This chapter sets the broader context for the book, which repeats a study on transition to first-time motherhood undertaken 21 years earlier. It asks what a new study on motherhood can tell us about how expectations and experiences are configured in harsher neoliberal conditions and digital landscapes that can empower and individually and experientially, undermine. In this first chapter, the context against which contemporary motherhood is experienced is compared to the earlier study. This chapter will also provide the theoretical and conceptual framework for the book through a focus on definitions and debates around motherhood and narrative construction, gender, and contextual, structural factors. The methodological details of the two qualitative longitudinal studies (which use the same research design) on transition to first-time motherhood are outlined in this chapter, setting the scene for the data presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. The chapter asks if it has ever been a more challenging time to be a woman who is also a mother.

The concluding chapter draws together the empirical threads identified in the preceding chapters and considers their theoretical and political implications. At one level, the aims of the book have been simple and straightforward: to examine in what ways women’s experiences of transition to first-time motherhood have changed since the original study was conducted 21 years earlier. But the unfolding accounts of transition have been anything but simple or straightforward in what they signal about women’s lives, societal expectations and contemporary motherhood. This returns us to a question posed in the opening chapter of this book, ‘has it ever been a more challenging time to be a woman who is also a mother?’ This was asked for several reasons, including a notable policy gap between discursive tropes of ‘balancing’ work and family life and everyday working and childcare conditions in the UK. But it was also posed in relation to older first-time motherhood, the effects of digitalisation on transition/motherhood experiences and how selves and gendered agency are narrated. Just over a decade ago, in her controversial article, Anne Marie Slaughter concluded that ‘women still can’t have it all’. My question is: why are we still doing it all?

In Chapter 2, we trace the demographic developments that have driven both the rise of new ‘identity liberal’ electorates and the decline of the formerly dominant ‘identity conservative’ group. Educational expansion has opened universities, formerly the preserve of a small elite, to the masses. Migration and rising ethnic diversity have dramatically increased Britain’s ethnic and cultural diversity. The combined effects have transformed the typical experience of a young person growing up in Britain. A typical citizen growing up in the 1950s had little prospect of attending university and had little or no contact with people with different ethnic or religious backgrounds. But her granddaughter growing up in the 2010s knows a society where ethnic and religious diversity are a part of everyday life for most young people, and university was an experience enjoyed by the majority of her peers. The generational structure of both these changes and hence of the identities and values associated with them, drives the third demographic trend: growing generational divides. Finally, we show how the geographical distribution of the different demographic groups adds to the electoral polarisation between identity conservatives and identity liberals, who not only think differently, but also increasingly live apart from each other.

In this final chapter, we explore emerging trends – the new horizons – in business, technology and society with a particular focus on how these developments are influencing ideas, practice, employee experience and academic research in the field of performance and reward management. We begin with emerging trends and practices that have already begun to impact the design of performance and reward management systems and academic research in the field. We focus on three interconnected global trends that have already started to change performance and reward management practice; an impact that is very likely to increase in the years ahead. The first of these trends is the technological revolution associated with ‘Industry 4.0’; the second is the economic disruption and employment uncertainty associated with what has come to be called the ‘gig economy’; and the third is the social transformation flowing from generational change around the world.