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Family, Work and Social Contexts

'At the heart of efforts to "strike the balance" between paid work and family responsibilities is the issue of time. Despite a decade or more of economic growth and prosperity many Australians are not living the lives they want and feel pressured, stressed and overly constrained in the choices they can make, particularly at key points in their lives'.
(Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (2007) It's About Time: Women, men, work and family).

These projects are focused on the family landscape in Australia and internationally where changes in family formation and fertility, shifts in women’s employment, and the deregulation and globalisation of industrial relations landscape are reshaping the interfaces of family care and employment.

Consuming Families: Buying, making, producing family life in the 21st century

with Associate Prof Jo Lindsay, Sociology, Monash University
This book is currently being written - under contract with Routledge publishers. Consumption is central battleground in public debates over morality, excess and responsibility. These contests are particularly critical for contemporary families in Western nations, where excesses of goods, the paucity of time, and changing relational structures are altering family life. Families have always been key sites for consumption and in recent decades, contests over childhood obesity, the sexualisation of children, the media practices of children and teenagers, and young people's use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs have dominated media and public policy discussions of family life in Western nations. Issues of responsibility, parental control and children and young people as active agents in a consumer world are central in the social policy, educational and health realms.Each of the chapters in the book addresses a key social issue on consumption and the making of family life in the 21st Century.

Recently Completed Work Family Projects:

JaneMaree Maher
 "Often in media and policy debates about work and family, simple descriptions of work-life balance and integration are discussed; these descriptions don't capture the contested and often difficult negotiations within families about how to integrate employment and care. Assumptions about motherhood, fatherhood, and care need to be carefully examined to better support people in their decisions. My research into women's and men's choices is always interesting to me because it reveals much more complicated information about the decisions people make about work and family."

Dr JaneMaree Maher