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Family CEOs A Feminist Analysis of Corporate Mothering Discourses
Abstract
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 purpose of this feminist critical-interpretive study is to interrogate corporate discourse as a new linguistic frame for defining mothering identity. Through textual analysis of online support Web sites and self-help books or guidebooks, four subject positions of stay-at-home mothers as professionals, managers, productive citizens, and irreplaceable workers are articulated and problematized. Corporate mothering is then further deconstructed in relation to historical ideologies of mothering, contemporary organizational privilege, feminist and postfeminist debates on women’s roles today, and raced and classed ideologies of mothering. Finally, implications for feminist praxis and organizational communication scholarship are addressed.
... The relationship between feminism and motherhood continues to be complex (Douglas & Michaels, 2004;Hallstein, 2007;Medved & Kirby, 2005;Porter, 2010). Adrienne Rich's influential text Of Women Born was one of the first within North American scholarship to theorize "both the oppressive and potentially empowering components of maternity" (Hallstein, 2007, p. 269;see also O'Reilly, 2010asee also O'Reilly, , 2010b. ...
... The institution of motherhood is said to include "societal expectations, assumptions, laws and rules which govern how a woman is expected or, in some cases, forced to mother her children" (Porter, 2010, p. 5;see also Rich 1976see also Rich /1986). However, Rich's text has been accused of forwarding anti-family and anti-mother sentiments, and the media has continued to attach those notions to most second wave feminist scholarship (Douglas & Michaels, 2004: see also Bell, 2004;Hallstein, 2007;Kuperberg & Stone, 2008;Medved & Kirby, 2005;Porter, 2010). The notion that society's devaluation of mothering is a direct result of the feminist movement has gained increasing public support (Medved & Kirby, 2005). ...
... However, Rich's text has been accused of forwarding anti-family and anti-mother sentiments, and the media has continued to attach those notions to most second wave feminist scholarship (Douglas & Michaels, 2004: see also Bell, 2004;Hallstein, 2007;Kuperberg & Stone, 2008;Medved & Kirby, 2005;Porter, 2010). The notion that society's devaluation of mothering is a direct result of the feminist movement has gained increasing public support (Medved & Kirby, 2005). ...
... This article examines the experiences of one particular subset of women entrepreneurs: those who set up a business in order to enable them to both work and care for young children. These women are an interesting group as they reflect current discourses on lifestyle entrepreneurship and a new approach to 'having it all': pursuing a career and managing to fit with the traditional mother Article ideology, where a good mother is at home full time with her children (Johnston and Swanson, 2006;Medved and Kirby, 2005). Thus, so called 'mumpreneurship' is presented as a means of overcoming the role conflict felt by working mothers (Houle et al., 2009) and feelings of being overwhelmed (Duxbury and Higgins, 2003;Wharton and Blair-Loy, 2006) as they continue to take primary responsibility for home and family while working (Jacobs and Gerson, 2004). ...
... Many women face competing and often contradictory societal expectations about career success and motherhood as they construct their identities (Douglas and Michaels, 2004;Medved and Kirby, 2005). For this group of women, the relationship with work is clearly influenced by the fact that their families are, in the main, not totally dependent upon their income, although they may rely on their income to maintain certain aspects of their lifestyle such as better cars and more expensive holidays. ...
This article examines the experiences of women who establish new ventures in order to combine income generation with childcare responsibilities. Based on interviews with 20 ‘mumpreneurs’, we examined career narratives to show how these women described the transition to entrepreneurship and their experiences of this new mode of working. The findings suggest that the women weave a path between the discourses of intensive mothering and enterprise. Becoming self-employed was deemed preferable to being perceived as a housewife as it enabled identification with a discourse of intensive mothering, facilitating far greater engagement with children than was possible during previous corporate lives. However, the findings revealed tensions which required individualized strategies to address excessive working hours and constrain business growth.
... Articulation refers to social actors' attempt to assign meaning to a signifier by positioning it within a particular Discourse or meaning system (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985;Phillips and Jørgensen, 2002). Take the example from a recent discourse study about staying-at-home mothers (Medved and Kirby, 2005). The meaning of household tasks performed by staying-at-home mothers can be articulated in myriad Discourses, such as child-rearing, work and labour, feminism, etc. ...
... The meaning of household tasks performed by staying-at-home mothers can be articulated in myriad Discourses, such as child-rearing, work and labour, feminism, etc. When articulated within a corporate mothering Discourse, their meaning is associated with such managerial tasks as planning, budgeting and oversight (Medved and Kirby, 2005). Similar to the concept intertextuality in Fairclough's (1993Fairclough's ( , 1995 critical discourse analysis, articulation describes the meaning production of a text through its relation with other texts and Discourses (Phillips and Jørgensen, 2002). ...
The literature on organizational change abounds with models that map the trajectory of change with ordered stages or episodes. However, limited progress has been made in understanding the dynamic process of changing or becoming from one stage or episode to another. To enhance our knowledge of changing, this study intends to offer a discursive framework grounded in a process-oriented perspective of organization. The framework highlights key discursive dynamics of changing by integrating recent developments in several streams of research. It conceptualizes changing as discursive struggles over articulating multiple layers of meaning. These layers comprise the articulation of organizational circumstance, organizational and individual identities and organizational practice.To illustrate the utility of this framework, the author undertook a discourse analysis of real-time communication among members in a large US insurance corporation. The interpretation was grounded in data from a four-month ethnographic study. The analysis effectively demonstrates how organizational changing takes place in interrelated layers of discursive action. It also offers critique on potential discursive effects of stage models when applied by practitioners in managing organizational change programs.
... Acknowledged or not, what we purport to study as organizational communication scholars is inherently raced, classed, and gendered. We are certainly not the first scholars in our discipline to point out this interdependency (e.g., Allen, 2004a, 2004b, 2007; Ashcraft & Allen, 2003; Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Medved & Kirby, 2005; Nadesan, 1997; Parker, 2003). Yet, we believe that the present discussion of meaningful work cannot be had without recognizing the centrality of these three pervasive discourses, structures, and experiences. ...
... Rather, how gender is fundamentally experienced for, let's say, an African American executive is also fundamentally an experience of race and class (Parker, 2003; see also Lucas & Buzzanell, 2004). Furthermore, acknowledged or not, discourses of work (paid or unpaid) for White women are also imbued with raced and classed language (Medved & Kirby, 2005). To be clear: We are not recommending surface or incautious attention to race, class, and/or gender in studies of meaningful work but consideration that is nuanced, detailed, and reflexive. ...
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 communication. Specifically, we reflect on how definitions of meaningful work are very much caught up in our contemporary milieu. Organizational communication scholars, then, must be willing and able to work within and across traditional boundaries, perhaps redefining them in the process. We illustrate these claims in three parts. In the first part, we consider the rise of communication work and how it calls into question common notions of meaningful work. In our second section, we argue that what counts as meaningful work often stems from the raced, classed, and gendered assumptions guiding our practice. Finally, in part three, and with these elements of our milieu in mind, we describe ways in which scholars can begin to investigate meaningful work by examining tensions between description and prescription and microlevels and macrolevels of discourse and experience to uncover the strategies and tactics available to individuals as they craft meaningful working lives.
... Scholars have explored how emotions are co-constructed through communication and established structures in corporate environments (e.g., [7,26,27,30,55]), as well as how organizations colonize behavior in the home (e.g., [20,55,56]). Exploring how emotions are performed, constitutive of, and sanctioned in other organizational structures and personal experiences is germane to understanding the far-reaching implications of corporate colonization and macro emotion discourses [19]. ...
Online support groups provide members a space to express emotions and gain emotional support, contributing to individual and organizational sustainability. Communication in these virtual spaces organizes and is simultaneously organized by member interactions and emotion expressions. To better understand how communication contributes to emotion, organizing, and meaning making, this study draws on Weick’s communication sensemaking theory and uses qualitative netnographic methods to analyze interactions in an online pet loss support group. Following pet loss, many American caregivers share their grief over the loss of a pet through online support groups, which help bereaved individuals acquire support, make sense of their experiences, and support similar others. Importantly, existing research indicates that virtual support groups provide members a safe space to engage their emotions. However, competing communication discourses uphold restrictive emotion rules across organized settings and can challenge how individuals perform their emotions. This study uses qualitative netnographic data gathered over 5 months from 106 participants, to better understand how virtual support group members used communication to understand, resist, reify, and reimagine emotions. We found that organizational members grappled with their grief at work and at home, often regulating their negative emotions in pursuit of advancing their workplace productivity and deferring to others’ expectations. Furthermore, although grieving members used communication processes to legitimize the virtual support group as an organizational safe space for displaying authentic emotions, site members controlled their emotions and reinforced managerialist discourses in their communication, demonstrating that emotion discourses are far-reaching and can contribute to or distract from sustainable healing practices. We offer implications regarding how online experiences complicate emotion rules, how safe spaces reinforce professionalism and managerialism, and how organized spaces can promote sustainable practices to support members.
... The gendered division of domestic labor is a key topic in gender and family studies. Numerous scholars have examined the unequal division of housework and childcare between husbands and wives, revealing how it has negatively affected women's well-being and reproduced patriarchal power in the private sphere (e.g., Bianchi & Milkie, 2010;Bianchi et al., 2000;Coltrane, 2000;Daminger, 2019;Hochschild, 1979;Hochschild & Machung, 2003;Medved & Kirby, 2005;Perry-Jenkins & Gerstel, 2020). Because of the rapid development and wide penetration of digital technology and media over recent decades, people in many societies have experienced the digitization of family life (Dworkin et al., 2018). ...
The gendered division of domestic labor is a key topic in gender and family studies. While there has been extensive discussion of time use and the division of physical, emotional, and mental labor in housework and childcare within couples, the division of digital labor in the family has not been systematically examined. Drawing on qualitative data obtained from 147 parents in 84 urban Chinese families, this study reveals prominent gender differences in digital labor in parenting by comparing urban Chinese mothers’ and fathers’ use of digital technology and media in searching for parenting information, maintaining online communication with teachers, and shopping online and using online education services for their children. The findings demonstrate an unequal division of digital labor in urban Chinese families, in which mothers shoulder most of the digital labor in parenting. This study enriches the feminist literature by demonstrating the mutual construction of gender and digital technology in the domestic sphere and highlighting a new form of domestic labor divided between husbands and wives in the digital age. This study challenges liberating and progressive myths surrounding digital technology and calls for academic reflection and public attention on its constraining and exploitative implications for women.
... O'Donovan (2007), also concerned with the health sector, highlights how even social movement organizations (connected to health organizations) can be colonized (see King, 2004, on the corporatization of breast cancer activism). Another productive line of inquiry has looked at the structuring of family life around the demands and logics of work organization (see Dempsey & Sanders, 2010;Denker & Dougherty, 2013;Medved & Kirby, 2005), pondering over the ways in which corporate values and ideologies are reinforcing gendered stereotyping. Finally, somehow closer to Deetz's original argument, and in particular its connection to the theme of democracy, Dahlberg (2005) argues that critical communication is being undermined by a corporate colonization of cyberspace, with digital spaces losing their potential to develop a strong democratic culture. ...
For the UK, the 2008 financial crisis coupled with the subsequent economic austerity programme forced many public institutions to engage in various cost-cutting and fundraising activities. In parallel, corporate ideologies came to dominate how academics, officials and professionals debated public activities, in turn profoundly affecting the provision of communal services. This paper explores how ‘corporate colonization’ (sensu Deetz, 1992), fuelled by austerity, claims public institutions for commercial interests. Drawing on in-depth interviews with senior staff, this paper demonstrates how retrenchment of external support in the UK museum sector has been an uneven process, resulting in the manifestation of three experiential states of corporate colonization: organizational perennity, organizational perseverance, organizational precarity. We thus investigate the differential and uneven ways in which corporate colonization affects organizations pertaining to the UK cultural sector. Overall, we argue that the austerity culture in the UK affects museums in largely negative ways by forcing them to respond to the progressive need to satisfy short-term financial interests.
... Beyond the immediate social sphere, motherhood is impacted by the broader social context. In Canada, for example, the mother role is most often viewed as inferior to a job held outside of the home (Kirby 2005;Leigh et al. 2012). A mother in Canada then, might evaluate her own mothering abilities as good or bad, by considering the fusion of self (a woman's identity), the dueling motherhood ideologies (romanticized and negative) and the broader social context (Marshall, Godfrey, and Renfrew 2007;Sutherland 2010). ...
Motherhood represents the fusion of mother and woman wherein a mothering identity becomes central. Motherhood is often based on romanticized and/or negative ideologies that are impacted by experiences of being a mother. Using agency as a framework, women’s experiences of breastfeeding-related pain were explored in relation to context (iterational), thought patterns (projective), and decisions (evaluative). This case study, grounded in a feminist lens, we conducted in-depth interviews with 14 mothers (age range of 24 to 26 years) from an urban center in Southwestern Ontario, who had experienced breastfeeding-related pain. Using an agency framework, deductive thematic analysis was conducted resulting in the following themes: 1) iterational–which included peer groups, familiar experiences and societal pressures as the three main external forces that influenced a woman to breastfeed; 2) projective–women’s perceptions and evaluation of their mothering abilities were impacted by their context of breastfeeding-related pain resulting in feelings of guilt and frustration; and 3) evaluative–the strategies mothers developed to continue or discontinue breastfeeding (such as tangible-nipple shields, latch support clinics, and creams or intangible-social support options) as well as acceptance of their decision. The impact of the context of breastfeeding within a paternalistic medical context and the implications for practice as well as suggestions for empowerment are explored.
... O'Donovan (2007), also concerned with the health sector, highlights how even social movement organizations (connected to health organizations) can be colonized (see King, 2004, on the corporatization of breast cancer activism). Another productive line of inquiry has looked at the structuring of family life around the demands and logics of work organization (see Dempsey & Sanders, 2010;Denker & Dougherty, 2013;Medved & Kirby, 2005), pondering over the ways in which corporate values and ideologies are reinforcing gendered stereotyping. Finally, somehow closer to Deetz's original argument, and in particular its connection to the theme of democracy, Dahlberg (2005) argues that critical communication is being undermined by a corporate colonization of cyberspace, with digital spaces losing their potential to develop a strong democratic culture. ...
For the UK, the 2008 financial crisis coupled with the subsequent economic austerity programme forced many public institutions to engage in various cost-cutting and fundraising activities. In parallel, corporate discourses came to dominate how academics, officials and professionals debated public activities, in turn profoundly affecting the provision of communal services. This paper explores how ‘corporate colonization’ (sensu Deetz, 1992), fuelled by austerity, claims public institutions for commercial interests. Drawing on in-depth interviews with senior staff, the paper demonstrates how retrenchment of external support in the UK museum sector has been an uneven process, resulting in three experiential states of corporate colonization being identified: organizational perennity, organizational perplexity, organizational precarity. By investigating how corporate colonization operates differentially in this sector – notably in terms of meso- and micro-level activities – our paper develops Deetz’ original (macro-level) concept in new theoretical ways. Ultimately we argue that the primary purpose of museums is being eroded progressively by the need to maximise short-term financial gain.
... While scholars have identified the ways in which business feminism increasingly informs both formal and informal corporate policies and practices (e.g., Gill et al., 2017;Kelan, 2008;Medved & Kirby, 2005), much less attention has been paid to the ways in which this logic is translated within multinational corporate networks, from headquarters located in western capitalist countries to corporate hubs located outside of the advanced capitalist west. In other words, very little attention has focused on the processes through which business feminism is made transnational. ...
Business feminism is a brand of feminism that privileges women's advancement in the corporate hierarchy and centres corporations as the ultimate purveyors of gender equity. While scholars have critiqued this formulation, little empirical research has analysed the processes that guide the dissemination and translation of business feminism in organizational settings within global corporate networks. This article advances scholarship on the global processes that drive the export of business feminism logics. We analyse the process of dissemination of business feminism from the headquarters of multinational corporations to corporate hubs located in Hungary. This process relies on women executives who are charged with translating policies and practices originating in the headquarters of western corporations. In‐depth interviews with women executives charged with implementing corporate policies reveal the ways in which business feminism is interpreted, modified and/or resisted by actors within organizational settings.
... A researcher's task is to trace how discourse generates knowledge about gender and (its) enactments, as well as the production of difference in work and organizations. Medved & Kirby's (2005) analysis of websites and self-help books is an example of how a postmodern feminism approach is used to uncover how corporate language is used to professionalize the work of stay-at-home mothers. ...
This article focuses on the study of organizational communication, which is a dominant subarea of communication scholarship as recognized by the National Communication Association (NCA) and the International Communication Association (ICA). Because communication, and organizational communication as a subarea, is multiperspectival, this article first defines communication and then organizational communication. Next, the article describes the philosophical perspectives of organizational communication. The next section points to specific areas of individual-, dyadic-, group-, and organizational-level communication research in which communication and organizational psychology and organizational behavior (OPOB) share similar interests. The article concludes by describing practical implications of this area of scholarship (i.e., what can organizations and individuals do with the findings of organizational communication scholarship) and by identifying promising areas of organizational communication study.
... Third, some scholars have traced the communicative constitution of difference in workplace settings not specifically within the creative fields, through popular culture depictions. The bulk of this research focuses on "women's work," or the role of women at the workplace, contrasted against stay-at-home mothers, as in Medved and Kirby's (2005) examination of online support websites for the latter. Popular media usually highlight the role of stay-at-home wives and mothers as professionals in their own right, productive citizens, and irreplaceable workers, but simplistically compare them with corporate mothers -without interrogating the deeper nuances and complexities underlying the societal division of labor. ...
Popular culture is the representation of a society in artifacts, symbols, and rituals of everyday life – represented through media such as television, radio, news, books, movies, and music. Studying popular culture thus offers organizational communication scholars an understanding of fundamental workplace and organizing processes, as evident to ordinary people through everyday life. Four broad areas of scholarship on the intersections of popular culture and organizational communication may be identified, pertaining to organization–society relationships, the nature of everyday work, building leadership, and social difference. Future research should focus on developing theoretical frameworks that better examine the intersections of everyday organizational practice and popular culture, adopting varied quantitative and qualitative methods to study popular culture representations of organizing, and examining different geographical contexts as well as broader organizational issues.
... It is important to note, too, that the work-life relationship may be more troublesome for women entrepreneurs because of the " imperative of maintaining a dual presence at home and at work " (Bruni, Gherardi, & Poggio, 2004, p. 416) that force " many women [to] construct their identities in the midst of contradictory and competing social expectations about career success and [woman]hood " (Medved & Kirby, 2005, p. 436). Since men are typically not responsible for the home-work and care giving associated with the home realm (Clancy & Tata, 2005; Hochschild, 1989 Hochschild, , 1997 Schor, 1991), they may be more likely to work out of the home and to have discrete work-life boundaries (as with a conventional job), thus reporting less worklife tension than women entrepreneurs. ...
Entrepreneurship in United States culture has been idealized as offering a flexible organizational identity, but has also been critiqued as subjecting individuals to organizationally preferred identities. An examination of work and life experiences for women entrepreneurs offers insight into the work-life relationship for people who ostensibly have more freedom and flexibility to make choices as to how to shape their material work-life as well as their work-life identity. In this empirical study, I apply Tracy and Trethewey’s (2005) theoretical concept of the crystallized self to explore the viability of entrepreneurship as a “solution” to work-life tensions and to draw out how women entrepreneurs discursively frame and manage their work-life relationship. I conclude that the crystallized self is evident in some women entrepreneurs’ conceptualizations of self, though they do not yet have a language to adequately express this. In addition, women entrepreneurs who over-identified with their businesses moved beyond the crystallized identity to experience a dis/integrated identity.
... 153). Thus, in the same way that not everything is truly a business (e.g. a family or a classroom are not businesses), business logic and discourse have become a pervasive discourse of organizing-even in nonprofessional work (Medved and Kirby, 2005). ...
With increased scrutiny over the value and promise of higher education, liberal arts degrees face criticism, in favor of professional degrees like business that position students for a linear career path to lucrative work. Research for this article is based on 20 interviews with college students majoring in Arts and Sciences, who completed a summer program to obtain a business minor. Our findings demonstrate that participants talk about the business minor as a key factor in ‘selling themselves’ to potential employers by (1) highlighting the discipline required to complete the program, (2) acting as a conversation starter with potential employees, and (3) emphasizing the broad applicability of a business minor. Implications demonstrate the power of professionalism to render specialized knowledge (like business knowledge) insignificant while offering an extension of Williams’ ideal-worker norm to young people.
... In her study of female entrepreneurs, Lewis (2006) pointed out that masculinity is nearly invisible in entrepreneurial discourses, an "unmarked category" against which otherness is constructed. 4. Medved and Kirby (2005) revealed the use of traditional work terms by stayat-home moms. Referring to themselves as the "family CEO," stay-at-home mothers believe that "motherhood is a career" (Sanders & Bullen, 2002, p. xi, from Medved & Kirby, 2005. ...
Pressure to achieve work-life "balance" has recently become a significant part of the cultural fabric of working life in United States. A very few privileged employees tout their ability to find balance between their careers and the rest of their lives, but most employees face considerable organizational and economic constraints which hamper their ability to maintain a reasonable "balance" between paid work and other life aspectsand it is not only women who struggle. Increasingly men find it difficult to "do it all." Women have long noted the near impossibility of balancing multiple roles, but it is only recently that men have been encouraged to see themselves beyond their breadwinner selves. Gender Equality and Work-Life Balance describes the work-life practices of men in the United States. The purpose is to increase gender equality at work for all employees. With a focus on leave policy inequalities, this book argues that men experience a phenomenon called "the glass handcuffs," which prevents them from leaving work to participate fully in their families, homes, and other life events, highlighting the cultural, institutional, organizational, and occupational conditions which make gender equality in work-life policy usage difficult. This social justice book ultimately draws conclusions about how to minimize inequalities at work. Gender Equality and Work-Life Balance is unique as it laces together some theoretical concepts which have little previous association, including entrepreneurialism; leave policy, occupational identity, and the economic necessities of families. This book will therefore be of particular interest to researches and academics alike in the disciplines of Gender studies, Human Resource Management, Employment Relations, Sociology and Cultural Studies.
... We develop this line of analysis to theorize the colonization and disciplining of older people's bodies as an adjunct to processes of corporate colonization; that is, theorizing the aged body as both the product of and site for colonization in organizations such as residential care homes. While Deetz' work has been used to examine the effects of corporate colonization on, for example, employee identity (Brown and Lewis 2011), work and family life (Dempsey and Sanders 2010;Tietze and Musson 2005) and child care (Katz 2004;Medved and Kirby 2005), relatively little attention has been paid to the effects on the lives of retired older people (Burns et al. 2014). This article seeks therefore to develop an analysis of older age and the body through such organizational theorizing (Dale 2001;Hassard et al. 2000;Hindmarsh and Pilnick 2007;Holliday and Hassard 2001). ...
Based on fieldwork in residential homes, arrangements for the care of older people are examined with reference, primarily, to Deetz’s theory of ‘corporate colonization’. Extending this theory, it is argued that grouping such people in care homes can result in a form of social segregation, one that reflects the management of the aged body in relation to normative constructions of dependence. Focusing on the experiences of residents, the everyday effects of narratives of decline on disciplining the lives of older people are assessed, with this analysis taking recourse to the work of Foucault (1979). The result is the identification of three related concepts at work in the colonizing process of the aged body: (i) appropriation of the body – the physical and social practices involved in placing older people in care homes; (ii) separation from previous identities – how a range of new subjectivities are produced in the process of becoming a ‘resident’; and (iii) contesting colonized identities – the ways in which residents can attempt to challenge normative concepts of managed physical and mental decline. Overall the disciplining of the body is theorized not only as an adjunct to the notion of corporate colonization but also, more generally, as a prominent and powerful organizing principle of later life.
... In these texts and parenting books, the image of Mother as CEO is reproduced, reinforcing the rationality of managerialism as the solution (Douglas & Michaels, 2004;Medved & Kirby, 2005;Sotirin et al., 2007). Likewise, Moe and Shandy (2010) noted that couples often describe decisions about cutting back on paid labor as the logical choice, or even base decisions on percentages and investments, leaving unseen the possible emotional aspects of the decision. ...
Increased demands at both work and home make it necessary for individuals and families to negotiate an increasingly precarious work-life balance. Managerialist discourse is one popular means of managing work-life balance by using corporate discourse to construct home life. This article uses the lens of corporate colonization to examine the often porous work-life boundaries of dual-earner couple's co-constructions of work-life concerns. Results suggest that the organizational realm is ever present in the couples’ understanding of the “ideal couple” and what should constitute “appropriate” interactions.
... The private domain, however, entails such feminine duties as childbearing, childrearing, housework, and many other familial responsibilities (Kugelberg, 2006;Mumby & Putnam, 1992;Nadesan & Trethewey, 2000). Due to the contradictory expectations from the public and private domains, working mothers tend to have a harder time negotiating the competing work and life obligations than their male counterparts do SUPPORT, WORK-LIFE CONFLICT, SALARY, AND CAREER Medved & Kirby, 2005). Some scholars (e.g., Medved, 2004) even defined work-life conflict merely from the perspective of women-the extent to which women can simultaneously manage daily routines in their work and personal lives. ...
This study took a first step to build a theory understanding public relations practitioners’ work–life balance. Through a national sample of Public Relations Society of America members, we examined what factors influence practitioners’ perceptions of work–life conflict and what kind of impact such perceived work–life conflict may have on their income and career path. Analysis of online survey data of 820 practitioners found that a more family–supportive organizational work environment overall would minimize practitioners’ reported work–life conflict. Gender did matter, especially in explaining strain-based conflict perceived by practitioners. Last, women whose career was interrupted earned significantly more than those whose career was not.
... A discursive lens elucidates how particular meanings, values, and attitudes are communicatively constituted (J. Martin, 1990;Medved & Kirby, 2005). Discourse is often understood as little "d" discourse-the micro practices of everyday talk-and big "D" discourse-the organizing ideologies that order our world (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000). ...
Employing the feminist interpretive focus group method, findings in this study demonstrate how different generational perspectives of professional women, socialized at different periods of time, intersect in the current workforce to explain conflict around work and life. In particular, the authors found conflict centers around two well-documented discourses thematic in their focus groups, which organize the way people think about work—paying one’s dues and face-time. Using interpretive focus groups to draw out the different interpretive frames of the generations, this study deconstructs the interpretations, providing a hopeful place to begin a theoretical and practical conversation that bridges the different perspectives of women across generations as they negotiate work and life. Findings have implications for organizational, work/life, and qualitative communication studies.
... First, we use rhetorical methods to study work=life issues. With the exception of a discourse analysis conducted by Medved and Kirby (2005), the majority of research in this area has been empirical or theoretical in nature. The tools of rhetorical analysis offer a new perspective on this topic. ...
Organizations wield great power over the structure of contemporary life. Using the rhetorical method of cluster analysis, we investigated the construction of work/life issues on Web sites of companies on Fortune's 2004 list of “100 Best Companies to Work for.” By identifying key terms and the terms that clustered around them, we uncovered a corporate ideology of work/life: 1) work is the most important element of life; 2) life means family; 3) individuals are responsible for balance; and 4) organizations control work/life programs. We conclude that organizational work/life programs may increase, rather than decrease, the amount of control organizations exercise over personal life. We explore the implications of this finding as well as directions for future research.
... First, making life choices and constructing identity in relation to work and family issues is a significant and practical dilemma today (Coltrane, 1996;Kaufman & Quigley, 2000). Although communication scholars explore how adults construct work and family choices and related identities in the midst of contradiction (Golden, 2001;Medved & Kirby, 2005), limited research to date has explored the various ways in which parental communication enables and constrains young adults' current interpretations of their future work and family life choices. Parents provide key information to young adults about future work and family arrangements (Csikszentmihalyi & Schneider, 2000;Piotrkowski, 1979), but the nature of the messages shared in these interactions is largely unknown. ...
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 receiving similar messages from parents about the role that work and family should play in adult life. Additional chi-square analyses demonstrate that women received significantly different messages than men about choosing particular careers and exiting the paid labor force in relation to anticipated family obligations. Possible ideological implications of these findings are delineated in the discussion section including: work as personal fulfillment, the gendered nature of work choice, and reinforcing family in young men's lives. Limitations and future directions of this study are also addressed.
... Moreover, organizational Discourse studies often examine the formation of Discourse as the assembly and combination of several societal Discourses within unique historical contexts to produce certain truth effects. For instance, a study by Medved and Kirby (2005) examined the emergence of a corporate Discourse that worked to define the identity of stay-at-home mothers. Their analysis illustrated that a corporate mothering Discourse was formed' at the confluence of three distinct yet interrelated streams of Discourse: ideologies of mothering in relation to the public or private spheres, the contemporary privileging of the organization, and feminist debates on motherhood' (p. ...
As Van Dijk (2007) proposed in the first issue of Discourse and Communication , the main purpose of this journal is to bridge the two cross-disciplines of communication and discourse studies. Given this goal, this article sought to help clear the ground for such interdisciplinary development by investigating how organizational researchers use the terms `discourse' and `communication' and cast discourse—communication relationships. By reviewing 112 organizational discourse studies from major journals in communication, organizational studies, and interdisciplinary journals published between 1981 and 2006, this study identified diverse conceptualizations of these basic concepts. The findings help dispel some of the misunderstandings that scholars from one research field may possess toward the other and sort through some, if not all, the confusions regarding the terms `discourse', `communication', and their relationships.
Purpose
This study aims to reveal and compare the cultural logics of university-educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong in their mothering practices to improvise their femininities in constituting their work–family interactions.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative research, with the ethnographic elements, has included 32 Chinese mothers to share about their mothering experiences through semi-structured interviews. This methodological design with feminist lens embraces women’s own narratives as sources of knowledge and learns their voices to reinvent their role and bodily engagement in shaping their family dynamics.
Findings
This discussion basically reaffirms the argument where the mother’s involvement in their children’s schoolwork becomes one of the core elements in their actual everyday mothering practices. It has further reflected the dynamics of family quality time in the light of mothers’ cultural logics as much as their attentive agency capacity to present their respectable femininity in the form of mothering.
Research limitations/implications
This research process has revealed the actual experiences of the participants from their own narratives. For future research development, data collection can be extended to include the husbands’ profiles and their narratives in understanding their wives’ mothering experiences.
Originality/value
This discussion enriches the work-family literature by extending it to the Asian Chinese context. While the concepts of cultural capital and habitus have been addressed in previous studies, this discussion highlights the agency capacity of the university-educated Chinese mothers in their cultural logics to deliver their respective mothering practices. This filtering process to transmit cultural capital to their children is as much as they involve in reproducing status boundaries for the family.
The coronavirus disease-19 pandemic and the accompanying public health restrictions have posed significant challenges to parents with dependent children. A rich body of literature has examined the problems encountered by parents and their gendered division of labour in childcare during the pandemic. However, little attention has been paid to their interactions and collaborations with extended family for childcare. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 43 urban parents in Shenzhen, China, I examine how parents mobilised childcare support from extended family during the pandemic, focusing on their collaboration with grandparents. Viewing parenting as a series of interactive and relational practices, I analyse how parents made new childcare arrangements and sought support from extended family to cope with work–childcare conflict and their ambivalence towards family collaboration in childcare during the pandemic. My findings highlight the significance of extended family collaboration for parents to overcome childcare challenges and reveal the embeddedness and relationality of parenting during the coronavirus disease-19 pandemic within extended family.
This article examines the nineteenth-century movement to professionalize motherhood by revising the rhetoric used to describe maternal expertise and training. On the surface, this revision appears to modernize maternal labor and articulate its value to a capitalist, democratic society. I argue that in practice, however, it demonstrates a double standard of professionalism that limits women’s social mobility while elevating the value of the maternal institution. To illustrate this argument, I analyze three articles that construct the rhetorical framework of professional mothering that emerged in the Progressive Era and demonstrate the continuity of their arguments with contemporary rhetoric regarding mothers and work. To this end, I offer suggestions for how we might better address the goals of professional mothering rhetoric in ways that disrupt traditional characterizations of motherhood, maternal labor, and professional identity.
Our article considers the possibilities and perils co-existing within entrepreneurial reproductive labor, a context easily dismissed as devoid of alternative economic possibilities due to its adherence to neoliberal ideals. Seasonal consignment sales involving the communal processing and reselling of used children’s goods provide a particularly compelling case of economic innovations drawing upon entrepreneurial reproductive labor. Rather than resting at an easy conclusion that seasonal consignment sales practices are determined by neoliberalism, thus precluding alternatives to capitalism, we highlight their ambivalences. Industry leaders’ authoritative discourses—centering on languages of entrepreneurialism and self-regulation—maintain a gendered division of labor, promote a neoliberal version of ‘mompreneurship’, and advocate moralized consumption, care, and labor practices. At the same time, we argue that seasonal consignment sales provide glimpses of alternative structures of value creation outside of the wage relationship. In highlighting the case of seasonal consignment sales, our study contributes critical consideration of the contested status of entrepreneurial reproductive labor within alternatives to capitalism.
We examine the portrayals of two good working mothers in popular work–family balance films—Melanie in One Fine Day (1996) and Kate in I Don’t Know How She Does It (2011). Using a critical standpoint, we build on communication work–family/life scholarship to extend theoretical understanding of underlying ideological notions of the good working mother. In particular, we analyze Melanie and Kate’s performances that reflect the underlying cultural ideologies of being an ideal worker, a true domestic woman, and an intensive mother. Further, we explicate how this juggling of identities portrays good working mothers as perpetually defensive. We go beyond the analysis of ideologies to lay out some of the consequences of the performance portrayals of the good working mother, in that she should (a) accept “punishments” from her children, (b) conceptualize fathers as secondary parents, (c) solve problems on her own, and (d) choose family over work.
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 in relation to historic cultural scripts of fathering is explored. Second, data collection and discourse analysis procedures employed in this study are described. Next, an analysis is presented of the various ways 45 at-home fathers’ use discourse to position themselves and their domestic labors in relation to hegemonic masculinity. Finally, three critical reflections are offered along with steps for future research and activism.
Organizations operating on a global scale encounter much pressure to be innovative in order to survive. For many, embracing diversity is a means of enhancing creativity, and thus, success. A common organizational strategy to harness diversity is through structures and cultures that organizational scholars would identify as post-modern alternatives to traditional, tall bureaucracies. While such organizations claim that these structures and cultures cater to diversity, particularly gendered diversity, they can often operate to mitigate gendered equality. This occurs because organizations, despite their best intentions and efforts, reinscribe masculine norms of working and organizing. This chapter examines two highly recognizable technology organizations, Google and Facebook, and closely attends to the ways in which their structures and cultures privilege masculinity.
One career path that sheds light on the relationship between work and family for women is that of care-giving professionals. Because of the stressful nature of their socialized roles as caregivers at work and at home, these women constitute a unique population. This interpretive study investigated female care-giving professionals' family-to-work spillover stress and revealed eight communication strategies the women used to cope with it in the workplace. Insight is also provided into the organizational factors that facilitated and inhibited supportive communication in the workplace. Practical implications regarding how “family friendly” communication may enhance the work environment for employees are also discussed.
With such overall variety in leadership study, it is surprising that interim leadership has gone largely unnoticed in the literature. The present study addresses this gap in the organizational and leadership literatures by examining the implications of interim leadership on both individual and organizational identity. Using data from semi-structured, in-depth interviews of 24 interim leaders from an organization (“Interim U”), we found that the questions of “Who am I?” and “Who are we?” were heavily entangled in the individual-collective identity management discussion. This study examines the ways in which the identity of interim leaders are managed and enacted at Interim U, and how the individual and organizational identities reflexively interrelate.
Transmen on the Web Blogging Transmen Making Erasure Visible Transmen's Public Realm Conclusion References
Work and family domains mutually influence one another in positive and negative ways. A fair amount of evidence supports the spillover effects between these two domains. In addition, research on crossover supports how one spouse may be influenced by another spouse's spillover. Much less evidence exists about how it affects other family members, especially children. This qualitative interpretive study explores emergent themes related to youth perceptions of how their parents' work–family spillover impacts them. Using crossover as a guiding framework, youth (N = 55) participated in a semistructured interview about their perceptions of their parents' communication regarding blending work and family and how it impacts those youth participants. The analysis of the transcribed interviews revealed several emergent themes related to youth awareness of and the impact of work–family integration issues as well as youth perceptions about their own futures. The results suggest the ways in which socialization occurs through a socially constructed view of work and family and the impact those constructions have on vocational decisions.
Motherhood in the United States is a negotiated performance for women who both create and contest the discursive structures that shape their experiences. Rhetorical analysis of ethnographic interviews with diverse mothers asked to reflect on the terms “focus” and “balance” as they relate to their negotiation of personal and professional responsibilities revealed a pattern of conflict between language and temporal experience. Caught between the rhetorical mandates of a culture predicated on anthropologist Edward Hall's concept of “monochronic” or “M-time” (linear, segmented, task-oriented)—and the experience of mothering, which relies on what Hall calls “polychronic” or “P-time” (relational, fluid, multitasked)—the women interviewed exhibit what we term “relational attention,” a rhetorical strategy that enables them to navigate successfully between these competing temporal modes, but one which they struggled to name.
Scholars have been examining multiple facets of the experiences of employed mothers for decades. However, much of this scholarship has focused on the examination of specific variables that may have an influence on their lives. In this article I seek to review much of this research and explore it through the framework of a temporal multifaceted adaptation approach. This framework addresses the specific phases that comprise the professional or semiprofessional employed mother's adaptation to her home and work environments. Thus, this approach organizes employed mothers’ experiences in terms of the antecedent, process, and outcome phases of their adaptation to their lives as employed mothers. Organizing and examining the research in this way enables a more comprehensive understanding of how the experience of employed mothers evolves over time, as well as the factors that both hinder and help them as they adjust to challenges associated with their role.
Research is equivocal about whether, in the context of work–life interrelationships, newer information and communication technologies (ICTs) primarily increase individuals' control over work and mitigate work–life conflict or help organizations extend the work-day and their control over employees. Informed by social theory and empirical research that views employees and their families as dynamic shapers of technological practices, this study presents empirical evidence of these practices in relation to ICT-mediated work–life management. Using a structurationally informed technologies-in-practice perspective as a boundary spanning framework, the study approaches ICTs as emergent from the interconnected practices and values of employing organizations, employees, and their families. Five forms of recursive structuring are identified that describe ways in which technologically mediated work-at-home and home-at-work (re)produce and transform rules and resources from both home and work at both home and work. Implications for employing organizations, employees, and family members are discussed.
Purpose
– The purpose of this article is to review the use of linguistic methods such as narrative and discourse analysis in workplace management research.
Design/methodology/approach
– Ten journals are reviewed in a time period of six years between years 2004-2010. The journals are categorized into three linguistic methodological journals and seven journals on built environment. Additionally articles were gathered with search words of workplace management, discourse and narrative analysis. Out of the total 2,245 articles, 40 articles were considered to be relevant for this research.
Findings
– The linguistic methods of narrative and discourse analysis are not recognized in the workplace management research in a comprehensive way by combining the research on built environment to the research on organization and culture. In the workplace management research methods of narrative and discourse analysis were applied to the processes of built environment. Additionally methods were applied to the research of space and place as means of communication and means of identity construction.
Practical implications
– Linguistic approach would reveal underlying messages behind evident structures of workplace and give new insights on understanding and developing workplaces both in design and in use.
Originality/value
– The linguistic methods of narrative and discourse analysis are rarely used in workplace management research and should be considered as a new resource in the research of WPM.
Many working individuals struggle with the time and timing of work, and often turn to books, web sites, magazines, seminars, and workshops to assist in their struggle to find meaning/fulness in work. In the present article, we first adopt Hassard's (2002) pluri-paradigmatic perspective on organizational temporality to consider the limitations of popular discourse that organizational members draw on in their day-to-day interaction. We consider themes in this discourse along three tropes—commodification, construction, and compression—intended to help members address widely held concerns associated with the time and timing of work. Our analysis highlights problematic issues arising from the focus of one trope over the others. We conclude by considering Adam's (2004) macro-level framework of temporal control to suggest broad implications of popular discourse on the time and timing of work.
The ideology of independence lies at the very core of the marketing agenda. For the free market to operate as a legitimate means of social organization, the right to be independent and to be free to enact ostensibly independent choices is to all intents and purposes sacred. Independence is an especially critical concept for marketing academics and practitioners to understand given the need to reconcile consumer demand for a sense of individuality, freedom and self, with an organization’s need to commodify consumption activities in order to realize market growth. This paper examines the ways in which a sense of independence is successfully offered to consumers within paradoxically mass-market communications. The study investigates what it means to be an independent traveller by implementing a critical discourse analysis of alternative guidebooks. Findings suggest that guidebooks construct independence by reifying inaccessibility, interpreting value, and constructing inauthenticity for consumers. This promulgates a powerful myth of the independent traveler as someone who defies inaccessibility, hunts for bargains, and avoids inauthenticity. Crucially, each of these cultural practices also acts to engender an implicit relation of dependency between the text and the tourist that is found to contradict, but ultimately not threaten, the whole notion of independence that the consumption experience itself is predicatedon.
Under the combined effects of commercialisation, urbanisation, migration and employment, significant changes are taking place in India’s process of modernisation. One change is the emergence of a population of women with degrees in higher education. These degrees, and the individuals’ desire to pursue professional positions that relate to their education, may influence the ways in which women perceive their identity. This study explores the situations and circumstances of college‐educated Indian females’ identity and illuminates the complexities and consequences of the university‐educated Indian woman’s life. Twenty‐five women from different parts of India were interviewed. The findings, which emerged by marital status, showed identities of single women appeared to be influenced by their interest to maintain a positive attitude about life, develop cognitive intelligence that relates to an interest, and explore the meanings of and learn independence. The identity of married, divorced and widowed women appeared to be affected by their goal to pursue an interest; need to balance personal interests and family responsibilities; and obligation to live in an extended family. The results are discussed in the context of shifting roles of women and the adoption of multifaceted identities.
The authors describe the work experiences of in-home day care providers, particularly their relationships with the parents of the children for whom they care throughout the day. The authors identify two unintended consequences of the providers' organizing structures and policies: feelings of stress and underappreciation in potential interactions. Ironically, the providers also instituted these same structures and policies to stay home with their own children and meet their own financial needs. This double bind of agency and constraint produced stress, which in turn compromised their interactions with their family and friends. Findings highlight the difficulties involved in managing work and family from a home-based business and draw particular attention to the relational challenges faced by the providers.
In this study, employed fathers of preschool-age children were interviewed, both individually and with their spouses, to identify their communicative strategies for constructing their own performances of childrearing. Bateson's “frame” construct provided the meta-analytic basis for an interpretive analysis of the interview accounts. The analysis identified 13 frames, clustered under 3 metaframes (“childrearing as work – expression of agency,” “childrearing as work – experience of constraint,” and “childrearing as expression of pure relationship”). The content of the frames and their interrelationships in the fathers' accounts are used to advance a “masculine concept of caregiving.” The significance of articulating a “masculine concept of caregiving” for overcoming obstacles to involved fathering is examined.
In this paper, I suggest that we might further contextualize our understanding of how work and life are navigated by approaching it as a struggle through which control and resistance are accomplished as various meanings of work are negotiated. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected at a Swedish organization, I argue that a normative cultural expectation for lagom (moderation) functions both to control members and to enable them to resist managerial control. These findings suggest that by approaching control as potentially fragmented, resistance as unobtrusive, and work/life issues as situated, scholarship can illuminate how societies and organizations might equip individuals to successfully navigate work and life.
There is a long tradition of applying managerial techniques and principles to more efficiently manage domestic and familial responsibilities. We argue that such appropriations of corporate practices, language, and thinking not only obscure distinctions between home and work but also integrate work values, patterns, and perspectives into everyday constructions of family life so thoroughly as to bring into question what a family is and what values, practices, and relationships make family life different from the corporate world. Using a feminist poststructuralist perspective, we analyze three texts illustrating the insinuation of managerialism into popular family management prescriptions. We conclude by critically examining four discursive strategies in these texts: (a) moral dichotomies; (b) managerial metaphors; (c) coopted concepts; and (d) emphasis on individualized choice. Our critique highlights the ironies that open these strategies to contestation and alternatives.
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 arrangements into many health care systems. This experimental initiative set out to test the hypothesis that traditional healthcare system animosities and exclusionary practices could be overcome by stakeholder participation in an ongoing, structured, collaborative dialogue about improving access to health services. In the process of collecting data through surveys, interviews, content analysis, and observation, we were struck by the occurrence of several overarching tensions that we perceive to exist in our data. The present article elucidates five such tensions and suggests how third parties such as communication researchers, evaluators, and practitioners can facilitate community health improvement initiatives and better their own data interpretation by acknowledging and understanding these tensions.
This study explores the metaphor of managing diversity and its related discourses that dominate current business communication about the changing workforce. We examine the language employed in practitioner- oriented texts and consultant websites on diversity. We first illustrate the characteristics of the managerial metaphor, including the emphasis on achieving competitive advantage and a "quick-fix" orientation toward improving managerial competencies regarding diversity. We then analyze the implications of the managerial metaphor in terms of (a) whose interests are emphasized by the metaphor, (b) whose inter ests are (potentially) marginalized by the metaphor, (c) how the metaphor system relates to power and economic interests, (d) how dif ferent metaphors present alternative positions, and (e) implications for business communication. We contend that language that constitutes individuals as resources emphasizes managerial and economic interests and potentially marginalizes human and ethical aspects of diversity.
Although work-family benefits are increasingly important organizational policies, limited research addresses the impact of communication on benefit utilization. However, communication is significant because the perceived appropriateness of work-family benefits emerges through interaction. For example, when coworkers complain about "picking up the slack" for those using family leave, their discourse may impact future decisions of other workers regarding whether they utilize the work-family benefits available to them. We apply Giddens' (1984) Structuration Theory to examine organizational members' discursive responses to conditions (and contradictions) present in utilizing work-family benefits in a governmental organization. We argue the daily discursive practices of individuals can either reinforce or undermine formally stated work-family initiatives, and in turn discuss the implications of this "structuration" of policy.
The present article investigates a communication, education, and training intervention program intended to initiate a sense of empowerment among women dairy farmers in India. A conceptualization of communication and empowerment is offered. The empowering and disempowering dimensions of women's communication are highlighted through the participants' own words and experiences. Our analysis of the communicative dimensions of women's empowerment yields 3 important insights. First, women's empowerment is displayed through different forms of communication and feminist action, particularly when women organize to accomplish social change within their families and communities. Second, empowerment is embedded in democratic practices, especially when women discuss issues and make decisions that improve their quality of life. Third, paradox and contradiction are an important part of the empowerment process.
We examine two key US labor market policies: state-level minimum wages for women from 1912-23 and the federal minimum wage established under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Each of these regulations implicitly defined which groups were and were not expected to conform to the hegemonic male breadwinner/female homemaker model of gender relations. In fact, social reformers and labor leaders advocated these policy measures as a means of extending the male-breadwinner family to recent European immigrants and white southerners. The male-breadwinner family and public policies designed to foster it became one means of defining a commonality of whiteness among different ethnic groups during a period of assimilation. Through the inclusion and exclusion of particular occupations and industries, African-American women were assigned a subordinated gender identity as neither full-time mothers nor legitimate breadwinners. They responded by forging their own gender identity as co-breadwinners.
Joyce Fletcher's research shows that emotional intelligence and relational behavior are often viewed as inappropriate because they collide with powerful, gender-linked images.
This study of female design engineers has profound implications for attempts to change organizational culture. Joyce Fletcher's research shows that emotional intelligence and relational behavior are often viewed as inappropriate because they collide with powerful, gender-linked images. Fletcher describes how organizations say they need such behavior and yet ignore it, thus undermining the possibility of radical change. She shows why the "female advantage" does not seem to be benefit women employees or organizations. She offers ways that individuals and organizations can make visible the invisible work.
Frankenberg explores the unique intersection of race and sex as she examines the way that white women relate to racism. She writes from the assumption that whiteness is socially constructed rather than naturally pre-existing. She theorizes "from experience" to offer a unique perspective that retains the strength of a theoretical foundation as well as the relatability of personal narratives. She interviews thirty white women to get their perspectives on various racial topics and gain a critical standpoint for thinking about individual and social forces that construct and maintain whiteness in contemporary society. She begins with the question, "What is white women's relationship to racism?" The women discuss various aspects of interracial courtship, the role of power in acknowledging racial differences, and the function of language in facing and overcoming the negative effects of this difference.
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 such outcomes. We supplement these studies with emerging communication research to illustrate new ways of thinking about each problematic. We highlight the role of daily microlevel discourses as well as macrodiscourses of organizations and families in creating the current processes, structures, and relationships surrounding work and family. We link each problematic with an agenda for empowerment through (a) questioning boundaries, (b) integrating identity, (c) embracing practical knowledge and emotionality, (d) seeking diverse voices, and (e) developing a communal orientation.
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Joan Williams' Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict And What To Do About It (Oxford, 1999) is a "theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly accessible treatise" that offers a new vision of work, family, and gender. (Publisher's Weekly, Nov. 1, 1999) It examines our system of providing for children's care by placing their caregivers at the margins of economic life. This system that stems from the way we define our work ideals, notably from our definition of the ideal worker as one who takes no time off for childbearing or childrearing and who works full-time and is available for overtime. The ideal-worker norm clashes with our sense that children should be cared for by parents. The result is a system that is bad for men, worse for women, and disastrous for children. Williams documents that mothers remain economically marginalized, and points out that when mothers first marginalize and then divorce, their children often accompany them into poverty. Williams argues that designing workplaces around the bodies of men (who need no time off for childbearing) and men's life patterns (for women still do 80% of the child care) often constitutes discrimination against women. She also engages the work/family literature to show that "flexible" workplaces are often better than existing practices for employers' bottom line. On the family side, she argues that the ideal worker's wage -- after as well as before divorce -- reflects the joint work of the ideal worker and the primary caregiver of his children, and should be jointly owned. In a comprehensive examination of the theoretical issues surrounding work/family issues, she uses the work of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu to explain why gender has proved so unchanging and unbending, reframing the special treatment/equal treatment debate, the debate over "women's voice," and offering new perspective on how to avoid the persistent race and class conflicts that emerge in debates over work and family issues.
One tremendous challenge in higher education today is meeting the needs of the diverse student populations in our classrooms and office hours. Currently, a growing number of college students are between the ages of 30 and 40 (Giczowski, 1990). For many individuals in this particular non-traditional segment of our student population, simultaneously managing multiple life-roles creates a variety of unique challenges. This study explores critical interactions between faculty and students when students are experiencing difficulties in managing school and family/work responsibilities from the framework of Negotiated Order Theory (Strauss, 1978). Data were collected through survey and critical interaction methods. Results demonstrate that childcare concerns most often triggered students to initiate negotiations with faculty members, informational support was often lacking for how to manage such negotiations, limited options were perceived by students, and faculty members not granting student requests often relied on rules-based or fairness rationales when framing their responses. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed, along with practical applications for university personnel.
The metaphor of “Student as Consumer” appeared upon the social horizon in North America and Western Europe seemingly for all the right reasons: the responsibility of higher education to its publics, the attendant accountability, an interest in practical applications of knowledge, and spiraling increases in the cost of going to college. Widespread adoption of the metaphor, however, can produce some negative educational consequences. Drawing upon the literatures of organizational studies, education, communication and rhetoric, we trace the rise of the student consumer metaphor, explore its limitations, and suggest alternatives to its use. Specifically, we argue that this metaphor (a) suggests undue distance between the student and the educational process; (b) highlights the promotional activities of professors and promotes the entertainment model of classroom learning; (c) inappropriately compartmentalizes the educational experience as a product rather than a process; and (d) reinforces individualism at the expense of community. We conclude with a consideration of a more embracing model of the learning process which we term “critical engagement.”
Based on the premise that past and current theories of pay discrimination fail to explain women's continued economic deprivation, a theory of extended housework is advanced and illustrated through responses from women employed in paid positions. Specifically, this theory views communication, not as an independent nor as a dependent variable, but as an integral aspect of pay inequity. Market theories, critical theories, and feminist theories concerning pay inequity are reviewed with special emphasis on how these theories position communication with the practice of pay inequity. Fifty women working at paid occupations were interviewed. Their responses shed light upon how pay inequity articulates patriarchal conditions often hidden behind the ‘rationality’ of capitalism. Implications for future research are discussed.
Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction: What is Social Constructionism? Where Do You Get Your Personality From? Does Language Affect the Way We Think? What is a Discourse? What Does it Mean to Have Power? Is There a Real World Outside Discourse? Can Individuals Change Society? What Does it Mean to be a Person? 1. The Person as Discourse-user. 2. The Self as Constructed in Language. 3. Subject Positions in Discourse. What Do Discourse Analysts Do? Glossary. Bibliography. Name Index. Subject Index.
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 family life. Through the analysis of 35 women's accounts of their daily work and family routines and conflict scenarios, results are reported including the detailing of three superordinate practical action clusters: routinizing, improvising, and restructuring, along with related commonsense rules. Results are then discussed in terms of the relational nature of work and family routines. Findings argue for examining how work and family balance and conflict get played out in daily practice. Finally, limitations and future directions are discussed.
The ethnographic study reported here examines executive maternity leave as a succession event that manifests itself in a novel transition pattern that I term “temporary executive succession.” In a study of one entrepreneurial firm, I investigated what happens when a founder takes a maternity leave, specifically, how the initiating force of maternity influences the event and how members respond to a breach in “feminine” leadership. The ethnographic analysis revealed an emergent leadership change in the absence of a formal successor. While firm members professed their “feminine” approach to work, they invoked the founder's maternity to increase the firm's autonomy and revise the founder's role. The study brings critical, participatory qualitative methods to succession inquiry and casts doubt on the validity of dominant assumptions about executive succession, its initiating forces, stages of the process, and control. It also informs research on “feminine” styles of leading and the place of maternity in modern organizations.
L'A. retrace la vie et la carriere de Lillian Moller Gilbreth, l'epouse de Frank Bunker Gilbreth, le pionnier du management scientifique. A la mort de ce dernier, Lillian Moller Gilbreth dut assumer a la fois la responsabilite de l'entreprise d'ingenierie industrielle fondee par son mari et celle de chef d'une famille nombreuse. L'A. presente les travaux menes par Lillian Moller Gilbreth dans le domaine du management scientifique. Il rappelle qu'aux Etats-Unis, depuis le debut des annees 1920, le nombre de femmes actives n'a pas cesse de croitre. Cette evolution devait poser certains problemes. Comment les femmes americaines pourraient-elles concilier activite professionnelle et travail domestique ? Lillian Moller Gilbreth s'efforca de developper une nouvelle vision de l'organisation du travail domestique permettant des gains de temps et une plus grande efficacite. Elle concut, en ce sens, un nouveau modele d'amenagement des cuisines dans le cadre duquel les appareils menagers electriques commencerent a jouer un role central
This article examines an innovative philanthropic program instituted by a Midwestern U.S. manufacturing company during organizational downtimes. Rather than institute layoffs and unemployment, the organization chose to enact a policy of “loaned labor,” securing employee pay and benefits in exchange for work in local nonprofit organizations. This case study examines the tensions that emerged when a traditionally structured company instituted a program indicative of incremental shifts toward feminist organizing principles. In this analysis of traditional structures and feminist management principles, the authors examine the promises and problems of this philanthropic program. Lastly, the authors explore the pragmatic and far-reaching benefits of this program for the employees, the community, and the organization as a whole.
This study of the colloquialism, “a real job,” challenges previous assumptions about work socialization. It extends theoretical approaches by situating the stage model of work socialization within a larger context of communication. In the current study, college students explain the meaning of the colloquialism by writing personal narratives. An interpretive analysis probes the ontology of work and the political socializing nature of the colloquialism.
Investigated changes over 2 decades in the degree to which Black and White women participate in the labor market out of economic necessity versus preference for working outside the home. Data comes from 6,483 respondents (18-65 yrs old) to General Social Surveys taken from 1973 to 1990. Factors included in the study are marital status, number of children, family income, education, age, mother's work role as role model, region of residence, prestige, and dislike of job. Results show that most working women from both racial groups participate in the labor force for reasons other than economic necessity alone. Black women are marginally more likely to participate in the labor market than their White counterparts. Certain correlates distinguish labor force participation and also distinguish among those staying home, those working out of necessity, and those working by preference (marital status, number of children, family income, education). Mother's work role as role model, as well as marital status, age, and region of residence also have dissimilar effects on the work statuses of Black and White women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article reconsiders the picture of the mother of young children in industrialised societies as the ‘isolated housewife’, suggesting this notion is by no means straightforward. We suggest there is considerable evidence for the existence of mothers' social contacts and their significance both as ‘work’ and ‘friendship’ in industrial societies. A pre-occupation with the notion of the ‘isolation’ of ‘housewives’ has led social researchers to neglect sustained examination of the social relationships within which many/most mothers are involved on a day-to-day basis. Complexities of interpretation, for example what ‘isolation’ can actually mean, need to be drawn out from the existing literature. Evidence presented from two recent ethnographic studies shows patterned opportunities/constraints occurring in relation to mothers' social contacts within localised settings, whether through organised groups or other personal ties. The complex nature of individual women's social contacts is thus brought out. Some key questions are raised for the importance to sociology, anthropology and social policy of these apparently insignificant or invisible women's networks.
Based on in-depth interviews with hospital nurses, this article examines the way in which employed women with children use
the night shift to support a construction of motherhood which closely resembles that of mothers who are not in the labor force.
Interview data reveal that a salient function of night shift work is the reconciliation of some of the structural and conceptual
incompatibilities of being “working mothers.” Night-shift nurses construct themselves as “stay-at-home moms” by limiting the
public visibility of their labor force participation, by involving their children and themselves in symbolically-invested
activities, and by positioning themselves in the culturally-appropriate place and time: at home, during the day. All of these
strategies work to highlight their visibility as mothers.
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"âmetaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1988. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 266-276).
This study of female design engineers has profound implications for attempts to change organizational culture. Joyce Fletcher's research shows that emotional intelligence and relational behavior are often viewed as inappropriate because they collide with powerful, gender-linked images. Fletcher describes how organizations say they need such behavior and yet ignore it, thus undermining the possibility of radical change. She shows why the "female advantage" does not seem to benefit women employees or organizations. She offers ways that individuals and organizations can make visible the invisible work.
hearts-at-home.org) @BULLET Homebodies (http://www.gospelcom.net/homebodies) @BULLET The Light Keeper
- bullet
- Home Family
- Network
@BULLET Family and Home Network (http://www.familyandhome.org) @BULLET Hearts at Home (http://www.hearts-at-home.org) @BULLET Homebodies (http://www.gospelcom.net/homebodies) @BULLET The Light Keeper (http://www.thelightkeeper.com/sah) @BULLET Main Street Mom (http://www.mainstreetmom.com) @BULLET Mothers and More (http://www.mothersandmore.org) @BULLET At Home Mothers (http://www.athomemothers.com) @BULLET What's a Smart Woman Like You Doing at Home? by Burton, Dittmer, and Loveless (1993).
Professionalizing Motherhood: Encouraging, Edu-cating and Equipping Mothers at Home. NOTES 1. This acronym was utilized by many stay-at-home mothers on their Web sites and in their handbooks. Thus, we did not create this term
- Medved
- Kirby
- Family
Medved, Kirby / FAMILY CEOs 471 at University of Strathclyde on March 17, 2015 mcq.sagepub.com Downloaded from @BULLET Savage (2002). Professionalizing Motherhood: Encouraging, Edu-cating and Equipping Mothers at Home. NOTES 1. This acronym was utilized by many stay-at-home mothers on their Web sites and in their handbooks. Thus, we did not create this term, but we feel comfortable in using it.
Help wanted: Thoughts on a real job Managing maternity leave: A qualitative analysis of tem-porary executive succession
- References Amberger Borgesen
- J Ashcraft
REFERENCES Amberger Borgesen, J. (1999). Help wanted: Thoughts on a real job. Retrieved October 21, 2002, from http://www.athomemother.com/articles/help_ wanted.htm Ashcraft, K. L. (1999). Managing maternity leave: A qualitative analysis of tem-porary executive succession. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, 240-280.