Welcome to the WFRN Research Feed!
The Research Feed is intended to make members of the work-family community aware of recent scholarship in academic publications (such as academic journals and books) or items of interest to the academic research community. The Research Feed canvases research journals that commonly publish work-family studies. The feed is presented on the WFRN website and is directed to members’ email accounts.
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Legacy Imprints and Categorisation Shifts: How Interpretations of Job Demands and Resources Change in Abrupt Transitions to Virtual Work
What happens when workers experience abrupt transitions to virtual working? Drawing on interviews with employees who were unexpectedly shifted to virtual work overnight, we show that people carry legacy imprints: expectations from face-to-face settings that shape how they initially classify job features as demands or resources. When lived experience in the virtual context contradicts these [Read More…]
October 2, 2026
Understanding Translation and Cultural Meaning-Making in Cross-Language Qualitative Research: Methodological Innovations and Challenges
Objective This article explores that translation in cross‐language qualitative research is not merely a technical procedure applied to already‐collected data but an interpretive, ethical, relational, and power‐influenced practice that shapes every stage of knowledge production. It establishes how culturally and religiously embedded concepts resist adequate interpreting into English academic prose, and it offers methodological strategies [Read More…]
October 2, 2026
Sustainable global careers: the role of career adaptability and cultural difference in expatriate health, happiness, and productivity
This study examines how career adaptability relates to career sustainability among expatriates and whether cultural differences between home and host countries moderate these relationships. Drawing on sustainable career theory, we conceptualise career sustainability through three interrelated indicators: health, happiness, and productivity. Given sustainable career theory’s emphasis on agency, we draw on career construction theory to [Read More…]
October 2, 2026
Family Economic Security after the COVID-19 Outbreak: Unions, Work-Life Balance Policies and Employment Outcomes
Unionization has been associated with benefits to workers, including higher wages compared to non-unionized workers and greater access to family-friendly work arrangements. In this paper, we consider another potential benefit of union representation by examining whether and how unions protected working parents from employment losses during the pandemic. The analysis draws on responses to a [Read More…]
October 2, 2026
Offering Paid Sick and Family Leave is Not Enough: Leave Supportive Supervisor Behavior Training Improves Policy Use, Health, and Work Outcomes
Paid sick and family leave policies provide employees the right to request paid time-off for personal illness or family demands. Yet, they can be underutilized, and their effects show mixed results. Research has underaddressed the disconnect between formal and informal work–family support, clarifying the role of supervisors as contextual resources supporting paid leave. Integrating research [Read More…]
September 29, 2026
How We Benefit from Job Satisfaction: The Moderating Effect of Informal Caregiving on the Associations between Job Satisfaction and Physiological and Psychological Stress
Job satisfaction and the resource-building processes it supports may have meaningful implications for health and well-being. These processes may work differently for employees who have informal (ie, unpaid) caregiving duties outside of work. Guided by conservation of resources theory, we examined two indirect stress-buffering pathways in a sample of 799 nursing home workers, measured four [Read More…]
September 29, 2026
In-work poverty in the EU—seeing the bigger picture
Research examining micro-level factors in European countries is well-established. However, little research explores how macro-level factors, such as institutional settings or labour market structures, shape working poverty. After reviewing the literature on macro-level determinants of in-work poverty, we classified these factors into two broad categories—institutional and structural—and examined their impact on in-work poverty rates across [Read More…]
September 29, 2026
Do what you love in low-wage work: Navigating stigma through narratives of work passion
Most research on “work passion” has focused on white-collar and creative occupations that workers choose to pursue for intrinsic rewards. This paper examines the intriguing case of economically vulnerable workers in the Global South who profess passion for their low-wage and stigmatized occupation. Using qualitative data, I analyze why women beauty workers in Pakistan routinely [Read More…]
September 29, 2026
Flexibility stigma in the UK and Germany post-pandemic: Intersectionality of stigma across gender and parental lines.
Is homeworking stigmatised in the post-pandemic labour market, and if so, does this vary across gender, parental status, and welfare regimes? Mothers’ homeworking may attract stronger bias due to assumptions that it is used for family purposes. Yet fathers’ or childless workers’ homeworking can represent a stronger violation of ideal worker norms and breadwinning expectations, [Read More…]
September 29, 2026
Shared paid parenting leave and gender equity: A longitudinal study of Austrian couples
In recent decades, scholars in family and gender studies have examined the correlation between shared paid parenting leave (PPL) and both parents’ reconciliation of employment, childcare and domestic work. However, longitudinal qualitative studies on dual PPL uptake – where both parents take at least five months of leave – are scarce. We address this gap [Read More…]
September 29, 2026
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