Community as a Context for the Work-Family Interface1

Workplaces, families, and individuals attempt to coordinate work and family opportunities and responsibilities within the context of communities. Workplaces and families are embedded in the communities in which they are located. Work, family, and individual relationships are intertwined with relationships among members of various communities. Communities may both help and hinder the efforts of work organizations, families, and individuals to enhance work- family integration. Communities are of two types: territorial and relational. For example, Phillips (1993, p. 14) defines community as "a group of people who live in a common territory, have a common history and shared values, participate together in various activities, and have a high degree of solidarity." Small and Supple (2001, p. 162) state that community refers to "social relationships that individuals have based on group consensus, shared norms and values, common goals, and feelings of identification, belonging and trust." These definitions of community are too broad to be useful for viewing community as a context for work-family role coordination. Therefore, Voydanoff (2001) has formulated six aspects of community that may be useful for this purpose. They include community social organization, social networks, social capital, formal volunteering and informal helping, sense of community, and community satisfaction. These aspects of community operate on different levels of analysis. Community social organization, social networks, and social capital are community-level concepts. Formal volunteering and informal helping, sense of community, and community satisfaction are individual-level concepts. Community social organization generally refers to local territorial communities, most commonly neighborhoods. As defined by Sampson (1999, p. 253), community social organization refers to "the ability of a community structure to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls." Examples include community supervision and control of teenage peer groups, informal local friendship networks, and local participation in formal and voluntary organizations (Sampson & Groves, 1989). Social networks are linkages among defined sets of persons, such as kin, friends, neighbors, or co-workers. They differ according to characteristics such as size, composition, heterogeneity, and density. Wellman (1999) describes contemporary community networks as narrow specialized relationships rather than broadly supportive ties; as sparsely knit, loosely bounded, and frequently changing; and as supportive and sociable although spatially dispersed rather than