Critical theory and the work–family articulation

Introduction

Why critical theory and work–family issues? After the Great Recession and politics of austerity, we need to explore how these two important areas of social life are affected by tensions and conflicts and how these fields are re-composed. Work and family articulation is known as ‘work–life balance’ or work and family reconciliation, and its literature is concerned over the fit between family commitments and the ‘requirements’ of the modern economy (Shorthose 2004). What is often obscured in the search of the exact amount of ‘time’ and ‘energy’ spent in family and/or in work and how they can be ‘balanced’ is the meaningful livelihood that is constructed by people, the contents of their daily activities and how their ways of life may be distorted by the very requirements of the capitalist economy. Most of these studies are narrowly focused, specialised and ‘lacks any meaningful historical appreciation of the larger social processes’ (Camfield 2000: 147) which shapes these matters; often do not include class and capital dynamics; and if gender is included in the analysis, it is usually from a liberal-feminist standpoint. This article (along with others in the past: MacInnes 2001; Shorthose 2004) then represents an effort to move the social sciences’ debates to a terrain where the reconciliation of work and family life is clearly linked to the critique of capitalism, and thus it may be of interest to an audience who is aware of how work and family issues may be connected to neo-liberal and gendered social order.

In this article, the tension between capitalism and contemporary forms of family will be framed through the concept of the dual nature of labour and family life, insofar as they entail both sensuous and abstract forms of human involvement – most notably abstract labour (how human activity is quantified for profit in a society based on exchange value). Issues around the emotional patterns of family life and the mediation that families operate between home and work will take centre stage. One of the main points of this article is that the development of labour as abstract labour under capitalism marginalises family forms in terms of the mediation between the private and the public spheres because it relies on a more direct social integration (or ‘synthesis’) of its subjects.

To use the ‘early’ Frankfurt School (mainly Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin) and the Open Marxism approach is to criticise rigid forms that constrain these activities, reducing them to things. It is about going to the roots of forms of family and work life as imposed by impersonal economic mechanisms and how they are resisted from ‘below’, by the activities of people. Impersonal mechanisms that distort family and work activities are central; capitalism is the distorting mechanism that reifies forms of life principally at work and also at home. However, the dynamics of capital are not considered acting structures: capital is not the subject. We feel that after the Great Recession, a more radical approach to these issues is needed as conflicts and distortions of social life become more apparent.

There are critical views on the ‘work–family balance’ (e.g. Gambles et al. 2006); however, it is not simply the case of critiquing the engineering of work life in relation to private life: a more critical view on how processes of re-composition of work life and family life are affecting subjectivities, understood as spaces of individual autonomy, is missing. In this field, ‘subjectivity’, the way people are aware of themselves as acting subjects, tells us about how individuals are making the content of their life, but within congealed forms: more precisely, how only the resistance to these forms allows them to emerge as subjects. As family and work are sites of conflict and contestation, the drive towards uniformity is resisted and challenged in a variety of ways: in this field, subjectivity is about exploring how social forms are constituted through the active practices of people, but also ‘perverted’ (Bonefeld 2009) by impersonal forms.

Thus, the contribution this article is making is about individuating the terms of conflicts that underpin the work and family articulation. These are represented by the tension between abstract labour – that is, how capitalism tends to impose social order and homogeneity – and the particularity of family life – the way mothers and fathers construct a meaningful order in their daily life in the chaotic and vital presence of children. Ultimately, the work–family articulation refers not only to a fad in social issues journalism or in social research but also to a crisis in the process of social reproduction of capitalism: women’s relation to the world of paid employment generates a series of conflicts that are not circumscribed at home, but are also linked to the transformation of the workplace. More in general work and family ‘conflict’ is to be linked to social integration of individuals into a capitalist order which tends to commodify and dispossess human activities and her fruits (e.g. the very reproduction of the labour force: Davies 2001; MacInnes 2001).

The rest of the article will develop as follows: in the next section, key concepts inspired by (Open) Marxist tradition will be applied to this field. Abstract labour, how work life is integrated into economic mechanisms, and the particularity of family life, what escapes this integration, are seen as underpinning the dynamics of ‘work’ and ‘family life’. Section ‘The emergence of the idea of “separate spheres” of work and home’ explores some of the historical forces that shaped what we call the private and public spheres, which also characterise work and family life. This long view helps show contradictions and conflicts not only between capital and class but also within the formation of the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ sphere. This leads to section ‘Capitalism, work and family: from mediation to integration’ where the pull of abstract labour (and social integration) and the particularity of family life are analysed according to subjectivities emerging in and conflicting with the latest phase of capitalist development. The last section explores the outcome of social changes in the tension between abstract labour and the particularity of family. Through the important work of Arlie Hochschild, we will ask whether we are in the presence of emotional cultures formed in families that are conducive of further integration or subjectivities that are nonetheless capable of resistance.

Work and family: subjectivities between abstraction and particularity

In this section, we consider ‘work’ and ‘family’ as expression of human activities; we will use the term subjectivity as the individual human being expresses herself in these areas and constitute them in interaction with others, but crucially she does so within the social form of exchange value. It is not as simple as saying that once the social reality is constituted by living subjects through the capitalist form, this reality turns into a thing-like, reified and thus constraining the subjects into an iron cage. With Bonefeld (2014), we try to understand this movement as a dialectic that is never solved. In our case, work and family are thus constituted fields and their constitution is understood as a tension between ‘abstract labour’ as an integrating force and the ‘particularity of family life’ which reflects aspects of private life in discontinuity with the general norms of family as social institution. The literature on work–family balance (e.g. Berg et al. 2003; Goldsmith 1989; Halpern & Murphy 2005; Peper et al. 2005; Vander Lippe 2007; Voydanoff 2001) consider these areas as signposts and it is not concerned with the formation of these concepts or the social forces that operate in these fields. This literature uses conventional sociological methods and operates from the standpoint of neo-liberal thinking, which sees individuals as rational actors adopting strategies oriented to maximise time and energy at home and at work. Even more sociologically aware literature (Crompton 2006; Lewis 2003) sees capitalism as a structuring force while it leaves on the side how exactly subjects are producing forms of work and forms of family and through what kind of social relations.

Family is not simply socially constructed, as the orthodoxy in sociological thinking would maintain, rather: it is subject to social integration, which is part of the wider, essential phenomenon of capitalist integration of society as such (Adorno 1976, 2000), or as John Holloway (2010) calls it, the social synthesis. According to Adorno (1976), late capitalism has halted its production of differentiation, thus directing its mechanism of abstraction at every individual human being, absorbing differences and producing uniformity through the objectivity of exchange (Holloway 2009; 2010; Tischler 2006). Following Adorno (1990 [1966]), we consider exchange value as the principal feature of capitalism and we then conceptualise individual beings as subjects that are entrapped within a quantity-measuring mechanism (Benzer 2011; Tischler 2008). Open Marxism (along with critical theory) is used here because it offers a re-reading of Marx’s concepts that highlight conflicts and struggles in operation in capitalist society. Thus, work and family, the categories used by this field of studies, are re-interpreted as areas of tensions: the area of work, between abstract labour and concrete human activities (the ‘doing’ of John Holloway 2002), and the area of family between the particularity of family life and ‘family’ as institutionalised reproduction of gender oppression and site of reproduction of the physical workforce. Open Marxism, as critical theory, privileges the constitutive force of subjects, of people operating from ‘below’, but as well as being anti-structuralist (whereby the analysis focuses on the constitutive acts of individuals) it is also wary of emphasising the subjective struggles as the foundation of social reality: it keeps introducing elements of ‘negative dialectics’, whereby the forces of capital are our products, but never under our control.

Subjectivity is central in understanding the phenomena of family and work and their interaction without reifying them, that is, taking them as phases of an unfolding process where human activity is congealed, but alive at the same time. These phases represent the active ‘doing’ (Holloway 2002) of people which is constantly caught in established, constituted social relations. These relations are woven into the social totality of capitalism, but the critical analysis of them is not bound to a ‘systemic’ theory of reproduction of the total social relations, rather to its negation (Tischler 2009). Once we understand this, then the interaction of work and family becomes the site of how human activities, the doing, are struggling to find spaces of autonomy, rather than managed spaces of reconciliation. This approach shares similarity with the critical ethnography of Cindi Katz (2004): as she analyses global capital forces in their ‘topographical’ unfolding, the resistance and re-appropriation from below (e.g. mothers and children) are never simply considered a constitutive existential force. She proposes a ‘critique of resistance’ that in many ways converges with the central concerns of negative dialectics and its emphasis on negation from below. Conversely, the specialised literature on work and family balance expounds an understanding of these two areas as reified entities, whereby there is an x amount of time and energy for work and y amount (possibly what is left) for family (Vander Lippe 2007; Voydanoff 2001). Thus, the problem of reconciliation between the two becomes an entirely subjective one. The thinking about ‘reconciliation between work and family’ simply does not take into account that the formation of subjectivities is connected to the conflicts in operation within work and within family – mainly between abstract labour as an integrating force and the particularity of family as an element of resistance. Let’s see more precisely how.

Abstracted forms of social relations are reproduced inside the families because under capitalism their members are necessarily involved in the abstract form of labour. Here abstract labour is labour (or ‘doing’) abstracted by its subjective, concrete and sensuous qualities: this abstraction allows a particular quality or activity to be measured and integrated in the exchange mechanism; through it the human activity becomes part of the process connected to capitalist valorisation (Tischler 2008) and capitalist totality (Holloway 2010: 95). Ultimately, it is abstract labour that transforms relations between people into relations between things (Holloway 2010). Abstract labour ‘perverts’ the doing of the families as the outcome of the search for income often signifies the disruption of routines and family rituals (Brannen 2005; Richardson 2006), transforming then into distorted routines. ‘It’s all about money’, people say when interviewed about the so-called work–life balance (Ba 2011). Abstract labour disrupts family life as well as work life and transforms family activities into rigid individualised forms (as it transforms work into specialist sets of fragmented activities), the forms of which assume the appearance of fragmented domestic life. But here, subjectivity must be sought in the particularity of family forms, a particularity which is characterised by the subjective conflict with the forms constituted by abstract labour. In a similar way, inside the ‘private sphere’ gender is reconstructed according to the unequal care labour shared through assigned sex-roles, which on their turn are appropriated and resisted by women (Federici 2004). The character mask of ‘woman’ has been fundamental to the processes of capitalist economic and social formation (DallaCosta 1995), to the point that the body of the women was (and is) part of the very un-acknowledged constitution of capitalist modernity (Federici 2004). This is crucial because through women’s resistance from ‘below’, private life attained a particularity which is not completely integrated in the capitalist totality. Within this article, care labour, the domestic work of women as carers for their families, signs the limits of abstract labour, as caring work (as the doing) cannot be completely commodified (Himmelweit 2000; Macintosh 2000). The ‘insoluble contradiction in the feminine condition of being an unwaged worker in a wage economy’ (DallaCosta 1995: 10) informs this dual nature of family life. While abstract labour is then intimately linked to social synthesis and engenders what appears fragmentation, however, the particularities of family life resist and negate the homogenisation. This is most clear in the case of caring work: there is an incomplete commodification of care labour which posits the care worker, mainly female, in a position that is both inside and outside processes of abstract labour (and therefore capitalist integration) (Himmelweit 2000). So, this article holds fast to the particularity of the family in the negative, as an expression of subjectivities negating the capitalist trends of social synthesis.

If we focus on the particularity of family life, then we find a kind of ‘excess’ (Tischler 2009), not reducible to the social substance produced by abstract labour. The particularity of raising children, developing bonds, creating language (verbal and non-verbal), using play to make time together meaningful, the particularity of these instances is not about spontaneous forms of life, more simply these represent ‘excesses’ in the order woven by capitalist synthesis (Tischler 2008). These instances only find their existence through ‘reified’ forms and these forms tend to ‘negate’ them, as they represent an excess vis-á-vis capitalist totality. The way these subjectivities and their ‘particularity’ are configured in theoretical and empirical terms makes the difference between a critical and traditional theory. It is a type of dialectic that informs the dual nature of family life, which must be then inscribed in the articulation of family and work. Particularity is always produced through and against abstracted social forms of life: they represent different temporalities which can pre-figure a different reality (Dinerstein 2014; Tomba 2014: 359).

As the ‘natural form of labour’ can be associated with living labour or doing, the ‘natural form’ of family can be associated with particularity, a kind of particularity that escapes the logic of abstraction (or integration in adornian terms), a particularity that is still substantiated by non-standard forms of life, pre-linguistic bonds (Donati 2006) negating the exchange value logic of capitalism. With ‘natural form’ of family then is not indicated a functional, biological form of the childrearing unit, rather how conflicts might be found in the daily practices of resistance that subjectivities in working families organise to contrast social integration: a ‘negative objectivity’ that reveals the universal social construction of identities as ‘rule and repression’ (Tischler 2009: 109). Here, Open Marxism critique of totality shows points of convergence with the anthropology of Cindi Katz (2004). This feminist critique of capitalist totality rejects the ‘formative’ features of the flows of capital, showing, for instance, how the time–space ‘compression’ of neo-liberal globalisation does not have an immediate homogenising effect on the life of rural communities and children. Women’s and children practices carry with them an excess and show the ‘mimetic possibility that something new will be created’, something ‘that is discontinuous’ (Katz 2004: 240) from the capitalist homogeneity. However, the gendered counter-topographies resisting social integration do not have an immediate potential of liberation or even effective resistance. Bonds in themselves are not liberating, but a critical theory of family would oppose the fable of a free, pre-social and pre-familial absence of links, or the possibility of a collective agency (e.g. the state) ‘constructing’ them in a less authoritarian way. Identities are negated from ‘below’, and it is from there that constitutive processes are arrested, congealed and dis-appropriated. ‘Social construction’ as imagined by mainstream sociologists is actually social synthesis, social destruction (Holloway 2010: 52).

The emergence of the idea of ‘separate spheres’ of work and home

In this section, we will see how the idea of ‘separate spheres’ of work and home came into existence and how the introduction of the categories of abstract labour and particularity may help explain the main historical trajectories of these forms of social life. The main point is that abstract labour and the sexual division of labour emerged with capitalism forming a totality, a social order founded on the subordination of women, and for this very reason, the private life that historically sprang from the institution of family could not be completely commodified, reduced to a thing.

Parsons more than other social theorists conceived the sphere of work and the sphere of family as functionally integrated in the industrial society. The ‘short’ conjugal family supposedly matches the requirements of the economic system with its values of universalism and achievement. For Parsons, not only the nuclear family is the model that can be best adapted to the institutional order of industrial society (Harris 1983), but it also reflects what is deemed to be the gendered ideal situation: the working husband, whose role inside family and society is said to be ‘instrumental’, and a house-wife, whose role is said to be emotional and ‘expressive’ (Parsons and Bales 1955: 23). The Parsonian approach has been rightly criticised as it reflects the ideology of separate spheres, whereby a specific social and domestic division of labour would ‘naturally’ assigns the home and reproductive sphere to women (Crompton 2006). In critical theory, the attention is posited on socialisation (and thus integration) and also on processes of subjectivity formation, and with them processes of conflicts and contradiction inside the general and the sexual division of labour (Federici 2004). Under capitalism, the structuring of economy as the sphere in which commodity production and exchange takes place cannot be isolated from the rest of society (DallaCosta 1995; Zaretsky 1976). Since Adorno and Horkheimer, critical theory has always considered the separation of the private sphere of family life from the economic sphere of production, a reified form of social life.

It is worth taking a brief historical detour here to analyse the links between subjectivities, capitalist dynamics and social forms of life. Personal fulfilment and search for personal meaning which was historically restricted to the dominant classes became at the turn of the 20th century an internal dynamics of working-class families as well: ‘the family now became the major space in society in which the individual self could be valued for itself’ (Zaretsky 1976: 31). Zaretsky (2004) clarifies that these traits of ‘the family’ (inner emotional life, etc.) were developed from the ‘classic’ patriarchal bourgeois family, which encouraged individualism, but were then taken up by the working classes, when capitalist society structured the workplace as separate physical space for labour (Federici 2004; Poster 1978). Once there was a separate sphere for production and its valorisation, the working classes constituted their own forms of family, involving their own temporality and subjectivity (Zaretsky 1976: 61). However, the classical bourgeois family was fundamentally patriarchal, and through the creation of a ‘separate sphere’ for the family, the ‘character mask’ of woman as subordinated to the gendered order of care labour was violently developed (Federici 2004: 97–107).

The separation between family and work is relevant for critical theory because it tells us of the formation of personality structure, subjectivities and subordination of women’s care labour, on one hand, and the mechanism of capitalism, patriarchy and abstract labour, on the other. So, how our personal and emotional lives were historically connected to capitalist development? The idea of personal lives as characterised by a rise of subjectivity divorced from the social division of labour, but interlinked with sexual division of labour, is a historical event that is connected to bourgeois culture. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno 1979 [1947]), the male bourgeois subjectivity is seen in continuous schism with the others: with society and with its community, with fellow class members, with his family, with his intimate partner, to the point of ultimately breaking with himself, where by the beginning of the 20th century the proletarian’s subjectivity is seen able to build solidarities as well as producing a ‘competitive’ culture between the two sexes within the private sphere, rather than a harmonious relationship between the spouses (Benjamin 1983: 65). Thus, the interweaving of abstract labour and gendered care labour, emotional lives and class differences created the conditions for forms of subjectivities to emerge in an antagonistic dimension. The generalisation of abstract labour historically created the conditions for the family to become a feudal relics (Beck 1992: 104), separated from the sphere of production and valorisation, in which the individual could be nurtured (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1966), where, though, this individual had a specific gender and ethnicity (DallaCosta 1995). The emotional patterns emerging in family life, with their tendency to favour an intimate dimension, were not only connected to the capitalist division of labour and to the sexual division of labour but also disconnected from the immediacy of the labour market requirements (Hawes & Hiner 2010). Subjectivities negating abstract labour were formed within this ‘artificial’ gendered private sphere, yet their substance, the intimate personal dimension, had the tendency to go beyond it.

The main point here is that the historical separation of production from the private ‘sphere’ and the separation of work from meaningful personal life were and are, at the same time, real and ideological. This becomes apparent if we consider how through the sexual division of labour, women were ‘enslaved’ to the privatised household economy, more so than their working-class husbands were enslaved to the wage labour economy (Federici 2004). The illusion of an autonomous family and personal life, not absorbed by the mechanisms of capitalist valorisation, was a gendered illusion partially grounded on an actual separated physical place: the factory and the office on one side and on the other the place secluded by the instrumental rationality which became the ‘haven in a heartless world’ (Lasch 1977). Critical theory and Open Marxist theory conceptualise capitalism as an irrational force, capable to produce forms of personal life which simultaneously reinforce and threaten capitalist’s social order (Zaretsky 1976, 2004); as Horkheimer and Adorno (1966) suggested, the bourgeois family is something that cannot exist in principle: it could not be a universal form (p. 154). Historically, the emotional, intimate elements of the bourgeois family are always contradictorily mixed with the ‘supposedly rational principle of individualism’ which capitalism structurally connects with the principle of exchange, supposed to be universally valid (Lasch 1977). The intimate dimension of the emotional pattern represents the particularity of family life, which is in contradiction with the homologating forces of the abstraction of labour and capitalist synthesis (e.g. Gordon 1988). For women, processes connected to the principle of individualism were mainly linked to the universal form of the subject, implicitly male, which produced the ‘hierarchy of bodies’ that for Joan Acker (1990, 2004) characterises the organisation of labour inside the workplace as well as inside home.

Family was socially defined as the site for personality formation, but subjectivity was (and is) not simply produced (Perrot 1990), as family is not simply socially constructed; this idealist version does not take into account the dialectic of abstract labour and doing, of constituting and constituted subjectivities, and of identity and its negation. In his essay on Adorno, non-identity and sexuality, Marcel Stoetzler (2009) links the classification of male and female to, among others, the ‘sublimation of Eros in the service of capitalist real subsumption’ (p. 151); within our framework, this means that family life as institutionalisation of love features love as well as the subordination of gendered bodies. But it is not possible to construe ‘humanity and reification as rigid opposites’ (Adorno 1967: 106), especially when the non-identity of women informs closely the contradictions of emotional and private life within domination. This particularity of families had the historical possibility to negate the general aspect of ‘the family’ as instrument of the discipline to be imposed to the members of capitalist societies. This is perhaps why we are witnessing a shift from the mediation between the public and private sphere to the integration of the latter into the social synthesis that capitalism needs in order to obtain consensus and obedience. This is what we will explore in the next section.

Capitalism, work and family: from mediation to integration

In this section, we explore how family life may become less central in the configuration that capitalism tends to shape for the social relations of production. The literature on work–family articulation will be assessed through an examination of how ‘structural’ transformations in the world of work (and therefore in capitalism) are intertwined with changes in the emotional patterns of family life and in subjectivity formation. Work is considered by part of the specialised literature as a force of ‘identity’ formation, but through the critique of abstract labour we will expose the dynamics of capitalism and how the particularity of family life takes place in conflict with it.

At the beginning of the neo-liberal era, Habermas (1984) postulated a growing divide between families’ ‘life-worlds’ and the social sphere of work and observed that these life-worlds do not tend to mediate the imperatives of the economic and administrative systems anymore (p. 388). Twenty years later, Hochschild (2003) records how family life is less central in socialisation processes (p. 143). Indeed, if families are said to be still central to the creation of structures of personality (Donati 2006), they are so within capitalist trends which valorise parenthood as productive of human capital (Brannen 2005; Edgar 2004; Laureau 2011). The shift from families mediating the requirements of capitalist modernity to the integration of the former in the capitalist totality can be seen through the reading of the work of Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. These scholars are famous for their ‘individualisation thesis’; however, in their work (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1995), they consider capital in the attempt to codify its organisational principles as a common vocabulary, a way of understanding human relationships that have an influence on and are related to how people experience the events in their emotional sphere, including the familial one (Beck 1992; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1995). In this framework, they propose a crucial set of concepts: ‘personal development and growth’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1995: 43), which relates to the emotional story of the individual and the couple, but far from being a purely private affair of personal and intimate involvement, represents also a way through which the market society promotes its values, its operational language. Following Open Marxism, we can call these paths of relationships the positive identity that family’s adult members develop and get entangled into. Indeed, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995) suggest that there is a fit between the personality of an ideal ‘progressive’ biography, with a special emphasis on growth, development and social communication, and how this class-ness ideal of personality is compatible with the labour market. These are not simply speculations: perspectives around families as reproducers of ‘intellectual, cultural and relational components’ of the workforce (Parcel & Hendrix 2014; Silva & Smart 1999: 6) point exactly at the links between the formation of personality structure and the requirements of flexible, ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism’. The identity formation which is fostered by the biographies centred on personal development and personal growth is linked by these analyses to the transformative values of new work arrangements. While in their early text Beck and Beck-Gernsheim show signs of discomfort for the proximity of personality development and labour market values, other studies seem less concern about it. On the contrary, for some these values are deemed to be beneficial for social life, ‘especially for improved family relationships and greater egalitarian patterns between genders’ (Castells 1996: 267).

Socio-psychological literature on the links between work and family explores the modes of interaction between psychological ‘structures’ and neo-liberal work organisations, based on the assumption that work serves as a catalyst for adult development (Bronfenbrenner 1989; Crouter 1994; Hoare 2006). The central concept of this approach is the ‘structural imperative of jobs’ (Crouter 1994: 20), which is defined by the nature of the tasks entailed in a certain field of work and its psycho-cognitive requirements. These studies then individuate traits of ‘post-Fordist’, ‘knowledge-based’ work organisation deemed to possess ‘intrinsic reward values’ (Bronfenbrenner 1989; Hoare 2006). Through the supposedly historical shift from manual to knowledge-based labour and through the new centrality of communication for the economic system, such intrinsic reward values are considered as exerting not only emotional and psychological influences on adult member of the family but cognitive (at ‘identity’ level) and cultural as well. However, a critical view of these elements would suggest that it is not simply about mechanisms of capitalist organisation of society that are positioning familial groups in their own fabric, securing the social reproduction of a workforce attuned to the requirements of the latest social and technological mode of production. Rather, it is the integration of subjectivities into the social sphere, the abstraction of personality into something positive, spendable, which makes sure subjectivities may be compatible with these requirements and inclined to take them as something natural.

The production of subjectivities within the frame of new capitalist work’s arrangements is discussed in terms of ‘work identities’: there is a literature that emphasise the constitutive force of capitalist’s re-structured work practices in almost celebrative terms. Capitalism’s neo-liberal work’s arrangements, such as high commitment or high-performance management practices, are said to induce a phenomenon of ‘internalisation’: the positively identified ‘worker’ would feel the need to improve job performance because of its intrinsic reward values. Within this frame, a job can be inherently interesting and sociable and the specialised literature assures us that it can become a ‘major source of status and identity’ (Gambles et al. 2006: 51; Lewis 2003: 348–349).

Thompson and Bunderson (2001) offer a sophisticated theoretical model to understand how ‘identity sources’ come to influence the work–family interaction. They argue that the ‘work–life balance’ metaphor reduces ‘human priorities to interchangeable commodities’ and that a more appropriate one would be to view time as a container of meaning (Thompson & Bunderson 2001: 20–21). In their intentions, there is the need to address the nature of the activities that occupy people’s time at work and at home, but the problem is that the nature of these activities is not fixed and is conditioned by capitalist abstraction. In this sophisticated approach to the work–family balance, it is evident how even the phenomenological approach has serious limits in understanding the dialectical nature of abstract labour and sensuous daily activities. In this theoretical model, one of the essential factors comes down to whether the time required by a specific domain of daily life is ‘identity affirming’ or ‘identity discrepant’, hence the possible hierarchy of importance that identities assume in the life of the person (see also the ‘narrative identities’ of Wajcman & Martin 2002). While it is right to emphasise that time becomes an embodiment of meaning and identity that is not simply parcelled out by people into neutral and abstracted activities, however thinking that meanings and identities associated with work and family life can then simply inform the experience of conflict between the two misses the articulation intrinsic to the dual nature of family and work life.

These ‘identity sources’ are at odds with the precariousness of new forms of social and labour relations. Indeed, prior to the Great Recession, the emergence of flexible employment and the historical general trend towards the de-standardisation of labour already meant the partial erosion of the standard working time model, increasing employment insecurity and for many sectors the decline in a stable career path (Crompton 2006; Gallino 2007; Rubery et al. 2005). Such an extension of conventional boundaries of the working day and week and the implementation of flexible working patterns is connected to neo-liberal organisational re-engineering (Bellofiore 2012; Crompton 2006: 110–111), which in principle requires workers who are totally ‘free’, with no caring or family responsibilities (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Sennett’s (1998, 2006) reflection takes into account the changing nature of the individual character that is produced by new social relations in neo-liberal capitalism. According to Sennett (1998), the de-standardisation of work brings forth the fragmentation of life’s experiences and goes in the opposite direction to that of a ‘composed life’ (p. 43). Through the conditions set by the requirements of flexibility, emotional life and interpersonal relationships are constantly channelled through seemingly individualised paths to achieve what seems to be the best result, but which forces people to lead a fragmented life: options and change simply mean drift (Sennett 1998: 30). Sennett (1998) refers to ‘weak work identities’ (p. 71) and relates these to neo-liberal capitalism, its short-term profit strategies and the de-standardisation of labour. His analysis does not take into consideration how struggles around the de-standardisation of labour relations are also constitutive of social relations, but from the point of view of the work–family articulation, Sennett is pointing at the important nexus of factors: capitalist re-engineering of labour destroys social forms of life that were the result of class struggle. These constituted forms of familial life may have represented an alienated form of living together and raising children, but these were vital forms for the working class studied by Sennett. Work practices in themselves do not constitute subjectivities; subjectivities are also the negation of constituted identities (including ‘work identity’).

Work–family articulation is then about how capitalism repositions the social relations between subjectivity and work and how the particularity of life is negated by social integration, as social synthesis on its turn tends not to be mediated by familial forms. The ideology of privatisation, personal development and personal growth indicates positive subject formation. But if there are ‘positive’ identities being promoted by this work–family articulation, do they also have specific forms of emotional patterns? How are these emotional patterns emerging in a familial context which is sidelined by social mediation? And first of all, as this articulation is formed and rotates around meaningful temporality of human life, is the ‘struggle’ of juggling work and family commitments an eminently individual one?

Particularity and ‘emotional culture’ in the work–family articulation

The managing of boundaries between work and family is often presented to parents as an ‘individual choice’ they can make. The flexible, neo-liberal economy, with its de-standardisation of labour, compels workers to create their own work time schedule, and the privatisation of the work–life balance increases the disconnection of parents from shared or ‘collective experience of time’, causing the disruption of family time and ‘family rituals’ (Brannen 2005: 117). A critical investigation of intimate and emotional dynamics goes in the opposite direction to the neo-liberal interpretation of ‘work–life balance’ which views it as mechanist and individualist choice-based behaviour on the part of supposedly rational actors. Critical investigations consider the dynamics internal to work and family life and interrogate private rituals, routines and the emotional side of the work–family articulation (Brannen 2005; Rossi 2006), thus opening the field to inquiries about the formation of subjectivities and their conflicts within family forms and labour forms. A closer interest in family life and its internal dynamics takes the analysis to a necessary distinction between ‘economistic and non-economistic’ notions of time. The conflicts between these two temporalities show the disruption of the non-economistic dimension of families by new forms of work (Brannen 2005: 118; Duncan 2005: 66), but these conflicts have not been analysed yet in terms of the struggles between sensuous activities and abstract labour, of class privilege in constituting culture and resistance to it. In Hochschild (1996, 1997, 2003), the economistic notion of time and its conflict with other temporalities inside and outside the families are importantly conceptualised as a clash of ‘emotional cultures’. In this section, we will then focus on her studies, because these understand work and family as areas constituted by the cultural and symbolic activities of people; her critical approach tends to open up concepts and explore their relationship with wider social forms such as gender and capitalism. Her critical observations on the transformation of ‘intimate life’ vis-á-vis work can be connected to the concern of this article regarding the tension between social integration and the particularity of family.

In Hochschild’s (1997) perspective, the spheres of work and family are understood as ‘enmeshed yet competing emotional cultures’ (p. xx), and emotional culture is defined as

a set of rituals, beliefs about feelings and rules governing feelings which induce emotional focus, and even a sense of the ‘sacred’ […] favouring some social bonds over others […] selecting and re-selecting relationships into a core or periphery of family life. (Hochschild, 1996: 20)

Emotional cultures can be understood as forms through which subjectivities express themselves in order to establish relationships in family and in work. Interestingly for our perspective, Hochschild’s emotional cultures are class- and gender-based processes operating in family and work life: family members may utilise an emotional form typical of home at work and vice versa, thus operating a redistribution of emotional bonds, for instance, seeking personal fulfilment in work rather than at home (Hochschild 1996: 20). Thus, her research points out that the particularity of family life is formed by its members through constituted forms and disrupted by processes of capitalist organisation of labour.

Similarly, the ‘ethnography of working family’ uncovered the interpenetration between routines, rituals and meanings in work and family domains (Darrah 2006; Marcus 1990; Richardson 2006). These authors observe how the dynamics of flexible economy are supposedly connected to easy socialisation and personal feelings of worthiness in the workplace for the middle-upper class. Indeed, a positive experience of work has been found to be proportional to the extent to which parents, especially fathers, have autonomy in their jobs, which is a sign of higher occupational status (Henninger & Papouschek 2008; MacInnes 2008; Schieman & Young 2010). There is then a clear indication of how the emotional cultures of family and work are linked to class and gender, and so to conflicts around autonomy at home and at the workplace.

Crucially, the distortion of temporalities and the integration of emotional culture into constituted forms of labour are narrated by Hochschild (1996, 1997, 2003) in terms of the absorption of the cultural mediation of familial everyday life into the dynamics of corporate capitalism. Hochschild argues that different dynamics happen at different levels of class structure: for the upper part of the middle class, family life becomes less central in the emotional structures of everyday life (also Honneth 1995: xxiii), while the sphere of work takes on the role of an emotionally rewarding system. Thus, emotional culture as a concept indicates ways of subjectivity formation, linked to class, and also to gendered forms of intimacy and emotions in the same way in which Brook (2009) identifies ‘emotional labour’ as concept linked to alienation and to the subjective and collective resistance to the commodification of feelings for work-purposes. However, Hochschild is not very clear about how class is incorporated into the work–family articulation. It is not clear how the pleasantness and the ‘home-ness’ of the socially engineered workplace can also be perceived to be ‘fast pace’ by many in these professions and how parents, faced by pressing daily family duties, can still find at home ‘protected time, time less intensely geared to the rhythms of the work world outside’ (Hochschild 1997: 51). More importantly, Hochschild does not entirely consider an important element that emerges from the relation between emotional culture and class, which is individuated by other studies: the power related to class hierarchy (Ba 2014). Power is intrinsic not only in the material resources used to manage work and family conflicts but also in the symbolic resources, that is, the privileged position of experiencing work’s skills as fulfilling and important for the sense of self. Witz (1992) has shown that the very concept of ‘skill’ cannot be divorced from the gendered dimension of power, for example, the ability of male professional groups, such as doctors, to define one’s work as skilled. Work thus emerges both as an involving occupation and as position of privilege and power in the gendered emotional culture of managers and professionals (Ba 2014).

These studies rightly suggest that forms of family life, or even intimate life (‘the commercialization of intimate life’ as Hochschild 2003 puts it), are in the process of being abstracted from their context, in the same way temporalities are in the process of being homogenised with abstract labour’s temporality. The ‘cultural’ mediation of family forms, the sense of ‘sacred’ of human bonds, are threatened by the latest forms of capitalist social reproduction. To be sure, the social substance that coordinates work and family life is connected to abstract labour and to the way human particularity is subordinated to the processes of capitalist valorisation, yet this is not the driving force of the work–family articulation; rather, its negation and the struggle over autonomy at work and at home is the constitutive force of forms of social life. It is this unreconstructed frame of reference that causes the shortcomings of Hochschild’s analysis, hiding how subjectivities and emotions are linked to social relations that are taking the form of things, both in the social sphere (corporate engineering of work) and at home (gender inequalities in household labour).

The symbolic reward for middle class in terms of coined identity and coined workplace warmth seems to be one of the pillars of the work–family balance as it is designed by neo-liberal imagination. However, after the Great Recession and the politics of austerity, this is increasingly the sign of class privilege, rather than a ‘structural’ transformation of workplace intimacy; in the same way, home intimacy is ever more threatened by old fashion lack of temporal autonomy over exploitative workplaces or financial autonomy through processes of exclusion and dispossession (which affect women more than men). In the end, emotional culture is a contradiction in terms: emotions are in dialectical relation with culture and they can be best seen as expression of the particularity of familial life, with its sensuous elements, resisting the social reconfiguration of forms of life at home and work: capital cannot be conceived in abstract terms as a ghost magically transforming the social landscape, with no opposition and with little creativity from ‘below’. The order at home is not simply planned; it is also the result of working-class daily struggles carving out spaces of autonomy and mutual aid. Emotional warmth at work is not simply managed by corporate capitalism; it can be the result of women’s struggle against male-dominated bureaucracies (Witz 1992), while at the same time emotional culture is increasingly connected to the practices of ‘intensive parenting’ that mothers have to perform on a daily basis (Hays 1997).

Conclusion

The application of critical theory’s approach helps us make sense of some of the phenomena apparent in the work–family articulation; it dispels the false singularity that the specialist approach attaches to facts while showing the links with historic tendencies of capitalism and the conflicts that it generates. Facts such as ‘choice’, time and energy – widely used in analysing the work–family interaction – reflect the conception of human priorities as exchangeable and empty quantum; individuals are reduced to calculating actors whose behaviour is abstractly rational. On the contrary, this article shows that the intimate dynamics of the private sphere and the emotions of people living in families are displaced or absorbed by a wider social dynamic linked to capitalism, characterised by abstract labour. Exactly because critical theory and Open Marxism point out that abstract labour is our product, the struggles intrinsic to capitalist tendencies are rendered intelligible. In this article, we have seen how the work–family articulation rotates around abstract labour and how the homogenising tendency of the latter produces social synthesis and weaves familial forms of life into the fabrics of capitalist market society. Indeed, the sexual division of labour shapes the family form and through a hierarchy of bodies arranges social cohesion (Acker 2004; Federici 2004). Social synthesis is here connected to a shift: the article analyses how the mediation function of family, a mediation which allowed especially its male member to be temporarily sheltered from the immediate commands of the labour market, is losing its centrality. If families are still the site of personality formation, the space that allows subjects to develop into individualised human beings, the autonomy of this ‘space’, is under the threats of the requirements of market capitalism.

Subjectivity, the way subjects feel and make sense of themselves and act in their environment, is a central concept here, as it allows the explanation of work–family articulation to refer back to material individuals, to people. More specifically, it allows an exploration of how personal qualities may be in the process of being integrated into the social synthesis of capitalism. Here, the phenomenon of subjectivity is understood through the developments of personal life in the private sphere, but the sphere of abstract labour is analysed in the sense of the growing integration of these intimate contents. More in particular, we have analysed how the ‘personal biographies’ are ever more consistent with the ‘ideal’ male worker of neo-liberal capitalism, as if the personal dimension could be finally integrated into the social relations of the market. This tendency is not without conflicts or struggles.

The particularity of family life negates the integration of emotional content of the private sphere into ‘positive’ forms of social life. We have seen how rituals and intimate family routines may be used to ‘mark’ different temporalities, disconnected by the homogenising capitalist one. But in the work–family articulation, the work-persona, the ‘ideal worker’, is created through the development of an engineered emotional culture which is in conflict with the particularity of familial forms. Here, Hochschild’s concept of emotional culture is explored through the dialectic of abstract labour and particularities. The emotional side of family life, with its routines, its intimate rituals and the symbolic relevance of daily interactions are rightly seen as in the process of being absorbed by the social synthesis operated by capital (Hochschild 2003), but the particularity of these subjectivities, their struggles and their creative activities are centralised here through the possibility of negating ‘emotional cultures’. At that regard, the critical approach points out at the recrudescence of class and gender disparities in this field, as the neo-liberal assault to autonomy at work is connected to ensuing time and financial pressures at home and to the exploitation of the care labour that women perform as un-paid labour at the service of social reproduction.