Breaking the Mold - Book Report/Review Example

In that sense, now is indeed the high time when the organizations and businesses that cherish and value their employees do take an initiative and alter their expectations and values to furnish a greater compatibility between the household responsibilities and career opportunities. There is no denying the fact that many organizations and businesses have indeed taken notice of this change and lacuna and have tried hard to realign their work policies to facilitate a better employee work home balance (Bailyn, 2006).

However, not only these measures have proved to be much meager in their ability to facilitate a higher coordination between the personal and professional responsibilities, they have also failed to furnish the concerned individuals and groups the breathing space they so badly seek in their quest for working with an organization that is responsive to their domestic concerns. Bailyn is indeed right in concluding that the primary impediment that is hampering this coveted cultural shift is the imminent cultural assumptions that are totally contrary to the needs and yearnings of the contemporary work force (Bailyn, 2006).

For instance the cultural assumption that work and home tend to be the segregated aspects of a workers life is so deeply entrenched in the mindset of the policy makers that it is making it impossible for them to empathize with the individual workers who face pressing domestic responsibilities and personal concerns. It goes without saying that many of these cultural assumptions do tend to affiliate to default gender biases. For instance it is a nauseating cultural assumption that the home happens to be the domain of the women and it is the women who are to be responsive when it comes to caring for the young and the old.

These cultural assumptions are not only making things stifling for the women, who give precedence to their work life, but not at the cost of the family, but are also depriving the larger society of the values that tend to cherish compassion and nurturing. Nothing concrete could be readily achieved, without achieving a change and shift in these deeply imbedded cultural assumptions. The interesting thing is that Bailyn takes an expansive and pan geographical view of the issue under consideration and tries to analyze as to how varied societies have tried to deal with the emerging issue of the relevance of accommodating familial concerns in the professional sphere.

She found out that the professional sector in the US is discernibly tilted in favor of the well entrenched male dominant cultural assumptions that value women in positions of high influence only as long as they are able to navigate their professional life in consonance with the established norms and rules (Bailyn, 2006). On the other side Netherlands has tried to grapple this issue in a more conservative way by condoning the traditional gender roles and responsibilities, while assuring the favorable privileges and equal remuneration to the women opting to work part time,