For further information about the series and a full list of published and forthcoming titles please visit www.rgsbookseries.com
Published
Work‐Life Advantage: Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation
Al James
Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics
Steve Hinchliffe, Nick Bingham, John Allen and Simon Carter
Smoking Geographies: Space, Place and Tobacco
Ross Barnett, Graham Moon, Jamie Pearce, Lee Thompson and Liz Twigg
Rehearsing the State: The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government‐in‐Exile
Fiona McConnell
Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System
Nick Gill
Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations
John Pickles and Adrian Smith, with Robert Begg, Milan Buček, Poli Roukova and Rudolf Pástor
Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin
Alexander Vasudevan
Everyday Peace? Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India
Philippa Williams
Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa
Stefan Ouma
Africa’s Information Revolution: Technical Regimes and Production Networks in South Africa and Tanzania
James T. Murphy and Pádraig Carmody
Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding
Andy Pike
In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads
David Matless
Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy
Merje Kuus
Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba
Marisa Wilson
Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline
Andrew Barry
Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy
Maureen Molloy and Wendy Larner
Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007
Linda McDowell
Dunes: Dynamics, Morphology and Geological History
Andrew Warren
Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey
Edited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter
The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia
Alex Jeffrey
Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage
Colin McFarlane
Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption
Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke and Alice Malpass
Domesticating Neo‐Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post‐Socialist Cities
Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz Świątek
Swept Up Lives? Re‐envisioning the Homeless City
Paul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen
Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects
Peter Adey
Millionaire Migrants: Trans‐Pacific Life Lines
David Ley
State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere
Mark Whitehead
Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850–1970
Avril Maddrell
Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South India
Jeff Neilson and Bill Pritchard
Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town
Andrew Tucker
Arsenic Pollution: A Global Synthesis
Peter Ravenscroft, Hugh Brammer and Keith Richards
Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter‐Global Networks
David Featherstone
Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies?
Hester Parr
Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability
Georgina H. Endfield
Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes
Edited by David J. Nash and Sue J. McLaren
Driving Spaces: A Cultural‐Historical Geography of England’s M1 Motorway
Peter Merriman
Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy
Mustafa Dikeç
Geomorphology of Upland Peat: Erosion, Form and Landscape Change
Martin Evans and Jeff Warburton
Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities
Stephen Legg
People/States/Territories
Rhys Jones
Publics and the City
Kurt Iveson
After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial Change
Mick Dunford and Lidia Greco
Putting Workfare in Place
Peter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel
Domicile and Diaspora
Alison Blunt
Geographies and Moralities
Edited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith
Military Geographies
Rachel Woodward
A New Deal for Transport?
Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw
Geographies of British Modernity
Edited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short
Lost Geographies of Power
John Allen
Globalizing South China
Carolyn L. Cartier
Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 Years
Edited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee
This edition first published 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: James, Al, author.
Title: Work‐life advantage : sustaining regional learning and innovation / Al James.
Description: Hoboken : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2017. | Series: RGS‐IBG book series |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026665 (print) | LCCN 2017040536 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781118944820 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118944813 (epub) |
ISBN 9781118944844 (hardback) | ISBN 9781118944837 (paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Flextime. | Women–Employment–Psychological aspects. |
Work and family. | Organizational learning. | Organizational change. |
BISAC: SCIENCE / Earth Sciences / Geography.
Classification: LCC HD5109 (ebook) | LCC HD5109 .J36 2017 (print) | DDC 306.3/6–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026665
Cover Image: Photograph © Al James, 2016
Cover Design: Wiley
For friends and colleagues at QMULGeography
(who always enjoyed a good bottle of workahol)
| Figure 2.1 | Unpacking the regional learning and innovation agenda: key concepts/objects of study. |
| Figure 2.2 | Engendering the regional learning agenda – a visual metaphor. |
| Figure 3.1 | Documenting the exponential growth in WLB research. |
| Figure 4.1 | Map of Greater Dublin region and key IT sites. |
| Figure 4.2 | Map of Greater Cambridge region and key IT sites. |
| Figure 5.1 | Lived experiences of work‐life conflict: IT worker survey (2008). |
| Figure 5.2 | Dublin and its commuter environs. |
| Figure 5.3 | What are workers’ preferred types of employer‐provided work‐life arrangements? IT worker survey (N = 162, 2008). |
| Figure 5.4 | What are workers’ preferred types of employer‐provided work‐life arrangements in the wake of recession? IT worker survey (N = 147, 2010). |
| Figure 7.1 | Unevenness of total suites of work‐life provision across IT employers (Dublin and Cambridge 2008). |
| Table 2.1 | Grounding regional learning and innovation theories: illustrating the scope of empirical research. |
| Table 2.2 | Building cross‐firm female communities of practice in high technology. |
| Table 3.1 | Labourforce participation rates by sex: UK, Ireland, EU, OECD (1990, 2000, 2013). |
| Table 3.2 | Women’s employment by age: UK, Ireland, EU, OECD (1990, 2000, 2013). |
| Table 3.3 | Multiple ‘definitions’ of work‐life balance. |
| Table 3.4 | A typology of employer‐provided work‐life balance arrangements. |
| Table 3.5 | Evidencing the business benefits of employer‐provided work‐life arrangements. |
| Table 4.1 | Comparing national WLB provision/welfare regimes: Ireland and the UK. |
| Table 4.2 | Whatever happened to the UK Silicon Cowboy? IT workforce demographics. |
| Table 4.3 | Whatever happened to the Irish Silicon Cowboy? IT workforce demographics. |
| Table 5.1 | Lived experiences of work‐family conflict: working mothers in the IT sector. |
| Table 5.2 | Employer provision of (formal) WLB arrangements, Dublin and Cambridge IT firm sample (2008). |
| Table 6.1 | Employer provision and worker take‐up of (formal) work‐life arrangements, Dublin and Cambridge IT firm sample (2008). |
| Table 6.2 | Consistency of manager‐perceived WLB learning benefits with measured improvements in firm performance (2004–2007). |
| Table 6.3 | Everyday mechanisms of work‐life/learning advantage. |
| Table 7.1 | Analysing regional knowledge spillovers I: influential/founding studies. |
| Table 7.2 | Analysing regional knowledge spillovers II: extending the debate in economic geography. |
| Table 7.3 | Dublin and Cambridge IT employer provision of (formal) work‐life arrangements (2008). |
| Table 7.4 | IT worker mobility in response to uneven work‐life provision by employers (Dublin and Cambridge, N = 162). |
| Table 7.5 | Evidencing the quality of female ‘embodied knowledge’ in Dublin and Cambridge (n = 115). |
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This book is about the everyday struggles of knowledge workers to juggle competing activities of paid work, home and family. It is about making visible the gendered networks of social reproduction and household divisions of labour which unavoidably shape the differential abilities of workers to perform as ‘human capital’ inputs to firms’ knowledge production processes on a daily basis. It is about demonstrating the considerable benefits that can accrue to employers if they are willing to provide ‘alternative’ working arrangements for workers, to help them and their families achieve a better work‐life balance. And it is about exploring the possibilities for more socially inclusive forms of regional learning, innovation and growth, and challenging the marginalisation of workers with significant caring responsibilities and personal life commitments.
Set against the backdrop of an increasingly abstract, self‐referential and firm‐centric regional learning and innovation research agenda, the book examines the everyday work‐lives of over 350 information technologists in two high‐profile high‐tech clusters (Dublin and Cambridge). It documents how the everyday workplace practices so widely celebrated by economic geographers as supporting regional learning and innovation can also be socially damaging, with multiple negative outcomes for workers’ careers, health, well‐being and quality of life. In response, it also identifies the kinds of employer‐provided work‐life balance arrangements that different groups of workers and their families find most useful in seeking to reduce those work‐life conflicts – and the ways that those arrangements can simultaneously enhance firms’ capacities for learning and innovation, in pursuit of long‐term sustainable competitive advantage. Ultimately, the analysis exposes and disrupts a series of taken‐for‐granted assumptions and masculinist economic universals within economic geography’s flagship regional learning and innovation literature. This includes the role of gendered work‐life conflict and uneven work‐life provision in motivating and constraining the cross‐firm job‐to‐job mobility of workers and the skills they embody – this in a manner that makes those knowledge spillovers much more complex than economic geographers have previously been able (and indeed willing) to recognise. It also explores the spatial variability of these high‐tech work‐lives and gendered learning dynamics within and between different regional economies as a function of different urban infrastructures of care and national welfare regimes.
This book began in 2006 and, 11 years on after a couple of brief intermissions, owes a lot to a lot of people. I want to thank the 350 plus technologists, programmers, software architects, CEOs, managers, network specialists, marketing professionals, HR managers and industry watchers who took time out from their busy lives to take part in this research through the interviews, surveys and other interactions in Ireland and the UK – but who necessarily remain anonymous in the analysis. Particular thanks also to Noreen Fitzpatrick at the Irish Work‐Life Balance Network, Larry Bond at the Irish Equality Authority, Damien Thomas at Ireland’s National Centre for Partnership and Performance, Paul Butler at Nexus Research, Barbara Keogh at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Eileen Drew at Trinity College Dublin, Rosheen Callender at the Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU), Karlin Lillington at The Irish Times, Mary Doolley at the Irish National Framework Committee on Work‐Life Balance, Sarah Blow and Nicole Mathison at GirlGeek Dinners, and Maggie Berry at Women in Technology. All of them had a major hand in helping me to get the fieldwork up and running, and in shaping the direction and scope of the earliest phases of the analysis. And later down the line, thanks to Kerry Cable at BusinessFriend for undertaking all the interview transcription, and Martina O’Callaghan in the Labour Market Analysis Section, Ireland Central Statistics Office, for generating special Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS) data extracts on the demographic and household situations of the IT workforce in Ireland.
This research received funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (RES‐000‐22‐1574‐A), and was also affiliated to the ESRC Gender Equality Network (GeNet, RES‐225‐25‐2001) led by Jackie Scott. I am grateful to geography colleagues at Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and Newcastle for providing the encouragement/support/sabbatical space to write this. Special thanks also to Diane Perrons. During the Irish fieldwork I was kindly hosted by Trinity College Dublin. And during the writing up stage I was hosted in Geography and Economic History at Umeå University, Sweden.
These ideas also evolved through interactions with successive cohorts of students at Cambridge, QMUL and Newcastle who took the Working in the New Economy, Spaces of Uneven Development and Geographies of Working Lives modules. Invited seminars were given at the Universities of Nottingham, Limerick, Umeå, Birmingham, Bristol, Stavanger, Turku, Glasgow, QMUL and the Institute for Education, alongside papers at various annual conferences of the American Association of Geographers, Irish Geographers, Nordic Geographers, Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, and the European Colloquium on Culture, Creativity and Economy. I would like to thank audiences at all those events for critical comment and encouragement on earlier versions of the final analysis presented here. Thanks also to Neil Coe and then Dave Featherstone as RGS‐IBG book series editors, the book series editorial team and two anonymous reviewers (although I think I know who you are!).
The author gratefully acknowledges permissions to reuse and extend ideas contained in three previously published single‐authored papers: Journal of Economic Geography (Oxford University Press, 2014), 14(3): 483–510; Gender, Work and Organization (Wiley, 2014), 21(3): 273–294; and Gender, Place and Culture (Taylor and Francis, 2011), 18(4/5): 655–684. Permission to reproduce Tim O’Brien’s cartoon in Chapter 2 was obtained from CartoonStock.com. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and we apologise for any errors or omissions in these acknowledgements.