Putting the family back into work and family research

Celebrating Journal of Vocational Behavior 50th Anniversary Special Issue, we acknowledge in this essay the strides made by work-family researchers in the last 50 years and propose new directions that would stimulate research on the interface of work and family from a vocational and organizational perspectives. The invited paper by Kossek, Perrigino and Gounden Rock (2021) reviews the different paths taken by the work-family and career literatures and suggests concrete ways in which future researchers can integrate work-family and careers perspective theoretically and empirically. In this contribution to Journal of Vocational Behavior 50th Anniversary, we add to Kossek and colleagues call by suggesting research on the interface of work and family should expand its scope by focusing on (a) true family outcomes – those that families, not employers, consider important; (b) family-level outcomes – outcomes that are observed when two or more people interact within the family unit, not just individual outcomes; and (c) the joint effect of work and social policies on work-related family decisions and outcomes – taking into account that families use all available resources available to them, not just those provided by their employer.