Caryn Medved

• The Graduate Center, CUNY

This study focuses on an under-investigated link between work–life interrelationships and health: how low-wage work impacts employees’ health by influencing their management of health-related concerns. Using structuration theory, interviews with 21 low-wage service work (LWSS) women workers were analyzed to identify structures and interactional dyn...

This research explores the competing discourses and relational tensions that emerge in intergenerational communication in immigrant families with undocumented parents through in-depth interviews with undocumented Latino/a parents and their children living in New York City. Through the articulation of three themes, we illustrate how material realiti...

I gingerly fold open the browned and stained cover of my mother's 1962 edition of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. The title page rests despondently unattached. Dementia first stole my mother's ability to read and then slowly took her life. I cannot ask her about the annotations she made throughout this text. Still, I can read with my mother...

We consider communication in the workplace as it is influenced and understood through the age of the worker. Age is an integral part of a worker's identity and experience of work as is the impact of a worker's age on the organization. Our entry proceeds through the lifespan and explores: youth and early work experiences; work experiences of millenn...

From an organizational communication perspective, policy is defined as an organization's formal statement of beliefs on issues or approved courses of action on matters of importance, and usually is set forth by senior management. Policy is a significant organizational communication issue as it plays an enduring and powerful role in the contemporary...

Public discourse of late has drawn attention to increases in number of married women in the U.S. who serve as their families’ primary breadwinners. Contributing to these conversations, this study examines how breadwinning mothers (BWMs) reproduce, resist or challenge hegemonic gender relations through an analysis of different ways these women discu...

This study explains and critiques how discourse and related practices of stay-at-home fathering perpetuate, resist and/or potentially undo hegemonic gender relations of work and family. Changes in everyday micro-discourses of fathering can contribute to a feminist politics of macrostructural transformations in gender relations. First, masculinity i...

Dual-earner couples are those in which both marital partners participate in paid employment. Empirical studies of dual-career couple relationships explore interpersonal communication processes such as spousal role-identity construction, work–family routines, and relational equity negotiation. Division of household labor and martial satisfaction are...

In this chapter, I review and critique social research which explores micro-practices of gender transgressions and macro-level transformations of occupational and household divisions of labor. Today, “crossing over,” even blurring of hegemonic gendered occupational and relational boundaries occurs more frequently. Yet, it remains a problematic and...

As organizational communication scholars, we routinely orient ourselves to organizations as places of work while often ignoring the diverse forms of communicative work and communication about our working lives that underpin such locales. In this essay, we consider how the study of meaningful work problematizes the boundaries of organizational commu...

Parental socialization is an important way we learn about the worlds of work and family. This study investigates the content and gendered nature of over 900 parental work, family, and balance memorable messages. A total of 21 inductively coded message categories are detailed in terms of message frequency and content. Overall, men and women reported...

Women construct their identities amidst contradictory and competing societal expectations about career success and motherhood. Due to the enormous value society places on our organizational lives and to the contradictory rhetoric on women’s roles today, the ability of stay-at-home mothers to construct their identities is argued to be in crisis. The...

Research investigating the challenges of managing work and family responsibilities has been rife across many social science disciplines over the past 30 years. The following study contributes to the growing body of communication scholarship by problematizing the everyday routine; in doing so, it explores the micro‐practices of navigating work and f...

Using a discourse perspective, we articulate four problematics, (a) boundaries, (b) identity, (c) rationality, and (d) voice that underlie work-family theory, research, and practice. We situate existing interdisciplinary research within each problematic, showing how such research examines outcomes and effects rather than the process of constructing...

Between the years 1993 and 2000, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored the Comprehensive Community Health Models (CCHMs) Initiative in three Michigan counties. CCHMs was comprised of three closely related community initiatives carried out in the midst of a failed national health care reform effort and the continued penetration of managed care arra...