WORK-FAMI LY BALANCE OR GREEDY ORGANI SATI ONS? Timothy Bartram, Rosaria Burchielli, Rani Thanacoody La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia t.bartram@latrobe.edu.au Abstract Can work-family balance exist in greedy organisations? Greedy organisations provide the minimum to workers. On the other hand, they sap as much as they can from workers; they make extraordinary demands on workers which workers meet with personal material resources; personal family and social resources, and personal non-material resources. Greedy institutions seek exclusive and undivided loyalty and they attempt to reduce the claims of competing role and status positions on those they wish to encompass within their boundaries. This paper examines qualitative data from interviews conducted with senior female managers at a major Australian bank. The paper critically examines the concept of work- family balance. Rather than work-family balance, the paper finds evidence that work is in conflict with life and that there is no balance for workers who must make many personal sacrifices in order to meet the expectations of the workplace, such as working long hours and leaning heavily on the social support of family and friends. Introduction Greedy organisations “make total claims on their members” and “attempt to encompass the whole personality”. These organisations are labelled “greedy” because they seek “exclusive and undivided loyalty” and they attempt to “reduce the claims” of their members. “Their demands on the person are omnivorous” (Coser 1974: 4). In the light of this, do greedy organisations care about work- family balance? In this paper we use the concept of greedy organisations to examine the excessive demands made on workers for their time and commitment, which has an impact on the notion of work-family balance. Over the past two decades as work has increasingly changed through the women’s participation in the labour force (Pocock 2003), firms increasingly searching for high profit margins (Rapoport and Bailyn 1998) and the deregulation of labour markets (Beynon et al. 2002), the notion of trying to achieve work-family balance has come to the fore. This is because it appears that employees are working longer hours with the result that there is less time for family, recreation and community (Pocock 2005). For example, in a recent address Lindsay Tanner MP suggested that “the scope for work to colonise discretionary time has soared” (Tanner 2006). For employees this poses a problem that needs to be addressed i.e., workers need to find a greater balance of work and life commitments since it would appear that work takes greater precedence than other commitments. This is borne out in the work intensification literature (Green 2001) which claims that employees’ work hours and work effort have been steadily increasing. In Australia and other advanced industrial economies, governments have advocated for the development of work-family balance initiatives (De Bruin and Dupuis 2004). Moreover, employers have jumped on the work-family balance bandwagon, at least in terms of rhetoric (De Bruin and Dupuis 2004; Fleetwood 2006). However, a number of academics have questioned whether employers are serious about supporting employees’ work-family balance goals (Burchell et al. 2002; De 1