https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

25. Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys. By D. B. Rubin. ISBN 0 471 08705 X. Wiley, Chichester, 1987. 258 pp. £30.25.

Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys

Men and Women of the Corporation

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

This article studies the relevance of different types of support for satisfaction with work life balance. More specifically, it investigates the relevance of state, instrumental and emotional workplace and family support, based on a survey of 7867 service-sector workers in eight European countries. The article starts by mapping available state, workplace and family support in order to determine which source dominates in which country and whether these sources match Esping-Andersen's welfare regime typology. The impact of the different support sources is then examined. Findings indicate that support for employee work-life balance satisfaction has a direct and moderating effect. Finally, results show that emotional support and instrumental support in the workplace have a complementary relationship. Whereas emotional family support has a positive impact on work-life balance satisfaction, instrumental family support does not.

Support for the work-life balance in Europe: the impact of state, workplace and family support on work-life balance satisfaction:

Research documents a wage penalty for mothers compared to childless women. We demonstrate there is also an occupational status penalty to motherhood. Interrogating supply- and demand-side explanations of the motherhood penalty from the life course perspective, we formulate and test original hypotheses about the short-term and long-run career implications of parity-specific births. We analyze longitudinal data from the European Community and Household Panel for 13 European countries and eight time points between 1994 and 2001. Our fixed-effects models show that status losses for a first birth are not just short-term but accumulate over the career. The timing of a birth in a woman’s life course matters only for older women, who experience a significant penalty to third births. Although the personal strategies that women use to minimize the career costs of motherhood (e.g., having only one child) prove ineffective, our cross-national evidence shows that public policies are linked to the motherhood penalty in...

/pdf/the-parity-penalty-in-life-course-perspective-motherhood-and-40j6vnae46.pdf

The Parity Penalty in Life Course Perspective: Motherhood and Occupational Status in 13 European Countries

Social support and the working hours of employed mothers in Europe: The relevance of the state, the workplace, and the family

Using a unique sample of 5,022 workers in 94 large German workplaces, the authors explore whether and how women’s access to higher level positions, firms’ human resources practices, and workers’ qu...

Women at Work: Women’s Access to Power and the Gender Earnings Gap

The present study analyzes workers’ non-use of telework in German workplaces. Recent research has focused mainly on the implications of telework for employees. Non-users of telework, and their reas...

Anja-Kristin Abendroth

Papers

Support for the work-life balance in Europe: the impact of state, workplace and family support on work-life balance satisfaction:

The Parity Penalty in Life Course Perspective: Motherhood and Occupational Status in 13 European Countries

Social support and the working hours of employed mothers in Europe: The relevance of the state, the workplace, and the family

Women at Work: Women’s Access to Power and the Gender Earnings Gap

The non-use of telework in an ideal worker culture: why women perceive more cultural barriers