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Yesterday, I announced that we launched Stage One of the new Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) website.  With that important milestone, comes our final Work and Family blog.  Before we sign off, I wanted to tell you how to learn about and share the latest news and events on the new WFRN website.

News to share? You can read or post many types of information to the News Feed including:

•Posting a call for papers, your latest report, or your newsletter.
•Sharing a press release or announcing the publication of your new book.
•Letting your colleagues know about a job opportunity.
•Notifying us of a new website that you want to share with the work and family community.
•Informing us of your TV or radio appearance by providing the link to your interview or news story.

Do you have an article from a news magazine or the popular press that is of interest to the work and family community but not “scholarly” or suitable for the Work and Family Commons? Consider posting it to the News Feed.

Writing a blog?  You can write an original blog or cross post a blog from another website and post it to the News Feed.

News posted to the feed will be auto shared with our Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts. Please follow us on Twitter (@wfrn), like us on Facebook and join our group on Linkedin.

How can you get the news?

1. Go to the home page.
2. Sign up to receive a daily email of all the new items on the website (news, repository, events etc).
3. Sign up for a subscription to our News Feed (delivered to your web-based reader such as Google Reader)

Calendar item to announce? You can view and post an event on our Calendar.  You will be able to inform the work and family community about a conference, workshop, event, or meeting?  You can let others know if you are having a webinar, or looking to inform your colleagues about a call for papers.

That’s it for the Work and Family Blog.  Today will be our final posting.  Previous posts are located in the Archive section of the new website.

Many people have contributed to the success of the Work and Family blog.  At this time, I’d like to especially thank Mary Curlew for her weekly “What’s New in Work and Family” blogs and Jen Hale for her administration and coordination of the blog postings.

Thank you for your support of the blog. I encourage you to become involved with the new Work and Family Researchers Network.

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Exciting news!  We are pleased to announce the launch of Stage One of the new Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) website.  The new WFRN (formerly the Sloan Work and Family Research Network), was formed in response to the need for an international membership association of interdisciplinary work and family researchers and scholars. The WFRN also welcomes the participation of policy makers and practitioners as it seeks to promote knowledge and understanding of work and family issues among the community of global stakeholders.

Starting today, you can browse the new website, create your own login, view and post to our News Feed and Calendar as well as access the Sloan Network Archive.  In addition, you can sign-up to become a member of WFRN.

Members will take leadership roles in running all facets of the organization, and in providing content of interest to the interdisciplinary work and family research community.

Here’s how you can get involved with the WFRN:

•    Visit our new website

•    Become a member

•    Get a login to contribute content

•    Read and post news items to our News Feed

•    View and post events to our Calendar

•    Access the Sloan Network Archive

•    Submit a paper or symposium for our June 14-16, 2012 conference in New York City, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Work and Family. Deadline September 30, 2011.

Later this fall when we launch Stage Two of the website, we will introduce the Work and Family Commons (WFC). WFC is a new open access subject matter repository hosted by the WFRN; the first such repository created to gather and preserve the intellectual output of the work and family research community and to offer immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, worldwide.

Your support and participation will help to advance, promote, and preserve interdisciplinary work and family scholarship and move the field forward.  We encourage you to become a member and get involved.

Questions?  Visit FAQ or Contact us.

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This is my final Work and Family blog as the Sloan Network transitions in September to the new Work and Family Researchers Network, an international membership organization of interdisciplinary work and family researchers. At that time, this blog will stop operating. Therefore, it seemed fitting for me to take this opportunity to reflect on what I have learned from working at the Sloan Network.

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, before coming to the Network, I was a clinical social worker in private practice with a specialty in maternal and child mental health. I had been and am still active in Postpartum Support International (PSI), a grass roots organization that seeks to educate family, friends, healthcare providers, and policymakers about postpartum mood disorders. PSI’s primary goal is to help moms and moms-to-be, as well as their families, find the support they need following the birth of a child. To me, it seemed like a natural progression to put these skills and passion for family health to work at a job that focuses on work and family.

Although I had some idea through my clinical work about how important the interface between work and family is to our overall well-being, I have been amazed at the impact this field has had in international, national and local discussions on employee health, productivity, definitions of family and the nature of work, just to name a few.

When I first began at the Network, I thought the work and family conversation really was about employees, primarily women, and their need to balance competing demands from work and family, often sacrificing the former for the later. How wrong I was! A quick look at the Sloan Network’s topic pages proves otherwise. During my tenure at the Network, we added four new topic pages, Disabilities and Employment, Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD), Single Workers and Fathers, Caregiving and Work, reflecting the move away from this limited point of view.

In addition, I have gathered almost 700 research articles and reports on various work and family topics since I began managing the Literature Database in February of 2010. I also enjoy following work and family news and trends through our Twitter feed. These articles and reports reflect not only a growing awareness and interest in the work and family field by legislators, the media, and the average Joe (and Joanna), but a broadening of the demographic focus through titles such as Workplace flexibility can spur business innovation, Beyond the breadwinner: Professional dads speak out on work and family and Flexible workplace solutions for low-wage hourly workers. Of course, I can’t leave out the National Dialogue on Workplace Flexibility as a prime example of the importance of work and family research.

Thank you researchers and readers for sharing your depth of experience and insight with this “newbie” over the past couple of years. I have greatly appreciated your work, passion and intellect. I look forward to seeing the future of work and family research and collaboration emerge through the Work and Family Researchers Network. I am grateful to have been part of these exciting times.

• Organizations , Policy , Publications , Research , Transition
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Jerry A. Jacobs has been a member of the faculty in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1983, when he completed his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard. He has served as the Editor of the American Sociological Review and the President of the Eastern Sociological Society. His research has addressed a number of aspects of women’s employment, including authority, earnings, working conditions, part-time work and work-family conflict, and entry into male-dominated occupations.  Jacobs’ current research projects include a study of interdisciplinary scholarly communication with grant support from the Alfred P. Sloan and Lyle M. Spencer Foundations. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

“Put your goods where the traffic is. Make it easy for your customers to find you.” I don’t know if my grandfather ever said these exact words, but in our family lore, this was his motto. When searching for a location for his tailor shop in Brooklyn, he would stand on street corners in order to gauge the number of pedestrians passing by at lunch time. Years later, when he built a hotel in the Catskill Mountains, he made sure we had three post-office addresses, in Liberty, Ferndale and Loch Sheldrake, in an effort to make sure that no letter sent by a prospective client was returned to sender.

Researchers and scholars are similarly interested in making it easy for the public to find their writing. They have long sought out high-visibility journals and prestigious presses for their publications. Today, the routes to visibility are changing. Posting research online increasingly represents an important complement to the traditional route of publishing. Online accessibility usually does not impinge on the ability to publish the material in a journal, although it is important to check the journal policies.

There are a variety of venues for posting online, including your own homepage. The Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) is hosting an open access subject matter repository — the Work and Family Commons (WFC), which is being watched with interest by information science professionals. Documents in this repository will be accessible by anyone with internet access, and will be searchable by Google and other browsers.

By featuring an extensive collection of materials related to work and family issues, the WFC becomes a go-to destination for those seeking the latest and most authoritative research in this area. This builds on the successful history of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network. Currently, this website garners some 50,000 page views per month, in no small part because of the 12,000 citations and reports compiled over the last decade. In my own research, I have found that searches on the Sloan Network Literature Database have fewer irrelevant items and a larger share of materials pertinent to my inquiries, compared with general internet or library searches.

Going forward, we anticipate that the WFC will build on this legacy. Compared to the Sloan Literature Database, the WFC will have expanded capabilities. In addition to the citations from the former Sloan Network Literature Database, full-text versions of articles submitted by authors also will be available. Work and family scholarship will be just a mouse-click away – but this goal will only be realized if we all deposit our research to this site. In other words, this will be a community-driven repository; we will not have a library staff to cull relevant work and family articles for us.

So the big question, how long did it take for me to gather these materials for a special prelaunch opportunity with the WFC?   I collected post prints of my own journal articles and first chapters of my books for uploading to the WFC as part of an effort to populate it with entries prior to launch. It did not take long – much less time than it took to set up the research section of my own homepage. Going forward, we have endeavored to make the process as simple and easy as possible.  And, after you have done this once, we hope that you will make submitting to the WFC a routine part of your efforts to circulate your new research.

We are excited about the launch of the WFC later this fall.  We realize that the process of depositing materials to the Work and Family Commons will be unfamiliar for some users. We will have detailed instructions on our website and will create a tutorial that provides additional guidance. We will sponsor workshops about open access and depositing to the WFC at the June 2012 WFRN conference.

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As you know, the Sloan Network is transitioning to the new Work and Family Researchers Network.  We know that many of you are interested in continued access to the resources previously provided by the Sloan Work and Family Research Network. I wanted to reassure you that we have done our best to archive the most popular content from the Sloan Network on the new website.

Here’s what the Archive will contain.

• Blog Entries from this Work and Family blog (over 500 posts)
• Encyclopedia Entries (will be located in the new open access repository, Work and Family Commons)
• Glossary terms
• International Corner reports from the Network News
• Links to work and family websites
• Literature Database citations (will be located in the new open access repository, Work and Family Commons)
• Network News
• Policy Resources
• Bills & Statutes
• Bills by Theme
• Policy Briefs
• Statutes by Theme
• Statistics or Fact Sheets
• Teaching Resources
• Additional Teaching Resources
• Syllabi
• Teaching Activities
• Teaching Modules
• Workshop & Class Activities
• Topic Pages
• Who’s Who
• Workplace Resources
• Effective Workplace Series
• Family-Friendly Employers
• The Wharton Work/Life Integration Project Case Studies
• Workplace Flexibility Case Studies

We will launch Stage 1 of our new website in September 2011.  At that time, you will be able to create a login, view and post to our News Feed and Calendar as well as access the Sloan Network archive.  In addition, you can sign-up to become a member of WFRN. Later this fall during Stage 2 of our launch, you will be able to view and deposit materials to our subject-matter open access repository, the Work and Family Commons.  You will continue to have access to the Sloan Network website until the full launch and then the Sloan Network will close.

We anticipate that you will find that the WFRN website has new features for information sharing and research dissemination in addition to the excellent content that you’ve enjoyed in the past.

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Featured Guest Blogger
September 9th, 2011

Martha Muldoon is an independent consultant providing individuals and organizations with assistance in a wide range of targeted areas including: project management, documentation, web and print content writing and editing –such as resource guides and communications materials – along with benchmark, best practice and other research and analysis to help organizations operate productively and perform strategically. Formerly the Director of Work/Life Initiatives at BankBoston, Martha has worked with the Sloan Network since 2006 in a variety of capacities including project manager for FlexNet, a proprietary web-based resource for Sloan Foundation flexibility grantees. Martha was also responsible for a quality control overhaul of the Network’s statistics database and, most recently, has been a member of the transition team supporting the evolution of the Network from grant funding to sustainability including the development and implementation of the new WFRN website and the creation of the open access repository component described in this blog. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

When the second stage of the new WFRN website launches later this fall, it will include a unique resource for those who create, read, teach, study or follow the latest scholarship from the work and family research community. WFRN will host the Work and Family Commons (WFC), an open access subject matter repository; the first such repository devoted exclusively to interdisciplinary work and family research.

A repository, as the name implies, is an online collection of information (e.g., reports, journal articles, conference papers and presentations, books, book chapters, and working papers). The WFC repository was created to gather and preserve the intellectual output of the international work and family research community.

Open access (or OA) is a newer term describing a movement aimed at offering immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, worldwide. To learn more about open access, go here.

Put the two together and you get the Work and Family Commons. Materials will be submitted directly by authors, including faculty, researchers, staff, and other contributors. Anyone with an interest in this area will be welcome to access and browse the materials free of charge.

Open access is principally about availability. It is about how we access, use and share information. OA enables scholarly literature – often in the form of journal articles – to be publicly available for free on the web. OA can remove some traditional barriers, such as costly subscriptions, for those who wish to read, copy, use and even re-use information via the internet. Open access is a relatively new movement, but it is gaining momentum in many areas of academic scholarship. Next month will be the fifth annual Open Access Week; a global event that promotes OA as a “new norm” in scholarship and research.

For the academic work and family community, OA seems tailor-made to strengthen the rich tradition of sharing knowledge inherent to the advancement of scholarship. Not only do many universities, both public and private, have open access policies and institutional repositories for faculty research, some (e.g., Harvard) have instituted a policy that mandates open access publishing of all faculty papers. Many funders – most notably the National Institutes of Health – have adopted a policy requiring open access for journal articles with findings from any NIH funded research.

Open access can increase the audience for an authors’ work by expanding its reach beyond typical subscription-based journals that are often only available to students and researchers at particular libraries. It also gives other interested individuals broader access to materials they need to complete their own research. OA can spark new collaborations and innovations and can level the playing field for faculty and students across institutions by providing equal access to resources suitable for a given curriculum.

OA is not only compatible with existing academic culture, it can actually transform the ability to conduct research across disciplines and therefore, is a good fit for interdisciplinary work and family scholars and researchers. In the words of the enthusiasts at Open Access Week, “OA has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship.”

We encourage you to visit the Work and Family Commons when it debuts on the new WFRN website later this fall.

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Welcome to cohort 3 (2011-2012) of the Early Career Scholars program!  As you may know, the Sloan Network is transitioning to the Work and Family Researchers Network.  As part of the transition, we are continuing the successful Early Career Scholars program with 2o new participants.

The selection process proved to be very challenging, as we received 80 applications, nearly all of which were from candidates well-suited to the intent of the program. In order to rank potential participants, special attention focused on a number of factors, but most importantly, the centrality of work-family concerns on research and teaching, the interest in the various components of the program, and the promise of scholarship relative to that of others in one’s graduating cohort. Beyond individual level concerns, achieving intellectual diversity within the cohort was also taken into account, with the intent of representing the various disciplines central to work and family scholarship. Finally, after all of those concerns were considered, and when all else was relatively equal, candidates who had moderate experience beyond their degree award were prioritized over those who were nearing the end of the tenure clock or those who had most recently earned their degrees, as they stand to benefit most from the mentorship and feedback provided through the program.

Below are the selected applicants for cohort 3 of the Early Career Scholars program:

•    Carrie Alexandrowicz Shandra, Hofstra University
•    Deirdre Anderson, Cranfield University
•    Bhavani Arabandi, Ithaca College
•    Medora Barnes, John Carroll University
•    Stacye Blount, Fayetteville State University
•    Erynn Masi de Casanova, University of Cincinnati
•    Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya, Middlesex University Business School
•    Sarah Damaske, Pennsylvania State University
•    Gwen Daverth, Manchester Business School
•    Jessica Hardie, Pennsylvania State University
•    Margo Hilbrecht, University of Guelph
•    Arielle Kuperberg, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
•    Pamela Lirio, EDHEC Business School, Lille Campus
•    Whitney Morgan, University of Houston–Downtown
•    Elizabeth Poposki, Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis
•    Jessica Rolston, University of Colorado at Boulder, Pikes Peak Community College
•    Leah Ruppanner, University of Hawaii, Hilo
•    Lisa Stewart, California State University, Monterey Bay
•    Ana Villalobos, Brandeis University
•    Marci Ybarra, University of Chicago

The new WFRN is excited to help with mentoring the next generation of work and family scholars!

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Things are changing as we transition from the Sloan Network to the new Work and Family Researchers Network and I wanted to keep you informed.

First, many of you know that we distributed the final issue of The Network News last week.  Since 1999, The Network News has been delivered by the Sloan Work and Family Research Network to over 5,000 readers. We would like to acknowledge the many staff, students and contributors who made the Network News the great resource that you have enjoyed. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our loyal readers over the years and invite you to continue to be part of our community as we evolve into the new Work and Family Researchers Network.

Second, we are thrilled to announce that we will launch Stage 1 of our new website in September 2011.  Later this month, you will be able to create a login, view and post to our News Feed and Calendar as well as access the Sloan Network archive.  In addition, you can sign-up to become a member of WFRN.

Later this fall during Stage 2 of our launch, you will be able to view and deposit materials to our subject-matter open access repository.  You will continue to have access to the Sloan Network website until the full launch and then the Sloan Network will close. If you would like to be added to our mailing list so we can keep you updated on these activities, please email us.

Lastly, new blog posts this month will focus on the features available on the new website of the WFRN. Once the new website is operational, we will close the Work and Family blog sponsored by the Sloan Network.  It’s hard to believe that since April 2009, we have published over 500 posts.  Previous blog posts will be archived on our new website.  Thank you to all our blog readers and contributors!

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Featured Guest Blogger
September 5th, 2011

Rachel Connelly is the Bion R. Cram Professor of Economics at Bowdoin College and currently the chair of the economics department.  She is also the mother of four children, one born before, one born during, and two born after tenure.  Her new book written with Kristen Ghodsee, Professor Mommy: Finding Work/Family Balance in Academia, on which this essay is based is full of advice for young women graduate students on how to succeed on the tenure track without having to give up motherhood, and the professor mommies at all levels of academia walking the tightrope of work and family life.  Connelly’s academic research is also in the area of work/family issues more specifically on the economics of childcare.  Her book, coauthored with Deborah DeGraff and Rachel Willis, Kids at Work:  The Economics of Employer Sponsored On Site Child Care (W. E. Upjohn Institute Press, 2004), is a case study of employee response to employer sponsored on-site care and her book, coauthored with Jean Kimmel, The Time Use of Mothers in the United States at the Turn of the 21st Century (W. E. Upjohn Institute Press, 2010)  uses time diary data to measure the determinants of time devoted to both child giving and employment. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

As occupations go, it would be hard to find one with more time-of-day flexibility than a university professor.  Oh, we do need to show up at class time each week of the term and have the exam written by exam time and all too often there is a committee meeting that we need to attend but other than that our time is our own.  Right?  Of course, right!  But also, oh so wrong! This may be the cruelest trick of all to those of us enticed by our love of schooling into hopes of a job as a university professor.  (And there are a lot of cruel tricks to choose among such as the low starting salaries, the small number of positions relative to applicants, etc.)

As Kristen Ghodsee and I have written about in our book, Professor Mommy:  Finding Work/Family Balance in Academia (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), the ultimate time flexibility of the academic profession lures many an unsuspecting victim away from the path of work/family balance.  There are lessons to be learned here that are true for any job that offers time-of-day flexibility.  We can fail at either end of the spectrum.  The flexibility of the job can cause us to work too much or to not work enough.  For many, there is a tendency to work too much.  The job is so flexible that there is always something else you could (should) be doing—another article to read before we write, another variation of the model to be explored.  Our graduate school professors often model these life choices for us such that we think that it is the only path there is.

New technology only exacerbated the problem.  My laptop is now powerful enough to estimate my complex econometric models and I can access my university library from anywhere in the world.  As much as we enjoy our work, working all the time is not healthy.  We need to leave time for relationships, families, and giving back to our communities.

On the other side of the coin, many parents of young children, particularly mothers, make the mistake of not allocating enough uninterrupted time to the job once the baby is born.  One needs to be very vigilant to not fall into the flexibility trap—the “I’ll pick up the kids after school” trap, the “I will work when the baby is napping” trap.  If your university is paying you to be a full time instructor/researcher then you need to allocate enough time each week to be successful at your task.  Only a small percentage of success in academics, as in any field, comes from brilliance.  Instead, most success comes from what I like to call “fanny power,” that is, the willingness to sit on one’s fanny for a long time and do what needs to be done.  You can’t do this and drive the kids to piano lessons at the same time.

Too many mothers fail to get tenure or opt out of the tenure track all together because they have been the flexible ones at home, the one who stays home when the child is sick, or attends the parent/teacher conference in the middle of the day.  Yes, we do have the flexibility to do that but understand that two hours off in the middle of the day needs to be made up sometime else in the week.  For some of us, this means working when the kids are asleep or working on the weekend when your partner is available.  For me though, I chose to be the least flexible with my time when the kids were young.  When the children were young, I worked very predictable (but finite) hours, literally 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, so that everyone, my husband, my kids and I all knew when it was time for Mom to be at work and when it was time that the kids could expect my attention.  Being structured with my time insured that I worked enough hours, but not too many.  Yes, I always wished I could be home more, but I also wished I could work more.

So yes, flexibility is something we value in a job, but once you get the job, give yourself a fighting chance.  Protect your best time for the most challenging aspects of the job, allocate enough time to do a good job but not so much that you lose the rest of what life is all about:  a life that involves work, family and community.

• Family Leave , Leave , Maternity/Paternity Leave , Workplace , gender
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New from the Sloan Work and Family Research Network:

• The final issue of the Network News: Featuring an interview with Stephen Sweet on the Anticipated and Unanticipated Consequences of Work-Family Policy: Insights from International Comparative Analysis and the International Corner with Siyka Kovacheva on Work and Family in Bulgaria.
• This is my last What’s New in Work and Family blog, as we wind down the operations of the Sloan Network in preparation for the transition to the new Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) next month. September blog posts will focus on the features available on the new website of the WFRN. Once the new website is operational, we will close the blog. Thank you to all our readers and contributors!
• We encourage you to stay current with the latest work and family news by getting involved with the new WFRN. When we launch our new website next month, you will be able to get and share the latest news, learn about and post upcoming events, find archived Sloan Network resources and join as a member. Later in the fall, you will be able to access and contribute content to our work and family open access repository.

New from the Work and Family Researchers Network:

• Call for Papers: Submission deadline: September 30, 2011
• Inaugural Conference: New York, NY: June 14-16, 2012

New, free work and family content online:

• The Atlantic: Why Summer Vacations (and the Internet) Make You More Productive
• BusinessWeek: Grandparents Play a Bigger Role in Child-Rearing
• Mass Medical Law Report: Paid Sick-day Law Could Save $22.7M
• Forbes: The Companies Doing the Most to Make Their Employees Happier
• The Glass Hammer: Flex and Job Security: The New Balancing Act
• Huffington Post: Working Moms: Work-Life Balance Affected By Language Used, Kellogg Study Finds
• Harvard Business Review: Why Are India’s Women So Stressed Out?
• Telework Research Network: California Telework Savings Could Be Huge: Work Anywhere Symposium 2011

• Dependent Care , Economics , Flexible Schedules , Leave , Mothers and Fathers , New on the Network , Organizations , Parenting , Policy , Publications , Research , Scheduling , Spillover , Telework , Transition , Vacation , Workplace , gender
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