Suchergebnisse

This paper examines how and why individuals distance themselves from the prescribed professional role that – like the 'ideal worker' image – centres on long work hours. Our study of audit and law professionals demonstrated that although many people complied with the professional role, some came to distance themselves from the professional role centred on long work hours. We develop a model of role distancing as consisting of two interrelated microprocesses: apprehension, involving a cognitive and emotional shift as individuals start envisaging their professional role as provisional and potentially changeable, and role redefinition, private and/or public, where individuals modify their work practices. In the firms we studied, although both men and women redefined their roles for themselves (private role redefinition), women were more likely than men to also redefine the professional role for external audiences (public role redefinition). Together, these findings highlight the importance of apprehension and role redefinition for role distancing, offer new insights into the role of emotions and material constraints, and thus enrich theory on role distancing.

Analyses relying on two international surveys from over 100,000 men and women across 29 countries explore the relationship between maternal employment and adult daughters' and sons' employment and domestic outcomes. In the employment sphere, adult daughters, but not sons, of employed mothers are more likely to be employed and, if employed, are more likely to hold supervisory responsibility, work more hours and earn higher incomes than their peers whose mothers were not employed. In the domestic sphere, sons raised by employed mothers spend more time caring for family members and daughters spend less time on housework. Analyses provide evidence for two mechanisms: gender attitudes and social learning. Finally, findings show contextual influences at the family and societal levels: family-of-origin social class moderates effects of maternal employment and childhood exposure to female employment within society can substitute for the influence of maternal employment on daughters and reinforce its influence on sons.

AbstractThis special issue (SI) contributes to a growing body of work in management and organization studies focusing on the complex relationship between social reproduction and inequalities in paid work and organizations. In this introduction to the SI, we first identify three key areas of inquiry relevant to the study of social reproduction: challenging the boundaries of productive and reproductive labor; inequalities and exploitation; and alternative organizing. We then present the seven papers of the SI that draw on research from Australia, South America, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and the US to contribute to the aforementioned areas, foregrounding distinctive social reproduction dynamics manifesting in the household and alternative organizations (cooperatives), and facilitated by state policies. Based on these contributions, we propose an agenda for future research on social reproduction that aims to address the persistence and potential transformation of the existing gender, class, and race orders. We call for future studies exploring changing parenthood roles and how these affect the organization of re/production tasks; for research revealing and investigating underlying inequalities (re)produced by public policy; for analyses of existing and potential forms of feminist alternative organizing, and how these are sometimes hindered by heteropatriarchal structures; and for the study of social reproduction dynamics across cultural, socioeconomic, and political contexts.