Building a Citizenship Argument on Top of the Business Case Argument: A Systemic Perspective on Work Family Articulation

摘要

As a work–life scholar at a Grande Ecole in France and a former project leader, entrepreneur and Accenture manager, I agree with Kossek, Baltes, and Matthews (2011) that work–family research seems to be making less of an impact on practice than it should. Making an impact on practice is a challenge in many areas of social sciences research, not only for work–family research (Rynes & Shapiro, 2005). Yet work–family research is a particularly complex area of research because of its intrinsic cross-disciplinary nature and of the many layers of context it has to embrace. Each one of us reads and designs research through a set of lenses: the gender lens, the ethnicity lens, the disciplinary lens, and the country of origin lens, to name only a few. The Kossek et al.'s article is no exception: it is rooted in industrial–organizational (1-0) psychology and proposes typical U.S. centric views. This commentary provides a different perspective that, combined with their perspective and other scholars', may help moving the field toward making a greater impact. Specifically, I argue that to make an impact, work–life research needs to embrace a systemic perspective encompassing invisible stakeholders as well as workers, and civil society and government as well as individuals and organizations. In short, work–life research needs to build a "citizenship argument" on top of the business case argument.