Chapter themes

How do you make a big job smaller, or a workload more manageable when you have less time to give to it? Do you integrate or separate professional work from childcare and family work? This chapter and the next shift the focus from the motivations and drivers of part-time and flexible working patterns to how women implement and sustain the flexible working arrangements they negotiate. Surprisingly little is known about how part-time and other forms of flexible working work in practice in professional and managerial jobs. This chapter explains how women redesign their jobs, create new workspaces, and how they manage the temporal and spatial boundaries between their professional work and their family work. It deals with the workrelated experiences and outcomes of women's transitions under three scenarios: converting a full-time job into a part-time job, job-sharing and working from home.

Time is the central theme in this discussion. In the context of a sociology of work, a sociology of time extends scholarly discussion of the problems of time in relation to achieving work–life balance to examining how workers experience time in organisational settings and how they accomplish what Flaherty (2003) terms ‘time-work’, that is, the manipulation of how fast, slow, full and empty time feels. In the professional sphere, time norms determine what work schedules and patterns are culturally appropriate and evidence suggests that these norms override the influence of employment contracts in setting expectations for the number of hours worked and the formulation of a work schedule. Work schedules can be used by employers as a mechanism of control, but they can also be protective and supportive of workers’ achievement of protected private time, or what Zerubavel (1989) terms ‘niches of inaccessibility’. This idea is helpful to explaining why it was that many women interviewed for this study sought to fix their regular non-work day or days and make their schedules public by declaring in an email footer or out-of-office message, for example, that “My working days are Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays” or “My non-working day is Friday.” Women embarking upon a part-time work pattern ideally seek private, protected time off work: a niche of inaccessibility. However, very few women in professional and managerial jobs in this study feel it is either realistic or advantageous to their career prospects to be completely inaccessible on non-work days.