ABSTRACT
The Netherlands is characterized by extensive national work-life regulations relative to the United States. Yet, Dutch employees do not always take advantage of existing work-life policies. Individual and focus group interviews with employees and managers in three (public and private) Dutch organizations identified how employee and managerial communication contributed to acquired rules concerning work-life policies and the interpretation of allocative and authoritative resources for policy enactment. Analyses revealed differences in employees' and managers' resistance to policy, the binds and dilemmas experienced, and the coordination of agreements and actions to complete workloads. There are also differences between public and private contexts in the enactment of national and organizational policies, revealing how national (e.g., gender) and organizational (e.g., concertive control) mechanisms play out in employee and managerial communication that determine the use of work-life policies.
ABSTRACT
Managers are key actors shaping employees' capabilities to utilize worklife policies. However, most research on managers' implementation of these policies has been conducted in liberal welfare states and ignores the impact of institutional context. In this study, we situate managers within specific workplace and national layers of context. We investigated how managers in financial organizations in the Netherlands, UK, and Slovenia talk about the utilization of worklife policies. Managers' discourses stressed disruption and dependency considerations in these case studies, as in the US research. However, a further management discourse of the moral case or right thing to do also emerged. The lack of resources for replacing staff on leave creates disruption and reduces managers capability to support the use of worklife policies, even when they are statutory or if managers are inclined be supportive (dependency or moral argument). This is likely to impact on parents' capabilities.
