! Conceptualising Work, Family and Community: What’s missing? Barbara Pocock, Philippa Williams and Natalie Skinner Centre for Work + Life, University of South Australia, Australia email: Barbara.pocock@unisa.edu.au Keynote address, International Industrial Relations Association Conference, Sydney, 23-27 th August 2009 This stream of research is new to the IIRA agenda and its addition is an important innovation. It builds upon the work of recent years to increase the analysis of work and family issues as well as the now long standing effort to see a gendered perspective applied in the field of industrial relations. The range and quality of papers in this stream attests to the importance of these issues to thinking about industrial relations now. In this contribution I want to reflect on some theoretical perspectives in making sense of work, family and community, and how they fit together and to explore the ways in which the perspectives of industrial relations are critical to a thorough and informed analysis of these connected issues. Industrial relations scholars and our tools and insights can contribute to making better sense of these relationships and their empirical outcomes, and thus the policy and action that might improve them. In these reflections, I draw on a body of empirical work that the Centre that I am associated with has been gathering over the past four years. In this light, this paper has three authors reflecting our joint work i . Locating our analysis of work in its larger context The experience of work, its conditions and relations are always located in particular household and community contexts. For many of the peak years of industrial relations scholarship over the past fifty years, these have been essentially background to analysis – not irrelevant to many employment phenomena, but not the focus of analysis. It is at moments of significant economic and social change that work’s location in particular household and community relations becomes obvious and of interest. One such moment was Polanyi’s ‘great transformation’ (1944) where he analyses the embeddedness of market regimes in the larger social and political fabric, and the ways in which a counter social movement is called into being by the operation of ‘free’ markets. Such an ‘embedded’, connected approach to analysis is appropriate to the current transformation underway in many economies as they witness the growing reach of labour markets into social life, with important implications for not only economic production but also social re-production. In pre-industrial Europe, there was much less separation of work from household life. While the division of labour was highly gendered, much work was conducted in and around the household, and community relations and their celebrations followed the seasonal contours of the agricultural year, with much greater spatial and temporal integration of work, family and community than we currently experience. As work moved into factories in the industrial revolution, work separated from home and national ‘labour markets’ emerged – with all their perpetual restructuring, and human relocation and dislocation. At the same time, at least in middleclass households, ‘breadwinner man’ gradually achieved at least discursive dominance in many societies, partnered by ‘domestic caring woman’ (Williams 2000). While this post- WWII ‘standard’ was far from prevalent in many poor, non-white communities it took root in many households and – with more powerful effect – in the psyche and imaginary of the citizens of industrialised nations like Australia. It is no surprise that the current profound changes in work arrangements in many countries are throwing the relationship between work, family and community into sharp relief – calling forward the kind of papers that this stream of industrial relations scholarship exhibits. Several factors are at play in ‘industrialised’ countries and beyond, and explain this essential line of intensified enquiry. These include: 1. the gradual displacement of breadwinner households; 2. the entry of women into paid work and the transformation of care regimes, including the redistribution of care to commodified exchanges (that fuel the growth of service sector employment)