Workplace, Work Force and Working Families
Kathleen Christensen, Program Director

Body of Quality Research

To build a body of quality scholarship that provides perspective to and understanding of the lives of working families and the work conditions that affect them, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program on Workplace, Work Force and Working Families created six Sloan Centers on Working Families. Four of these centers are engaged in ongoing research. 

• The Center on Parents, Children and Work at Michigan State University
• The Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL) at Emory University
• The Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life (CEEL) at the University of Michigan
• The Center on the Ethnography of Everyday Life of Families (CELF) at the University of California, Los Angeles

The remaining two centers have completed their funded work.

• The Center on Working Families at the University of California, Berkeley
• The Employment and Family Careers Institute at Cornell University

Each of these interdisciplinary Centers is directed by leading scholars who have developed research programs built on their intellectual strengths. As a result, each Center has developed its own distinctive approach to its study of middle-class working families. In addition, the Centers have played an instrumental role in developing the next generation of scholars interested in studying working families.

In addition to the six Centers on Working Families, the Foundation also supports the M.I.T Workplace Center, which is devoted to building—in theory and in practice—a mutually supportive relationship between the performance of firms and the well being of employees, their families, and communities

More detailed information on the work of each of the Centers funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation can be found at the Centers' web sites by clicking on the links above.    

Research funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation also is influencing the lonstanding discussion about women who choose to leave the paid work force to stay home with young children. "'Opt Out' or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict" by Joan C. Williams, director of the University of California Hastings Center for WorkLife Law, demonstrates that the highly publicized concept that women are "opting out" of the work force in increasing numbers is a myth. In addition, Pamela Stone's Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home points to a lack of workplace flexibility among the workplace conditions impacting women's decisions about work and family.