Politiche e pratiche conciliative nel Regno Unito

Reconciling family and work: policies and practices in the United Kingdom (by Sara Mazzucchelli) - ABSTRACT: The essay aims to deepen the theme of reconciliation between family and work, a very relevant problem for the western societies, with a special concern on the case of the United Kingdom. In the first theoretical part the Author tried to provide a complex overview of the measures and the policies taken in this regard in the last decades. In the second empirical part, Mazzucchelli analyzed the organizational contexts of some of the most important British multinational companies. The aim was to examine and identify the reconciling measures utilized by the companies. The analysis was carried out through a careful review of the each company’s web page. The companies were selected from the list "Fortune Global 500", a worldwide ranking of 500 companies with the highest annual turnover. This list is compiled and published annually by Fortune magazine (www.money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/), the second most important American magazine in the field of economics and financial affairs. The Author finds that the balancing instruments for the conciliation between family and work, in UK, concerns many areas and measures. We can distinguish between: flexibility measures that reduce or articulate in many ways the work time (i.e. parttime, flexibility, job sharing, teleworking, term-time work, hour bank, work shift); childcare services (i.e. daycare centres, nurseries, infant schools, company nurseries, post schools); leave or tools which release time (maternity leave, paternity leave, parental leave, leave for familiar reasons, adoption leave; maternity interruption of career with right to hold down the job place after the return, part-time right after the son’s birth) and tools which create a different time culture (on the job training, mentoring). The essay shows many and interesting ways to reconciliate work and family, starting from what one could call the new corporate welfare, embedded in a innovative culture of corporate citizenship.;

Sara Mazzucchelli, Politiche e pratiche conciliative nel Regno Unito in "SOCIOLOGIA E POLITICHE SOCIALI" 1/2008, pp 87-111, DOI: