ABSTRACT
Sociologists have been concerned with institutional friction between work and family systems in the industrialized West as far back as the 1960s, when Lewis and Rose Laub Coser (1974) first labeled both the family and workplace greedy institutions that monopolized individuals’ time and energy. Although the problem has been framed in different ways at different times, the essential sociological insight that ties their different perspectives together is that the personal difficulties individuals face in trying to fulfill both family and paid work responsibilities are socially patterned and somewhat predictable given the competing goals of industrial production and family reproduction.
