Competing Claims in Work and Family Life, edited by Tanja van der Lippe and Pascale Peters, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2007, 278 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84542-751-1.

Time use issues and the quest for balancing competing claims from work and family have become a central feature of social and economic policy debates in industrialized countries, as they affect individuals, families, work, productivity, management and society. This book’s focus on the causes of disturbed balances in professional and private lives and on solutions households and companies have chosen to address it is therefore most timely. The editors of the book have participated, since 2000, in an interuniversity research team on time competition and innovative approaches to deal with it, financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. The new perspective of this project was to look at the impact of governance structures within firms and households on time allocation decisions regarding paid work and caring tasks, and to link it with organizational research. The results were discussed in a workshop at the Utrecht University with experts from European countries, the US, Australia and Japan who provided the inputs to this book. Twenty-five academics contributed to this research, mostly sociologists, but also specialists from other disciplines, namely, economics, labour economics, organizational psychology, management, civil and environmental engineering. The book consists of three parts. The first points to the trends in time use and time pressure and its impact on the quality of life, particularly for working mothers and the impact of multitasking and odd working hours on time pressure. Looking at the EU, US and Japan, the authors note that along with global competition of national economies, overwork and time pressures are proliferating. They contest the claim of an emerging leisure society, as people spend more time on paid and unpaid work, including work-related activities. Since life quality depends on time and money, people tend to suffer from both time and money poverty. As to the relation between atypical working hours and time pressure, a study of the Netherlands, where working hours are more flexible and extend trading hours, the authors note that although roughly half of the employees work evenings, nights and weekends, “odd” working hours represent only 10% of the total, and this has not increased over time. It often concerns the higher educated people whose “odd hours” extend their regular working day and are not associated with their feeling time-pressured. By contrast, a study from the Flemish-region of Belgium notes that for prime-aged professionals, especially in dual-earner families, in spite of their higher professional responsibilities and the related time-determination autonomy, they suffer from heavy workload and time pressure. The second part looks at the trade-offs between work and family time, noting people’s preferences for both longer and shorter working hours, questioning the rationale for the high incidence of unpaid overtime, looking at the effects of employer demands and household governance on labour supply. It notes that in the US, longer work hours do not automatically translate into a desire for more family time. While men sometimes voice a desire for more family time, only women who want more family time desire less time on the job. Changes in the length of the workweek apparently do not make individuals feel more pressed for family time. Moreover, the desire to work longer hours is not associated with family time preferences. The authors conclude that shorter working hours or part-time are therefore not the only solution. Scrutinizing working hours preferences surveys, the authors note that they are predominantly influenced by work status and pay levels: low-earning workers prefer to work longer hours, and employees in a challenging job have a lower preference for shorter hours than those who perceive their job as a burden. Looking at the rationale for …