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The paper considers the impact of work‐life balance policies on the work and family practices of professional, dual‐earner parents with dependent children, by assessing the extent to which “well‐balanced families” have been resultantly facilitated. It poses two research questions: the first centres on how far work‐life balance policies have better enabled working parents to manage their commitments to employers and children, whilst the second focuses on how far parental and employer responses to work‐life balance policies may be gendered. The ultimate aim is to (re)‐articulate the importance of gender in the work‐life balance agenda.

The paper draws upon historical and conceptual research on work and family practices. It invokes gender as a lens through which notions of the “well‐balanced family” are considered.

It is argued that work‐life balance policies have not led to well‐balanced, or “gender‐neutral”, work and family practices. This is for two reasons, both relating to gender. First, the take up of work‐life balance policies is gendered, with more mothers than fathers working flexibly. This is partly because organizational expectations fail to acknowledge social change around the paternal parenting role. Second, work‐life balance policies focus mainly on the issues of paid work and childcare, failing to take account of domestic labour, the main burden of which continues to be carried by mothers.

Deeply ingrained social assumptions about the gendered division of labour within heterosexual couples limit the impact of work‐life balance policies on work family practices.

The paper moves forward the debate on work‐life balance through taking an interdisciplinary approach to an issue which has often been addressed previously from discipline‐specific approaches such as health, psychology or policy.

The growing demands of work and life have shifted the concept of work-life balance to work-life integration (WLI). The success of integration depends upon the flexibility to perform the duties. This paper aims to explore the factors that affect WLI and the role of flexible work arrangements (FWAs) in the process of WLI.

Systematic literature review was used to explore the concept of WLI and FWAs. A bibliometric analysis was carried out with Bibexcel and VoSviewer.

This paper explained the organizational and personal factors that create the demand for WLI. The FWAs, perceived flexibility, technology and self-efficacy have important roles in WLI. The result of WLI can be enrichment or strain, depends upon how effectively the work-life domains are integrated.

This paper explores the work-life from both personal and organizational views. The findings of this paper will be useful to design the organizational policies and work arrangements that match the requirements of employees and organizations. This paper helps to develop the future research agenda of investigating the relations of WLI to performance, organizational policies and personal factors.

Three basic approaches to retail institutional change can be discerned in the last 30 years. The first contends that institutional evolution is a function of developments in the socio‐economic environment. The second argues that change occurs in a cyclical fashion. The third considers inter‐institutional conflict to be the mainspring of retail change. None of those approaches is found to be entirely satisfactory, and a series of combination theories has been posited. It is argued that regional institutional change is the result of environmental forces and a cycle‐like sequence of inter‐institutional conflict.

This paper aims to respond to calls in academia for an update of the product lifecycle (PLC). Through a systematic literature review, the authors provide an updated agenda, which aims to advance the PLC concept in research, teaching and practice.

The authors started by surveying 101 marketing academics globally to ascertain whether a PLC update was viewed necessary and beneficial in the marketing community and thereafter conducted citation analysis of marketing research papers and textbooks to ascertain PLC usage. The subsequent literature review methodology was split into two sections. First, 97 empirical articles were reviewed based on an evaluative framework. Second, research pertaining to the PLC determinants were assessed and discussed.

From the results of this review and primary data from marketing academics, the authors find that the method of predicting the PLC based on past sales has been largely unsuccessful and perceived as somewhat outdated. However, a new stream of PLC literature is emerging, which takes a consumer-centric perspective to the PLC and has seen more success at modeling lifecycles in various industries.

First, the study outlines the most contemporary and successful methodological approaches to modeling the PLC. Namely, the use of artificial intelligence, big data, demand modeling and consumer psychological mechanisms. Second, it provides several future research avenues using modern market trends such as sustainability, globalization, digitization and Covid-19 to push the PLC into the 21st century.

The PLC has shown to be resolutely popular in management application and education. However, without a continued effort in academic PLC research to update the knowledge around the concept, its use as a productive management tool will likely become outdated. This study provides a necessary and comprehensive literature update resulting in actionable future research and teaching agendas intended to advance the PLC concept into the modern market context.

The purpose of this study is to compare the gender gaps in work–life balance satisfaction across occupations. Due to data limitations, the studies of work–life balance satisfaction have generally relied on researcher collected data. As a result, large-scale studies encompassing all occupations in the same social and policy context are rare. In several cycles of the Canadian General Social Survey, the respondents are directly asked about their work–life balance (WLB) satisfaction. The present paper takes advantage of this unique opportunity to compare the gender gap in WLB satisfaction across occupations in Canada.

This paper pools four cross-sectional datasets (N = 37,335). Multivariate regression analysis is used.

Women in management and education are found to have a lower WLB satisfaction than their male counterparts. Conversely, and rather surprisingly, a WLB satisfaction advantage is found for women in transport over males in this occupation. Further investigation shows that the female WLB advantage in transport is driven by the relatively low WLB satisfaction of males in this occupation, while the opposite is true for education.

The findings are discussed in light of the WLB policies and their increasing gender-blindness.

This paper is the first large-scale study which compares the gender gap in WLB satisfaction across occupations, in a given policy context.

Using the example of medication safety, this paper aims to explore the impact of three managerial interventions (adverse incident reporting, ward‐level support by pharmacists, and a medication safety subcommittee) on different professional communities situated in the English National Health Service (NHS).

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with clinical and managerial staff from two English NHS acute trusts, supplemented with meeting observations and documentary analysis.

Attitudes toward managerial intervention differ by professional community (between doctors, nurses and pharmacists) according to their existing norms of safety and perceptions of formal governance processes.

The heterogeneity of social norms across different professional communities and medical specialties has implications for the design of organisational learning mechanisms in the field of patient safety.

The paper shows that theorisation of professional “resistance” to managerialism privileges the study of doctors' reactions to management with the consequent neglect of the perceptions of other professional communities.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the importance and influence of paternity leave on individual level organizational outcomes. Drawing on signaling theory, the study examines the relationship between paid paternity leave entitlement (PPLE) and organizational attractiveness (OA) through a mediating path of anticipated organizational support (AOS). Furthermore, the study proposes that this mediated relationship would be conditional on traditional masculinity ideology (TMI) such that the relationship would be stronger for individuals who score low on TMI.

The study analyzed a moderated mediation model using the data from a survey experiment. Data were collected from 264 professionals enrolled in an executive education course and will soon be looking for employment.

The findings supported the mediating role of AOS between PPLE and OA. As predicted, the positive impact of PPLE on AOS and OA is stronger for individuals scoring low on TMI.

This study takes a multidisciplinary approach to understand the underlying mechanisms that impact decisions related to employers. It is one of the few studies that study paternity leave in the Indian context and makes important contributions to theory and practice.

Reports the findings of a study that examined the relative impact of various marketing strategies on the performance of mature products in a rapidly developing country, South Korea, from a contingency theory perspective. The results indicate that the competitive environment of the maturity stage in the product life cycle in Korea can be classified into four distinctive types and that different strategies have different effects on product performance for each type of environment. The results also suggest that generally, vertical integration and product/ service improvement strategies have the most significant influence on the performance of the mature products in Korea. Discusses implications of the results for domestic and international marketers in the country.

Recent gender-related research has focused on how gender affects work–life balance (WLB), particularly whether men and women have similar difficulties balancing work and family demands. However, to broaden WLB research beyond its concentration on employees to a different population, this study investigates the WLB experiences of single student-working mothers.

This article uses a qualitative study using three focus groups to compare Nigerian and British single student-working mothers' WLB experiences and coping strategies or mechanisms adopted in these two contexts.

The findings indicate that, regardless of nationality, single student-working mothers are affected by inter-role conflict, role ambiguity, role strain, role overload and external role pressures, which make achieving WLB a herculean task. Nevertheless, given the different political, economic and socio-cultural landscapes of the two countries, the extent to which the aforementioned factors impact single student-working mothers varies and influences the range of coping mechanisms adopted in the two contexts.

The insights gleaned from this study suggest that there are huge challenges for single student-working mothers in terms of achieving WLB due to their status as students, workers and mothers. Combining these roles negatively affect their WLB and level of productivity and effectiveness, at home, at work and at university. This poses significant implications for human resource structures, policies and practices. The authors suggest that single student-mothers should learn from their counterparts' experiences and coping mechanisms, and that organisations and government should also provide adequate support to help them combine their challenging roles. This would ease the tension associated with combining multiple roles and enhance their well-being and WLB.

The study calls for a re-examination of WLB policies and practices at organisational and national levels to ensure that single student-working mothers are well supported to enhance their productivity and WLB.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the availability and the real use of work-life (WL) benefits by employees. Most research focuses on adoption, and some studies have analysed the levels of use. However, it is yet to be explained why some firms offer formal WL benefits, which ultimately are not used by employees.

The hypotheses developed here are tested using data from a sample of 146 Spanish private firms, which is very relevant because findings from research developed in Anglo-Saxon contexts cannot necessarily be extended elsewhere.

The results reveal that availability significantly influences the level of use of WL programmes. Both the proportion of women employees in the organization and the formalization of the WL balance culture moderate the relationship between availability and use.

These findings hold lessons for practitioners and researchers interested in WL balance and its actual diffusion among employees. Practitioners should consider WL balance in an unrestrictive way, thinking about different kinds of employees and not only women with caring responsibilities. The mere provision of benefits to a small part of the workforce does not guarantee any of the positive outcomes related to WL balance.

Aside from exploring the availability-use gap, this research was conducted in a non-Anglo-Saxon context.