Work–Family conferences I Organize and Chair
Honored to facilitate research generation, sharing and advancement in Work-Family.
9th International Conference of Work and Family
Social inequality, climate change and poverty around the world have people questioning our understanding of growth and development. We all are increasingly concerned about the way our decisions affect natural resources, impact the environment and foster economic growth. More voices are claiming that our current patterns of consumption, production and disposal might actually decrease the quality of life for future generations. For these reasons, organizations, individuals and society are ever more interested in building a shared vision to work toward a more sustainable way of life.
In 2015, the United Nations established the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs comprise 17 ambitious goals to be reached by 2030 under the pledge: Leave no one behind. The call to action includes topics such as eliminating hunger, tackling inequality and fighting climate change, collectively addressing social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainable development. With this, leaders should work toward peace and prosperity while ensuring the protection of our planet.
Since then, individuals and society have begun to demand more immediate answers. In 2018, Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish girl, became a global phenomenon after beginning a strike to fight for climate change. Her message went viral and resulted in multiple demonstrations all over the world. Society called upon leaders for answers and demanded that organizations work immediately toward a more sustainable world. It seems we need solutions to accelerate the process of achieving the proposed SDG agenda.
Policies that benefit the environment and individuals’ quality of life are part of efforts toward a sustainable society. The SDGs include physical, mental and social well-being as an objective on the road to healthy lives for all. Lately, the number of working adults with problems related to anxiety, quality of sleep, frustration and depression has risen. Addressing mental health is important in itself, but it is also relevant for organizations and society as part of their contribution to sustainable development. Organizations with employees that enjoy good health and high well-being benefit society. Healthy employees are better equipped to achieve sustainable human development. Therefore, we believe a healthy workplace is part of the path to a healthy world.
Through work-family balance, families and business can foster social responsibility, well-being, role modeling and sustainability. The 9th Biennial International Conference of Work & Family focus on individual and organizational capacity to manage work and social aspects of life under a sustainable view. We encourage research and discussion around solutions to make workplaces more sustainable – that is, that they promote employee well-being, family enrichment and environmental responsibility. We are interested in understanding practices, sociocultural aspects and institutional frameworks that motivate work-family balance and foster social, economic and environmental sustainability.
2019 Work and Family: Work family in the pursuit of happiness
Mireia chaired the 8th International Conference of Work and Family “Work Family in the Pursuit of Happiness” The Conference will took place in July 1st and 2nd at IESE, in Barcelona (Spain). We welcomed papers focused on the current and future transformations of work and family and their social and organizational implications, from a wide range of scientific perspectives: management, philosophy, empirical social sciences, law and regulation, and humanistic studies, among others.
The conference aimed to contribute in building a new vision of work and family that places the centrality of the human being at the core of the definition and practice of organizations and societies. It attracted more than 70 academics coming from over 20 countries.
2017 Work and Family” The (new) ideal worker”
Mireia co-chaired the 7th bi-annual International Conference of Work & Family, that focused on the (new) ideal workers, as well as on their needs, desires and new forms of flexibility.
In the seventies, Coser defined the Greedy Institutions as those institutions who asked their members for an “exclusive and undivided loyalty”. These institutions assumed that the “ideal worker” was the one who devoted long hours to their jobs with no family interference. In some sense, this image of “ideal worker” still exists, but empirical evidence seems to suggest that far from being positive for the organizations, having old “ideal workers” may have a negative impact on the 21st Century Organizations. Moreover, recent technological, social and demographic changes have reshaped the way people work and the way families organized themselves. In a situation like that, where more employees ask for a real work-family balance/integration, it was timely and relevant to examine the “new ideal worker”, to understand how companies could adapt to this new situation. We focused on the definition of the (new) ideal worker.
The Conference took place in July 3rd and 4th at IESE Campus in Barcelona, with more than 80 participants from the five continents, representing more than 20 nationalities.
2015 Work and Family “Balance, Technology and Globalization”
The sixth bi-annual International Conference of Work & Family focused on Balance, Technology, and Globalization.
In an age in which information technology has brought the promise of autonomy and control by allowing asynchronous communications; in which work systems have enabled people to work from various times and locations; in which work and non-work boundaries have as a result been blurred; the work and family interface needed to be reconsidered. In this conference, we were specifically interested in papers that focused on new perspectives in work-family that addressed a wide range of topics current problems, and contributed with solutions to those problems. For example, what are the impacts of changes in the global economy? How do global workers cope with work-family issues? How does information technology affect work-family dynamics?
The Conference took place in July 1st and 2nd, 2015, at IESE Campus in Barcelona.
