Project description
Navigating the challenges of flexible work and family life
In today’s fast-paced world, families find themselves entangled in the intricate dance between professional obligations and familial duties. The emergence of flexible working arrangements has further blurred the lines between work and home life. However, this shift often accentuates existing disparities, particularly favouring higher-status employees. With this in mind, the ERC-funded FLIN project explores the dynamics of contemporary families navigating flexible work. Spanning multiple countries, it explores the impact on family time, gender equality, child-rearing and partnership stability. By examining flexible work’s inequalities and contextual factors, FLIN aims to inform policy in the post-COVID-19 era. The findings will shed light on the benefits and challenges of flexible work in modern employment practices.
Objective
Families often lead time-intensive lives, having to balance the demands arising from the workplace and the family. With the recent shift towards flexible working – enabling employees to decide (partly) where and when to work – the spatial and temporal segregation of employment and family has been substantially reconfigured. Greater flexibility is one of the most important labour market transformations of our time.
FLIN creates new knowledge on how contemporary families combine employment and family in the context of flexible working. Taking a cross-national, couple-level perspective, FLIN will study the implications of flexible working for (1) family time, (2) gender equality in (un)paid work, (3) childbearing and partnership dissolution. It will also (4) monitor inequality in flexible working and (5) address the role of contextual factors. The project design is longitudinal with a focus on the “new normal” of flexible working after the COVID-19 pandemic. FLIN will generate a novel empirical and theoretical understanding of the work-family interface and its consequences, enabling policy development.
Because flexible working is mainly a privilege of higher status employees, its recent rise has the potential to exacerbate the socio-economic divide. If flexible working has predominantly positive consequences (e.g. more childcare time), higher-status families could disproportionally reap the benefits of this new development. Theoretical frameworks and past research are inconclusive as to whether flexible working leads to a better work-family balance or more difficulties in managing the work-family border. Considering that flexible working is an emerging social challenge for equality, clarification is urgently needed.
The project combines a detailed country analysis (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and Poland) with a comparison across the EU. It is based on high-quality, representative data: time use surveys, register data and the EU Labour Force Surveys
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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1010 Wien
Austria
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