ABSTRACT
Job sharing - ‘dividing a job with each taking responsibility for half the total work - splitting the total workload of a single job’ - is developing as one new way of integrating and balancing the once separate domains of work and family. Job sharing for wages is particularly unique to the western experience, with its strong commitment to an ideology which emphasizes work and occupational status and wealth as primary goals. The job-sharing couple struggles to maintain a balance between their unique ‘gains and strains’ like the dual-career family ‘in which both heads of household pursue careers and at the same time maintain a family life together’. In part, job sharing provides a form of resolution for the dilemmas that working couples must confront in the management of both public and domestic domains. The shared-role ideology is both implicit and explicit to job-sharing couples, marking a significant dimension of this working-couple arrangement.
