Book reviews 419

Uma Sekaran, Dual-Career Families. Contemporary Organizational and Counseling Issues. Jossey-Bass, San Fransisco, CA, and London, 1986. pp. XIX + 261, 227.50.

This book is essentially problem-oriented, being directed at the counselling needs of dual-career families, rather than being a treatise in psychological or sociological economics. Nonetheless it does touch on areas of interest to researchers in the above fields. In conventional economics agents are assumed to maximise their utility subject to resource constraints and exogenously given tastes. Alternative ap- proaches are concerned with how and why tastes change. These are the fundamental concerns of the present work along with the formulation of policies to hasten desirable changes.

The author defines a career as the pursuit of upward mobility in employment hence dual-career families are those where both partners engage in life-long struggle for job advancement. Such an arrangement is seen to be the source of problems which families find difficult to deal with. We might be tempted to ask why people choose to put up with arrangements which inflict severe problems on them. The author’s answer to this question is straight out of the conventional economics textbook. After listing a series of pros and cons of the dual-career lifestyle she concludes that it is chosen when ‘the rewards of being a dual-career family more than compensate for the stresses experienced by the spouses’ (p. 12). We can not, of course, treat the family as a single decision-maker, rather the decision is made jointly by the partners. This is recognised, in chapter 3, where a typology of dual- career families is given and it is argued that families may improve their ability to cope with their problems by deciding which type best describes themselves.

The core of the author’s argument can be expressed, in economic terms, as market failure arising from poor information about the stresses of dual-career partnerships and spillovers from pressure of work to homework. On this later point there appears to be a problem (chapter 2) that male attitudes have not adjusted to the career orienta- tion of women hence women in dual-career families spend almost twice as much time, on average, in housework as their husbands. The unbalanced distribution of homework time is viewed as potentially imposing costs on firms as excessive tiredness of wives and distress arising from conflict at home may lower productivity at work. It is a

420 Book reviews

trifle strange that the author seems to feel that equal hours of home- work ought to be the norm. The well-known Becker approach, which is not mentioned at all in the book, predicts that relative shares in homework time reflect comparative advantage of the partners in home- work and their wage-rates.

The thrust of the book is that externalities contingent on the emer- gence of the dual-career family impose such serious costs on firms and families that something needs to be done, for example, some very ad hoc calculations in chapter 4 are used to show that 8.3% of a firms costs might be due to spillovers from dual-career families. Sekaran makes no attempt to appraise the costs and benefits of the possible responses and thus fails to countenance the prospect that their imple- mentation may make society worse off than at present. In general the text presumes that counselling will be provided by firms. The incentive for them to do so is that productivity gains will arise from improve- ments in their employees’ quality of like making the counselling self-fi- nancing or even profitable. This being the case we can only assume that firms have failed to implement counselling because they, like husbands, cling on to outmoded attitudes in large part arising from the male bias in organizations. Sekaran appears to believe that attitudes will adjust upon receipt of the ‘correct’ information such as that contained in her book. Thus the general message of the book is that counselling will make everybody better off because it provides information that changes attitudes and promotes productivity. The book is marred by an incom- plete treatment of the role of government in increasing the volume of counselling. In fact, the role of government is only discussed twice in the whole book (p. 136 and p. 200 infra.). In the first case government subsidies to childbearing are proposed as a mode of alleviating stress through facilitating parental leave. The second discussion is bizarre as it is argued that government will have to intervene because inflation increases the number of two-earner families who then experience strain from the inadequate provisions, at present, which produces a fall in total G.N.P.! Surely Sekaran ought to have considered the possibility that a government information campaign could be more efficient than counselling on a case-by-case basis. Alternatively one could envisage the information being part of the school curriculum which, if effective, would obviate the need for counselling.

An annoying feature of the book is its handling of empirical evi- dence. Newspaper articles, television features and academic articles are

Book reviews 421

cited in a totally undiscerning fashion with there being no attempt to indicate which piece of evidence is more reliable where there are contradictory findings. The author’s own empirical work appears some- what dubious from the description given in an appendix. Three major criticisms may be made: (i) the sample only covers experience in 16 institutions (ii) only those in dual-career families are included with the consequence that their reponses can not be compared with others working in the same contexts (iii) on p. 222 it is alleged that factor analysis was used to check that the ‘concepts used were perceived to be relevant by the respondents’ which must be regarded as nonsense as it is hard to see how any multivariate statistical technique could do such a thing. Perhaps more annoying is the style of the work. It can hardly be described as an easy read thanks to the preponderance of uninfor- mative jargon and leaden prose.

In summary this is a book about an interesting problem which highlights some possible responses to it. Its major substantive failing is its reluctance to weigh up all possible responses in terms of their net benefits.

Samuel Cameron Dept. of Economics

North Staffordshire Polytechnic Stoke on Trent ST4 2DF

UK

Barbara R. Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women. Basic Books, New York, 1986.

The labour force participation rate of women has grown almost continually since the beginning of this century. In the USA in 1900, only 21% of all women under 65 had a paid job, whereas in 1986 this percentage is about 64%. Of course the women without a paid job are far from being idle: they almost spend at least forty hours a week in a demanding job in the household production process. The huge increase in the labour-force participation rate hence indicates a massive change of jobs, from the unpaid household sector to the paid market and government sectors.