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Flexible work and work–family interaction

The origin of this special issue stems from the International Community Work and Family Conference in Tampere 2011. The theme of the conference was broad: Actors, Structures and Theories. The papers presented covered issues from care to management and from local to global contexts within various theoretical and methodological frameworks. Due to this variation and to a large amount of high quality papers, it was a challenge to select papers for a single special issue. Therefore, we decided to select papers on the basis of a narrower topic, and ended up with the topic of flexible work and work family interaction. The topic is increasingly relevant and timely issue with contradictory findings so far. In addition to this special issue, an edited volume titled Women, men and children in families: new openings will be published in 2012. The editors are Eriikka Oinonen and Katja Repo from the University of Tampere. In this special issue, five selected articles focus on contractual, temporal and spatial forms of flexibility and how they are associated to work family interaction. Contractual forms of flexibility cover here practices of self-employment and temporary work while temporal flexibility covers working time arrangements. Spatial forms of flexibility are studied in relation to telework. The articles are based on empirical analysis using qualitative or quantitative data collected in Australia, Canada, Finland or the Netherlands. In their contribution Anne Annink and Laura den Dulk study how self-employed women with children feel they manage paid work and other life domains. Autonomy appeared to be an important resource, allowing them to combine their work more easily with childcare, household duties and social and personal life. However, the degree and nature of that autonomy and the ability to use it varied among the selfemployed women in this study owing to work-related factors such as sector, work location, employees and years of experience. Karen A. Duncan and Rachael N. Pettigrew examine the effect of different work arrangements (flexible schedules, shift work and self-employment) on perception of work family balance. Results indicate that work arrangements strongly affect work family balance and do so differently for women and men. For women, some control over the work schedule significantly improved the perception of balance. For men, both self-employment and shift work relate negatively to reported work family balance. Hanna Sutela examines the association between temporary employment and first child fertility among young employees in partnership taking into account the moderating effects of employer sector and insecurity of employment situation. The findings confirm a negative association of temporary employment with transition to parenthood in the year following the survey for both men and women. Johanna Närvi examines mothers’ and fathers’ choices concerning care and career in the Finnish context of gender equal family policy and employment Community, Work & Family Vol. 15, No. 4, November 2012, 381 382