Work-life balance among cruise ship crews (PDF)

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction:
Every cruise passenger experiences the ever smiling, friendly faces, which care for all and everything. Working where others experience adventures, relax, restore their energies, and enjoy world-class services, has to be fun. It seems that working on a cruise ship is a very enviable job. But is it really? This paper examines the impact on personal costs, in terms of physical and emotional exhaustion, of performing outstanding service and work on cruise vessels for several months a year.
¿Work-life balance¿ meets many criteria of a popular common phrase: It seems that everybody has at least a rough idea what is meant by the term; its use is connected to positive association rather than negatives and so it is quite easy to attach many factors ¿ old as well as new ones- to its meaning. Therefore it is no wonder to meet in many Companies ¿well known- job arrangements, which are titled now Work-life balance arrangements. The most common statements are: more flexible and family friendly working hours, followed by sport and leisure time offerings, nutrition counseling, further job training and a higher service for families to assist finding a child day-care. Nevertheless the general traditional academic discussion about the relationship between work and the ¿rest of the life¿ stands above the balance of job and family. So the scope has changed from (expectant) mothers and, especially younger, kids in former times, towards a higher concentration of diverse fields of life and job.
Since there is no unified definition of the term, and within the academically and popular-science literature a multitude of different explanations and description exist, it is needed to define it by its single facets, Work, Life and Balance. Afterwards combine those to get a clear idea of the whole term.
Work: ¿activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result; such activity as means of earning income; treated as a place where industrial or manufacturing processes are carried out¿.
Life: ¿the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death; a particular type or aspect of people¿s existence; vitality, vigour or energy¿.
Balance: ¿an even distribution of weight ensuring stability; mental or emotional stability; a condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct [...]