Work and Family: Is Peaceful Coexistence Possible?

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Working too much, worrying about work too much, neglecting family, neglecting self, experiencing conflict, dissatisfaction, depression: These problems are all too familiar in today's overbooked, overworked world. Indeed, they seem practically inevitable in a culture that defines success as "having it all."

Everyone struggles to balance work and family; everyone has some firsthand knowledge of the stress, frustration, and fatigue that arise when personal and professional priorities conflict. We are all familiar, too, with the massive commercial response to this pattern. Seminars, self-help books, software, support groups, periodicals, electronic planners, executive briefcases, and even executive pens have been developed to help people negotiate the competing, increasingly complex demands of modern life.

This flood of knowledge, advice, and specialized equipment speaks both to an acute need for help and to the skillful exploitation of that need by a business sector whose pressurized atmosphere produced that need in the first place. The demand for practical tips on living is so great that people are willing to pay top dollar for organizational and psychological assistance. (This reviewer happens to be devoted to her Seven Habits Organizer, which sits open before her as she writes. Item 1 on the Prioritized Daily Task List: Finish writing book review.)

As inspirational and even consoling as much of this material is (my planner is bound in soft green, soothing suede; it contains an uplifting quote for every day of the year), it tends to be a bit light on actual information. We are rich in theories and opinions about what is at stake for people working in today's fast-paced and impersonal corporate environment, but we are comparatively poor in hard data about what choices professionals as a population actually make and how they experience the results of those choices.

Stewart D. Friedman and Jeffrey H. Greenhaus address this problem in their new book, Work and Family -- Allies or Enemies? What Happens When Business Professionals Confront Life Choices. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press this summer, Work and Family sets out to study the lived experience of 860 business professionals, as recorded in an extensive questionnaire designed to elicit both the facts of their life situations (how many hours a week they work, how many hours they devote to child care each week, what sort of work they do, and so on) and their feelings about those situations (how satisfied they are with their careers, their families, their personal growth, and so on).

The group surveyed consists of business graduates from Wharton and Drexel, and the substance of the book centers on an elaborate interpretation of their responses. The authors report their data in a logical way, their explanations are clear, and they supplement the whole with various charts and graphs for easy statistical reference. The book is a solid account of the difficult culture of modern professionals, an account whose dual emphasis on quantitative and qualitative factors allows it both to confirm conventional wisdom and to uncover surprising new information.

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