Work - personal - life

Work – personal life Between harmony and disintegration Introduction […] when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we realize that we are like shipwrecked people trying to keep their balance on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whether they are drifting. Albert Einstein In the monograph the Reader is being given, the issue of the transformations that take place between work and personal life has been analysed scientifically, in interdisciplinary ways. The deliberations each of the Authors presented base on the hypothesis that the relations between the aforementioned areas have been undergoing changes, by evolving from the harmonious and orderly ones into the work area appropriating the personal life’s area of the individual. Professional work is being defined as the most valuable form of human’s participation in community life, through which one fulfils one’s material and psychosocial needs, generated within the extraprofessional sphere. This sphere is associated with one’s personal life and comprises family responsibilities, educational activity and one’s own personal development, interpersonal relations, social activities, and also one’s free time, that is one’s rest, leisure, entertainment, realising one’s hobbies and interests, which is necessary to regain the energies one’s lost due to work as well as to regenerate physical and mental strength. Personal sphere is an important part of people’s biography, being closely dependent on the professional activities they perform. Nonetheless, being committed to work should not exclude the possibilities to fulfil oneself within the areas that constitute one’s private life. At present, more and more attention has been drawn to the relations between one’s professional work and private life. When analysing the relationships between those two areas, it is crucial to take their two-way character into consideration. As each sphere may be the source of both positive and negative influences, in relation to diverse aspects of one’s functioning. On the one hand, researchers point out the mutual, positive influences of both those areas, owing to which the social roles connected with them become enriched and strengthened. In this case, the term of facilitation is being used, which means the situation where performing one role becomes better or easier due to serving another role. On the other hand, scientific analyses as well as the observation of social life indicate that there has been a progressive – since the 80ies and 90ies – disintegration of the relations between professional and extraprofessional spheres, manifesting itself as the predominance of the former over the latter. The indicated change bases on the broadly understood civilisation trends that make both the work and personal life undergo transformations. The most significant trends are, for example: 1. Development of flexible employment and work organization forms: in Europe, in the last twenty years, they have gained in significance, which means that there has been a greater demand for workers who are more easily adapted to work that is dispersed in time and space. Being flexible at work often leads to the loss of flexibility in other life spheres, which often has severe adverse consequences for physical and mental health of the person, their functioning within a family and social contacts. 2. The pace of life accelerating: we live in the culture of haste and impatience, in which the pursue for “happiness” has almost become a duty, and speed – the world’s obsession. More and more people begin to feel the urge to function faster, more and better. Thus, we become a part of the society, that has been emerging in both developed and developing countries, and which has been called “non-stop”, “24-hour” or even “manic”. The development of such a society type is becoming a threat to health and life of humans. 3. Development of consumer culture: as the results of the studies conducted in many diverse cultures and various age groups show, concentrating on gathering goods and associating possessing with happiness is positively related to people preferring such values as power, wealthy life, material comfort, financial security and hedonism. In the situation where the significance of materialistic goals increases, it also correlates negatively with the importance of such values as: relations with other people, family, inner balance and religion. It may be emphasized that Poland belongs to the group of countries in which there has been observed an increase in significance of the individualistic and material values related to welfare. The changes in the value systems of the Polish, in their aims and life goals, have been presented in the picture below. The dynamic civilizational transformations that are taking place right now do not facilitate keeping balanced proportions between diverse segments of one’s existence. It is mostly the omnipresent acceleration of the pace of life, connected with the development of the so-called “new economy” and the loss of employment security that follows it, which affected the spheres of professional work and the life outside it in the most spectacular way, by taking the form of distinct expansion of the sphere of work at the expense of one’s daily life. Due to this situation increasing, we repeatedly often experience the lack of integration between these two spheres. This thesis seems to be supported by the results of the Third European Quality of Life Survey – Quality of life in Europe, the fragment of which has been presented in the diagram below. The presented data shows that among the citizens of 27 European Union countries, 53% indicate that they are too tired to do some household jobs after coming home from work at least several times a month, and 30% have had problems with fulfilling family responsibilities due to the amount of time they devote to their professional work. On the other hand, 14% believe that their family responsibilities make it difficult for them to concentrate on their work. The results may lead to conclusion that the Europeans are more unhappy with the amount of time they spend with their families than with the time they spend at work, which means their work life disturbs their private lives to a greater extent than the other way round. The disintegration of the relations between work and family life may be analysed in the category of threats, both individual and social. The most significant consequences that result from it are, for example: 1. Interpersonal relations being transient and shallow; 2. The increase in the number of one-person households and the “postponement syndrome” concerning starting a family; 3. The increase in promoting life forms alternative to family and marriage; 4. The decreasing number of children being born; 5. Postponing the birth of the first child; 6. Conflicts in families, more divorces; 7. The deterioration in health of the professionally active people, including high mortality rate of the people of the working age and lower life expectancy of the citizens of Poland in comparison with the citizens of other European countries; 8. The financial costs, resulting from workers’ absence and lower quality of their work, which the organizations that employ them have to cover. One could give even more examples of such consequences, in the individual, organizational and socio-economics spheres. The complexity and multidimensionality of the discussed issue generate the need for the mutual relations between those two life spheres, which are so significant in a person’s life, to become a considerable scope of scientific research, particularly as far as social sciences are concerned. Due to this fact, the following monograph comprises theoretical deliberations and the results of empirical research of the representatives of such sciences as: pedagogy, psychology, sociology and economy. The book has been divided into three parts: the first one contains analyses of the transformations that take place between work and personal life; the second part concentrates on the disintegration of these relations, seen as a threat to marriage and family; the last one presents the role of work environment in harmonising personal and professional spheres of workers. I would like to thank all the Authors for the contribution they have made to this book. I also wish that all the Readers interested in the issues presented in the book will find their own, individual life balance point and will be able to take care of it and keep it for the longest time possible, thus rarely experiencing the feeling of conflict between their professional work and personal life, according to Alfred North Whitehead’s quote: “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order”. [...]