Abstract
Dreams of the Overworked is a beautiful text that succeeds in rendering the textures and feelings of the everyday struggles of middle- to upper-class American working parents. Beckman and Mazmanian analyse how these parents’ lives are dominated by three collectively built expectations – the Ideal Worker, the Perfect Parent and the Ultimate Body.
They refer to these expectations as ‘myths’ to stress that they are impossible to attain, and, thus, to aim for them necessarily involves frustration and vain struggles. The Ideal Worker must be totally committed to work, which by definition contradicts the possibility of being the Perfect Parent which involves complete dedication to the childrearing project. Both these myths are also incompatible with the myth of the Ultimate Body that involves taking care of one’s health, energy and longevity – or one’s appearance, since a 4 a.m. treadmill session might help maintain one’s figure, yet probably not one’s overall health given the sleep deprivation involved.
While observations of how working and parenting conflict are far from new – it is remarkable how little has changed since Hochschild’s enlightening 1980s analysis The Second Shift (reissued 2012) – Beckman and Mazmanian’s focus on the perverse role of digital technology in the issue is compelling. The beginning of the book (Chapters 1 to 4) demonstrates the existence of the three myths and how they oppress. Chapters 5 and 6 then outline the authors’ theorization of how technology – which is supposed to save time and make life easier – has the effect of raising expectations and, thus, rendering our lives more hectic, less manageable and more strenuous. Yes, working parents can manage the afterschool club, babysitter, school homework and family dinner while still being at the office because there are online systems that allow them to book afterschool spots, coordinate with the babysitter, check what assignment is due when, and contact someone who can provide the missing dinner ingredient. Not only can physical and coordinating work be achieved using technology but mental and emotional tasks can be dealt with too. Parents can motivate the babysitter by sending a thank-you text while cooking dinner. They can keep grandma happy by sending pictures of the kids to let her know she is appreciated – a natural reward for the help she provides. Last but not least, they can send an encouraging email to their subordinates who have an important presentation the next day – while also preparing for bedtime story. Yes, they can. And since they can, they must. Here is the trap of raised expectations. None of this is free of labour. None of this is free of stress. It all adds up.
In Chapters 7 and 8, Beckman and Mazmanian elaborate how families cope with these myths, describing the resources they deploy to face the demands of being the Ideal Worker while striving to be the Perfect Parent and cultivating the Ultimate Body. They outline the invisible work, an expression borrowed from Daniels (1987), performed by these families and describe the different forms of ‘scaffolding’ (or support systems, paid or unpaid), that every family relies on, including afterschool clubs, babysitters, grandmothers, neighbours and other parents. In passing, they notice how much this scaffolding relies on a gendered division of labour, with most of this invisible work being accomplished by women. While not addressing this issue in their theorizing, Beckman and Mazmanian refer to some of the critical work that has deconstructed the power struggles that pervade our societies, oppressing the powerless and comforting the powerful. In particular, they refer to the body of feminist work that has demonstrated how care work is associated with women, whereas socially valued roles such as the Ideal Worker are marked by the masculine.
Finally, in Chapter 9, the authors sketch potential solutions to ease the tensions experienced by overworked parents. To me, this is the weakest section of the book as the recommendations are conventional and do not do justice to the preceding critical empirical analysis. Fortunately, thanks to the richness of the ethnography, and of the associated bibliography, you can draw on this excellent piece of research to develop further connections with broader societal challenges. However, before discussing those, I would like to highlight the methodological quality of the book.
The excellence of the ethnography is an evident reason for taking the time to read Dreams of the Overworked. I learnt a critical lesson as a graduate student: ethnography is not a data collection method but the written text that results from the research. This book is a vivid reminder of this lesson. Beckman and Mazmanian manage to take the reader into these families’ lives with a well-crafted combination of real-life vignettes that have a novel-like quality, and interpretation grounded in further data. We live with the participants in the moments of their everyday lives: we are with them in their kitchen while they multitask; we are with them when they receive an urgent work email at 10 p.m. and decide to set the alarm earlier in order to deal with it before starting the daily routine. And from these fine-grained reports, the authors’ analysis flows naturally.
Notably, the authors provide a detailed description of their research journey in a ten-page appendix. This offers a precious reflection on their behind-the-scenes ethnographic work. Beckman and Mazmanian describe how the project was undertaken, with fieldwork assistance from PhD student Ellie Harmon, the alignment of stars that allowed their research to proceed; their positioning within the field; the ethical issues faced both during the fieldwork and analysis stages; and the emotional work performed in the field. This is an admirable demonstration of the richness and limitations of the ethnographic enterprise.
Moreover, the project reported in Dreams of the Overworked crossed work and life domains – a rare feature in organization and management scholarship – which raised acute ethical questions. In particular, Beckman and Mazmanian describe the relationships that developed with participants, and we can see how these relationships are intrinsic to their analyses and ultimately to their writing. The researchers were welcomed into the homes of families which, understandably, heightens the responsibility of the researchers, especially towards the children, given that they are not wholly in control of their participation (their parents are).
Ethnographers always struggle with the inevitable betrayal of their field and I wonder whether the betrayal here comes, paradoxically, from trying to protect participants by casting their behaviours in an overly positive light. We see these families struggling, and sometimes failing, but it is never their fault: they are always presented as the victims of external demands, or of their own search for perfection. While I want to believe these participants were all bright, courageous, hard workers, loving parents, and caring spouses, systematically cleaning the dirt from the picture is not neutral to the analysis. For instance, disregarding the conflict in relationships may be ethical when the focus of the research is working and parenting, yet the strain on relationships and the impact that has on families, especially the most vulnerable members of the family, is a significant issue (see Hochschild (2012) on the entanglement between working-parenting and relationship struggles). Viewing these lives with such a benevolent gaze may help prevent participant families from feeling uncomfortable; however, it might have the indirect effect of ‘turning down the volume’ on the negative consequences of the phenomenon observed. Let me turn it up a little.
While not discussed by Beckman and Mazmanian, I believe this study has implications for broader society. For white collar, middle- and upper-class workers (and academics may well recognize themselves here), Dreams of the Overworked constitutes a mirror in which they can observe how distance technology can control their subjectivity (see Hafermalz (2021) for a recent analysis in this journal). As Weeks (2011, p. 1) aptly states, ‘even the best job is a problem when it monopolizes so much of life’. Yet, there is an important issue for business and management scholars that Beckman and Mazmanian hint at but never really tackle: why is the Ideal Worker myth so prevalent and who is benefitting from it? Beckman and Mazmanian describe their study participants as ‘the lucky ones’ (p. 175) and recognize this as a limitation of their work. They eat every day, sleep (albeit not enough) in comfortable places, have exciting jobs, have children that they chose to have and have the material and social resources to raise them as they deem fit. In a way, they are living the American dream. Yet, the analyses presented in Dreams of the Overworked are also a platform for a wider and more radical critique of the work society (Weeks, 2011). Who has the upper hand in such belief and value systems, I ask? The capitalists, the shareholders, the white men. Such systems serve to keep increasing inequalities based on wealth, gender and race. Thus, some people do not have a job because others work 70 hours per week; some have low-paid jobs because some earn six-digit salaries and others receive nine-digit dividends; some come to your house at impossible times to do undervalued caring for you, your children, your house; some work and die in sweatshops on the other side of the world so that you can have cheap clothes since working hard, caring for your children and looking good are part of the myths that drive your life. Admittedly, these less privileged others are not the focus of Beckman and Mazmanian’s study and, thus, can only appear in the margins of the story. To a degree, this is also symbolic of business and management scholarship. For an overview of the responsibility of organizations in increasing societal inequalities in this journal, see Amis, Munir, Lawrence, Hirsch and McGahan (2018).
The observations in the book resonate with Federici’s (2004) famous analysis of how caring work has been made conspicuously invisible and gendered to serve capitalist development, undermining and brutalizing women as part of the process. What has changed, we might ask. Nothing, except that women are not the only victims of this oppression. The whole future of humanity is threatened as a result of a system that values only certain work – the type that leads to increased profits – and has made such value systems so hegemonic that it seems impossible to stop the hellish spiral of economic growth and social and environmental catastrophe. Calling for change through individualized actions (such as admonishing people to ‘ask less of themselves’), or technological solutions (‘ask more of your devices’) has little chance of stopping the spiralling, and no more so than relying on the benevolence of organizations to change the cultural norms of overwork that have made them so (economically) successful.
To conclude, Dreams of the Overworked is a beautiful piece of ethnography. While the theoretical focus of the book is the perverse effect of digital technologies for assisting (middle- and upper-class American) working parents to succeed in all domains of life, it has the potential to trigger theoretical insights on the wider work society and the place of (self)care. Such insights are all the more relevant given the painful experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has so clearly exposed the gender, race and class inequalities that structure the world of work.
