Work Orientations of Female Returners

Abstract

Hakim’s Preference Theory on the heterogeneity of the work-life preferences of women, and in particular its implicit assumption that a woman’s preference to work or to stay at home is based on her personal choices, has frequently been criticized. Other researchers emphasize the constraining influence that a woman’s personal, financial and family situation can have on her preferences. Our article aims at contributing to this debate by analysing the work orientations of female returners, in themselves a particular job-seeking category which differs noticeably from other categories in regard to their central motivation when considering whether or not to re-enter a paid job. Our research indicates that older female returners are more job and people oriented than younger ones. Female returners with a lower level of education and female returners with financial problems are money oriented, whereas higher educated female returners and female returners who are financially well off show more of a job orientation. Surprisingly, the presence of young children in the household does not significantly influence the work orientations of female returners.

Conceptualizing boundaries between ‘life’ and ‘work’

“…Crompton et al, 2005;Duncan et al, 2003). In a recent study of caring work for example, McKie et al (2002: 897) conclude: 'traditional assumptions about the seeming relationship between femininity and caring remain relatively intact, despite major shifts in family formation, women's participation in the labour market and debates about the Ransome: Conceptualizing boundaries between 'life' and 'work' 381 changing role of men' (emphasis added; see also Doorewaard et al, 2004;Marks and Houston, 2002;Simpson, 2004).…”

Preference Theory and Low Fertility: A Comparative Perspective

“…The same concept has been outlined by Tomlinson (2006), who observes that care networks, work status and the welfare policy context are three powerful forces which can either facilitate or impede the realization of every woman's work preferences, driving female trajectories toward and away from part-time work following maternity. Doorewaard et al (2004), focusing on a sub-sample of female returners 2 and analyzing women's orientations toward work-i.e. different reasons driving women's (re)entrance in the labour market-demonstrate a strong association between personal, financial and family constraints and women's work orientations.…”

Voicing job satisfaction and dissatisfaction through Twitter: employees’ use of cyberspace

“…These resonated with those found in the work orientations literature and so Doorewaard et al . 's () work orientations framework (2004) was adopted as the basis for categorizing the data. Following the manual coding, the keyword list was extended to include additional words that the same two researchers identified for each category within the most frequently occurring terms in each of the two high‐level clusters of tweets (hate and love).…”