‘Work–life balance’ is a contested notion, involving conflicting interpretations of ‘flexibility’ in relation to employment and family commitments. It may be justified on the basis of a social case, a business case or the contemporary public policy compromise. In practice, however, people's capacity as employees and family members to achieve the kind of flexibility they want rests on their bargaining power. This chapter draws on findings from a small-scale qualitative investigation of work–life balance in a low-income neighbourhood in the UK. It discusses the issue of bargaining power in relation to employer practices, income maintenance and childcare arrangements. The chapter concludes by arguing that prevailing ‘Third Way’ public policy approaches favour forms of flexibility that can sometimes be exploitative. They need to be inflected towards an understanding of work–life balance that is premised more on the social than the business case.

Ideology and work–life balance

In debates about work–life balance, ‘work’ and ‘life’ are code for wage labour on the one hand and familial caring on the other and for the ways in which each may be ‘flexibly’ accommodated to the other. This chapter proceeds from the premise that our understandings of jobs or occupations on the one hand and of kinship ties and household arrangements on the other are historically contingent and socially constructed. Functionalist sociological orthodoxy envisages a narrative in which capitalist modernity swept aside the unity between work and life that (supposedly) once characterised feudal social relations. It reconstituted productive ‘work’ in terms of the wage relation and it transformed ‘the family’ from a unit of economic production into a specialised unit of consumption and social reproduction (Morgan, 1975; Gittins, 1993). Industrial capitalism shifted work from the field to the factory and it kept the factory separate from the family. The modern welfare state played a critical part in mediating that separation (Titmuss, 1958; Pascall, 1997). Post-industrial capitalism now requires a more flexible relationship between the changing worlds of paid employment and family life. The re-evaluation of that relationship may be informed by competing ideological perspectives, reflecting different interpretations of the orthodox account.