ECONOMIC FREEDOM OR SELF-
lower income brackets (Holtz–Eakin, Rosen and Weathers 2000). It also provides workers, ‘‘a high degree of autonomy, in the sense of freedom from direct supervision, in the performance of their work tasks’’ (Goldthorpe 1980: 41). More generally, self-employment gives workers the chance to break free from bureaucratic control, the ability to decide when, where, and how to work, and the opportunity to ‘‘be their own boss.’’ Self-employment may have special advantages for women (Arai 2000; Buttner and Moore 1997; Hughes 2003). In fact, many women start business ventures in the hopes of finding a sense of freedom and autonomy that their jobs did not provide (Brush 1992), or relief from the glass ceilings and patriarchal nature of existing organizations (Smeaton 2003). Clearly self-employment has much to offer, and many people seem quite happy to work for themselves (Smeaton 2003).
In this paper, we examine the extent to which self-employment lives up to its theoretical potential to solve one important employment problem men and women face: work-life conflict.1Although there is a growing literature on how work intersects with personal and family life, scant research is available on how self-employment may reduce or increase the conflict that arises when one has to balance work and life roles (for exceptions seeJurik 1998; Loscocco 1997; Parasuraman and Simmers 2001). In fact, Aldrich and Cliffhave called attention to this gap and, ‘‘encouraged entrepreneur- ship researchers to incorporate family considerations in their conceptual models and empirical investigations’’ (2003: 574).2 We answer this call with both theory and analysis. More specifically, we use boundary theory (Ashforth, Kreiner and Fugate 2000) and work–family border theory (Clark 2000) to predict levels of work-life conflict among self-employed and wage and salary workers. Then, we make hypotheses about the mech- anisms by which self-employment should affect work-life conflict and test our predictions using data from the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW). Since gender has played such an important role in the literature on work–life conflict (Greenhaus and Parasuraman 1999), we also pay special attention to the possibility that self-employment may affect the experiences of men and women differently. In short, we examine whether men and women who have pursued self-employment have found a solution to work–life conflict or simply misplaced their hope in an employment arrangement that leaves them no better off than the average wage and salary worker. As far as we know, this is the first study to examine the connection between self-employment and work–life conflict using a representative sample of workers and directional measures of work–life conflict.
Work–Life Conflict
Although holding both work and personal or family roles can improve psychological and physical health (Barnett 1999;Barnett and Hyde 2001), many people experience role conflict because the demands of their work and life roles are at least partially incompatible. This form of role conflict, which is called work–life conflict, is both widespread and harmful for workers and organizations (Allen et al. 2000; Galinsky, Bond and Friedman 1993;
Galinsky, Kim and Bond 2001; Perry-Jenkins, Repetti and Crouter 2000).
In some cases, work–life conflict is described as time-based because people do not have enough time to satisfy the demands of work and life roles (Greenhaus and Beutell 1985). An employee who misses a parent–teacher conference because of a business meeting, for instance, would experience time-based conflict. Work–life conflict can also be strain-based when people do not have enough energy to satisfy both work and family roles (Green- hausand Beutell 1985). A mentally and physically exhausting day at work, for example, could make it difficult to be an attentive parent or spouse.
Finally, people may experience behavior-based conflict when they have dif- ficulty switching back and forth between behaviors that are appropriate for one role to behaviors that are appropriate for the other. Impersonal, bu- reaucratic styles of communication that are just fine at work, for instance, may raise eyebrows at home.
As the examples above suggest, work typically interferes with personal and family roles more than personal and family roles interfere with work (Greenhaus and Parasuraman 1999), but work–life conflict can originate in either the home or work environment (Carlson, Kacmar and Williams 2000;
Frone, Russell and Cooper 1992). Consequently, many authors have begun using directional descriptions of work–life conflict (Allen et al. 2000;Green- haus and Parasuraman 1999; Greenhaus and Powell 2003). Furthermore, research has shown that the determinants of the two types of conflict are different. In particular, work-related factors are the primary determinants of how much work will interfere with life roles, and family-related factors determine how much life roles will interfere with work (Frone, Yardley and Markel 1997;Greenhaus and Parasuraman 1999).
Consequently, we examine work–life conflict by examining how work interferes with life (WIL) and how life interferes with work (LIW). The few quantitative studies that have examined the connection between work–life conflict and self-employment have not used directional measures (see Parasuraman and Simmers 2001), therefore, our understanding of work–life conflict among the self-employed may be slightly misleading. Since
Economic Freedom or Self-imposed Strife 35
self-employment is a characteristic of work, we expect it to be more closely related to WIL. Most of our hypotheses are about the factors that mediate the relationship between self-employment and WIL. Nevertheless, if self- employment alters the boundaries between work and life, it may also have an effect on LIW and our analyses also examine this possibility.