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While current scholarship on innovation typically examines its antecedents, the purpose of this paper is to provide a more complete account by advocating for social impacts as a critical component of the sociological study of innovation.

This study adopts a conceptual approach to illustrate the ways in which innovation may generate unequitable outcomes. The authors illustrate the purpose of the paper by discussing strategically selected examples that are intended to reflect prominent themes and topics in the relevant literature.

The analysis suggests that while innovation yields many positive benefits, pervasive narratives about its virtues can be overstated when, in fact, innovation may generate adverse effects for particular social groups by reproducing or exacerbating inequality. The authors provide a more complete account of innovation by naming social impacts as a critical component of its sociological study and discussing examples that illustrate how innovation can produce disadvantageous effects by race, gender and social class. The authors move forward the discussion of social impacts by elaborating conditions in which innovation is likely to reproduce the status quo as well as ameliorate negative impacts.

While many studies have explained the conditions that foster innovation, this study pushes the boundaries of the study of innovation – a timely topic for practitioners and scholars in the fields of not only sociology, but management, education and public policy. Accordingly, we move forward the discussion of the social impacts of innovation by identifying the ways in which innovation is likely to reproduce structural inequalities.

The purpose of this chapter was to examine the implementation of a flexible work initiative that attempted to challenge two institutionalized precepts of contemporary white-collar workplaces: the gendered ideal worker norm, with its expectation of the primacy of paid work over family and personal life, and the assumption of managerial control over employees’ schedules and work location.

Using ethnographic and interview data, how the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) was experienced by employees in four different teams within the Best Buy, Co., Inc. corporate headquarters was explored.

Comparing more and less successful implementation across teams, results suggested that collective institutional work is required for the emergence of new norms, expectations, and legitimated practices. Findings indicated that managers’ task-specific knowledge – their deep experience with the tasks that the team is charged with completing – is a structural condition that facilitates managers’ trust in employees and encourages team experimentation with new practices.

Data for this study was limited to one organization and four teams. Future research should include similar organizational change efforts in other organizations and in larger teams.

These findings may promote a better understanding, among researchers and practitioners, of the importance of manager knowledge and background and how this appears to be key to achieving institutional change.

This research is an example of an innovative approach to workplace flexibility and applies an institutional theory lens to investigate variation in the implementation of organizational change.

This volume of Research in the Sociology of Work brings together chapters that address the intersection of work and family in the new economy. In our introductory chapter, we provide a short overview of some characteristics associated with the current era, briefly introduce the other chapters in the volume, and explain the major themes that connect them. The chapters are diverse – ranging from how precarious employment influences the boundaries workers create between work and family, to how social environments present within work teams, organizations, or nations shape the work–family intersection, and workplace interventions that aim to create more flexibility in when, where, and how work is done. Collectively, these chapters reflect some of the breadth present in the growing work–family field. We conclude with our parting thoughts about the current state of work–family scholarship.

This chapter investigates how normative beliefs attributed to insecure paid work and care responsibilities affect social understandings of the work–family boundary, and either challenge or reinforce traditional links between gender and moral obligation.

Within an interpretive approach and from a gender perspective, I present a discourse analysis of 41 interviews with Italian parents.

This chapter shows that women in the sample felt forced into blurred boundaries that did not suit their work–family normative beliefs. Men in the sample perceived that they had more boundary control, and they created boundaries that support an innovative fatherhood model. Unlike women, men’s boundaries aligned with their desires.

The specific target of respondents prevents empirical comparisons between social classes. Moreover, the cross-level analysis presented is limited: in particular, further investigation is required at the level of organizational cultures.

The study suggests not only thinking in terms of work–family boundary segmentation and integration but also looking at the normative dimensions which can either enhance or exacerbate perceptions of the work–family interface. The value of the study also stems from its theoretically relevant target.

With the rise in the number of women faculty since the 1970s, the traditional academic model of an exclusive devotion to work has been increasingly contested. Broad changes have occurred in academic culture and policies to make many universities more family-friendly. Recent research on graduate students points to a shift in attitudes about work/family management as well. Graduate students, both male and female, seem to balk at expectations for a sole devotion to an academic career to the exclusion of family life. We examine how faculty members carry out acts of resistance to this traditional model.

This article presents research from two separate but related qualitative studies for a combined sample of 74 faculty members with children.

Women and men faculty make professional and personal choices and engage in behaviors that, in essence, are acts of resistance against the dominant but perhaps “old” culture of academe.

Resistance to the ideal worker norm in academia has been largely overlooked in studies about faculty parents (particularly fathers) and work/family balance. We demonstrate how faculty members act as agents of social change in academia.