http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/

This is the Alfred P. Sloan Work and Family Research Network website. This website provides a multidisciplinary teaching resource covering the following work-family topics: Afterschool Care, Breastfeeding and the Workplace, Changing Definitions of Families, Dependent Care Tax Assistance, Domestic Violence and the Workplace, Elder Care at the Workplace, Employer-Supported Child Care, Family & Medical Leave Act (FMLA), Family Leave, Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD), Flexible Work Schedules, Gender and Use of Workplace Policies, Generation X/Generation Y, Health and Workplace Flexibility, Low-Wage Workers, Military Families, Work-Family Spillover: Negative Impacts, Older Workers, Overwork, Parents Caring for Children with Disabilities, Part-Time Work, Phased Retirement, Return on Investment, Shift Work, and Telework. The goal of the website is to provide resources, build knowledge, share information, stimulate interest and engage the workplace leadership, academic/researchers, and state and federal legislators on the issues of work and family.

I believe the intended audience of this website is college students, academic teachers and researchers, business owners and other organizational leadership that influence employment policies, public policy makers (i.e. -legislators, both federal and state), and journalist. I believe this is the intended audience because under the link "First Time Visitors" the website offers suggested resources for each of the aforementioned audience categories. I believe this website is accessible to the public that has some form of college level education coupled with an interest in work and family issues. If an individual visiting the site didn't understand something, the website provides a link to an internal glossary and encyclopedia for their use.

I would say that this is a very credible website. It is in the ".edu" domain which is reserved only for organizations accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies. I would trust the information provided by the website because they provide empirical evidence with a plethora of statistical data to back these observations up when necessary. In addition, the overall feel of the website doesn't seem very biased. It seems the only agenda of the website is to ensure that key policy makers, both public and private, have all of the most up-to-date data, facts, and figures to clearly understand the current state of affairs so they may make the most informed decisions regarding these issues. The website also seems to cite and cross-reference many other universities and other non-profit organizations websites for additional information and provides a multitude of scholarly reviewed articles and policy briefs. In each of the websites published policy briefs, they provided more than enough credible source citations for their source of information and data used to create these publications.

I would say that I learned more about the issues of Family Responsibilities Discrimination (FRD) that occur in the workplace by exploring this website. I also learned more about how the State of Nebraska stacks up statistically to the rest of the nation regarding their response to the issues facing today's Nebraskan working families. From this information provided in the Nebraska state profile, I learned that Nebraska lags behind the curve regarding many of the modern work-family issues and their attempts to introduce legislation to correct them. This doesn't surprise me since the state is majority Republican politically.

http://www.totalleadership.org/

This website is a redirect from the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project hyperlink available in the syllabus. The reason it redirects is because one of the main advisors on the Total Leadership company website is Stew Friedman, the CEO and creator of the Total Leadership program and faculty member at the Wharton business school, responsible for founding and directing the Wharton Leadership Programs and the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project at the Wharton business school. This website provides information on a program that facilitates one's ability to excel in all domains of one's life; work, home, community, and the private self. The website claims that most leadership development programs only focus on professional skills and most work/family workshops and self-help programs over emphasize family and personal needs at the expense of business results. The Total Leadership programs offers a way to win (they call it the "four-way win") in all four domains of one's life; 1)work, 2)home, 3)community, and 4)self by creating sustainable change by teaching one how to "be real," "be whole," and "be innovative."

The intended audience is an organization, both for-profit and non-profit, that has C suite/executives (i.e. - CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, etc.), high-potential/emerging leaders, management/HR staff, and other employees/teams that it would like exposed to this leadership program to obtain more production from these individuals. One can gather that this is the intended audience because under their "Services" tab on the website it mentions that this program can be tailored specifically for these four unique audiences. The website also has a list of current and former clients from various industries, trade groups and associations, in both the private and public sector; such as Accenture, Coca-Cola, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Disney, and Society for Human Resource Management. I believe this website assumes a certain level of knowledge about the individuals visiting their website. This is identifiable in the terminology that they use when discussing this program. I believe they assume that the potential audience of the program will have some sort of business or management background.

I believe this is a fairly credible website. However, it is a for-profit service that is being offered by a company. This alone makes them biased to their product and in a way; the whole website comes off as an advertisement enticing the organization to purchase their service. The company makes money off of selling the program and offering services such as appearing as key-note speakers, coaching, consulting, providing workshops, and assessments of organizations. The website is registered in the ".org" domain, which was originally reserved for non-profit or non-commercial organizations; however, this organization is selling a commercial service. The advisors to the Total Leadership program seem very credible. All have either a Master's or PhD in management and leadership or an MBA combined with a lot of substantial personal experience dealing with these issues of management and leadership within an organization. This was found under the "About: Who We Are" link on the website. The website does highlight the results that the former participants of the Total Leadership program claim to have experienced after attending this program. They seem credible, but they are quoted and framed in a way that only provides positive feedback about the service/program so it seems very biased.

The general observations I took from this website regarding Work, Family, and Community is that this is a significant issues in the business world. The fact that this company is selling a service/program to coach people on how to succeed in all aspects of their life, the whole-person approach, makes me realize how serious of an issue the work/family conflict has become within organizations and that they are truly recognizing that this is something then need to begin to address to improve their own bottom-line (in the case of for-profit organizations) or improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations (in the case of non-profit organizations, trade groups, associations, and government agencies).