A Time for Renewal: developing a sustainable community, work and family interface

The 7th International Community, Work and Family conference will take place on 25-27 May 2017 at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, Italy. A pre-conference doctoral workshop will be held on May 24.

The conference will bring together experts and academics from a broad range of countries and disciplines. It intends to contribute to the debate on the relationships between community, work and family and stimulate further research in a multistakeholder perspective. It will also provide a unique networking opportunity for scholars who are interested in comparative and multidisciplinary research.

Overview

Contemporary societies face a set of critical challenges, which need to be carefully considered in relation to the community, work and family interface. Many forces at play (such as demographic shifts, mass migrations, global economic and financial trends, increases in unemployment and precarious employment, work intensification, technological advancement, new care needs and dynamics, budget constraints and austerity policies) may have serious long-term consequences for workers, companies and society as a whole if not properly managed. In this regard, the great recession has adversely affected the wellbeing and quality of life of many people and households. It also revealed that the institutional foundations of contemporary societies may have hampered the development of meaningful relationships between work and non-work domains, spread inequalities, threatened social cohesion, and led to an overconsumption of social, economic and environmental resources.

Hence recasting work, family and community settings, as well as their interface in a sustainable manner is a serious challenge. This challenge is the focus of the 7th International Community, Work and Family conference.

Within this general framework, we invite contributions (i.e. papers and posters) and proposals (for symposia, panel discussions, and author-meets-critics sessions) that address, theoretically or empirically, the issue of sustainability and its constitutive social, economical, political and ethical aspects, possibly from a multi-stakeholder perspective.