Technology, employed mothers, and corporate colonization of the lifeworld - Term paper, research paper & custom essay writing service

Home

Technology, employed mothers, and corporate colonization of the lifeworld

Technology, employed mothers, and corporate colonization of the lifeworld: A gendered Paradox of work and family balance.

by Paige P. Edley

Abstract: This study explores the bounded realities of employed mothers as they negotiate the balance of paid work and family. Informed by Deetz's (1992) concept of corporate colonization of the lifeworld, Haraway's (1990, 1992) cyborg identity, Hochschild's (1989, 1997) concepts of the second and third shifts, and Rakow and Navaro's (1993) parallel shift and remote mothering, I discuss the complex and simultaneous paradoxes of women balancing responsibilities of their everyday lives. I examine how employed mothers use technology to achieve some balance in their complicated lives, finding them simultaneously empowered to choose when to do paid work and feeling controlled to work all the time. I discuss the paradox wherein the very technology that makes women's lives easier also creates colonized workers of the employing institutions.

As employers allow employees to telecommute and work flexible schedules, they create a gendered paradox of simultaneously increasing the productivity of employed mothers while also making the women's lives easier and less frustrating by allowing them to choose when and where they work. Space and time are extended via communication technology that allows organizations to control workers in such a way that employees are accountable to work responsibilities 24 hours a day. On the other hand, employed mothers consider technology a boon to balancing work and family responsibilities. So which is it--boon or bane to employed mothers? Must our choices of description be limited to either/or dichotomies? Can technology not be both empowering and controlling simultaneously? After all, employed mothers negotiate the day-to-day tensions of balancing work and family in a paradox of conflicting messages and dual identities of employee/full-time student and mother. They are exhausted from working two full-time jobs of paid w ork and unpaid work of childrearing and housework while trying to "have it all."

The Paradox of Dualism in a World of Simultaneity

The paradox of technology extends space and time into the home and during weekends, evenings, and predawn hours in order to balance work and family responsibilities. Informed by a critical/feminist organizational perspective, I discuss how society treats these socially constructed terms of work, family, public, and private, as if they are natural and real. By doing so, we ignore the negotiated tensions and contradictions that employed parents engage in as we attempt to balance the multiple roles produced and reproduced in the gendered discourses of work/family. By using Foucault's (1980, 1988) and others' (Jaggar & Bordo, 1989) method of connecting terms with slashes (/), I attempt to engage a language without dichotomous divisions and categories in order to give credence to simultaneity and constancy. We do not live in a world of "either/or," but our language systems describe a "both/and" world in "either/or" dichotomous terms. Language produces and reproduces a dualistic division of choices and separates, d ivides, and organizes people's relationships and experiences into strict categories of mutual exclusion. Even the language of "balancing home and work," and of "working mother" reproduces false dichotomies, since we know that all mothers work inside the home and some work outside the home. The terminology of balancing home and work suggests the balancing act is between two separate spheres, the public sphere of work and the private sphere of home and family. The division of public and private spheres into separate, mutually exclusive realms reproduces what Kanter (1977, 1989) calls the "myth of separate worlds" and Martin (1990) refers to as a "false dichotomy," a gendered work/family paradox in which men and women traverse the boundaries of public and private in different ways (Hochschild, 1989, 1997; Nippert-Eng, 1995; Rakow & Navarro, 1993). For employed mothers the boundaries are blurred as work and family responsibilities spill over into both areas of their lives. The boundaries are permeable as employed mothers move in and out of public and private discourses--a constant and simultaneous dance rather than a periodic or sequential movement.

I explore how technology allows organizations to break down distinctive boundaries between the public and private spheres and extend organizational control into the home. I build on Deetz's (1992) concept of corporate colonization of the lifeworld, Hochschild's (1989, 1997) concepts of the second and third shifts, and Rakow and Navarro's (1993) concepts of the parallel shift and remote mothering.

Theoretical Grounding

Corporate Colonization of the Lifeworld

Drawing on Habermas' (1987) work, Deetz (1992) defines corporate colonization of the lifeworld in which "[w]orkplace values and practices extend into nonwork life through time structuring, educational content, economic distributions, product development, and creation of needs. Modern corporations affect society by both their products and their income distribution but also by the practices internal to them" (p. 113-114). Not only is corporate colonization influencing the decisions that employees make regarding their private lives, corporations and universities also are seducing employed women and men into believing that that can "have it all." Employed mothers often think they can be Super Moms; however, this concept is a myth. Organizations have seduced parents with technology and have gained their consent to be controlled through the illusion of removing spatial and temporal constraints.

The separation of public and private, as discussed by Ferguson (1984), Kanter (1977, 1989), Martin (1990), and others, has presented the separate spheres as gendered, exclusive realms. In addition, the concept has been extended to include keeping employees' personal life out of the paid workplace. One must always don a professional image and never bring personal matters to work. However, the separation of public and private is not a two-way street. Employers expect employees to take tasks home, to meet with clients after hours and on weekends, and to be available by telephone, e-mail, or pager any time the boss needs to reach them. This is a form of corporate colonization of the lifeworld.

Martin (1990, 1994) argues that the boundaries separating the public and private spheres are a false dichotomy. In actuality we never leave one sphere and enter another. We exist on a continuum in which we traverse the false boundaries of either/or distinctions while being immersed in both worlds simultaneously. Employees do not shed their roles of parent, sibling, daughter or son when they enter their workplaces. Nor does work necessarily end when an employee goes home. As Hochschild suggests, work becomes home and home becomes work.

Second and Third Shift Work

Hochschild's (1989, 1997) concepts of the second and third shifts are described as attempts at balancing paid work and family. In her 1980s research, Hochschild found women engaging in second shift work. She argues that women not only work a paid shift during the day, but they also come home to a second shift of childrearing and housework in the evening. However, women are not the only ones participating in second-shift responsibilities. Men have taken a more active role in childcare and housework in the past decade. The second shift is not as gendered as it was in the 1980s. The workload is not completely equal, but fathers are helping now more than they ever have in the past.

Hochschild (1997) builds on her concept of the second shift to include a third shift of relational maintenance and repair work that must take place with children and spouses who feel angry and neglected due to their parent/spouse's hectic work schedules. Employers demand so much time away from home, or require work in the home office, that families are not spending enough time together. This is a sad comment on organizations' invasion of the former haven of home life and organizational members' consenting to colonization. They are being seduced into believing they can "have it all." They even consent to working a "fourth shift" late at night as they respond to e-mail and write reports. Technology is an extension of the employee's body and allows her/him to extend the workday and workplace.

However, the concepts of the second and third shifts (and what I refer to as the fourth shift) suggest a linear, monolithic dimension of employment and family when both are complex, multi-dimensional, continuous processes. The work and family relationship is more complex than Hochschild's theorizing suggests. The complex roles and identities of employed parents are too complex and dynamic to explore from this simplistic perspective.

The Parallel Shift and Remote Mothering

By extending the workday and workplace via communication technology, employees engage in parallel shift work (Rakow & Navarro, 1993). Technology allows workers to check on latchkey children via mobile phones, beepers, instant messaging, and the traditional telephone. Technology also allows employees to check in with their employers when they are away from the office. The parallel shift is a less linear, less naive concept of negotiating the artificial boundaries of work and family. As Martin's (1990, 1994) false dichotomy suggests, time and space are neither linear nor bounded. Thus, Rakow and Navarro's parallel shift and concept of remote mothering well describe a world of fluid boundaries, multiple roles, and complex identity work.

Co-existing in this spectrum of technological extensions of the body, space, and time are discourses of resistance. With every instance of power there also is resistance (Foucault, 1988). In the next section I discuss Haraway's (1990) concept of the cyborg--a strong woman's subjectivity that opens up a world of possibilities in balancing family and work.

The Cyborgs

Haraway (1990) views technology as a way of developing cyborg identities--"chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism" (p. 191). The cyborg is an empowered construction of "natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred" (p. 207). According to Haraway, communication technologies "embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide" (p. 205). The computer allows women to develop powerful identities without the social biases that constrain them within the politics of sex, gender, race, and class. Technology erases the politics of difference; "It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices. . . . [M]achines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves" (p. 219-220). Haraway argues; "The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment" (p. 222). Boundaries a re blurred. Machine and woman are one and sex, gender, race, and class are eradicated. Potent selves are constructed in this technological hybrid.

Technology's ability to extend the body, space, and time can be empowering. Simultaneously it can be a form of control. In the next section I discuss my research methods and preliminary findings in an ongoing project that examines work and family balance.

Method and Process

The method of inquiry for this research project consisted of extended interviews with employed mothers and student mothers. The overall research question guiding this project was: How do employed mothers balance employment and family? Interviews included questions such as: What is a typical day like? How do you handle the need to work overtime or to bring work home? How do telecommunications devices (e.g. computer and modem, cellular phone, pagers, and fax machines) figure into the balance of job and home responsibilities? Does technology help or hinder your balance?

Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. Interview participants signed informed consent forms and were assured of confidentiality by the use of pseudonyms. The data were analyzed using a feminist standpoint theoretical perspective (Harding, 1987; 1991; Wood, 1993) in which I read the transcripts multiple times to get a sense of the women's lived experience. In analyzing the transcripts I sought to give voice to the participants as they tell their stories of balancing work and family. Themes of empowerment and control emerged from the data, as well as the women's attitudes toward technology, which included themes of time, place, and how they organized their lives and blended work and family responsibilities.

The interview participants were ten employed mothers and three full-time undergraduate students whom I defined as employed mothers since they are accountable to professors for assignment deadlines. The employed mothers range age from 33 to 42. They are middle class and have one, two, or three children ranging age from 2-11 years. Only one woman has more than three children; she has five children ranging from 9-17 years old. Six participants have bachelor's degrees (one is writing her master's thesis and employed full-time), two have master's degrees, one has a law degree, and one has a doctoral degree. "Tanya," is a manager at a Fortune 500 company, while "Shelly" and "Theresa" are interior designers who work part-time and often cover for each other on the other's day off. "Gale" and "Erin" are full-time college instructors, "Sue" is a public relations consultant, "Beverly" is a public school band instructor, "Bonnie" is a teacher's aid, "Katrina" is a social worker, and "Jane" is an attorney/paralegal instr uctor. The full-time students range from 27 to 34. "Laura" is a single mother who lives with her 9-year-old son and elderly mother. "Kay" is divorced and has two daughters. "Anna" is married and has a 6-year-old son. In the following sections I discuss the findings from my preliminary data collection.

Results and Interpretation

Discourses of the Colonized and Their Resistance Discourses

Employed parents report having to work at balancing employment and family. Time and stress are big constraints. The employed mothers discussed not having enough time to get all their work done, feeling stressed, and feeling tired. They sacrifice their own sleep and bring things home from their workplace to do after their children are in bed.

When asked about the balance between family and work, Tanya described her four-day work week in which she is able to telecommute:

I've managed to come up with a four-day work week. If I worked a five-day work week, I don't think I could handle it. But . . . my management, has been really supportive . . . . When I first started back after [my son] was born, I said I actually wanted to work a three-day work week ... but I found that three days was harder than four days, because I was too guilty when I was home. The two days I was home I was calling in all the time and I really didn't have a base myself. So, I decided to do a four-day week and then the day I was home I would forget it. I wouldn't call in and um that has worked out for me. (Tanya)

Tanya's talk of guilt when she was away from the office signifies how her life has become colonized by the corporation. She cannot be part-time without feeling guilty when at home with her children. However, Shelly and Theresa also find it necessary to meet clients after hours. Theresa expressed more of a willingness to meet clients after hours and also to do evening and weekend shifts at the combination design shop and retail store. Shelly resists corporate colonization. She is more protective of her schedule:

I try not to meet clients at night . . . because it throws off my personal time, and that probably sounds selfish, but that is very important. That's my priority, not this. So I don't make an evening appointment, once in a blue moon.... Otherwise, I would be here seven days a week. That could very easily happen. And I don't want that. I need a break. (Shelly) Shelly and Gale both explicitly resist doing paid work outside of regular hours. Gale described having to grade papers late into the night and pulling "all nighters," which she now vehemently refuses to do. She said she works at her office and tries "not to bring anything home anymore," (Gale). She even said, "if I did it at home, it felt like work was never ending" (Gale). Shelly and Gale are reifying the public/private dichotomy. They explicitly define work as something that takes place during a particular timeframe and in a particular location other than home. On the other hand, Theresa and Tanya have embraced the extension of workplace and work time. The full-time students, Laura, Kay, and Anna, also described giving up sleep in order to stay up late to study and write papers. They spend time playing with their children and helping with their homework in the afternoons and evenings, postponing their own schoolwork until their children are asleep. They also view the collapsing of public and private boundaries as the only way to achieve balance between work and family.

Telecommuting by the colonized. One form of flexibility includes telecommuting from home a few days a week. Most telecommuting consists of after hours work. Deming (1994) reports that 23.7 million "homeworkers" are categorized as "corporate after-hours homeworkers" while 14.2 million are self-employed home workers and only 9.1 million are telecommuters. Of these totals, 53% are white-collar workers, while 22% of salaried homeworkers are classified as doing manual labor and traditional blue-collar work (Deming, 1994). I argue that these "corporate after-hours homeworkers" are employed parents who are putting in another shift of work at home after their children are in bed. I do this myself, either retreating to my office after my son goes to bed or getting up at 5:00 a.m. to work a couple of hours before the rest of the family awakens. Those of us engaging in after-hours paid work are consenting to our employers' colonization of our private lives. After-hours workers are led to think we have to do paid work a lmost all the time, to be accountable to employment responsibilities almost 24 hours a day. Technology allows us to extend the workplace into our homes so that we can spend time with our families.

The romanticized myth of children playing at the feet of their mother while she works does no favors for the exhausted working mother. She is balancing multiple situated identities as she moves in and out of public and private discourses (Weedon, 1997). Her home computer, cell phone, pager, and laptop computer extend her body into the realm of work--even when her physical body is at home. As Rakow and Navarro (1993) argue, mothering and employment are simultaneous activities. Whereas their concept of remote mothering is simultaneous and parallel, I argue that when mothers telecommute, they are employed remotely while mothering in person. They turn the parallel shift on its head as they engage in remote employment rather than remote mothering. But again, the situation is never all or nothing. Employed mothers engage in remote employment during some parallel shifts while they engage in remote mothering in other parallel shifts. It often depends on their employer's needs are rather than what their own. Thus, th e lives of employed mothers constitute a gendered paradox of trying to succeed at two jobs that are simultaneous and contradictory.

Resisting technology. In addition to the discourses of resistance to corporate colonization, several of the women explicitly resisted certain types of technology. Two women openly resisted the use of mobile phones and electronic pagers, while one of them also resisted the bluffing of public/private boundaries in relation to personal e-mail messages. Gale expressed a strong concern about possible surveillance of e-mail messages. She refuses to send personal messages on the server at her office. She described her fear of surveillance:

I don't know that there is. But given what you see on the shows like "20/20" or "Dateline," where they say it's fairly pervasive that your boss might break into your system to see what you're doing at the moment that you are doing it, or call up your old files to see what you have been talking about or who you have been talking with. And so I have refused to communicate with people this way. (Gale)

Gale's discourse not only resists the use of technology for personal communication, it also articulates a sense of distrust of her employer. She reifies the boundaries between private and public and prefers to keep them separate.

A slightly different discourse of resistance to technology was Gale's and Erin's adamant opposition to mobile phones and pagers. Gale told a story of her husband's response to a television commercial advertising electronic pagers; "Only last night there was a commercial on television regarding a beeper and my husband said, 'I am glad that we don't have one of those' (Gale). Erin, on the other hand, declared her own disdain for mobile phones while telling me how she appreciates being able to reach her husband on his cell phone. She said:

My husband has a car phone... . And I can reach him when I need to and, you know, "can you stop at the grocery and get this?" or "we're heading off to the doctor's, can you meet us there?" ... . It gives me more options of getting in touch with him. But I don't have a cell phone and don't have any intentions of getting one. (Erin)

These women have not resisted technology completely but have set limits on its use, limits often constructed along the same spatial boundaries of public and private spheres. Only when technology allows her to "work at my leisure" in the "privacy and comfort of my own setting" does Gale embrace technology in her home. She both reifies and blurs the boundaries between public and private. No mutually exclusive categories are constructed consistently. In the next section I illustrate how the employed mothers view technology as empowering.

The Empowered Cyborgs

Many employed mothers believe technology has made their lives run more smoothly. Home computers and cell phones allow busy maternal cyborgs to have it all, to balance home and employment effectively and efficiently. Most of the women I interviewed do their paid work at home in the evenings after their children go to bed. Tanya telecommutes one day a week. When asked, she said:

There's a lot of emphasis these days at [my company] on the family and balancing work and family. If you have the right management structure, they really actually do it. Most places don't. (Tanya)

Sue, a public relations consultant, also does paid work at home one day a week: "I have an office at my home that I try to work out of. It doesn't always work out though. There are meetings that you have to come in for occasionally and I try to keep Fridays as a sacred day at home for working" (Sue). With three children, Sue's work-at-home day is accommodating in times of emergency, such as school closings or a sick child. She also appreciates the flexibility that her home office allows: "You can go in there and work in it in the evenings, weekends, and things like that. So then you lessen your guilt that you are not physically putting in 50 hours a week [at work]... which means that you are balancing and giving more time to the kids" (Sue).

Erin spends two days a week at home with her two children. She also spends several evenings a week in her home office preparing lesson plans and publishing a newsletter. She describes her home computer as a definite aid in her balancing act:

It is definitely convenient having a computer at home, 'cause I do a newsletter for . . . the [professional] association I belong to, and if I had to come to school to do that, that would be a pain. You know at 10 or 11 at night or 2 or 3 in the morning, when I could be working. . . . I do a lot of word processing at home. (Erin)

As dual-career academics, both Gale and her partner also feel the need either to telecommute or bring work home.

As band director for the high school and three elementary schools, Beverly keeps track of "hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and in music" inventory on her home computer (Beverly). She also types handouts and schedules for the students. She described her home computing as inventory management:

"I am in charge of the entire uniform inventory, I have a parent group that I advise, but ultimately I am the one that makes sure all 5,000 pieces of uniforms are where we think they are. I am trying to learn how to be appreciative of e-mail . . . and that is partly because I am a volunteer for the music teachers' organization" (Beverly).

She also is a single mother; therefore, she works on her master's thesis on weekends when "April" is with her father. Home offices and computers with modems are a necessity to the busy cyborg mother.

Another indispensable item for some cyborgs is their cellular phone--the electronic extension of their motherly bodies. The cell phone allows for remote mothering (Rakow & Navaroo, 1993), whether she calls directly or is on stand-by in case or an emergency. For some working parents the cellular phone is their connection to their children, as well as to their spouses to coordinate schedules. Jane, a community college instructor, refers to her cell phone as her "emergency phone" and she does not leave it on all the time except "when the kids are kind of iffy, when you don't really think they're sick but you're not sure." She also allows her students to receive phone calls in class. Since most of her students are nontraditional students, and mothers of small children, Jane said: "I don't mind, you know, some people don't like cell phones. I'll have mine in there [in class], if one of my children is iffy and I'll let people do that in my class, too, as long as they just walk out when it rings. But I just sort of see it . . . as an emergency thing." (Jane)

Sue and her husband rely heavily on their mobile phones. "Thank goodness for cell phones, because I always have to get a hold of him late in the afternoon to say, 'you need to pick up so-and-so and take so-and-so here and I will pick up this person. We are running in different directions by all means." (Sue). She said that her cell phone gives her peace of mind when her children are home alone. The oldest child gets home from school at 3:30 and is responsible for meeting his younger sister when she gets off the bus at 4:00. Sue emphasized that she could not do this without the cell phone. She uses it as a babysitter. Her cell phone is her technological connection to her children--an extension of her embodied self. She continued:

Otherwise, even an eleven-year-old, I wouldn't leave him by himself and certainly not leaving him in charge of a six-year-old, if I knew I didn't have that constant communication. And he has my husband's cell phone number, too. . . . For peace of mind you can't put too much money into it. It's peace of mind, literally. . . . Again, if we were living twenty years ago and didn't have cell phones and all the technology that we do today... there is no way that I could leave anybody at home for a short hour at a time. (Sue)

Thus, Sue uses the technological extension of herself as a cyborg babysitter. She feels that her cell phone allows her to be two places at once and to be Super Mom. She can have it all.

Beverly, a single mother, needs her cell phone to stay connected to her ex-husband and family members regarding her daughter. She told me:

I like having it with me. I am on the road a lot because of weekend commitments where I go to adjudicate music festivals and things like that. And whoever has [April], I want them to be able to reach me.... I feel much better having it or knowing that when I need it ... they could find me. (Beverly)

She and her ex-husband both rely on cell phones to coordinate schedules for their daughter. They are both determined that she will never suffer for their adult problems with each other. She is the first priority for both of them. Well connected technologically, both use cell phones, voice mail, and e-mail to protect the priority. Both Beverly and her former partner have jobs that take them away from their offices, so they swear by their cell phones.

Beverly's only regrets regarding technology were expressed in what she called "a fear of technology" and a loss of connection. She fears that technology isolates us from our children. She is concerned about the "human element in our modem parenting". (Beverly) She explained:

One problem I have with doing my own writing is I hate sitting in front of my screen and my kid parked in front of hers, you know like the TV, VCR, or whatever. I hate that image that we are in our little phone booths, so to speak. And I won't do that. I try to do a lot of the work when she is [asleep]. I think she would understand, but it just seems so isolated ... I just don't want her image of her growing up years as her mother parked in front of a screen, instead of interacting with her. Because she will be in front of a screen at work, maybe who knows what she will do with the rest of her life. Her life will be full of screens and so I have a real hard time just being an isolate in front of my computer. (Beverly)

Beverly's discourse of resistance cries out for human connection with her child. She recognizes a priority and wants to focus as much on her daughter as possible. The cyborg needs human connection too.

Discussion

The paradox of technology's use in balancing paid work and family lies in the simultaneous contradictions of employees producing or reproducing both empowerment and organizational control. Due to flexible management programs that allow them to engage electronically with children from work and with the office from home or family outings, organizations can increase parents' productivity and produce a semblance of empowerment. At the same time, extending technology into the life world of employees colonizes private decisions, including childcare and childrearing, even as employees feel they are making choices that prioritize both work and family simultaneously. On the whole, however, the organization's needs outweigh the family's needs and important life decisions are based on what is best for the employer.

Implications of the Study

When technology is located in the home, it segments and regiments time just as at work. As Hochschild (1997) suggests, home has become work. Home has become work, both metaphorically and physically, by extending the ability to be "at work" all the time--not only doing the housework and relational work of the supposedly private sphere, but also corporate/academic work of the public. Thus, employment invades the home and blurs the divisions. Home ceases to be an escape from employment and becomes simply an extension of it. The boundaries of time and space are blurred and the shifts are parallel and simultaneous, just as Rakow and Navarro (1993) argue; however, the mothering is not only remote but also onsite in the home office. Thus, the public and private spheres are blurred and blended, simultaneous and parallel, remote and onsite. There are no distinctions.

This study has ethical implications for developing organizational policies for telecommuting and flexible work schedules for employed mothers. Technology can provide empowerment and balance for parents, but when the pressure to do employers' work at home removes the sense of choice, technology becomes a form of corporate colonization. Cyborgs, on the other hand, can make choices. Their choices are to balance paid work and family, but family comes first. Cyborgs can be Super Moms because they recognize the priority of their children. Yet, even while discursively producing their children as priorities, many cyborg mothers, especially those engaging in remote mothering, simultaneously reproduce organizational priorities. The communication technology becomes a form of one using "the master's tools" to control oneself to accomplish the organization's needs and goals.

Moreover, Haraway's concept of the cyborg does not protect employed mothers from being controlled by their employers. The cyborg identity allows women to be empowered and to assume powerful subject positions in the cyber network but does not protect them from being colonized by the corporation/academy. Cyborg identities are not a panacea for developing subjectivities but maybe they are a start.

Heuristic Value and Weaknesses of the Study

Because of the increasing numbers of people trying to raise a family and work outside the home, the need for continued research in this area is imperative. Many employed mothers are starting their own businesses located in their homes in order to spend more time with their children and maintain employment. Thus, another important population to study in terms of balancing home and paid work are home-based entrepreneurial mothers. Negotiating the boundaries of home and employment when both are physically located at the home would be a fascinating complex process to study. And, although I argue that the balance of work and family creates a gendered paradox, I also recommend adding to the mix employed fathers, both married and single. How do their balancing acts compare to employed mothers? What is a typical day of negotiating the boundaries of home and employment like for a single father with primary or shared custody of his children?

Finally, thus far the sample is predominantly white and middle class, not a diverse population. I plan to use snowball sampling interviews with more diverse individuals to extend my sample to other regions of the United States, to women of color, and to working class women. The sample has not included many such lower economic scale women. Is the technology issue middle class phenomenon? Given the ubiquity of cellular telephones, probably not. Clearly, this ongoing project needs to continue.

Conclusion

In the employed mothers' discourses they produce and reproduce a power continuum of colonized workers and empowered cyborgs with instances of resistance playing out on a daily basis as they dance the balance of simultaneity and the reification of public and private spheres. Some are optimistic about technology and produce cyborg identities as they see themselves achieving a healthy balance of work and family. Yet, this optimistic attitude occurs simultaneously, or at least sequentially, with times in which they resist technology and resist the blurring of boundaries between public and private. This simultaneous and sequential negotiation of dichotomous attitudes creates a gendered paradox. Thus, the vehicle that makes our lives more efficient and less complicated also creates greater control over our cyborg bodies. This simultaneous and sequential negotiation of dichotomous attitudes creates a work/family paradox of balancing between self-empowerment and corporate/academic control.

Paige P. Edley (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Interpersonal Communication and the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include the production and reproduction of gender, power, and identity in organizational life, especially in women-owned businesses, and how working parents balance family and work. She teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in organizational and interpersonal communication, as well as communication and gender, power and ethnography in organizations, and power and gender in organizations.

Note

(1.) The term working mother describes all mothers, so I generally prefer the term "mothers who work outside (or inside) the home." The fact that this project focuses on women who work outside the home or are full-time students, in addition to working at home after hours, makes for a linguistic conundrum. For the sake of simplicity, I am adopting the phrase "employed mothers" to indicate this group of women. Both employees and students are accountable to other people (bosses and professors) in terms of assignments and deadlines. Thus, the students also are "employed" by the university system and are earning "knowledge" as opposed to a paycheck.

References

Deetz, S. (1992). Democracy in an age of corporate colonization: Developments in communication and the politics of everyday life. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ferguson, K. E. (1984). The feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977. (C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, K. Soper, trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault. (L.M. Martin, H. Gutman, P. H. Hutton, eds.). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Foucault, M. (1990/1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (A. Sheridan, trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1990/1978). The history of sexuality, Volume 1. (R. Hurley, trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, volume 2: Lifeworld and system (Thomas McCarthy, trans.). Boston: Beacon Press.

Haraway, D. (1990). Manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In N. Fraser & Nicholson, L. J. (Eds.), Feminism/postmodernism (pp. 190-233). New York, NY: Routledge.

Haraway, D. (1992). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & Paula Treichler (Eds.), Cultural Studies (pp. 295-337). New York, NY: Routledge.

Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Harding, S. (Ed.). (1987). Feminism & methodology: Social science issues. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (1989). The second shift. New York: Avon.

Hochschild, A. R. (1997). Time bind: When work becomes home and home becomes work. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Jagger, A. M., & Bordo, S. R. (1989). Gender/body/knowledge. Feminist reconstructions of being and knowing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. New York: Basic Books.

Kanter, R. M. (1989). When giants learn to dance. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Martin, J. (1990). Rethinking feminist organizations. Gender and Society, 4, 182-206.

Martin, J. (1994). The organization of exclusion: Institutionalization of sex inequality, gendered faculty jobs and gendered knowledge in organizational theory and research. Organization, 1, 401-431.

Nippert-Eng, C. E. (1995). Home and work: Negotiating boundaries through everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rakow, L. F., & Navarro, V. (1993). Remote mothering and the parallel shift: Women meet the cellular phone. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 10, 144-157.

Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice & poststructuralist theory. (2nd ed.) Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Wood, J. (1993). From "women's nature" to standpoint epistemology: Gilligan and the debate over essentializing in feminist scholarship. Women's Studies in Communication, 15, 1-24.

< Prev

[ Back ]

Our benefits

Free extras

Main Menu

Service features