Balance isn’t just about boundaries

New PhD thesis about Work-Life Management by Anders Raastrup Kristensen

The auditorium was full to bursting when Anders Raastrup Kristensen successfully defended his PhD thesis Metaphysical Labour: Flexibility, Performance and Commitment in Work-Life Management on January 8, 2010. The thesis is the result of an industrial PhD project completed at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy with funding by Rambøll Management and the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation .

The thesis is a critical contribution to theories about work-life balance, where there has been an increasing interest in the need for companies and employees themselves to set boundaries between work life and private life for many years. This does not seem to have reduced stress and frustration among employees, however, and Anders Raastrup Kristensen demonstrates in his thesis that the real issue is not about setting boundaries. Rather, it is about defining what counts as work for the individual. This changes the task of management (work-life management), so that it ceases to be about telling the employee that “it’s time to go home” and becomes a matter of inquiring into what work means for the individual. Why, for example, is the employee still at work? Or, Has the employee set too high a standard for the quality of his or her work? And the employee can ask: How much do I need to sleep in order to accomplish what I want to accomplish without getting tired? And, is it work to write emails on the weekend?

So work-life management is about making the employee more conscious about the rules they set up for their own self-management. But it is also about establishing a management focus on these individual rules, instead of discussing boundaries for the distribution of work with the employees.

The assessment committee said, among other things, that it is “a fascinating thesis combining philosophy with organizational sociology. It is an imaginative example of the use of philosophical ideas in seeking to understand an everyday problem of the relationship between work and life as currently characterised by the discourse on work-life balance.”

Links:

· Anders Raastrup Kristensens ph.d. afhandling

· Anders Raastrup Kristensens slides

· Anders Raastrup Kristensens hjemmeside