This chapter deals with the integrated conceptual approach of the Combination Model to the daily life of men and women within a complex modern society, the division of professional and family labour being a central part. As a starting point for presenting the new integrated approach, the first section of this chapter provides a short overview of the evolution of the traditional (economic) approach.

Traditional (economic) approach to daily life

Traditional dual approach to human activities

The general concept of activities within daily life is the result of a long conceptual development in social sciences during past decades, which is most apparent in economics. Since the middle of the 20th century, the microeconomic approach has been dominant, emphasising the dual concept of ‘labour versus leisure’ (non-labour) or ‘production versus consumption’, as shown in Figure 2.1 (Malinvaud, 1972; Kirzner, 1976; Gravelle and Rees, 1987, Kreps, 1990). Labour or production is almost completely identified with professional paid labour, referring to all productive, economic, market-oriented, value-creating activities – paid labour is conceived as the only basis for the welfare of society. All other activities are seen as consumptive, non-labour, non-productive, non-economic or non-market, ‘consuming’ the value or welfare created by productive paid labour. This concept of ‘productive labour’ is the result of the conceptual widening process of the classical economists (for example, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Stuart Mill, Marx) against the background of the Industrial Revolution. This was mainly a reaction against the narrow labour concept of the physiocrats (for example, Quesnay, Turgot, du Pont, de Nemours in the 18th century, who claimed that only agriculture offered real productive labour and was the basis for societal welfare (Baeck, 1984).

This basic dualism is a major inheritance of the long philosophical tradition of the western world, together with many other dualisms such as body versus soul/mind, nature versus nurture, subject versus object, material versus non-material and individual versus collective. This tradition was initiated by Platonic philosophy about 2,000 years ago and formalised to a large extent by Cartesian philosophy in the 18th century (Adam, 1990; Van Dongen, 1990, 1993). This basic dual view of the world is strongly embedded in the basic paradigm of classical mechanics, which in its turn was largely the inspiring conceptual basis for modern theories in economics and sociology during 1900-1980 (Mirowsky, 1984; Neuberg, 1989).