Abstract
A substantial body of literature considers the experience of precarious work in market economies. Only recently, however, have scholars of work begun to consider the impact of precarity in the workplace on work-life interrelationships. This study contributes to that research and expands its focus beyond the form of precarity represented by job insecurity to other forms of precarity that inhere in the management of work-life interrelationships for working families in industrialized nations. Taking a communication as constitutive of work-life interrelationships perspective, we identify four forms of precarity in middle class working mothers’ accounts of work-life, and then examine how these forms are communicatively managed through classed and gendered discursive and material/technological practices of resilience. Using Weick’s organizational sensemaking model, in particular his notion of “partial inclusion,” we discuss the implications that individuals’ practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity have for the individual-organization relationship among middle class working mothers.
Keywords
Precarious work is far from a new cultural theme. It has been bubbling up in U.S. society since the 1980s, when massive layoffs in the private sector economy were precipitated by a period of widespread economic instability (Ciulla, 2000). In recent years, work-related precarity – in the sense of that which is insecure, unstable, or unpredictable – has been particularly identified with the experiences of workers in the expanding “cultural” or “creative” sectors of the economy (Hermes et al., 2017). However, as Kalleberg and Vallas (2018) observed, precarious work impacts multiple employment sectors. The contemporary world of work in this context is characterized by limited employer commitments, shrinking benefits, greater reliance on contract workers, exportation of work across national boundaries, along with weakening of organized labor, and limited involvement of the state (Kirby & Buzzanell, 2014; Pugh, 2015). These changes correspond to a global shift toward neoliberal economic programs emphasizing deregulated markets and the pursuit of greater flexibilities and efficiencies in production. In an environment that favors a “disposable worker” (Harvey, 2005, p. 169), individuals are vulnerable to a chronic sense of insecurity (Mumby, 2019).
Pugh (2015) observed that while the literature on the experience of precarious work is substantial, the relationship between precarity in the workplace and the rest of life is at this point a “nascent” area of research. In an extensive study of workers who varied with respect to employment status and socioeconomic position, she found classed and gendered differences in her participants’ responses to the “insecurity culture” of neoliberalism. Those in the upper end of the middle class were more likely to “embrace independence, insecurity, and self-actualization at work, always on the lookout for something better” (Pugh, 2015, p. 14) while those with fewer resources, found it more difficult to “fight back against the influx of insecurity” (p. 14). Kalleberg and Vallas (2018) noted the particular forms of precarity that Pugh’s women participants coped with as they “shoulder the rising demands of caregiving even as they work more hours in the paid labor force and the state has increasingly withdrawn from social provision in various institutional domains” (p. 15). Moreover, in the U.S., which is “marked by the absence of many supportive [child care and family leave] policies found in Europe, women are especially likely to be locked into jobs that offer some modicum of stability or benefits” (p. 15).
These variable responses to precarity point to a potential contribution to understanding this phenomenon from a communication perspective, as individuals actively manage the meanings of unstable and changing circumstances of work and personal life and their interrelationships. In this study, we turn to interview accounts of work-life interrelationships produced by middle class working mothers to identify the communicative resources they draw upon in both constituting and managing work-life precarity. This study contributes to organizational communication scholarship on work-life interrelationships taking the “communication as constitutive” perspective described by Kirby and Buzzanell (2014), and to the interdisciplinary conversation on precarity and work-life (e.g., Pugh, 2017). Here we focus on precarity, both as a lens for viewing work-life interrelationships and as a specific aspect of work-life. That is, we do not limit ourselves to job insecurity, the primary focus of research on precarity in the context of work-life interrelationships, but rather examine multiple aspects of work-life (for example, the role of physical health) as seen through this lens. To accomplish this, we examine, in our participants’ accounts of work-life, how precarity is communicatively constituted through sensemaking processes communicatively managed through discursive and material/technological practices of resilience. The data for this study were almost completely collected prior to the beginning of the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.; however, its advent both heightens the relevance of the processes we describe and would predict their intensification.
Within the neoliberal frameworks dominating U.S. workplaces, the responsibility for managing work-life relationships and finding solutions to caregiving dilemmas is assumed to lie with the individual worker. Low-wage workers in the U.S. are particularly strained, with little or no employer support to meet caregiving commitments (Buzzanell et al., 2010). More stably employed white collar workers, in contrast, may have greater access to accommodations such as family leave and other flexibilities but still not use them to avoid undermining their reputations as committed workers (Kirby & Krone, 2002). However, even though social democracies in the EU have more institutional and organizational provisions for workplace accommodations, forces of globalization, job insecurity and austerity have impacted workplaces throughout the global north, with the result that individuals’ experience of work is more and more likely to be marked by intensification and precarity (Kinman & McDowall, 2017). Thus, this study, while situated in the U.S., where the responsibility for managing work-life interrelationships is negotiated largely between the organization and the individual, nonetheless reflects conditions of work that are experienced by workers in many nations that participate in the global economy.
Precarity, Sensemaking, and the Communication Theory of Resilience
The analysis presented here is guided by two related theoretical frameworks, in addition to prior research on work-related precarity: Weick’s (1979, 1995), Weick et al.’s (2005) sensemaking model of organizing and Buzzanell’s (2010, 2017) communication theory of resilience. As in Golden’s (2009) study of interactions between a high tech organization and employee families, we emphasize the grounding of Weick’s sensemaking model in the open systems metatheoretical perspective, such that sensemaking consists of the enactment of order on the stream of experience that constitutes the individual’s environment, and a “reciprocal relationship [exists] between ecological change and enactment” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 414). More specifically, enactment consists of “bracket[ing] and construct[ing] portions of the flow of experience” (p. 147); that is, noticing (bracketing) and assigning meaning to (constructing) some portion of the individual’s environment through discourse or nondiscursive action. Weick (1995) argued that enactment intertwines sensemaking organisms with their environment, because through enactment they create a version of that environment and (en)act out relationships with it, which the environment responds to with its own enactments. The forms of work-life precarity voiced by participants in this study are thus what they have bracketed for attention out of the flow of work-life related experiences and constructed as stability threats.
We draw on Buzzanell’s (2010, 2017) communication theory of resilience (CTR) as an explanatory framework and organizing principle for the practices through which our participants managed the precarities they enacted. Buzzanell (2017) differentiated CTR from other perspectives on resilience by noting that in this model resilience is not a property of the individual, but is constructed through interaction and relationships; and that it is not only about reactivity but also proactivity. This shifts the focus away from “individual deficit approaches” to recognition of the “politicized contexts in which material resources, policies, and ideological structures” (p. 99) shape enactments of social arrangements. Gender hierarchies and other normative assumptions, for example conceptions of the “ideal worker” as unencumbered by caregiving responsibilities (Acker, 2012), shape resilience practices by limiting perceptions of what are appropriate or even conceivable responses to work-life dilemmas.
Buzzanell identified five communicative processes or practices of resilience that she noted, “are not mutually exclusive and are often entangled in complex ways: (a) crafting normalcy; (b) foregrounding productive action while backgrounding negative feelings; (c) affirming identity anchors; (d) maintaining and using communication networks; and (e) putting alternative logics to work” (2017, p. 100). She explained that while these practices are “activated by a trigger event,” this might take the form of “recognition of accumulated challenges” rather than a traumatic single act (p. 100). We build upon this description to foreground the proactive dimension of resilience, including resilience as a practice that forestalls a more traumatic disruption and fosters endurance. At the same time, it could also be argued that the recognition of a threat - recognition of precarity in this instance - constitutes a “disruption” in itself. In other words, it is not necessary for the threat to materialize; rather, just the recognition of its possibility constitutes a kind of disruption, which is then responded to with the communicative practices that our respondents display.
Buzzanell made her most explicit connection to Weick’s sensemaking model in defining the fifth resilience practice, putting alternative logics to work, noting that it “has its roots in sensemaking, where tried and true response patterns or routines fail to work for a disruption (Weick, 1979, 1995)” (p. 102). She noted that this practice “also emerges from communication scholarship on contradiction, ambiguity, and paradox, offering opportunities for creative ways of communicating” (p.102). We enlarge the connections between CTR and Weick’s sensemaking in the context of work-life precarity by making more explicit the processes of enactment participants engage in through what they bracket for attention and the meanings they assign, as well as exploring Weick’s concept of the reciprocal relationship between enactment and ecological change. We also echo Buzzanell’s observation regarding paradox, as we observe that talking precarity into existence threatens stability, yet communicatively realized precarity is the essential starting point for resilience through its anticipation and management of threats. Consistent with Buzzanell’s theorizing resilience as “process . . .an ongoing dynamic activated when humans experience distress and disaster,” (2017, p. 103) we envision the management of precarity as an ongoing process of resilience practices, though with the emphasis, among our participants, on distress rather than disaster: distress occasioned by the realization of precarity through processes of enactment/bracketing for attention, and processes of resilience that function to forestall disaster in the context of work-life interrelationships.
Precarity in the Context of Middle Class Working Mothers
As noted above, job insecurity, or the threat of losing employment, is arguably the most extensively examined dimension of precarity as it relates to work. The form that such precarity takes and its implications for work-life interrelationships are classed, with working class and lower income service sector workers facing the most economic precarity (e.g., Pugh, 2015), and having the fewest organizational supports for managing work-life interrelationships (Kossek & Distelberg, 2009). The middle class, though, also experiences precarity, with scholars of work pointing to a changing social contract between employers and white-collar employees, marked by reduced employer commitments and concomitant erosion in employees’ perceptions of long term security (Sennett, 2006). Among white collar workers insecurity is amplified as their work is increasingly mediated by new technologies that contribute to the acceleration of working life (e.g., Kalman et al., 2021) and the creation of a “productivity imperative” (Gregg, 2018, p. 3).
Thus, any discussion of work and precarity would be incomplete without acknowledging that “work and social class are deeply enmeshed” (Dougherty, 2011, p. 95). Dougherty argued that “social class should be viewed as a web-of-power in which social class is deeply imbedded in the fabric of society,” and one of the strands of this web is “classed language that reveals classed location” (p. 12) [emphasis added]. We would therefore expect the communicative constitution and management of work-life precarity to reveal classed locations, as previous research dealing with communication, work, and class (though not specifically work-life precarity) has done (e.g., Dougherty et al., 2017; Gist-Mackey & Dougherty, 2021). Accordingly, because existing research specifically on precarity in relation to work (leaving aside work-life interrelationships), and research on work-life interrelationships (but not specifically focusing on precarity) points to its classed, gendered, and racialized nature, and because of the relatively small scale, exploratory nature of this inquiry into precarity and work-life interrelationships, we focus in this study on a relatively homogenous sample to allow us to make meaningful claims about a particular demographic group, foregrounding class and gender rather than race – in this case, a group of predominantly White middle class working mothers. Larger scale studies have examined intergroup differences among Black, White, and Hispanic men and women on such work-life related issues as work-family conflict (Ammons, et al., 2017), work-family decision making (Guo & Wadhwa, 2022), and work-family balance (Ray & Jackson, 2013), though not specifically work-life precarity. At the same time, we readily acknowledge the inextricably linked nature of race/ethnicity and class, with persons of color over-represented in low-wage service sector jobs (Robbins & Vogtman, 2016), and under-represented in white collar occupations (Gee, 2018) as a result of persistent structural racism (Gould & Wilson, 2020).
We also acknowledge the challenge in defining “middle class,” addressed by many, including Ehrenreich (1989/2020), whose arguments regarding a preoccupation with “fear of falling” have been widely influential. Ehrenreich argued that the middle class coheres around being employed in knowledge work occupations with extensive educational prerequisites; having household incomes that permit home ownership in neighborhoods with similar families; and engaging in habits of consumption that include travel, psychotherapy, fitness activities, and cultural activities. Moreover, Ehrenreich and others have claimed that they are marked by a lack of concern for those of other classes and a “quest for positional advantage” (Ball, 2003, p. 21). However, Quart, in her foreword to the 2020 edition of Ehrenreich’s book, observed that the generation that followed Ehrenreich’s subjects have inherited a set of burdens which make the “fear of falling” very real, including “the swollen price of healthcare and childcare, record educational debt, and a housing market gone berserk” (p. XV).
The purpose of this study is therefore to identify, within the relatively focused social and economic context of middle class working mothers, the forms of precarity specifically implicated in managing work-life interrelationships (versus in work alone). Working within a framework that regards communication as constituting work-life interrelationships, we examine how precarity is communicatively constituted through sensemaking processes and how it is communicatively managed through discursive and material/technological practices of resilience. Our inquiry is guided by two research questions. RQ1: How is precarity discursively realized in middle class women’s accounts of managing work and family, what specific forms of precarity do they realize, and how are these discursive realizations classed and gendered? RQ2: How do middle class women communicatively manage the precarities they realize, through practices of resilience, and how are these practices classed and gendered?
Following our presentation of findings from our interviews regarding our research questions, we discuss implications of our findings for individuals’ relationships to the organizations that employ them and organizational change within the framework of Weick’s organizational sensemaking model. We also discuss paradoxes in the management of precarity through practices of resilience.
Research Procedures
Data Collection and Participants
The findings reported here are part of an ongoing project exploring how workers with dependent family members make sense of the relationship between work and family life in an increasingly market-focused society. The data for this study came from semi-structured interviews with 24 middle class working mothers (with class defined by a combination of their reported occupations and their partners’ occupations, their level of education, and inferred income). Participants were recruited through word-of-mouth referrals and through an announcement posted on a listserv for working mothers. All participants had attended college and 14 had graduate degrees. 20 participants self-identified as non-Hispanic White, two as Hispanic, and two as Asian American. Their ages ranged from 30 to 52. All were in committed relationships (23 heterosexual and one same-sex), and all had caregiving responsibilities for children, who ranged in age from 7 weeks to 19 years; 21 participants had children under the age of 12. Some also reported additional caregiving responsibilities for parents and siblings. Four participants reported having family members with physical or mental disabilities.
Selective sampling was employed to locate a group of information-rich cases that would be homogeneous on certain dimensions while allowing for maximum variation on others. Of particular importance was variation in the degree to which participants perceived their employing organizations as “family friendly” or responsive to caregiving commitments. For this reason the sample was purposefully varied in terms of the type of employing organization (public, private or not-for-profit) and occupation. Reported occupations ranged from those aligned with stereotypically feminine roles (e.g., teaching, social work, human resources) to male-dominated fields (engineering, military), as well as non-gender-specific occupations such as corporate sales, law, and veterinary services. Most, though not all, engaged in “text” or knowledge work rather than “body work” (Dougherty, 2011). Hours spent in paid employment also varied, from 50–60 hours per week (n = 9), to 40–49 hours (n = 9), to 39–30 hours (n = 3), to 29–20 hours (n = 2), to a variable 10–24 hours (n = 1). In addition, participants varied in terms of how critical they considered their contributions to household income were to maintaining their current arrangements, ranging from primary breadwinner to part-time employment, but with almost all making what they viewed as essential contributions.
The interviews were conducted in person, by video conferencing platforms, and by telephone. They averaged 47 minutes in length and were professionally transcribed. Participants received a $10 gift card as an expression of appreciation for their participation. Participants addressed questions regarding educational background and career history, family status and household living arrangements, description of a typical workday, including the use of technology to manage family commitments while at work, and the extent to which their employing organization acknowledged and accommodated family needs.
Data Analysis
Our approach in this study is informed by the view, following Wetherell and Potter (1988), that individuals use discourse “constructively,” meaning that “discourse has an action orientation: it has practical consequences ... discourse can be said to ‘construct’ our lived reality” (pp. 171–72). Moreover, we understand the interview, as a method of data generation and collection, to be an “active,” “interactional, interpretive activity” (Holstein & Gubrium, 2004, p. 140). Therefore, the interactional interpretive activity that takes place during the interview is understood as another occasion to utilize and display “the procedures and resources used to apprehend, organize, and represent reality” rather than a process that is different from other sense-making activities of participants (Holstein & Gubrium, 2004, p. 149). Lindlof (1995) elaborates from the more specific perspective of qualitative communication research, arguing that the minute particulars of participants’ accounts may be unique to the individuals who recount them, but they are also embedded in broader “cultural logics” (p. 167).
Analysis of the interview transcripts was a multistage process informed by the constructivist grounded-theory approach articulated by Charmaz (2006), in which identification of the processes we describe here was both emergent from the data we collected and informed by existing theory and research. As Clark (2007) elucidated this approach, “theorizing is generated by tacking back and forth between the nitty-gritty specificities of empirical data and more abstract ways of thinking about them” (p. 424). We describe below the specific form that these processes took in this study.
Our analytic process began with both researchers familiarizing themselves with the data by reading and re-reading an initial set of seven transcripts, and intensively annotating them with comments on passages that met one or more of Owen’s (1984) principles of recurrence (of meaning), repetition (of key phrases), and forcefulness. We then compared and discussed our collective comments. We noticed that economic precarity emerged as a much more prominent theme than we anticipated in the context of middle income workers, especially in the forcefulness of its articulation (e.g., the possibility, voiced by participants of becoming “homeless” or “losing the house”). We noticed, further, that words such as “stress,” “strain,” “pressure” and “uncertainty” occurred repeatedly across participants’ accounts of work-life relationships, suggesting “precarity” as a broader interpretive category. Precarity became a focal construct and a lens for considering other forms of instability, unpredictability, and insecurity relevant to work-life interrelationships that were voiced across participants’ accounts. We were able to delineate three additional interrelated discursive realizations of precarity and communicative management strategies. Both authors reviewed the remainder of the accounts and then each author independently annotated a subset of these, noting excerpts of talk that reflected any of the four forms of precarity and management strategies. We further discussed and compared these analyses. In cases of disagreement, discussion continued until we resolved divergent interpretations and ascertained that the four themes described the contours of the entire data set (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
In the iterative process of moving back and forth between the data and relevant research literature, we found that CTR provided an organizing principle for the communicative practices for managing precarity emergent from participant accounts and a higher level of abstraction or categorization, as well as offering further insights into the functioning of these practices. Weick’s sensemaking model served to further specify the communicative processes through which the forms of work-life precarity were enacted and managed. In addition, we interpreted our findings using Weick’s organizational sensemaking model’s linking of enactment with ecological change, and his notion of “partial inclusion,” to explore implications that individuals’ practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity have for the individual-organization relationship and in turn organizational functioning.
Findings and Interpretation
We identify four primary domains of work-life precarity emergent from our participants’ accounts: economic, regard, health, and time precarity. These problematics are distinctly identifiable, but also intertwined, consistent with the entire notion of precarity, such that a threat to stability in one domain has the potential to cascade into another. For each form of work-life precarity, we also identify associated practices of resilience engaged in by participants for managing precarity.
The forms of precarity enacted by participants and their communicative management strategies are summarized in Table 1.
Economic Precarity
Two distinct forms of economic precarity emerged from participants’ accounts: job insecurity and resource strain.
Job Insecurity
Recognition of precarity in the form of job insecurity as a real feature of their work-life landscape was strongly evident in our participants’ accounts of managing work-life interrelationships. One participant voiced this particularly forcefully: I think the older I get, and you see people come and go, and you see people being laid off who never did anything wrong. All they did was give 110%, and then they lose their job anyway. … I always have in the back of my mind that I can’t lose my job because we would be homeless. Well, not really, but you know. - Carly, age 47, White, human resource manager, mother of one
Carly’s expression of precarity is telling as a marker of her classed location; i.e., homelessness as a consequence of job loss would represent a precipitous descent from her family’s middle class status. More likely, while Carly and her family might become temporarily “unhoused” if they were unable to keep up their mortgage payments, they would be less likely to become truly “homeless” in the sense that a lower income family living in a rental property might be. Behind this expression may be the gendered circumstance of her position as the primary breadwinner in her family.
One communicative strategy that Carly deploys to manage this precarity corresponds to the CTR practice of affirming identity anchors. As Buzzanell explained, identity anchors are “relatively enduring cluster[s] of identity discourses upon which individuals . . . rely when explaining who they are for themselves and in relation to each other” (Buzzanell, 2010, p. 4). For Carly this means the discursive construction of a work identity as a superlative and valued employee. Several minutes after referencing the possibility of becoming homeless, Carly says, “Not to brag, but my reviews are always completely outstanding. So, I have no reason to even try to push myself, ‘Oh! Why am I not doing a good enough job?’ That’s just me. I hate to disappoint.” Thus, although she brackets for attention the reality of job insecurity in her work environment (“see[ing] people being laid off who never did anything wrong”), she offsets this by painting a self-portrait centering her superlative performance. Underlying this identity work is a cultural logic of fairness and meritocracy, in which hard work is rewarded (Sennett, 2006), even as she acknowledges that the application of these principles is not guaranteed.
A second strategy for managing the threat of job insecurity was articulating a contingency plan in response to job loss, or, within the CTR framework, crafting normalcy, as in this participant’s account: My job is the lesser [compared with my husband’s] and on the defense job. And I do keep my toe in too because if he were to lose his job – thankfully he’s worked at the same place since he was 17 years old and seems to be pretty secure right now. He has survived many a layoff. But if something were to happen, at least I’d have my toe in somewhere. And hopefully we wouldn’t lose the house too quick. – Kim, age 45, White, part-time social worker and home schooler, mother of three
As Buzzanell explained, “crafting normalcy” is about “narrativizing,” which Kim does by spinning a story in which her husband’s past work history is at least partially predictive of the future, while also including a scenario in which his possible job loss would be offset by her earnings long enough for the primary earner to find new employment before they “lose the house” – at least “hopefully.”
Resource Strain
The loss of work and income is the most profound threat to economic stability for these middle class women and their households, but even when not focusing their attention on this ultimate economic threat, participants also enacted economic precarity in maintaining their existing work-life arrangements, with a particular focus on childcare arrangements as an expensive and critical component. One participant notes “Our daycare monthly expense is twice what my mortgage is.” She manages this strain and precarity through the resilience practice of putting alternative logics to work, construing the costs and benefits as tradeoffs: The cost is worth it to me because they get structure and stimulation and interaction and enrichment that I don’t think I could provide if I was home with them all day, but I resent that it is such a high expense. We balance it, “Well, they’re taken really good care of. Their school provides their meals.” I still resent that we can’t afford to move until we’re done paying for daycare.” – Shelly, age 35, White, sales manager, mother of two
Shelly also maintains resilience by legitimizing negative feelings while foregrounding productive action when she positions her family as less strained than some other families because We’re not in a situation where we’re working to pay for daycare. If that was the case, we’d reevaluate but, when I look at what other countries have and what other benefits are out there, it’s very frustrating to think, “Well, why don’t we have?”
Thus, on the one hand, she mitigates the characterization of daycare as a source of economic strain by enumerating the benefits of daycare. She construes her situation as better than that alternative reality being experienced by others, using a well-defined interpretive resource (“working to pay for daycare”). But on the other hand, she positions her resentment as reasonable because of the existence of an existing alternative in the global economy in which the state assists families with paying for childcare. From a classed language standpoint, it could be argued that Shelly’s comparison of her circumstances with others who in fact are “working to pay for daycare” constitutes evidence of the competitive individualism that Erhenrheich influentially argued for in her “fear of falling” thesis as a distinctive quality of the middle class. However, there is also evidence of a more communal orientation in Shelly’s expressed wish for state support for childcare.
Another form of discourse that was prominent in participants’ accounts as a strategy for mitigating this form of precarity was long term temporal framing, which may be understood as another instantiation of crafting normalcy and a practice of “juxtaposing hope with reality” (Buzzanell, 2017, p. 101). Talking about a time, as Shelly puts it, “when we’re not paying for daycare. When that expense is gone, (emphasis added)” makes real a future time in which she and her husband will be “done paying for daycare,” easing their economic precarity. This discourse is arguably more distinctively classed, given the pronounced short-term temporal orientation that has been demonstrated to infuse coping and decision-making among the poor and working class (Gist-Mackey & Guy, 2019; Shah et al., 2012). We examine this issue of temporality further in the context of the domains of health precarity and time precarity.
Precarity of Regard
Precarity of regard was enacted by participants in their expressions of awareness of co-workers’ and/or supervisors’ actual or possible appraisals of their effectiveness as employees and the potential for falling short of ideals in these appraisals. Given that we understand middle income parents to be spending almost all (or all) of the income they generate, responding to precarity of regard assumes critical importance. For some participants, compensation appeared directly tied to performance that could be quantitatively measured, as in attorneys’ billable hours, or sales figures. For others, raises might be tied to more diffusely defined evaluations related to the identity co-constructed by an employee’s discourse and practices and the evaluating manager, in the context of a particular organizational culture.
Participants enacted precarity of regard and practices of resilience in two modes. In the first, they responded to perceived precarity by affirming the norms of “the ideal worker,” accepting organizational standards, and managing personal life concerns into the background (Mescher et al., 2009). In the second mode, the employee acknowledged the potential for negative judgment when setting boundaries for work but insisted on the primacy of family and personal well-being. It must be noted that these modes of enacting precarity of regard and practices of resilience exist within a neoliberal context of high variability across organizations with respect to their “life-friendliness” (Pitt-Catsouphes, 2002), or willingness to accommodate employees’ personal life needs.
Legitimating the “Ideal Worker”
Kristin, a corporate attorney, enacts precarity of regard when she characterizes her current work as requiring significant accountability in terms of hours billed and tracked, and availability on evenings and weekends. [I’m] expected to be on call all the time basically because I get emails on my phone, and people expect that on weekends, you’re gonna be emailing, and tonight, you’re gonna be emailing. … I mean, the only time I – even when I put like I’m out of the country with no email, I still think some people expect me to respond to email. – Kristin, age 36, White, corporate attorney, mother of two
She goes on to produce an even more minutely detailed account of her employer’s requirements: My billable requirement is 2,000 hours a year, which …comes out to 40 hours a week [and] okay, that’s fine … except I don’t – I can’t bill when I go to the bathroom. I can’t bill when I go to lunch. I can’t bill if someone goes in my office and just asks me how I’m doing that day… So, if you take vacation, real vacation, you then have to do some weeks where you're really killing yourself in order to make it work.
Kristin’s narrative makes it clear that it is a strain for her to meet these “required” standards, which conveys a sense of precarity, an ever present specter of falling short. While it is not made explicit in Kristin’s account what the consequences would be of failing to meet the “billable requirement,” she does say “if I don’t work those hours, there’s losses to that,” suggesting her compensation might be reduced.
Kristin manages this precarity of regard by attempting to meet rather than challenge the requirements of the organization, through the resilience practice of using ICTs to extend human capabilities, moving work across the work-life boundary, answering emails on weekends and evenings. In analyzing this strategy, we respond to Buzzanell’s call (2010) to identify additional communication practices associated with resilience: in this instance, we identify the material practices associated with information and communication technologies (ICTs) to manage work-life interrelationships and conform to organizational expectations by extending human capacity for work. However, these practices require “technological capital” (Carlson & Isaacs, 2018, p. 243), encompassing awareness of the technology and how to use it, which is markedly classed, as demonstrated by the growing literature on digital inequalities. Thus, the use of these technologies to extend the human capacity for work limits the type of workers for whom this resilience practice is an option.
Another participant, Bianca, offered further perspective on precarity of regard in the context of higher education, where, as a professor and department chair she feels the weight of culturally-based expectations: As a Latina woman in academia, …, sometimes you’re the token Latina who’s –they forget the research that you do, but they remember all the service that you can provide for their translation or interpretation, or … there are all kinds of events for first generation college students that you’re asked to speak at or be part of. And so, my responsibilities, – I feel because of my identity at a predominantly white institution, that is changing, – but I feel that they’re more numerous than maybe a White male counterpart - Bianca, age 49, Hispanic, college professor , mother of three.
Although expectations for departmental and professional service are a component of any academic role, Bianca alludes specifically to additional responsibilities placed on her because of her “token” status. She manages this precarity of regard by subtly challenging organizational expectations, that is, affirming an identity anchor (“a Latina woman”) while also using this positioning to question the disparities between her service duties and those of a “White male counterpart.”
Legitimating the Claims of Family
The second mode of enacting and managing precarity of regard acknowledges the potential for negative appraisal but nonetheless resists organizational pressure to perform the ideal worker at the expense of family through resilience practices of putting alternative logics to work and affirming identity anchors. Jean, a physicist who works in energy systems, describes how she transitioned from an organizational role that required extensive travel and round the clock availability to one that allowed her to assume a reduced work schedule including work from home: Quite soon after when I had my first [child], I went down to 20 hours a week, and mainly from home, and just really changed roles, stepped out of a sales role… [I] just went in and said to my boss, “This is what I want to do, and I think this person and this person should take over this piece, and I want to do this.” – Jean, age 35, White, physicist, mother of three
In cutting back to 20 hours per week, Jean uses the resilience practice of putting alternative logics to work – that is, an alternative to the logic of the ideal worker script. She skillfully weaves this together with the practice of affirming identity anchors, characterizing herself as “empowered [to request the reconfigured work schedule] … because I deliver and have always been well-regarded and trusted.” The potential for negative appraisal and thus precarity of regard is implicit in Jean’s claim that she, as a “well-regarded and trusted” worker is in fact not negatively regarded and has her request approved. But the fact she feels the need to account for this suggests that workers without these qualities would lack her options. Such discursive practices, however, are distinctly classed since they are primarily available to workers whose knowledge and skills are considered costly to replace and therefore highly valued by their employers. More limited options are available to less skilled and lower paid workers employed in sectors where the primary tool for safeguarding organizational profitability is the tight control of labor costs and in which significant turnover is considered inevitable (Carré & Tilly, 2017).
Health Precarity
Unanticipated health problems of children or the declining health of parents emerged as a cluster of experiences we identify as health precarity. Such events can upset existing stable work-family arrangements, given the complex interplay of family and work systems (Golden et al., 2006), requiring workers to engage in practices of resilience.
Health Problems of Children
Kim, for example, a White, part-time social worker, age 45, has two children born with a combination of special needs and complex chronic health conditions. Such unpredictable events can present a dramatic temporal interruption to an individual’s anticipated trajectories and require a rethinking of future plans and projects (Shirani & Henwood, 2011). Unable to find suitable childcare facilities, Kim decided to leave her full-time position for a part-time job as a hospital social worker. Later, after encountering problems navigating various educational systems to obtain what she considered adequate schooling for her daughter, she opted to home-school all three of her children full-time and restrict her paid work to weekend evenings. Faced with what she construes as immovable constraints imposed by the institutional contexts of work and school, Kim withdraws and creates a new, and in her words, “fulltime job” of homeschooling. She sums up this reprioritization in which her paid job is now clearly secondary to her husband’s work, saying, “I think I just realized I need to focus on them [children]. My husband’s job is the bread and butter of our house. And then my job is the lesser end.” Putting alternative logics to work, she frames caregiving/homeschooling as meaningful work - a “fulltime job” - and relegates her own paid employment to a secondary status, both in terms of time commitment and meaningfulness.
Kim’s account displays agency in her communicative constitution of resilience in the face of health related work-life precarity. However, her account also situates her in a classed location insofar as it must be undergirded by a set of material resources that allows her to curtail her paid employment. Moreover, her account also displays the influences of persistent gendered cultural assumptions about default responsibilities for caregiving, which are reinforced by the institutionalization of gender-based pay inequities (National Women’s Law Center, 2020).
Health Problems of Parents
In contrast to Kim’s improvised response to health precarity in which she must deal with the flow of events as they unfolded, other participants were able to adopt a more intentional and structured approach by anticipating and planning for future health contingencies, which involves maintaining and using communication networks. The co-construction of an extended temporal orientation can enhance a sense of control by promoting a belief that long term life plans are attainable even in the face of threats to work-life stability. Camilla, for example, a White high career counselor and mother of two, age 38, who depended on her parents to provide essential childcare, held on to the idea that she could stave off the uncertainty of her father’s Parkinson’s diagnosis through a kind of risk calculation. She said, “It could be any day when my mom has to be his caretaker. And then, I always think in the back of my head, ‘This is what I would do, I always have that back-up plan.’” Thus, Camilla looks ahead, scanning her environment for possible threats to be ready for expected transitions so that disruption to the communication network can be minimized. As noted above in connection with communicative practices of resilience that respond to economic precarity, such planfulness is distinctively (middle) classed.
Time Precarity
Throughout their work-life accounts, participants construed time as a scarce and precious resource, with the present always “filled to the brim” (Brannen, 2005, p. 116) and in a precarious state of devolving into chaos and unmet demands. The large time commitments required by many employers is combined with intensification in the volume and pace of work as employees are exhorted to do more with less (Kinman & McDowall, 2017). All appear to contribute to participants’ feelings of pressure and time shortage. Time precarity was enacted within both a near-term and a longer term temporal horizon.
Near Term Temporal Horizon
Using ICTs to extend human capabilities was framed by participants as a practice of resiliency for keeping up with work intensification and creating maximally efficient work-life arrangements in the near term. As one participant describes, On a day-to-day basis, I choose to check my email when I get home because I’ve taken a shorter lunch, and I feel like hey, I’m only really in my office a little over 8 hours a day. So, I check it, . . .when I get home I want to make sure I finish out the day right because I’m kind of dashing out at quarter to four. – Kelly, age 50, White, project manager at human services agency, mother of one
Another participant shared a similar perspective. Although she has chosen not to connect her work email to her phone, she explains that “that doesn’t mean that sometimes as I’m just sitting around at home watching TV, I don’t sign on to email or do a project or whatever that may be. - Victoria, age 36, Hispanic, college administrator, mother of 1
Kelly’s “choos[ing]” to supplement her 8 hour day by checking email from home and Victoria’s signing in from home are strategic parts of their identity enactment, which can also be understood as forestalling precarity of regard. This is, of course, only possible because Kelly’s and Victoria’s work is primarily textual rather than requiring bodily presence and thus classed, as well as driven by gendered expectations for caregiving responsibilities.
Another form of the resilience practice of using ICTs to extend human capabilities that emerged from participants’ accounts was the application of rational planning procedures embodied in electronic calendar systems. Outlook and other systems accessible via smart phones allow users to closely monitor the schedules of their co-workers in order to schedule meetings among multiple parties, while also enabling them to track their spouses’ activities and thus synchronize the family’s scheduled commitments. Jessie, a White communication specialist at a non-profit, age 36, and mother of two, enthuses about Google Calendar, explaining how she and her husband coordinate their schedules using a color coded system that overlays three calendars, one for her personal and work appointments, a parallel one for her husband, and a third one for the family: “It’s a major component of how we stay on the same page about what’s going on … it’s crucial.” In Jessie’s ICT enabled system for coordination of family activities, including work, childcare, and children’s school, which she shares with her husband, her family’s store of technological capital (Carlson & Isaacs, 2018) is on full display.
Similarly, Veronica and her husband also share Google Calendar to keep track of one another’s schedules. She considers her children as old enough to participate in the calendaring system and uses a dry erase board calendar on the refrigerator to help her children keep track of their own activities and their parents’ work commitments. She looks forward to eventually getting a refrigerator with a screen built into the door: And so everything gets – like, you can put all these apps on there, including a calendar, so you can put your Google calendar on there, so any time you update it, it goes right on the, and anyone who goes there can look for the calendar. - Veronica, age 45, Asian American, physical therapist, mother of three
Brannen (2005), however, argued that while communication technologies appear to offer greater control to workers by introducing flexibilities in the spaces and times of work, they often have the opposite effect by destabilizing “normative ideas of what is a ‘reasonable amount of time’ to spend at work” (p. 115). To address this, our participants also put alternative logics to work as a resilience practice in relation to ICTs’ facilitation of paid work invading spatiotemporal regions formerly reserved for family. Participants in this study reported mindfully managing the work-life boundary in the home space, sometimes with the encouragement of family members. As Barb, an elementary school guidance counselor describes, “I certainly wouldn’t be pulling out my computer at dinner to check work email…and not because there’s a rule but just because you know it’s just time to be with them and that’s that.”
Long Term Temporal Horizon
Another form of alternative logic participants practiced to achieve resilience in the face of work pressures and foreground the logics of family commitments, and in which a longer term temporal horizon is implicated was retrospective-prospective sensemaking. This practice for managing the precarity of time pressures was evident in the way they talked through and evaluated the consequences of their work-life choices to resolve tensions between short-term experiences and long-term life goals. Carly makes use of an explicit “future perfect” construction in describing her ongoing efforts to carve out time from her busy work schedule to spend with her daughter: I will never intentionally make a decision that would disappoint her because she is just my world. Thankfully because my goal is to never look back, and go, ‘Oh, I wish I would have done this with her when she was young.’
In the alternative logic of retrospective-prospective sensemaking, Carly reconstructs the temporal horizon by imagining a future time in which she might look back on the present with regret, a possibility she wants to avoid. As Lois (2010) concluded from her research with homeschooling mothers, expressions of nostalgia and the associated desire to avoid regret serve as interpretive resources for making sense of a present in which time feels too densely filled with obligations.
Participants also reported achieving resilience in the face of time precarity by maintaining and using extended family networks for childcare in order to have enough time to get work done. This short term solution had longer term temporal implications when grandparents were involved. Participants acknowledged that grandparents’ availability is contingent on their own health status, illustrating how precarity of health and precarity of time intersect and reciprocally influence one another. Kathleen, a White engineering geologist, age 41, with three young children, described how her mother is “young at heart but not in her mobility. She struggles. . . . When the twins were born, she was there every single day helping me while my husband was working. It’s been amazing. As the kids grow and start running around, then it becomes a little more challenging. . . she can’t go up our stairs, for instance. And that’s where the kids' bedrooms are.” Comparing our participants’ accounts with Gist-Mackey and Guy’s (2019) suggests that the ability to rely on social support from family members plays a large role in coping with work-related stresses across classes.
Communicative Practices of Resilience and Organizational Inclusion
In the interest of advancing the communication and resilience research agenda, we engage further here with the issue of the level of context (Buzzanell & Houston, 2018). Up to this point we have foregrounded individual experiences of work-life precarity and communicative practices of resilience to manage it, though also demonstrating how these practices are interactionally enacted and shaped by a neoliberal political economy. Here, we return to Weick’s organizational sensemaking model’s postulation of a “reciprocal relationship between ecological change and enactment” and to his notion of “partial inclusion,” to explore connections between individuals’ practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity and the individual-organization relationship, and in turn organizational functioning. We argue that organizations’ recognition of these implications can contribute to organizational level resilience.
The expression organizational inclusion has appeared in earlier research (e.g., Golden et al., 2006). We briefly elaborate here its relationship to Weick’s “partial inclusion,” (1979), which refers to the phenomenon of the individual not “invest[ing] all behavior in a single group; [rather,] commitments and interlockings are dispersed among several groups” (p. 95). Weick argued that from the viewpoint of an employing organization, only if the amount of investment an individual has with other groups is known, can the level of effort a person will expend to maintain organizational ties and execute group tasks be predicted.
Looking across the four domains of precarity enacted by participants, and the communicative practices of resilience they employed, we discern three positionings with respect to organizational inclusion: practices that legitimate organizational expectations of the ideal worker and thus foster greater organizational inclusion; practices that delegitimate organizational expectations of the ideal worker (and legitimate claims of the family) and thus foster less organizational inclusion and greater family inclusion for the individual; and practices that balance organizational inclusion with family inclusion. More specifically, and summarized in Table 2 the practice of using ICTs to extend human capabilities in response to precarity of regard and time precarity, as well as the time precarity practice of maintaining and using communication networks in the time precarity context, primarily functioned to legitimate organizational expectations of the ideal worker, and thus foster organizational inclusion. The resilience practice of putting alternative logics to work in response to precarity of regard, health precarity in the context of children’s health, and time precarity delegitimated organizational expectations of the ideal worker. Finally, the resilience practices of affirming identity anchors (“I’m a valued employee”) and crafting normalcy associated with managing economic precarity in the form of job insecurity (“If my husband gets laid off we’ll have my job to fall back on”), and maintaining and using communication networks to manage health precarity in the form of health problems of parents, serve to balance organizational and family inclusion.
Discussion
The communication discipline’s distinctive contributions to the interdisciplinary field of work-life research have been marked by their emphasis on processes (versus outcomes) and on the importance of the social construction of meanings, which then serve as the basis for action. This study has identified and explored a key process in the management of work-life interrelationships: the enactment of precarity and its management as communicative practices of sensemaking and resilience. The communication theory of resilience has not previously been applied to work-life research as such, nor has the lens of precarity; yet CTR is particularly appropriate for explicating how precarity (or stability threat) is enacted and managed on an ongoing basis, thus realizing resilience. This study therefore adds another context for CTR that mutually enriches CTR-informed research and research on work-life interrelationships that uses a communication as constitutive meta perspective. In applying CTR as an explanatory framework to the management of precarity in the context of work-life interrelationships, we have extended CTR to (a) include an additional resilience process (i.e., the use of ICTs to extend human capabilities), and (b) elaborate CTR’s emphasis on sensemaking using Weick’s organizational sensemaking model. Moreover, (c) we use Weick’s linkage of enactment to ecological change, together with his related concept of partial inclusion, to explore how individuals’ resilience practices for managing work-life precarity may impact the individual-organization relationship. Thus, whereas previous studies have tended to focus more on how resilience practices help the individual endure and even thrive, we also consider implications of these practices for organizational functioning.
Precarity, Resilience, and Organizational Inclusion
As noted earlier, Weick (1995) argued that enactment intertwines sensemaking organisms with their environment, because through enactment they create a version of that environment and (en)act out a relationship with it, which the environment (in this case the employing organization) responds to with its own enactments. Individuals’ practices of resilience that function to manage their organizational inclusion, as described in our findings, reflect this reciprocal dynamic. Weick did not see the acceptance of partial organizational inclusion as either a “moral failing” on the part of an organization’s leadership or as necessarily dysfunctional. In fact, he argued that acceptance of partial inclusion can be instrumental for managing people’s concurrent needs for group affiliation and independence. Since the organization does not, as Weick pointed out, really require “whole persons,” partial inclusion only becomes problematic when the organization’s management behaves as if employees have no other commitments.
Kossek et al. (2010), in arguing for the need to mainstream work-life initiatives as “‘core’ human resource and management prerogatives” (p. 4), advocated fostering organizational culture change by training supervisors to provide better social support for such “partially included” employees’ non-work demands (Kossek & Hammer, 2008). We question the extent to which supervisors/managers are even aware of the forms of precarity identified here that are faced by employees in their organizations, as well as the implications for the accommodations that employees may periodically need. Kirby and Buzzanell (2014) noted that “despite the influence of supervisors, Galinsky et al.’s (2008) survey of 1100 employers found that (only) 50% train supervisors in responding to employees’ work-life needs” (p. 356). Supervisor training might be aimed at making clear the pervasiveness of precarity in employees’ experience, destabilizing the expectation of stability, and re-envisioning workplaces as flexible, fitting the changing needs of employees, and part of a system of work-life. Part of such training might be recognizing organizational practices that exacerbate (such as just-in-time scheduling practices and the use of global virtual teams) or mitigate precarity (such as flexible work arrangements).
However, for such practices to become widespread, organizations must endorse the argument that organizations have a moral obligation to contribute to ensuring that employees have the ability to pursue work-life choices that maximize their opportunities to achieve a “good life” (Buzzanell & Lucas, 2013). As Blair-Loy (2010) argued, “the workplace is a potent site of moral expectations, identities, emotions, and contradictions” (p. 445) regarding enactments of organizational and family roles. Yet according to a 2005 National Study of Employers, 47% of companies surveyed reported that the main reason for implementing work-life programs is recruitment and retention – while only 19% gave altruistic or moral reasons, such as “it’s the right thing to do” (Kossek & Distelberg, 2009, pp. 14–15).
Kalleberg and Vallas (2018) argued that the most promising mechanism for ameliorating precarity in work is “the expression of voice … [and] the mobilization of workers demanding changes . . . in public policy to provide social supports to workers” (p. 21). However, willingness to voice is arguably grounded in a sense of entitlement, that is, workers feeling justified in requesting accommodation in negotiating the relationship between the individual and the organization, which in turn depends on awareness of norms, in both local and more distant contexts (Lewis & Smithson, 2001) – for example, as heard in Shelly’s account. Accordingly, a sense of entitlement and willingness to voice is likely to be classed, with white collar workers (who are, as noted earlier, disproportionately White) more likely to view organizational accommodations to personal life needs as normative. Within the middle class, however, race and ethnicity may contribute to differences in willingness to voice through perceptions of precarity of regard. As suggested by one Latina participant’s comments, navigating these choices may be especially challenging for women with more intersectionally complex identities, though a larger participant sample would be needed to make definitive claims. Accounts in the mainstream media provide evidence of some workers voicing this sense of entitlement, and of the reciprocal relationship between enactment and ecological change as workers resist returning to inflexible in-person work following widespread work-from-home practices initiated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We encourage researchers to continue to work toward reshaping public discourse around framing work-life initiatives and more specifically the amelioration of pervasive precarity as a part of corporate social responsibility. Although such discourse may not directly bring about policy change, it can open spaces for working people to support each other in their sensemaking and talk differently about the subject, which is the beginning of transformational change. Organizational communication action researchers (see Lewis & Cooper, 2005) can also play a role in raising workers’ awareness of explanations for work-life conflict that focus on structural causes, which were mostly absent from our participants’ discourse, rather than individual deficits. Action research in service sector organizations with lower paid and more racially and ethnically diverse employees has the potential to be particularly impactful.
Intertwined and Paradoxical Nature of Precarity
Domains of work-life precarity and communicative practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity.
Domains of work-life precarity, communicative practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity, and impact on organizational inclusion.
Looking at the sum total of what is present in our participants’ accounts, the most salient and potentially problematic characteristic is the paradoxical quality of precarity and planfulness. Participants talk precarity into existence (make it real) as a defense against it (so they will not be caught unprepared); and yet their planfulness creates precarity even while it defends against chaos. Participants in this study managed extraordinarily complex temporal realities on a daily basis, frequently with the assistance of information technologies like electronic calendars to micro-coordinate work and caregiving and requirements of personal life such as haircuts, dentist appointments, and grocery shopping. In addition, they scanned their longer term temporal horizons for signs of precarity, particularly with an eye to the impact of aging parents’ health on family caregiving arrangements. They engaged in a complex form of retrospective-prospective sensemaking, in which work-life choices in the near term were evaluated for their consequences in the long term, particularly risk for regret, positioning the speakers precariously between the present, the future, and the future perfect.
Weick’s model of sensemaking calls our attention to the fact that practices of resilience are not simple remedies to ruptures; rather, the remedies are subject to ongoing re-evaluation in the context of an environment that changes in response to our interactions with it. Thus, while planfulness (for example, in the form of crafting normalcy) is an antidote to enacted precarity, it also engenders additional precarity – unless planfulness takes into account the sensemaking model’s assumption of reciprocal relationship between enactment and ecological change. That is, to achieve resilience, planfulness must be able to respond to ongoing change in the environment, keeping all plans contingent.
While these highly textualized modes of engendering and managing precarity, in which technological capital and discourse invoke extended temporal horizons, are distinctively classed (and – as seen in the over representation of Whites in the middle class – raced), and can be argued to represent a form of middle class privilege, we conclude that this is a relative position. Though middle class participants have comparatively greater material resources and relatedly the ability to imagine a more expansive temporal horizon, they share some forms of precarity and communicative practices of resilience with poor and working class individuals; for example the importance of social networks and social support, as well as the health vulnerabilities that attend the universal human condition of embodiment.
Conclusion
In applying CTR in this study, we take particular note of Buzzanell’s (2017) positioning from a metatheoretical perspective: CTR “retains its basis in the interpretive approach but recognizes that structures and consequences can constrain agency in complex ways” (p. 100). However, largely absent from our participants’ accounts were structural explanations for precarity in the context of work-life interrelationships. The vast majority of the respondents’ discourse positions themselves as individually responsible for managing precarity, albeit sometimes with the support of other family members. This is consistent with what Pugh (2015) described seeing among many of her participants: “a decisive, autonomous self that fits in well with what we might call ‘insecurity culture,’ a culture of personal responsibility” (p. 4) in the context of a society in which individuals, not governments, are responsible for care-related arrangements (Drago, 2007).
The paradoxical quality of precarity and its communicative management, and the absence of structural explanations for precarious work-life interrelationships have important implications individually and in relationship to each other, as well as potential ramifications for practice in the workplace. Our findings show participants working at positioning themselves as having agency within the existing system of precarity, composed of work arrangements and policies, and exigencies of health and care giving. Clearly, from a moral standpoint, organizations should not be absolved of responsibility in helping employees to manage this precarity. At the same time, we must acknowledge the immense challenge in obtaining organizations’ acceptance of this responsibility. Organizations’ understandings of their relationship to and obligations toward the individuals they employ are embedded in social and economic structures that have been evolving for decades in a post Fordist neoliberal globalized economy, leaving the U.S. the only industrialized country with no national policies supporting paid leave or childcare (Kossek & Distelberg, 2009).
We conclude by noting that the communicative constitution of precarity could simply engender anxiety, or anger and resentment. However, through the lens of CTR, we see how individuals not only talk these threats to stability and well-being into existence, but manage them proactively and positively to achieve some measure of security and stability. At the same time, we also heed Buzzanell’s call (2010, 2017) to critically examine communicative practices of resilience by contextualizing our participants’ practices within national level public policy and organizational practices for managing work-life interrelationships that rely on a cultural logic of personal responsibility.
In addition, we readily acknowledge that our sample is relatively small, in keeping with the study’s goal of accomplishing a close analysis of the participants’ discourse; it is also by design fairly homogenous, as too much variation in too small a sample would diminish confidence in the validity of our findings. While our sample of predominantly White middle class working mothers represent an important segment of the workforce, research increasingly points toward the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, employment sector, and socioeconomic status condition individuals’ challenges in managing work-life interrelationships (e.g., Ammons et al., 2017), including their experiences of precarity, which at this point remain under-explored. Our own study points toward potential differences in experiences of work-life precarity for persons of color with respect to precarity of regard. Kalleberg and Vallas (2018) identify other sources of workplace precarity specific to racial and ethnic minorities. They are over-represented in the inherently precarious secondary labor market (encompassing service sector employment). In addition, they are vulnerable to layoffs in blue collar manufacturing driven by globalization. Also, as a result of the contraction of the public sector, they are more likely to be affected by cuts to education, local government, and transportation, which have historically been major employers of Black workers particularly, which could contribute to differential perceptions of economic precarity, even among these middle class workers.
Such investigations can help to provide voice for segments of the workforce whose voices have been largely absent from conversations on work-life and hold potential for surfacing possibilities for mitigating conflict and precarity. Ample evidence exists that “a life plan is a key source of happiness and subjective well-being and its absence is a source of mental stress” as well as being detrimental to physical health (Kalleberg & Vallas, 2018, p. 18.) Communication researchers can play an important role in representing marginalized interests and in surfacing and challenging neoliberal cultural logics of individual responsibility.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Dr. Rebecca Meisenbach and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and support in the development of this manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
