The comparative analysis of reconcilement policies promoted by European countries highlight the presence of various intervention models. The data suggest diversifying reconcilement tools to meet the needs expressed by increasingly more heterogeneous family and life models but also to support the centrality of system actions aimed at the provision of public care services with flexible times, of high quality and contained costs which contribute to overturning the gender division of care. Public intervention also allows the reduction of costs which would otherwise be sustained by enterprises thus reducing poverty and social inequalities in the long term as well as increasing productivity given the positive effects on learning capacity and living conditions of the new generations.only subscribers can see the full article

Starting out from the premise that in order to encourage work/family reconcilement, it’s important to intervene at various levels - the sharing and redistribution of care work, market-targeted work modalities, organisation of local services, times and usability of life spaces - the paper examines the Italian case, demonstrating how reconcilement policies have been developed and consolidated due to pressure from the Eu and the importance of a nucleus of norms, the most important being law 53/2000. The variety of experiences conducted are traced back to three successive intervention phases and a type of reconcilement «measures» integrated by some proposals. Lastly, some critical aspects are highlighted for the development of these policies and the positive role of organisational innovation prospected and the resort to more advanced models for flexibility management. only subscribers can see the full article

The paper analyses the relationship between life and working times and the transformations that have occurred in the passage from the Fordist, post-Fordist to today’s «globalised» society. The main contradictions that stem from the requirements for hyper-flexibility of working hours (synchronisation and desynchronisation, relocation of temporal rigidity and life quality, uncertainty, market risk and precariousness, the need for emergent security and the crisis of the system of guarantees) are listed. The matter of temporal flexibility is placed in relation to the other three dimensions of work flexibility: functional, numerical, wage. Some policy-making implications are developed from the concept of sustainable flexibility.only subscribers can see the full article

The author examines in this paper four interconnected issues: the ambivalent nature of work flexibility, which on the one hand makes work more precarious yet on the other seems to give greater opportunities for professional growth; the increasing «social recognition» of non occupational activities such as care or voluntary work; and, as a consequence, the prospects of a realignment between working and life times and the requirement for a new organisation of the protection system to provide answers to old as well as new risks and opportunities.only subscribers can see the full article