10th International Community, Work and Family Conference

Kseniya Navazhylava, Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya

Session focus
Witnessing the flux of ongoing change, stemming from challenges such as COVID-19 pandemic, digitalization, threats to climate, migration, and ongoing armed conflicts, puts the well-being of workers and communities around the world, including academic community, in question. Extreme situations like this provide an opportunity to “turn upon oneself” (Foucault,1997:96) and establish a relationship with oneself, governing oneself, enjoying oneself, teaching oneself, and learning from oneself, which Foucault understood as self-care. Since the Greco-Roman times one of the practices that contributed to self-care in face of challenges is writing: joining together knowledge about the world and knowledge about oneself (Foucault, 1997). Affordances of materiality are known to shape social practice and wiring is not an exception (Kreniske, 2017). In the modern world, digital technologies allow for collective writing that contributes to alternative practices of self-care in the face of crisis such as global pandemic (Navazhylava et al., 2023), at the backdrop of on-going experimentation with forms of writing such as poetry (Kostera, 1997), textiles (Rippin, 2013) and dolls (Rippin, 2015), and ways of exploring the ‘bodiliness’ of academic research and writing (Essén & Värlander, 2013). (Boncori, 2022) argues that writing differently concerns content, topics and sensibilities; (Pagliarussi, 2022) suggests to incorporate author’s voice, stories and attractive titles and paragraphs; what other practices become available for academic writers? How else does technology, such as digital media and artificial intelligence, shape writing differently?

In addition to the practices of writing, recently, the process of writing has been put in flux. Participative research questions the extraction of data, aims and position of researchers and their subjects in creating research projects (Baskerville, 1997; Reason, 1994). Calling for affective writing that develops a writing where bodies are simultaneously active and inscribed upon, (Mandalaki, 2020; Vachhani & Pullen, 2019) suggested to show the difficulty of writing from the body and thus challenge the gendered structures operating in the Academy. Such as, exploring the feelings of shame and physical angst during the ethnographic work (Beavan, 2019), or employing multi-voice autoethnography to highlight the interplay of academic work and academic bodies in the experience of author’s miscarriage (Boncori & Smith, 2019), being guided by bodily metaphors such as writing as skin (Brewis & Williams, 2019), or taking stock of interpersonal influences and disruption (Weatherall, 2019). What other changes to the process of writing emerge in response to globalization, migration and digitalization, health crises, cancelling culture and other challenges that are on-going? How do they reflect the changes in ethics of academic process, and how do they shape values of the future academics and what is understood as academic rigor?

Furthermore, resulting from a reflexive “turn into oneself” of the academic community, calls have emerged to search for alternatives to the current scientific form of writing. Playful explorations with forms of writing allow writing differently to communicate less abstractly (Grey & Sinclair, 2006), or more imaginative, experimental, dialogic (Helin, 2019) and reflexive (Richardson, 2000). Specifically, existing attempts to break with the traditional academic genres include narrating ethnographies in poetic form (Beavan, 2019), in the form of mystery novel playfully reproducing the plot from existing Agatha Christie’s novel (Kociatkiewicz & Kostera, 2019), or in a genre of response letter proposing to reject a
submission (Kociatkiewicz & Kostera, 2024). How to make sense of these explorations? How does the form of academic writing reflect on academic impact, on legitimacy of academia? How does such experimentation impact the jurisdictional boundaries between science and art (Biehl & Schönfeld, 2023; Grafström & Jonsson, 2020)? How to bridge the schools of thought where adherence to blueprints is used as a criteria for evaluating the quality of work, with the schools of thought that highlight adaptation, innovation and creativity? What other developments to genre and form of academic writing are possible without compromising academic rigor?

Aforementioned global changes such as globalization, migration and changing structure of the workforce also call for different approaches to interpretation, both of the data that inform academic writing and the products of the latter. Existing options include postfeminist approaches to research – for instance, an event-based approach through through creative fiction, corporeal movement, and collective speculation (Kinnunen et al., 2021), or appropriating voices of others (Yan et al., 2023). Moreover, postcolonial approaches emerge that warn of fetishizing the stranger by assuming others having distinctly different lives and problems (Ahmed, 2000), of excluding those who are neuro-atypical
through sedimenting heteronormative, neurotypical conceptions of the Global-North (Bozalek, 2022), or attempt at deterretorializing research (Honan & Bright, 2016) and szhysoanalysis – simultaneous use of a plurality of models and thinking with plurality of voices (Bozalek, 2022). How do academic institutions work as filters of these global changes? What barriers exist to making academic writing more inclusive? What structures should be built to support new ethics of research?

We welcome submissions that engage with this and other questioning about writing differently, and of course, that practice writing differently, for an open discussion of where from and why we are writing.

Relation to the theme of the conference
This session is relevant to the Community, Work and Family as it addresses the way wellbeing of academics as community members, family members and workers could be secured through practice of writing.

Aligned with the theme of the conference being “Community, Work, and Family in Flux: Exploring changing structures, policies, and practices in a global perspective”, this session addresses ongoing challenges such as pandemic, digitalization, migration as opportunities to “turn upon oneself” and construct alternative practices of wellbeing through collectively caring for self and others through writing (Navazhylava et al., 2023).

In addition, the questions suggested in the call for this session, aim to integrate the global perspectives of the global south and north through inviting submissions using postfeminist and postcolonial approaches to writing, in line with the philosophy of the CWF conference.

Finally, the session aims to spur a debate on changing policies and practices that hinder writing differently and highlight the organization structures that filter changes towards more inclusivity.

Ann-Christin Bächmann, Dana Müller, Kevin Ruf

In recent decades, women's participation in the labour force has steadily increased in many Western societies (OECD 2018). This trend has been accompanied by an erosion of the traditional male breadwinner model, and thus of the clear division of care work and gainful employment in families. As a result, work-life balance issues have become a major topic of public and political debate. As women still often bear the main responsibility for household and care work (Grunow 2019), in particular female – but more and more also male – employees are confronted with time and role conflicts (Masterson & Hoobler 2014). These conflicts are challenging for both employees and employers, as they are inter alia associated with higher levels of stress (Voydanoff 2005) and lower productivity (Glass and Estes, 1997). Simultaneously, demographic change is making it increasingly difficult for companies to recruit and retain skilled workers. Research shows that a family-friendly working environment is an important factor in improving job satisfaction and increasing employees' motivation to work and thus to retain good employees in the company (Hayman, 2009; Butts et al., 2013; Zheng et al., 2015). Overall, the trends described above mean that companies are increasingly faced with the need to enable a better reconciliation of family and working life, and thus with the challenge of integrating compatibility options into their human resources policies and daily processes.

Accordingly, in recent years, companies have expanded their family-friendly arrangements in Germany (Frodermann et al. 2019) and other countries around the world (Evans 2001). Thereby, organizational measures to improve the reconciliation of work and private life can look very different: They range from a reduction in weekly working hours or the possibility of working from home, to specific familyrelated measures such workplace childcare or special onboarding processes after parental leave. Despite the growing demand and supply of family-friendly organizational measures, scientific research on the usage and consequences of those measures for different groups of employees is still rare. This is also because there are special data requirements for this type of analysis. To consider the employer and employee sides simultaneously linked individual and establishment data is particularly suitable. Against this background, the aim of the proposed session is to bring together research projects that explore...

• the introduction and consequences of different formal organizational arrangements
• the importance of structural working conditions (such as flexible working time arrangements or the possibility of working from home) and
• the importance of the working environment, organizational culture and informal arrangements for the reconciliation of family and working life.

We encourage to hand in contributions that focus on different outcomes on the employee side ranging from employment patterns and wage development to satisfaction and health. We are particularly interested in research that focuses on the consequences of organizational arrangements for inequalities between different social groups.

Overall, the aim of the session is to shed light on the interplay between individual decisions and company strategies for improving work-life balance in different political, social and structural contexts. The sessions goal is to bring together excellent international researchers in the fields of organizational and labour market research. Beyond this, we are very interested in stimulating a fruitful discussion on the theoretical and empirical challenges associated with existing linked employer-employee data, and in developing new, innovative ways to analyze the interaction between organizations and individuals.

Eva-Maria Schmidt, Andreas Baierl, Barbara Beham

Over the last decades, working life, careers, and workplaces have changed profoundly in Western countries and have become mobile, variable, and flexible. At the same time, a plethora of research has shown how men’s fathering practices have transformed slowly but steadily towards more caring, intimate, and emotionally engaged ways of fathering (e.g., Adler et al., 2023; Doucet, 2018; Grau-Grau, 2022). Fathers increasingly wish to invest more time in caregiving and policies – at the level of both welfare states and companies – would support them to do so; however, fathers do not act and decide in isolation. Rather, their practices and decisions are related to social norms and collective attitudes that are reproduced in interactions with various actors in different life spheres such as the workplace (Ewald, Gilbert, & Huppatz, 2023; Koslowski, 2023; Laß & Wooden, 2023; Li & Zerle-Elsässer, 2023). In our session, we want to focus on these normative expectations and collective attitudes towards working fathers in these contexts because they are supposed to serve as filters of change in shaping fathers' options, constraining their freedom of choice and scope of action, and entailing challenges for individual fathers.

Fathers’ options, choices, attitudes, responsibilities, and practices are shaped by employment relationships, workplace interactions, and dominant working time regimes. Companies and policies have increasingly facilitated flexibility in working hours and family friendliness at working places, thereby increasing individuals’ freedom to choose how they organize their family relationships and manage work-life boundaries (James, 2009; Nabergoj & Pahor, 2016; Wiß, 2017). However, women and men are exposed differently to flexibility stigmas (Chung, 2020; Williams, Blair-Loy, & Berdahl, 2013) and develop a different sense of entitlement towards work-life policies (Alemann, Beaufaӱs, & Oechsle,
2017; Brandth & Kvande, 2018; Lewis & Smithson, 2016). For example, men’s sense of entitlement to family-friendly policies may arise only in highly supportive organizational cultures (Bernhardt & Bünning, 2017). Furthermore, men seem to be less likely to reduce working hours as do women (Langner, 2018), and are more likely to be expected to fulfil the normative expectations of the ideal employee and worker (Acker, 2013; Beham, Baierl, & Eckner, 2019; Beham, Drobnič, Präg, Baierl, & Eckner, 2018; Williams, 2009). With regard to family responsibilities, women and men are expected to fulfill different ideals of intensive parenting (Faircloth, 2014; Gauthier et al., 2021) and/or breadwinning (Dallos & Kovács, 2021; Schmidt, 2018; Warren, 2022) that constrain and shape flexible working options for fathers.

In our session, we welcome papers that deal with questions regarding these complex interrelations that fathers face in the workplace and in society. We aim to unpack in more detail how various actors at workplaces and in organizations construct, understand, and find strategies to deal with fathers’ caring responsibilities; how can we tackle normative forces and collective attitudes in the working sphere that might hinder fathers’ responsible caregiving in their families; and which workplace interventions and organizational realities have the potential to change and degenderize family responsibilities. In relation with the theme of the CWF conference 2025, this session aims to explore changing structures, policies, and practices of fathering in a relational and global perspective. We welcome papers from diverse disciplinary and country contexts, empirical work that applies both quantitative or qualitative methods, as well as conceptual or theoretical work on the topic.

Johanna Lammi-Taskula, Ivana Dobrotić

Paid parenting leaves provide social protection against labour market risks for parents before and after the birth of a child, as well as the time to provide care. They are more firmly established within the welfare state architecture than carers’ leaves acknowledging the need to provide care through the life course, providing carers with paid leave to provide personal care or support to a relative or another close person/household member. As leave rights and quotas for fathers/partners have been introduced, parenting leave policies tended to counteract gender inequalities that may emerge from a traditional gendered division of labour. However, multiple and intertwined inequalities still prevail as leave designs place most of the care on women, while some groups of parents/carers are still excluded from paid leave. Also, variations in leave benefits may limit possibilities for take-up.

We welcome submissions for presentations on various perspectives of (in-)equalities in (parenting) leave policies development and design, as well as take-up of leave, e.g. according to gender, employment status, diverse family forms or health. These can include perspectives of self-employed, students, migrants, lone-parents, same-sex parents, adoptive parents, persons with disabilities or long-term illness, etc. Also, papers analysing the implications of parental leave policies for inequalities between children in physical or mental health, cognitive development, or well-being are welcomed. We particularly encourage the submission of papers that link socially sustainable goals of, for example, ending poverty and aiming towards good health, well-being and gender equality with leave policies.

We especially welcome studies that transcend the gender-only approaches, that is, provide a better understanding of complex, multiple and intersectional inequalities that underline leave policy designs, developments and outcomes. In other words, we would like to inspire submissions with a more critical approach, challenging social policy designs in the light of growing diversity in employment patterns, work and family choices, lifestyles and lifecycles and offering new insights to the contemporary understanding of new challenges and institutional evolution of welfare states. Recognizing conceptual and methodological pluralism, we encourage proposals arising from different conceptual and methodological approaches in analysing leave policies and reforms from an inequalities perspective, and covering broad geographical areas.

The University is looking forward welcoming you at the campus. Sessions, talks and lunch will take place in the building X (“Gebäude X”) Universitätsstraße 24, 33615 Bielefeld.

Nestled in Germany's heart, Bielefeld offers a rich history and vibrant culture for both ancient and modern exploration. Its pivotal industrial role in fabric manufacturing and food production underscores its innovative spirit. Bielefeld's allure extends beyond history, offering dynamic art scenes, bustling markets, and innovative culinary delights, blending old-world charm with contemporary flair. Set amidst the Teutoburg Forest, it is a destination for relaxation and outdoor adventures in the countryside. As an academic hub, Bielefeld hosts many institutions like Bielefeld University and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, fostering intellectual exchange.

The ICWF Organizing Committee has secured rooms for reduced prices in the heart of Bielefeld. Information on booking discounted rooms from the hotel contingents will be included in the confirmation of the conference registration.

Steigenberger Hotel Bielefelder Hof 
Am Bahnhof 3, 33602 Bielefeld

Légère Hotel Bielefeld 
Neumarkt 2, 33602 Bielefeld

Comfort Garni Stadtzentrum Hotel 
Bahnhofstraße 32, 33602 Bielefeld

Ibis Styles Bielefeld 
Niederwall 31-35, 33062 Bielefeld

B&B HOTEL Bielefeld-City 
Europaplatz 2, 33613 Bielefeld