aging parents. This type of analysis requires more longitudinal design. Moreover, the research has largely ignored other faculty contracts. Do student evaluations for nontenure track faculty change over time and in relationship to work/life events? Finally, measuring productivity of existing faculty , particularly those with tenure, hides the cultural biases of having children as noted by Mason and Goulden (2002). Their studies reveal that women leave the professoriate either by choice or because they do not receive tenure, due to an incompatibility, both perceived and real, between faculty work and childrearing.

Policy Use

Although not all work/life research in higher education focuses on context and institutional factors, studies on parental leave policies tend to center context as important. This focus on policy use in higher education scholarship is in contrast, in some sense, with scholarship in organizational studies and psychology. Although there have been some studies in organizational studies that examine differences in policy use among employees (Haas, Allard, & Hwang, 2002; Thompson, Beauvais, & Lyness, 1999), higher education ’s consistent concern with policy use stems from the field’s shared site of research and practice. Higher education scholarship concerns itself with colleges and universities and those who populate them while organizational studies focuses on a variety of organizational types with their own structures and norms. Thus, focusing on policy use in one unique setting (e.g. an insurance company) may not be applicable to the use of policy in another (e.g. a medical office). However, higher education scholars seek to develop an understanding of the types of policies available and the patterns of use across colleges and universities which, though diverse in their composition, are united by a loose set of shared structures, norms, and values.

Over the decades and since the 1977 AAUP statement on pregnancy, parental leave has had a variety of stipulations. The first iteration of policies was more aligned with pregnancy leave and often mirrored short-term disability policies. This may be due to the fact that the AAUP argued that pregnancy is analogous to disability. More contemporary versions are parental leave that is inclusive of maternal and paternal leave as well as adoption. A variety of studies have sought to catalogue the existence of parental leave policies as well as link policy existence to outcomes, often relying on a notion of individual agency . However, the earliest work on policy use was largely atheoretical and focused more on description of existing policies.

In their survey of 255 U.S. institutions, Hollenshead, Sullivan, Smith, August, and Hamilton (2005) examined which institutional types were more likely to offer seven types of work/family accommodations: tenure clock extensions, modified duties, paid leave while recovering from childbirth, paid dependent care leave, unpaid dependent care leave, in excess of the 12 weeks ensured by the Family and Medical Leave Act, reduced appointments for dependent care needs, and the availability of part-time positions or job-share positions. The authors found that, on average, institutions offered 1.67 of these 7 available policies. Research institutions offered the greatest number of policies, averaging 2.99 policies per campus; doctoral institutions offered 1.38 policies, master’s and baccalaureate offered 1.29 and 1.09 policies, respectively. Community colleges offered the fewest number of policies at 0.80 policies per campus. These discrepancies across institutional types are correlated with the resources available on each campus; research institutions tend to be more resource-rich and therefore are able to offer more policies than the typically cash-strapped community colleges . In another study of the availability of parental leave across institutions, Yoest (2004) found that the most highly ranked institutions were more likely to offer paid parental leave, compared with institutions in the middle and bottom tiers. While both studies identify which institutions are more likely to offer leave policies, both are over a decade old and thus the field may benefit from a new survey of institutions to catalog the current state of work/family policies.

Although there have been no recent national studies across institutional types of family-friendly policies, there have been a number of studies seeking to catalogue the existence of family-friendly policies in medical schools in both the United States (Bristol, Abbuhl, Capolla, & Sonnad, 2008; Welch, Wiehe, Palmer-Smith, & Dankiski, 2011) and Canada (Gropper, Gartke, & MacLaren, 2010). Welch et al. (2011) studied leave policies at medical schools in the Big Ten conference and found that institutions offered a range of policies (maternity/paternity leave, childcare options, lactation rooms, part-time appointments, etc.) often used to support work/life. However, the institutions varied dramatically as to the degree of availability of policies; out of a maximum of 21 points, institutions in their sample ranged from a high of 13.5 to a low of 9.25, indicating that medical schools still are not offering maximum benefits for faculty . Similarly, Bristol et al. (2008) found that the top ten medical schools in the U.S. range in the degree to which they offer policies for faculty use. The authors noted that the medical schools that offered the most comprehensive policies also tended to have the highest percentage of women full professors, further underscoring the degree to which policy existence and use is critical for women who are navigating work/family demands.

Additional scholarship has gone beyond simply cataloguing the availability of leave policies to examining faculty perceptions around the existence and use of leave policies. In one of the first articles to systematically examine leave policies, Finkel, Olswang, and She (1994) surveyed faculty at one large research institution and found that faculty overwhelmingly supported paid leave policies for women who have children. They also support a wide range of options to support new mothers. Supported in more recent studies (Mason, Goulden, & Wolfinger, 2006), the study found that only a small percent of eligible women took paid leave as they believed taking time off would be detrimental to their career . Additional scholarship has also found that faculty are less likely to use family-friendly policies, despite their widespread availability (Mason, Wolfinger, & Goulden, 2006; Pribbenow et al., 2010; Quinn, 2010). In their study of nearly 4500 tenure-line faculty in the University of California system, Mason, Wolfinger, and Goulden (2006) found that only 30 % of eligible faculty used a tenure clock extension. However, women were far more likely to use the tenure clock extension; 30 % of eligible women compared with just 8 % of eligible men used the policy . Similarly, Quinn (2010) found that only 24 % of eligible faculty at one research university used a tenure clock extension; women were slightly more likely to use the policy as 32 % of women compared with 18 % of men reported taking an extension. These quantitative studies conclude that women are far more likely to access policies than men are, but do not provide any explanation as to why that might be. However, some qualitative scholarship has investigated reasons behind men and women’s policy use, acknowledging social and cultural norms that may create gender-based inequities.

O’Meara and colleagues (Campbell & O’Meara, 2014; O’Meara & Campbell, 2011) introduced the theory of agency to examine parental choice for men and women faculty . Their focus was on the scaffolding that supports faculty in making parental decisions. They conceptualize agency as “a sense of power over her or his work” (O’Meara & Campbell, 2011, p. 448), creating a conceptual relationship between structural environments (i.e., institutional reward systems, policies, demographics, and institutional type to name a few) and temporal elements (i.e., socialization in graduate school and career stage). Part of agency is the ability to exercise one’s desire for work/life balance by using institutional policies and programs.

A few other higher education scholars have examined faculty agency in navigating work/family issues. In her consideration of the ways in which men navigate parenting and academic careers , Sallee (2013) used Lawrence’s (2008) theory of institutional power, which calls attention to the ways in which organizations both shape and are shaped by individual actors. In short, Lawrence’s (2008) theory considers the role of institutions, defined in this theory as social norms, as well as types of power (both individual and organizational) in shaping attitudes, beliefs, and structures. Sallee (2013) examined the institution of parenting to consider how gender norms and beliefs about parenthood shaped individuals’ responses to parenting. She found that some participants minimized the use of available family-friendly policies because they did not want to appear to be uncommitted to their work. Some also worried about having their identities as men challenged and reported hearing messages that work/family policies should only be used by women, despite being available on a gender-neutral basis. In comparing the experiences of faculty fathers on three campuses, she concluded that while institutions maintain a stronghold on expected gendered behaviors , individuals on one campus, through repeated forms of collective action, were able to challenge the institution of parenting to create a new definition that was more inclusive of men and women as parents. Similarly, in their study of faculty fathers, Reddick, Rochlen, Grasso, Reilly, and Spikes (2012) also found that participants felt that there was a bias against active parenting on the part of fathers and did not feel supported by colleagues to prioritize family over career .

Although studies focusing on policy use have evolved in this decade to incorporate notions of faculty agency , initial studies primarily sought to simply catalogue the existence of policy and perceptions of the acceptability of their use. These initial descriptive studies were needed and important in mapping the types of policies but did little to understand the impact. Questions still remain as to the impact of using a parent leave policy versus not; more comparative and quasi-experimental designs are needed to know the long-term and relative impact of policy use. Do faculty who use the parental leave policy have a greater bond with their children compared to those who do not? Do the patterns of productivity return after using the parental leave policy compared to those who do not? Or, do those who use parental leave policies experience greater productivity upon their return? In addition, the studies remain isolated to specific levels of the organization and do not take into account the nested nature of higher educational institutions. More research is needed on how power and agency operate across and within the institution to frame cultural and social norms around policy use. In an age where higher education institutions are overwhelmingly susceptible to external influences and faculty work continues to be both inside and outside the institution, the complex dynamics across and within sectors need attention. For example, how do faculty with external research grants navigate institutional leave policies with on-going research grants that offer no opportunity for leave? These are just a few critique and opportunities for research on work/life policy which are continuously complicated by the diversity within faculty ranks and faculty responsibilities.

Demographic Changes

Stemming from the research on productivity that suggested a more complex set of dynamics within higher education institutions that create, perpetuate, or mediate productivity differences, many scholars sought to identify differences in how various groups navigate work/family issues. While many studies have focused on the unique experiences of one gender (Armenti, 2004a; Sallee, 2012; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012), others have focused on differences by appointment type – such as full-time versus part-time on the tenure-track (Perna, 2001). Still others have focused on differences by generational status (Helms, 2010; Sallee, 2014). Generally, these studies have relied on the assumptions of role theory in order to understand how salient roles and identities create spillover and conflict between work and life. Work /family conflict occupies an important place in the higher education literature, drawing upon theories of role conflict, role strain, and satisfaction. However, with a few exceptions, scholars do not necessarily articulate that they are examining these particular constructs in their work. Rather, the general sentiments behind conflict, strain, and satisfaction emerge in findings. In part, this may be due to the preference within the work/life higher education literature for qualitative methods, which rely less heavily on strict operational definitions of constructs. Nonetheless, these concepts, so pivotal to psychology and organizational studies’ treatment of work/life, make an appearance in the higher education scholarship. As we discuss, role conflict and strain receive the most treatment, though there has been limited consideration of satisfaction in higher education scholarship.

Satisfaction first emerged in the higher education literature in Near and Sorcinelli’s (1986) mixed methods study of 100 faculty at one research university. The authors used in-depth interviews in conjunction with questionnaires to understand the relationship between various work and life factors to measures of life, work, and nonwork satisfaction. The authors found that work and nonwork conditions were related to work satisfaction as well as nonwork satisfaction, which points to spillover between life in various domains, a concept that the authors picked up on in a subsequent study (Sorcinelli & Near, 1989). In short, satisfaction in one domain is related to satisfaction in another. Satisfaction received little subsequent attention in the higher education literature until McCoy, Newell, and Gardner’s (2013) survey of 242 faculty at a research university. The authors combined a study on environmental conditions with a focus on well-being among faculty , which was composed of a series of constructs, including job satisfaction and emotional and physical health. The authors found that women experienced significantly lower measures on each of these scales. The authors also found that “work-life integration was significantly associated with job satisfaction , emotional health, and physical health” (McCoy et al., 2013, p. 320). Like Sorcinelli and Near (1986) three decades earlier, McCoy et al. found a relationship between job satisfaction and work/life integration, and importantly focused on differences between women and men.

Gender differences in navigating work/family concerns have occupied a central place in the higher education literature. While many studies in organizational studies and psychology have included gender as an operational variable, higher education has more closely examined the specific nature of work/life for gender groups, primarily women. The focus has been on the relationship between the role of being a worker, often a faculty member, and other roles, such as being a mother, drawing both implicitly and explicitly on theories of role conflict and role strain. Early studies focused specifically on the concerns of women, as work/family concerns were often considered in the mother’s domain (Finkel & Olswang, 1996; Finkel, Olswang, & She, 1994; Hamovich & Morganstern, 1977). Indeed, mothering has remained a focus of many higher education scholars over the past four decades as more recent scholarship has also focused explicitly on their experiences (Armenti, 2004a, 2004b; Philipsen & Bostic 2008; Sallee & Pascale, 2012; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012; Ward, Wolf-Wendel, & Twombly, 2007). These studies have tended to focus on the disproportionate role that women assume in childrearing. For example, Armenti’s (2004a) study of women faculty explored the differences between senior and early career faculty and the different strategies each group used to accommodate the arrival of a new child in the home. As we discuss later, this notion of generational differences continues into other scholarship. Other studies of women faculty found that women assumed a disproportionate burden in the home compared to their husbands (Sallee & Pascale, 2012; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2012). Some studies have focused on the unique experiences of men navigating parenting concerns. Both Sallee (2014) and Reddick et al. (2012) studied faculty fathers; both concluded that men wanted to be engaged in parenting but felt that they were less free to prioritize their family demands because of their genders. In other words, they received messages that parenting was best left for women to perform. In a follow up study, Sallee and Hart (2015) focused exclusively on the experiences of international faculty fathers at two research universities, concluding that many of the men became more engaged parents than they might have had they stayed in their countries of origin. In part, their increased involvement was due to being removed from traditional support structures, but also due to the influence of U.S. gender norms that have started to shift to encourage men to take an increasing role in the home. Each of these studies relied on the basic assumptions of role theory , principally that individuals play multiple roles that may have a spillover effect on one another.

Still other studies have compared the experiences of women and men at both home and at work examining potential role conflict. Mason and Goulden (2002) compared the family formation decisions of men and women Ph.Ds, using the Survey of Earned Doctorates. The authors found that men who had babies five years post-PhD were far more successful at earning tenure than women who had babies in the same period. Other studies have also compared the ways in which men and women navigate family decisions. In their study of over 4000 English and Chemistry faculty members across 507 U.S. colleges and universities, Drago, Colbeck, and colleagues (2006) compared men and women’s bias avoidance behaviors , or the ways in which parents either productively or unproductively avoid bias against caregiving in the workplace by minimizing or hiding family commitments. Productive bias avoidance behaviors increase career success while unproductive behaviors hamper success . The authors found that women were far more likely than men to engage in both productive and unproductive bias avoidance behaviors . For example, the authors found that 14.4 % of fathers but 51.1 % of mothers returned to work sooner than they would have liked after the birth of a child, out of fear of career repercussions. These results underscore that men and women are often expected to assume different roles, and choose to navigate that conflict in different ways. Additional studies have compared differences in men and women’s role strain, such as Elliott (2008) who found that both women and men faculty experience role strain. However, women’s role strain tended to emanate from family stress while men’s role strain emanated from work stress.

A few studies have focused on the ways that administrators navigate work/family demands (Bailey, 2008; Jones & Taylor, 2013; Marshall, 2009; Nobbe & Manning, 1997). For example, in her study of student affairs administrators with children, Marshall (2009) found that the intense time demands of work in the field coupled with challenges of parenting led participants to pass up some opportunities for professional advancement while also reducing time spent with their children. The experiences with role conflict and the potential for additional conflict are major barriers to women entering leadership roles. Additional scholarship has focused on the ways in which graduate students (Lynch, 2008; Martinez, Ordu, Della Sala, & McFarlane, 2013; Mason, Goulden, & Frasch, 2009; Sallee, 2015) and undergraduate students (Brown & Nichols, 2013; Wilson, 1997) navigate work/family demands. The majority of these studies highlight the difficulties that students have navigating a campus context that typically assumes that students are single and childless. Participants in several studies noted a lack of understanding from professors when childcare issues arose, interfering with class or assignment due dates (Lynch, 2008; Robertson & Weiner, 2013). However, in other studies, faculty were noted for playing an important role in helping participants navigate the demands of school and family (Sallee, 2015). Regardless of the differences, it is worth noting that the past decade, in particular, has seen a significant increase in studies focusing on student -parents. As higher education demographics continue to shift, this population will hold an even larger position on college campuses.

One final demographic area of interest has focused on differences by generational status, most frequently comparing the experiences of Baby Boomer and Generation X faculty (Helms, 2010; Latz & Rediger, 2014; Sallee, 2014). Scholarship on generations suggests that each generation is characterized by a particular set of values that are shaped by societal issues that emerged during each generation’s youth. One of the largest generations, Baby Boomers (born between 1943 and 1962) tend to be assertive, competitive, and willing to work long hours; in part, the large size of this generation made competition for jobs especially fierce, leading Baby Boomers to feel the need to put in longer hours at work. In contrast, Generation Xers (born between 1963 and 1980) are one of the smallest generations in recent history and value adaptability, independence, and privilege flexibility in work practices (Lancaster & Stillman, 2002). Studies of these two groups of faculty have confirmed these claims. In her study of Generation X faculty , Helms (2010) found that participants expressed a strong commitment to work/family balance. In addition to seeking greater balance between work and family responsibilities, Sallee (2014) found that Generation X faculty also were more likely to espouse progressive gender norms than their Baby Boomer counterparts, arguing that men should take more of an involved role in parenting. As Millennial faculty are a relatively new addition to the academy, they have yet to be explicitly included in studies on work/family issues in higher education . However, given that this generation is also noted for valuing work/life balance and has been noted for being more open to progressive ideas on gender and other identities than Generation Xers (Lancaster & Stillman, 2002), additional studies might be useful to parse out differences between the expectations and experiences of the multiple generations making up the academy.

While role theory , albeit not explicitly, has been used in many studies on work/life in higher education , it is not operationalized in the same ways as in studies in other disciplines. While most studies in psychology and organizational studies evaluate role conflict using quantitative measurements, studies in higher education tend to apply the concept of role conflict more broadly in qualitative settings. For example, in their study of faculty mothers, Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2004, 2012) used role conflict theory to examine the ways that women navigate the competing roles of mother and professor. They argued that while traditionally role conflict theories set multiple roles in opposition to one another, their participants viewed their roles as complementary. The authors applied role conflict theory alongside the notion of the ideal worker found in gendered organizations to explore how tenure-track women manage their roles of being mothers and academics. The findings from their interviews generally cast academic motherhood positively, noting that while there are “dark clouds,” faculty generally felt that they experienced more “silver linings” (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2004, p. 241). Or, as they indicated, “for example, faculty work tends to be autonomous (a silver lining), but this work condition can lead to ambiguous expectations and isolation (dark clouds). We saw participants grappling with varied aspects of their roles as academics and as mothers” (p. 241). Throughout the findings of this study is a sense of contradiction: faculty work is autonomous which allows one to juggle childrearing with work but also boundaryless with a high level of demands requiring extended work hours often done after the children are in bed. The faculty also found that motherhood complemented their faculty work, helping them become more efficient and to place their jobs in perspective, as a job and not as a defining identity.

Other studies have also approached role conflict theory from a qualitative perspective as Sallee did in her study of women scientists (Sallee & Pascale, 2012) and in graduate student parents (Sallee, 2015). In both studies, she used theories of role conflict to explore the ways participants navigated their multiple roles. Although traditional theories of role conflict suggest that multiple roles are incompatible (Goode, 1960), participants found ways to combine the responsibilities inherent in both roles so that they might complement one another. Not all studies of role conflict employ a qualitative lens. Elliott (2008) used quantitative data to investigate role strain and stress among 288 faculty at one research university. The author measured role strain by using two items that measured how frequently participants experienced conflict between their jobs and families and how often they felt their jobs affected their family lives. Findings suggested that women and men both experienced role strain, though the causes and sources of the role strain differed for each group.

The studies on demographic changes largely were an outgrowth of the increase in diversity in higher education generally and in the professoriate specifically. With more women, faculty with children, people of color, and those identifying as LGBTQ, for example, more research was needed to unpack the complexity of work/life beyond questions of productivity . While many studies have interrogated the differences between men and women’s experiences, a number of other demographic variables remain ripe for future exploration. LGBTQ faculty ’s experiences navigating work/family demands remain noticeably absent from the literature. Furthermore, in some ways, by emphasizing differences between men and women’s experiences, work/family researchers may only be succeeding in reinforcing differences between genders as well as the gender binary. Additionally, relatively little research disaggregates by race and ethnicity. As we discuss later, these are critical gaps that need to be filled.

The research consistently identifies pervasive role conflict across groups suggesting that there are some significant areas of higher education as an organization that requires changes. The identification of role conflict, while congruent with the literature in organizational studies and psychology, continues to rely on the assumptions of the discrete nature of roles. Much like the Conservation of Resources theory out of psychology, early work on role conflict in higher education suggested that attention given to demands in one domain necessarily detracted from available attention to other domains. However, as recent research has suggested (Sallee, 2015), there are ways for people to integrate the demands of multiple roles; considering responsibilities as in opposition with one another suggests that individuals will always have to choose between roles. Future research should identify exactly where those points of conflict arise and what interventions can be developed to reduce role conflict, promote role integration, and continue to retain and promote diversity in the professoriate. Research also needs to move beyond conceptualizations of individual experiences as roles and to theoretical frameworks of identity and how multiple and overlapping identities relate to create and even mediate work/life.

Organizational Context

Another body of work/life scholarship in higher education has addressed institutional or organizational factors. While some of this research is driven by theories in organizational studies, such as Acker’s (1990) notion of the ideal worker and role theory , others focus more on the structural differences within and across institutions – these studies tend to rely less on theoretical assumptions as they are more descriptive or exploratory. This section provides a review of research that complicates the research on tenure-line and tenured faculty by accounting for institutional differences, such as the expectations across research-intensive and extensive universities.

The majority of initial studies included faculty as one major group without attention to difference in discipline, career stage, and institutional type. As higher education became larger and more embedded within disciplinary cultures, a need arose to understand how those disciplinary norms and practices may impact work/life. Tosti-Vasey and Willis (1991) examined differences across disciplines, English and Engineering, but did so with a sample of mid-career faculty , those individuals who are post-tenure or over 10 years from date of employment . The faculty who were clustered as competent – engaged and productive in their work – reported spending considerable time on family responsibilities, experiencing greater role strain. Engineering faculty reported more difficulty in balancing family and work as their work was often place bound in a laboratory while English faculty had more flexibility in working from home or other locations. The authors conclude that more work/family policies could assist these faculty in continuing their productive careers during the mid-career stage and acknowledge disciplinary difference.

Another organizational perspective found in the literature in higher education is a more explicit gender analysis that acknowledges the role of proportionality of men to women across departments within the context of work/life. Wolf-Wendel and Ward (2015) similarly identified disciplinary differences germane to the nature of work and critical mass of, or lack thereof, faculty in the department. For example, humanities faculty tended to have an easier time balancing work and family because their work tended to be individualistic and not place bound. STEM faculty who worked in a lab setting noted that “the communal nature of the lab sciences made these women aware of their absences because the larger lab community relied on them for continuity” (p. 30). The authors concluded, however, that there were more similarities than differences across the disciplines, suggesting that faculty work/life continues to be a significant struggle across all universities. In her study of faculty fathers, Sallee (2014) found differences between the structure of faculty work in various disciplines. In particular, she found that while faculty in the humanities and social sciences had more flexibility in where they performed their work, faculty in the sciences and engineering also felt more tied to campus to oversee work in their labs. Many scientists also noted the pressure to bring in grants to keep their labs operating and their graduate students funded, adding an additional layer of stress that their social sciences counterparts did not experience, thus leading to greater work/family conflict.

Higher education is diverse with substantial contextual differences across institutional types that have an impact on work/life. Acknowledging these differences, several studies have focused exclusively on work/life within community colleges . Community colleges often do not have a tenure option, may have employee unions, and faculty focus exclusively on teaching (Cohen, Brawer, & Kisker, 2014); each of these features of organizational life have consequences for work/family conflict. This research tends to rely less on theoretical or conceptual frameworks. Ward, Wolf-Wendel, and Twombly (2007) found that women chose to work in community colleges as opposed to four-year universities because they desired more balance between work and family responsibilities; their prior experience in community colleges and four-year universities resulted in these perceptions. This does not suggest that women did not feel pressure and stress. The faculty in the sample struggled with balance, often due to the lack of flexibility from administrators, but noted contentment and joy in their faculty and family roles. The authors concluded, “despite these challenges, one major conclusion from this study is that female faculty at community colleges who have young children form a fairly contented group of individuals” (p. 276). Respondents to Sallee’s (2008) survey of faculty at one community college did not share the same levels of satisfaction as Ward et al.’s (2007) participants. Although 72 % of participants noted that they chose to work at a community college, in part, due to work/family concerns, 84 % of respondents noted that they consistently experienced great degrees of work/family conflict. Only 17 % of respondents strongly agreed with the statement that the institution encouraged faculty to seek work/life balance.

Although Sallee’s (2008) participants felt great levels of work/family conflict, other studies of community college faculty and administrators found that employment at the institutional type led to satisfaction. The theme of contentment despite heavy workloads was also found by Bailey (2008) who interviewed occupational deans at community colleges . The deans in this study worked at least 60 hours per week on average, but noted enjoying their work and intended to remain in their current positions. This is not to suggest that community colleges are a haven for work contentment despite work/life balance. Indeed, Bailey (2008) concluded, “the deans in this study espoused work life integration, but the levels of tension noted, the lack of white space on their calendars, and a focus on work belies this claim. Indeed, both men and women in this study are working as ideal workers” (p. 790). A study of mid-level staff confirms the contradictory nature of work/life at community colleges . Jones and Taylor (2013) surveyed community college staff who consistently noted that their colleges are family-friendly but lack formal work/life policies , flexible work arrangements, and career advancement.

A few additional studies focus on other institutional types. Wolf-Wendel and Ward (2006) examined work/life among faculty with young children at comprehensive institutions. In this qualitative study, work/life among faculty was impacted by the shifting aspirational mission of the colleges who were striving to be more research-intensive and thus placing additional demands on faculty for research productivity . Faculty reported feeling overworked with high levels of stress. Having young children complicated their ability to meet the increasing and unreasonable demands and, thereby, created more frustration and stress.

Although less frequently used in the organizational studies literature to examine work/family concerns, Acker’s (1990) work on gendered organizations has been deployed by higher education scholars to examine the ways in which the structures and culture of higher education institutions create challenges for men and women seeking to reduce work/family conflict. Gardner (2013) interviewed women who left a striving research university to understand reasons for their departure. Applying Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organizations, she argued that gender is seen in the division of labor in pay differences and an increase in service work for women. Mentoring and informal relationships as well as the nature of rewards and awards being linked to productivity privileges men over women. Finally, gendered interpretations are present in the continued disproportionality of men in leadership roles and emphasis on research over teaching . Gardner concludes that striving institutions place increased emphasis on the gendered nature of organizations:

Given the fact that the research environments to which these striving institutions aspire can foster culture that promote male-dominated social structures (i.e., “the old boy’s network”) as well as an emphasis on self-advancement, competition, and a lack of transparency (Becher & Trowler, 2001), the quest for status in the academic hierarchy can further such a gendered perspective. (pp. 363–364)

Although Acker’s work has traditionally been used to examine the ways in which women are penalized by organizational structures and practices, Sallee (2012, 2014) used the theory of gendered organizations to understand how faculty fathers might be similarly penalized. She focused on the ways in which divisions between genders do not just suggest divisions on campus, but divisions off campus as well. Men who wish to prioritize caregiving are often at a disadvantage as it is assumed that they have a wife to care for their children; these divisions are supported by symbols that suggest that women are more nurturing than men. Sallee (2012) similarly found that these divisions and symbols were reinforced by interactions with other faculty and department chairs on campus. Some fathers received messages that family-friendly policies were meant to be used only by women; some who wanted to use the policies had their masculinities and consequently, their identities as men challenged. Acker’s (1990) work has been used by scholars to help call attention to the ways in which the structures of the contemporary university make it difficult for men and women to be engaged parents without penalty.

O’Meara and Campbell (2011) also make use of the ideal worker, placing additional emphasis on the academic department and the role it may play in work/life policy usage. Their findings suggest that the additive nature of faculty work constrains faculty agency to achieve any form of work/life balance. The participants in their study were regularly working over 50 hours a week. Moreover, female faculty felt more constrained due to their status as the primary caregivers of children. The contribution of this study is on a focus of the constraints that are constructed by individuals over time that limit individuals to conceive of work/life balance. The impact may lead to overworked faculty or faculty who forgo childbearing altogether. Similar findings emerged in Gardner’s (2013) study of faculty departures noting that the striving culture of the institution promoted and perpetuated a gendered organizations framework with an emphasis on competition, self-advancement, and a lack of transparency.

Few studies explicitly address the relationship between organizational culture and work/life balance. Lester (2013) applied Schein’s (2010) theoretical framework of organizational culture and found that artifacts and beliefs play a strong role in creating a narrative of eligibility that emphasized the hierarchy of employment contracts; by virtue of having progressive policies for faculty , their employment status was perpetuated and perhaps heightened. In addition, Lester found that connecting “change movements for work/life balance to gender-laden histories and traditions on the campus perpetuates work/life as a gendered issue” (p. 483). In a similar study by Lester (2015), cultural attributes emerged as connected to one’s individual identity and symbols, suggesting that a unified culture that values work/life is, perhaps, not the most appropriate goal; rather, the fragmented nature of organizational life leads to individual interpretations, a fluidity of needs connected to identity and life circumstances, and contradictions in symbols. Cultures that values work/life need to include a vast and expansive definition that account for changing needs around work/life.

Additional scholarship has examined the role that organizational culture plays in shaping work/life. Sallee’s (2014) study of faculty fathers similarly employed Schein’s (2004) theory of culture in conjunction with Acker’s (1990) theory of gendered organizations and Connell’s (1995) work on hegemonic masculinity to understand how organizational culture both shapes and reflects norms about parenting in the academy. She used Schein and Acker’s work to examine differences between campus cultures as well as disciplinary cultures. Like Lester (2013), she used artifacts, values, and assumptions to gain an understanding of each campus culture. Artifacts such as the existence of policies, the actions of department chairs and administrators as well as colleagues, and the degree to which children were present in the department pointed to different values on each of the four campuses studied. For example, on one campus where only women were expected to use family-friendly policies and administrators did not support men navigating work/family demands, traditional gender roles were evident in the campus’s values.

The research on organizational context evolved from a more descriptive approach by simply addressing the variations in experience and needs related to work/life across faculty groups. These studies were instructive and important as faculty work began to grow in complexity with the introduction of more contingent faculty . More contemporary studies take a critical and even feminist approach to unpack the gender bias within higher education that creates and perpetuate work/life conflict proximately found in the research using role theory . With a need to address differences across faculty groups and a lack of structures, climates, and cultures to support work/life policies and programs for work/life balance and family-friendliness developed across many higher education institutions. This area of research, however, needs to continue to unpack the ways in which ideal worker norms permeate all aspects of higher education . Major questions still remain about the relationship between power and agency : how do individuals exercise agency in organizational contexts that continue to exert power that aligns with (and is always increasing) productivity standards? Other questions that might be interrogated include the role that the relationship between academic capitalism and gender norms might play in shaping work/life issues for faculty .

Summary of the Higher Education Literature

Given its status as an interdisciplinary field of study and the historical trajectory of women entering the professoriate, it is perhaps not surprising that the higher education scholarship on work/family covers a wide variety of topics, including policy use, demographic changes , organizational differences, and productivity . The studies largely responded to the conflicts and assumptions that emerged as women entered the professoriate and challenged the very way that faculty work was constructed. The research on work/life in higher education paints a picture of progress and stagnation. On the one hand, the increase in the number of women entering the professoriate has helped to bring to the fore gender inequities and promoted scholarship to debunk myths related to gender and productivity . Studies consistently identified a lack of long-term impact of childbearing and childrearing on women faculty productivity . Women and men faculty experience peaks and valleys in their productivity throughout the career which can coincide with major life events, including having children. Consistently, however, the literature finds that being married and having children leads to more productive and dedicated faculty . More recent qualitative studies applying role theory suggest that there is congruence between the roles of faculty and parent, leading to more, not less, satisfaction.

On the other hand, the research has created further evidence of biases that continue to support notions of the ideal worker identified in the organizational studies literature. This represents an area of stagnation where the issues are consistently identified but remain unchanged. The area of literature focused on what work/life policies exist and if and why they are being used identified bias avoidance where faculty shy away from using policies in fear of professional repercussions, particularly if they are on the tenure-track. In this regard, the critical mass theory suggesting that more women will lead to change is debunked; merely having more women in the professoriate is not leading to cultural change. And, the picture of how policies and norms operate are complicated by many institutional factors, such as institutional type, size, and mission. Those faculty who are at rural community colleges have very different needs than those urban research universities, for example. These issues are further complicated by the continuation of focus of work/life and work/family. No studies in higher education address the issues of caring for elderly parents, experiencing medical leaves, or those of single individuals who do not have children. The intense focus on work/family does little to help those who lead and manage higher education institutions to see the pervasive nature of work/life needs across all constituents groups on a campus.

The literature also helps to frame the relationship between higher education institutions and society, suggesting that universities are, in fact, a microcosm of societal dynamics. Socio-historical notions of gender, particularly the primary role of women as caregivers, creates additional challenges for women faculty . While they can find synergy, as opposed to conflicts, across theirs roles, more critical studies point out that the lack of conflict is not a solution; rather, the very gendered nature of higher education institutions must be revealed and challenged if women and parents are to find equitable workplaces. These more critical perspectives are supported by the recent studies on policy use suggesting that individuals still experience bias and discrimination, truncating their agency to navigate work/life issues. These very serious issues around work/life will become increasingly salient as higher education becomes more diverse. Scholars have incorporated a variety of organizational and psychological theories, but as we discuss in the section that follows, the field seems to suffer from a repeated application of the same theories and may benefit from a deeper treatment of some of the theories reviewed here as well as a consideration of other theoretical traditions not explored. Given that higher education is a multi-disciplinary field, it has the promise of combining theories from across disciplines to create new insights to ultimately push the field forward. We discuss this and other implications for the future of scholarship in the field in what follows.

Implications

Our review of the work/life scholarship, both within and outside of higher education , has led us to the following critiques and conclusions. First, the very conceptualization of work/life in higher education needs to be expanded to include life issues beyond parenting and populations beyond faculty . Second, the field could benefit from a more application and discussion of theory with the intent of building, critiquing, and creating theories relevant to work/life in higher education . Although our review of the literature in psychology and organizational studies began by first discussing method before turning to theory, our implications foreground theory, given that concepts and theory should drive methodological choices and thus comes first as we reimagine work in this field. After discussing theory, we then turn our attention to the importance of multiple methodologies that address the dynamic and personal nature of work/life balance. Additionally, we see the need to find some mechanisms to continually update baseline information about policy use, as some of the oft-cited studies are already quite dated. Finally, we see the need for the use of networks for information-sharing as well as the use of evidence-based practices. We discuss each of these suggestions in what follows.

Reframe and Expand Work /Life Research

As stated throughout this chapter, the primary focus of the research on work/life has been on parenting or work/family. The field needs to expand to consider how issues beyond parenting affect an individual’s career . Individuals navigate a slew of issues, from elder care to illness, that deserve additional attention; all create unique demands on an individual’s time. But beyond work/family issues, the field might consider simply work/life demands, considering how those without significant family responsibilities navigate the press of work with the ability to craft a meaningful and satisfying life. What implications does the ideal worker construct have for faculty , staff, and students ? How do expectations that individuals are always working impact their ability to craft meaningful and fulfilling lives off-campus?

Most suggestions for future research in articles state that the research should be expanded to include other populations. While this has become somewhat of a platitude, it is an important truth for work/life scholarship on higher education . The field has succeeded in capturing differences between men and women’s experiences, yet attention to nearly all other identity groups is noticeably absent. Scholarship could benefit from differences in the work/life experiences of faculty , staff, and students by race and sexuality. What are the unique experiences of LGBTQ faculty , staff, and students as well as those outside the gender binary and how do heteronormative assumptions around parenting affect their experiences navigating work/life? How might the extra service burden placed on faculty of color, along with the racialized context in which all faculty work, affect the work/life experiences of faculty from various racial and ethnic groups? The field has failed to focus on racial differences, which is a tremendous shortcoming and one that deserves immediate attention. Attention across difference need not stop at race/ethnicity and sexuality/gender. Additional studies might focus on people with disabilities, which creates a unique host of work/life demands. Finally, identities are not neatly siloed; rather an individual simultaneously is defined by race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, disability status, SES, and many other demographic factors. Work /life scholarship would benefit from adopting an intersectional lens, in both quantitative and qualitative research, to understand the influence of intersectional identities on work/life issues.

Additionally, scholarship needs to expand to consider more than just the needs of tenure-line faculty . Scholarship should focus on the work/life experiences of contingent faculty and the difficulties this underpaid and undersupported group of faculty face. Staff are noticeably absent from the work/life literature. Although a few studies have examined the experiences of women in student affairs, the university is populated by employees in a variety of areas, including facilities, finance, and athletics. Studies might investigate the role that departmental culture and norms play on the worklives of staff including those in auxiliary services. All too often, staff who are in service roles in the university are working multiple jobs and have little to no ability to maintain work/life balance. These individuals are also often faced with temporary summer layoffs or jobs just under full-time status. Very little research has been conducted on these groups across the higher education scholarship, let alone in the work/life literature. Similarly, scholarship should interrogate the differences between exempt and non-exempt staff, as the demands placed upon each group of employees differ, creating different challenges for work/life. Another group in need of additional research are postdoctoral researchers who are often on grant-funded projects with no long-term financial stability and are in positions generally designed to prepare them for faculty careers, thus creating ideal worker demands.

Finally, as we commented earlier, students are understudied in the work/life scholarship and their unique experiences should be investigated. Given that an increasing number of undergraduates take substantial time away from schooling before matriculating, some of these individuals will be parents, and thus face work/family challenges. How might institutional work/life policies and protections (i.e., paid leave for childbearing or adoption or medical issues, availability of lactation rooms, childcare, or guaranteed funding after a family or medical leave), or lack thereof, for undergraduate and graduate students impact their ability to be successful students ? However, the conversation about work/life should not only focus on those with parenting responsibilities, but with obligations to other family members as well as a focus on crafting a meaningful balance between work or school and life responsibilities. Scholarship that centers the experiences of all on a college campus—faculty , staff, and students —and acknowledges the multiple demands on their lives would be a welcome addition to the field.

Go Beyond Descriptive Studies

While the higher education work/family scholarship is robust, some of it suffers from a lack of a theoretical orientation, in some cases, or incomplete theoretical application in others.. Many studies have detailed the differences in productivity of parents versus non-parents. Other studies have detailed the differences in policy use between men and women. These studies either do not offer a theoretical framework or seem to use it to frame their studies as opposed to fully integrating it into their methodology. Let us be clear: these findings are important and have contributed to developing a baseline for understanding work/family issues in higher education . However, we are concerned about a lack of theory use to guide interpretation of findings. Even in some articles that introduce theories in the literature review, authors do not always use the theory to interpret their findings. We offer a challenge to our colleagues to be more intentional in their use of theory, and to use it as an interpretive tool. Doing so will only strengthen the scholarship in the field and help create new frameworks for how to more deeply understand work/family in higher education and other organizational forms. For example, the research on productivity , often framed using human capital theories, would benefit from integration of theoretical frameworks that address power, agency , and identity, such as the work of Foucault (1976) or Weedon (1997). One major critique of the productivity studies emerges from the assumptions of human capital theory, particularly the assertion that all individuals are able to receive the benefits of education regardless of social or structural inequities related to gender, race, social and economic class and so one. There is some acknowledgement in the quantitative models of the structural, or organizational, constraints but the variables fall short in identifying how power and agency operate throughout the organization that define and constrain the ability for individuals, particularly women and people of color, to meet standard notions of productivity (i.e., number of publications ). Whether it be merging or using new theoretical frameworks, more attention is needed to build more sophisticated models that account for power and truncate agency in higher education institutions.

Although higher education scholars have used a variety of theories in work/life scholarship, many of those used come from other disciplines, principally organizational studies and psychology. In some instances, they simply replicate the findings from studies in other arenas in the higher education sector. For example, higher education scholars have deeply engaged with role strain and role conflict theory (Elliott, 2008; Sallee, 2015; Sallee & Pascale, 2012; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2004, 2012), perhaps to the extent that the field might agree that navigating work and family is indeed a conflict of two roles. Our concern is that higher education scholarship may be limiting itself by relying on the same theories to guide discussions of work/family scholarship. We suspect that the field would benefit from an engagement with alternative theories and disciplinary traditions in our work. For example, the work/life scholarship in higher education has yet to grapple with ecological theories found in the organizational studies literature. Those studies using Bronfenbrenner (1989) interactive nested levels of systems – microsystems, mesosystem, exosystem, and a macrosystem – are beginning to identify a complex relationship between individual family circumstances, organizational dynamics, and societal expectations. Applying this work to caring for aging has the ability to reveal how individual cultural and familial expectations of elder care coincide with gendered norms and a lack of discourse and policy for elder care.

However, there have been few applications of some theories and constructs (e.g., satisfaction, well-being , boundary theory ) in higher education literature, which has not provided enough opportunity to replicate findings to see if there are any unique differences between the higher education sector and other organizational contexts. Indeed, our review of the higher education literature suggested only two studies that used satisfaction as a theoretical construct (Near & Sorcinelli, 1986; Sorcinelli & Near, 1989). While we are not advocating that higher education scholars must use the same theoretical traditions as our counterparts in other disciplines, we wonder to what extent the field would benefit from considering these concepts more deeply in our research.

While satisfaction has received some attention in the higher education literature, there are additional key concepts from various disciplinary traditions that have received little to no attention in the higher education scholarship, such as subjective well-being , Ryan and Deci’s (2000) self-determination theory , and Bronfenbrenner’s (1989) ecological systems model. Subjective well-being and self-determination theory , both constructs out of psychology, have tremendous promise to introduce new depths to the higher education scholarship, in part because both focus on ultimately helping individuals reach their potential, which, in turn, has consequences for workplace productivity . For example, self-determination theory suggests that an employee is most productive and happy when she experiences autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Although higher education scholars have used the concept of agency to explore faculty work/life issues, SDT goes beyond simply suggesting that faculty have control over their lives (via agency) to describing the various conditions that must exist for an individual to be both productive and motivated (i.e. self-determined). While much work/family scholarship in higher education has focused on the existence or use of policies as a proxy for how an organization helps employees strive for work/family balance, self-determination theory suggests that supervisors and administrators can play a key role in facilitating self-determination, which has implications for work/family in higher education . This theory has not been used in the higher education work/family scholarship. Going beyond the standard theories that have come to dominate higher education work/family scholarship is necessary to continue to push the field forward. Given the field’s overreliance on the same theoretical concepts, we are particularly concerned that this leads to a lack of depth in scholarship. There is a limitation in producing original results with the continued application and replication of the same theoretical frameworks.

Finally, the theories are not always accurately or fully adopted. We reviewed some work/family studies in the higher education literature that did not use all parts of a theory or did not apply theory with the depth that was present in the original. In another study, Lester, Sallee, and Hart (in press) found that many applications of Acker’s theory of gendered organizations failed to implement all five interaction processes. The authors concluded that

while separating these interacting processes has the potential to expand and test the robustness of their assumptions, all too often authors seek to make larger scale claims about gender in organizations and must find other theories with more robust conceptualizations (and decades of empirical refinement) to provide clarity to one or two interacting processes as often happens with those using performance theories. (p. 22)

In other words, parsing out the original theory loses the ability to more deeply understand the systematic nature of how gender operates within higher education or other organizational forms. Simply, Acker’s theory is not just a sum of its parts of a complex overlaying of the constantly shifting and morphing set of processes that disadvantage women.

In their review of studies using Acker’s (1990) framework, Lester et al. (in press) further found that the many articles used Acker’s theory in conjunction with other theories to provide greater theoretical depth to the arguments. In some instances, the multiple theory use was to compensate for a partial or inaccurate application of Acker’s work as we suggested above. However, in other instances, authors accurately engaged with more than one theory, which provided a novel way to interpret findings. Work /life scholars, for example, might combine theories from the organizational and psychological literature, such as using Bronfenbrenner’s (1989) ecological systems model in concert with Ryan and Deci’s (2000) self-determination theory . Such studies could seek to understand how different organizational contexts (microsystems and the resulting mesosystems formed through the microsystems’ interactions) shape an individual’s ability to achieve autonomy, relatedness, and competence. For example, how does the mesosystem formed by an individual’s workplace and home influence self-determination? Do demands in one realm influence an individual’s ability to achieve relatedness in another? Other studies might examine how boundary theory interacts with Conservation of Resources. The list is potentially endless, and our examples simply serve to underscore that higher education scholarship could benefit from deeper engagement with multiple theories to ultimately push work/family scholarship forward.

We would also suggest that higher education scholarship might benefit from theory-building, and not just theory application (Eisenhardt, 1989). Higher education provides a unique context for the study of work/family issues, given the enterprise’s historic reliance on governance and collegiality among faculty as well as the presence of multiple actors-faculty , staff, and students -who play a variety of roles and have various-and sometimes competing – concerns. Further, the differing contexts of various institutional types create unique concerns. The field could benefit from the use of grounded theory to develop theory that accurately reflects the unique conditions of higher education . Potential theories that might be developed could focus on factors that affect work/life concerns over an individual’s life course or the role of institutional policies and programs on work/life outcomes.

Adopt Robust and Innovative Methodologies

Another observation across the work/family literature in higher education is the need to consider new methodologies that examines the complexity of the work/family phenomenon. Across the literature, there is a reliance on only a few methodologies, principally quantitative survey research, and case studies and interviews in qualitative research. The criticisms of the large scale survey research are noted in the organizational studies and psychology sections. A lack of consistent definition of key constructs, an over reliance on the same measures, and a lack of complex measurement all call into question the findings or the application of the findings over time. And, comparison across studies is difficult without similar measurement. What is needed are more meta-analyses, agreement on testing more refined measures, and a sharing of data across studies to examine not just the outcomes of the studies but also the methods employed. There are also more contemporary analytical tools available to explore larger datasets that can approximate quasi-experimental designs such as propensity score matching. The field might also benefit from drawing on longitudinal designs or time-diary studies, used by some of the psychology work/life scholars. Additional studies, either quantitative or qualitative, might also take to querying an individual’s partner or children to gain a more holistic understanding of the impact of work/family demands. More experimental designs would also help to examine key questions that either have contradictory evidence or no evidence. For example, what types of interventions (i.e., policies, professional development programs) assist faculty and staff in balancing work/life? We also need to develop programs to address implicit bias that is found to lead to a lack of policy usage. Of course, these designs rely on robust datasets that have national samples. With the stopping of the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) by the National Center for Education Statistics, a large scale and robust dataset of faculty does not exist. Although efforts to revive the survey are underway, higher education scholars have to rely on either dated statistics from past iterations of the NSOPF or other datasets that, while robust, do not offer the same deep pool of institutions that was present in the NSOPF. These datasets need to include the diversity of faculty ranks, including contingent faculty , and consideration of institutional variables for more hierarchical and nested analyses. Additionally, more national studies are needed on the work/life needs of graduate students and university staff. The intense focus on faculty across the literature is a point of critique that could be addressed with future studies. Without more quantitative research that employs expanded methods, the findings continue to be limited.

Turning our attention to qualitative research, all too often the case studies methodologies draw on single institutional (or case) samples, yet still draw conclusions beyond the scope of the data. For example, several case studies have twenty or fewer interviews of faculty per institution with conclusions that attempt to speak to the experiences of all faculty across those institutions. Lester (2015) began to identify the complexity of faculty employment contracts and a significant area of research on contingent faculty points to a diversity within faculty ranks. As we discuss shortly, while there is great worth to qualitative studies that intimately explore the experiences of a small group of people, the field would benefit from more large-scale qualitative studies, such as that undertaken by Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2012) and Sallee (2014). These studies would help to illuminate key concepts, such as the salient differences across institutional types as well as aspects of climate and culture within units and departments that impact work/life balance. Case studies can also explore how organizational logics and discourse related to academic capitalism impact how work/life interfaces with institutional priorities, internal and external pressures, and isomorphic tendencies. These are just a few ideas of how larger scale qualitative studies can fill a gap in existing knowledge on work/life in higher education .

Qualitative research need not be just large scale to have a direct benefit on knowledge of work/life balance. In addition to case study research, the field would also benefit from the use of additional methodologies, including narrative research, discourse analysis, and ethnography. Such methodologies would allow scholars to capture the nuances of a handful of participants’ lives, analyze the use of language related to work/life, and describe how a department or institutional culture shapes the home and work lives of those who populate it. Although several studies identify a relationship between personal definitions, career stage, family status, and perspectives and use of work/life policies , there seems to be a dynamic nature of work/life needs that remains unexplored. This has implications on policy and program development, which often focuses on two major areas: parental leave and elder care. The mid-career individuals and those with other life needs beyond caregiving are not understood. In addition, the role of individual agency is unclear. How do we address work/life balance when one chooses to not have balance, for example? In-depth narratives and observational data are needed to examine questions about perspectives of individual agency, the role of surveillance, and structural impediments (such as the rise of productivity standards for faculty ), to name a few.

Finally, work/family scholarship in higher education could benefit from the use of mixed methods studies. Such studies would allow researchers to combine the strengths of quantitative and qualitative methods to capture a broad snapshot of a particular issue across large populations while also employing qualitative methods to develop a deep understanding of the context. Mixed methods studies could be used to address any number of topics, including the consequences of policy use on faculty productivity and careers. A study might survey faculty across institutions to measure which faculty used institutional policies related to work/family issues and what consequences (research productivity , tenure and promotion) faculty experienced as a result. In-depth interviews might be conducted with a small sample to better understand the ways in which faculty felt that their careers were affected, both positively and negatively, by policy use. This is just one possible study that would benefit from mixed methods. The field could benefit from the bold deployment of a variety of methods to enhance the knowledge generated for the field.

Create a National Repository of Work /Family Scholarship in Higher Education

In conducting this review, we were struck by two realizations: 1) the higher education scholarship is quite disparate and 2) findings become quickly obsolete. For example, the most recent national survey of work/family policies is Hollenshead et al.’s (2005) survey, which, as of this writing, is over a decade old. We suspect that many institutions have shifted their policies; given the economic downturn that began in 2008, it is possible that some institutions have scaled back the policies that they offer. Rather than the anticipated progression of more work/family policies throughout institutional types, it is possible that policy existence has contracted. For example, a decade ago, many research universities were offering modified duties for faculty , which typically provides a semester of teaching release after the birth of a child. And while other institutions were slowly following suit and adopting such policies as their own, it is possible that the progression slowed. Other innovative policies and supports included lactation consultants, emergency back-up childcare, and childcare funds to use for conference travel. All of these policies cost money and therefore may not have been adopted by other campuses or defunded on existing campuses. But, since there is no agency that collects this data, we are left to speculate. The field could benefit from an updated survey of work/life policies across institutions, but not simply another one-off study that is conducted by a group of researchers. Rather, we suggest that an infrastructure be implemented that allows a research center to conduct a similar survey on a regular basis. The field suffers from a lack of regular collection of data; having a common baseline of data with which to work would help unify the scholarship in the field. The national repository might go beyond simply cataloging which institutions offer which types of policies, but perhaps also track employee and student use as well as various outcomes associated with such use (tenure and promotion, career advancement, graduation, etc.).

Network to Promote Scholarship and Knowledge Sharing

As our survey of the literature has suggested, scholars have taken a variety of approaches to the study of work/life, both within higher education and in other disciplines. However, with few exceptions, ideas from one discipline do not inform scholarship in others. Multiple knowledge networks, such as the existing Work and Family Research Network, should be created to facilitate the dissemination of research and collaboration across disciplines. Such networks allow scholars from a variety of disciplines to meet and learn from one another. In addition to focusing on content, these networks should also promote the use of new methodologies for the study of work/life. Scholars in psychology might benefit from bringing more qualitative methodologies to their work while higher education scholars might be pushed to adopt longitudinal designs, qualitative designs in addition to the oft-used case studies, or use more sophisticated statistical methods to inform their research. The point of such networks is to push work/life scholarship in all disciplines forward in meaningful ways to ultimately find solutions to the significant concerns facing individuals who work and study in all sectors.

Develop Evidence-Based Interventions

As work/family scholars, we are strong advocates for policies and programs that help faculty and staff navigate their personal and professional responsibilities, such as paid parental leave, tenure clock extensions, alternative duties, and a reduction of teaching duties. However, rarely is research publicized that illustrates outcomes of such interventions. The National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE program has spent much of the last two decades funding programs to increase the representation of women in science and engineering fields. Many of the institutions who have received such grants have included attention to family-friendly programs and policies as one way to recruit and retain women in the STEM fields. Although funding reports are submitted, few of the work/family-based outcomes have been documented in the higher education research. Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder conducted a large-scale study of 19 institutions that received a NSF ADVANCE institutional transformation grant (Austin & Laursen, 2015). Findings from this study reveal important strategies for promoting institutional change but did not compare institutional data across interventions. Coordination on a large scale prompted by a national organization or funder would need to be in place to help individual institutions collected similar data and share that data nationally. Questions still remain to include: do tenure clock extensions or a reduction of teaching duties ultimately lead to more success (defined in any number of ways—productivity , retention , promotion) for those who use the policy versus those who do not? Providing evidence to support the existence of policies will both illustrate their effectiveness and signal to other institutions the importance of adopting them. From this corpus of research-based practices, scholars should compile practical resources to help others develop work/life programs and policies. We envision the presence of a clearinghouse that highlights best practices. As higher education is a discipline that focuses on both research and practice, it is incumbent on work/life scholars to bridge the two arenas.

Conclusion

Work /life scholarship in higher education has evolved considerably since Hamovich and Morgenstern’s (1977) article , comparing women and men’s productivity to provide a defense for mothering in the academy. Over the past forty years, the field has taken up important questions of faculty productivity , demographic differences, the importance of organizational context, and policy use. Scholars have incorporated theories from a variety of disciplines to support their analyses, including role conflict, gendered organizations, and agency . However, we are concerned that the field is stagnating by the repeated use of many of the same theories and methods to drive scholarship. We offer a challenge to higher education scholars to continue to turn their gaze outward to the concepts explored by scholars in other fields, including psychology and organizational studies, among others. By bringing new concepts and methods to bear on work/life research in higher education , scholars will push the field forward, producing new knowledge that comes closer to creating a gender equitable academy that recognizes the importance of work/life for all who populate it.