Work-Life Advantage

Work-Life Advantage analyses how employer-provision of ‘family-friendly’ working arrangements - designed to help workers better reconcile work, home and family - can also enhance firms’ capacities for learning and innovation, in pursuit of long-term competitive advantage and socially inclusive growth.  Brings together major debates in labour geography, feminist geography, and regional learning in novel ways, through a focus on the shifting boundaries between work, home, and family Addresses a major gap in the scholarly research surrounding the narrow ‘business case’ for work-life balance by developing a more socially progressive, workerist ‘dual agenda’ Challenges and disrupts masculinist assumptions of the “ideal worker” and the associated labour market marginalization of workers with significant home and family commitments Based on 10 years of research with over 300 IT workers and 150 IT firms in the UK and Ireland, with important insights for professional workers and knowledge-intensive companies around the world

List of Figures viii List of Tables ix Series Editor’s Preface xi Preface and Acknowledgements xii List of Abbreviations xv 1 Inclusive Regional Learning? 1 2 Recentering Regional Learning: Beyond Masculinist Geographies of Regional Advantage 16 3 Work]Life Balance and its Uncertain ‘Business Case’ 38 4 Researching Labour Geographies of Work-Life and Learning in Ireland and the UK 67 5 Juggling Work, Home and Family in the Knowledge Economy 86 6 Overcoming Work-Life Conflict and the Gendered Limits to Learning and Innovation? 117 7 Work-Life Balance, Cross-Firm Worker Mobility and Gendered Knowledge Spillovers 145 8 Conclusions: Gendered Regional Learning and Work-Life Advantage 176 References 197 Index 226