The Division of Labour between Family Members - Is the Economic Approach Obsolete?

It has been argued that the increasing labour market participation of married women with children can be understood as a process of gender despecialization which is not in accordance with the propositions of the production theoretic approach to household behaviour. The idea of this paper is to show that--by extending the production theoretic model beyond the limits of neoclassical thinking--it is possible to explain non-specialization within the framework of the economic approach to family behaviour so that it is not necessary to have recourse to "non-economic" reasoning. In order to do this a linear model of time use and consumption within families is developed. This model explains processes of specialization and despecialization within families in a context of restrictions in the labour market, consumption demands and characteristics of the consumption technology of the household. A multidimensional time concept is used. Implications of joint consumption are taken into account. The method consists in simulating alternative constellations of data starting from a linear optimization model which is based on the tradition of the Lancasterian theory of consumption. The results show that non-specialization is not in contrast to conclusions which can be drawn from production theoretic modelling.