Family-friendly policy evolution: a bibliometric study

The study is motivated by global demographic shifts—aging and persistently low fertility—along with rising female labor force participation and intensifying work-family conflicts. Family-friendly policies, originating in Western welfare states to help women balance work and family, are increasingly salient for employees, organizations, and societies. Despite their perceived effectiveness, conceptual ambiguities, uneven practice, and issues such as policy inequality and motherhood penalties persist. The authors aim to clarify the field’s development and provide an objective, comprehensive overview using bibliometrics. The research questions are: (1) What is the concept and content of family-friendly policies? (2) How has family-friendly policy research developed and what are future directions? (3) What impacts do these policies have on employees, organizations, and society, particularly regarding work-family conflict?

Prior reviews on work-family topics highlight work-family conflict as a major source of stress and emphasize interventions, but bibliometric syntheses focused specifically on family-friendly policies are lacking. Existing bibliometric studies addressed related areas: work stress (Cassar et al., 2020), work-family conflict (Mumu et al., 2020), work-life balance (Rashmi & Kataria, 2021), and work-life integration with flexible work arrangements (Kumar et al., 2021). Traditional narrative reviews in family-friendly policy are dated and topic-specific. This study fills the gap by applying bibliometric and social network analyses directly to family-friendly policy literature to map its knowledge structure, hotspots, and evolution.

Data source: Web of Science Core Collection (SCI-E, SSCI, AHCI, ESCI). Retrieval mode: Topic search using compiled synonyms for family-friendly policies derived from classic literature: “family friendly polic*,” “family responsive polic*,” “family supportive polic*,” “work family polic*,” “family friendly benefit*,” and “family friendly practice*.” Document types: Articles and Reviews in English. Time span: 1985-01-01 to 2022-12-31. Search date: February 27, 2023. Initial records identified: 677; excluded non-article/review items: 66; assessed: 611; manual screening of irrelevant categories: 4; duplicates and unrecognized results removed: 17; final sample: 590 documents (571 articles, 19 reviews). Tools and analyses: CiteSpace (v5.6 R5) for knowledge mapping, co-citation, pathfinding, and clustering; burst detection; time series/exponential growth modeling; geospatial and network analyses (countries, institutions, authors); keyword co-occurrence and timeline analyses. Model fitting indicated exponential growth of publications and citations with high R² values. The study also synthesized a 2W1H framework (what/why/how) for family-friendly policy research based on bibliometric evidence and classic theories.

• Growth and volume: Earliest WoS record (1988). Publications increased from 3 (1988) to 55 (2022) with exponential fit R²=0.8503; citations rose to ~2,400 in 2022 with total 20,212 citations and exponential fit R²=0.9408.
• Countries: USA leads with 288 publications (48.81%); UK 62 (10.51%); China 40 (6.78%); Australia 37 (6.27%); Spain 23; South Korea 20; Italy 17; Netherlands/Norway 16; Sweden 14. Collaboration is relatively sparse across countries; the USA, UK, China, Australia, and Spain show higher intermediary centrality.
• Institutions: Top producers include University of California (31; 2,667 citations), University of Texas (18; 911), University of North Carolina (14; 318), University of Pennsylvania (12; 555), University of Wisconsin (12; 666). Nine of the top 10 institutions are in the USA; inter-institutional collaboration is stronger within the USA than globally.
• Authors: Core authorship not yet consolidated per Price’s law. 114 core authors (≥2 publications) produced 275 papers (46.61% of total). The most prolific author is Blair-Loy (6 publications), with a highly cited 2002 paper on organizational and social factors in policy use (270 citations).
• Journals: 308 journals contributed; top sources include Community, Work & Family (23), International Journal of Human Resource Management (16), Personnel Review (12), Gender, Work & Organization (11), Work, Employment and Society (11), Journal of Marriage and Family (10), Public Personnel Management (10), Work and Occupations (10), Journal of Family Issues (7). Most top journals have IF > 2 and span Business & Economics, Sociology, Psychology, and Public Health.
• Highly co-cited references: Budig & England (2001) on motherhood wage penalty (TC=1003); Bianchi & Milkie (2010); Voydanoff (2004); Kelliher & Anderson (2010); Grover & Crooker (1995); Batt (2003); Beauregard & Henry (2009); Judge et al. (2004); Hammer et al. (2011) with high TC/Y; Perry-Smith & Blum (2000).
• Co-citation clusters: Eight main clusters including #0 mothers’ perception (62 topics, e.g., class inequality effects), #1 work-family support policies (global perceptions, importance of supportive culture), #2 gender ideologies (gender differences; flexibility stigmatization), #3 business outcome (organizational commitment, turnover, satisfaction; moderators include policy number and workforce composition), among others.
• Burst references: Strong bursts include Allen (2001), Thompson et al. (1999), Correll et al. (2007), Hegewisch & Gornick (2011), Korpi et al. (2013), indicating organizational mechanisms and societal impacts (gender/class equity).
• Keywords: High-frequency/central terms include gender (freq 151), conflict (93), women (87), impact (84), work (80), employment (69), job satisfaction (68), work-family policy (61), policy (59), child care (53), work-life balance (41), parental leave (39). Keyword clusters and timeline show evolution from gender and organizational commitment to flexibility, performance, and work-family balance.
• Evolution phases: (1) Initial stage (1970s–2000): policies primarily for women (maternity leave, part-time, job sharing); low utilization due to stigma; fairness concerns (motherhood penalty). (2) Expansion (2000–2015): broadened welfare scope to spouses/parents/children; child care, parental leave, telework gained traction. (3) Steady development (2015–2022): responses to fertility challenges; emphasis on paternity leave, flexible work, telecommuting.
• Theoretical bases: Macro (rational choice, new institutionalism), meso (social exchange, social support), micro (role theory, conservation of resources). The study synthesizes a 2W1H framework detailing definitions/classifications, antecedents/mediators/consequences, and implementation processes.
• Overall: The field is growing, interdisciplinary, and dominated by organizational-level analyses focusing on women/mothers; fairness, flexibility, childcare, and satisfaction are current hotspots; a stable core author group has yet to form; cross-country and cross-institution collaboration remains limited.

Findings address the research questions by clarifying what constitutes family-friendly policies (through consolidated classifications), mapping how the field has evolved, and delineating impacts at individual, organizational, and societal levels. The exponential growth and concentration in management, sociology, and psychology underscore the field’s importance and interdisciplinarity. Dominance by US institutions and limited cross-national collaboration suggest opportunities to diversify contexts and broaden generalizability. Co-citation clusters and burst analyses show core emphases on gendered experiences, especially motherhood, and organizational mechanisms (supportive culture, supervisor behaviors) that influence utilization and outcomes. The keyword evolution toward flexibility and work-family balance indicates practical relevance in modern workplaces and the potential to address low fertility and aging through supportive policy ecosystems. The synthesized 2W1H framework integrates theoretical lenses and operational guidance, offering a scaffold for cross-level, cross-disciplinary empirical work and for practitioners to design equitable, effective policy bundles that mitigate conflict, enhance enrichment, and improve performance and well-being.

The study provides the first comprehensive scientometric mapping of family-friendly policy research (1985–2022). Key contributions include: (1) documenting exponential growth in publications and citations and identifying leading countries (notably the USA), institutions, authors, and journals; (2) demonstrating the field’s interdisciplinary spread with dominant organizational-level analyses; (3) showing that a consolidated core author group has not formed and that international collaborations remain limited; (4) identifying core topics—women/mothers, gender discrimination and penalties, work-family conflict, and employee attitudes—and synthesizing major theoretical underpinnings; (5) highlighting persistent hotspots (gender, impact, job satisfaction) and frontiers (policy fairness, flexibility, scheduling). The paper proposes a 2W1H framework to guide future research and practice. Future directions include cross-level empirical analyses, integration of multiple theoretical perspectives, examination of fairness and stigma mechanisms, expansion to under-studied groups (men, single and non-caregiving employees), and enhanced cross-country collaboration to assess policy-context interactions.

The analysis is limited to English-language Articles and Reviews in the Web of Science Core Collection; relevant literature outside WoS or in other languages may be missed. Software, language, and access constraints necessitated the exclusion of some document types, and the use of a single primary bibliometric tool may bias mapping; future work should broaden databases and triangulate multiple tools.