| The increased labor force participation of women has created growing efforts on the part of work organizations to reduce role conflicts between work and family. Family programs are organized efforts by employers to ease family role conflicts that can potentially affect work performance. This project treats family programs as an organizational innovation and investigates how organizational characteristics shape innovation processes. Discrete event-history analysis are used to examine the effects of boundary-spanning units, political groups, organizational problem-solving approaches, and the organizational life-course on the adoption of work-family programs.;The data for this project comes from The Corporate Reference Guide survey of Fortune 1,000 firms (N = 188), my own survey of human resource departments, and archival sources (Dun and Bradstreet, Moody's, and Fortune).;This project represents a substantial contribution to organizational sociology by systematically following the development of a salient organizational innovation during the 1980s. This project also has policy implications because the research identifies structural obstacles that affect the adoption of family programs in the workplace. |
