Caroline Gatrell

Maternal body work: How women managers and professionals negotiate pregnancy and new motherhood at work

This article builds on the theorizing of body work through introducing a new concept: ‘maternal body work’. In so doing, it shows how progress towards a feminist politics of motherhood within organizations remains limited. Despite decades of feminist scholarship, dissonances remain between the private worlds of reproduction and public worlds of organization. With regard to this limited progress, the article reveals how, among a sample of 27 mothers (all professionally and managerially employed in the UK), 22 felt marginalized and undervalued at work, experiencing the borders between maternity and organization as unmalleable. By contrast, five women treated borders between reproduction and organization as more fluid than anticipated. Setting a high value on their skills, they developed strategies for parrying unfavourable revisions of their status. The article concludes by considering the potential development of resources for enhancing maternal coping strategies.

A fractional commitment? Part-time work and the maternal body

This paper builds on the existing literature on work–life balance (WLB), professional employment and motherhood. It explains why career mothers who work fractionally (as a percentage of a whole tim...

Whose child is it anyway? The negotiation of paternal entitlements within marriage

Based on qualitative research, this paper suggests that among some married/co-habiting couples, where mothers are professionally employed and there are pre-school children, fathers seek to enhance their paternal role. This contrasts with previous research, which indicates that married/co-habiting men leave to mothers the responsibility for nurturing both maternal and paternal relationships with children. Using the notions of situational and debilitative power, it is shown how married/co-habiting fathers developed strategies for augmenting paternal rights. While fathers’ involvement with children was perceived as beneficial by some mothers, others regarded it as a threat to maternal status. The paper suggests that power relations between married/co-habiting parents in the sample are similar to power struggles between couples who are separated or divorced. The possibility is raised that paternal strategies to diminish the maternal sphere of influence among both married/co-habiting and divorced fathers may be symptomatic of wider male fears about the erosion of male hegemony. It is observed that the schemes employed by fathers in the sample to enhance the paternal role are similar to the approach advocated in policy statements of fathers’ rights activists.

Managing the Maternal Body: A Comprehensive Review and Transdisciplinary Analysis

This paper comprehensively reviews transdisciplinary and critical perspectives on the employed maternal (pregnant and post-birth) body in the context of management studies. It highlights the disparities between equal opportunities policies and everyday management practices in relation to pregnancy and new motherhood. In so doing, the review examines the contradictions between equal opportunities policies aimed at protecting pregnant and newly maternal employees and the discouraging treatment that such women receive in practice at work. In analysing the disparity between policy and practice, the review identifies gaps within the field of research on the employed maternal body. It then shows how perceptions about the pregnant and newly maternal body are based more on myth than on evidence. In keeping with policies encouraging family friendly working practices and aimed at enhancing parental health, the paper argues that research on the maternal body is integral to management studies.

Well balanced Families: A gendered analysis of work-life balance policies and work-family practices

Purpose – The paper considers the impact of work‐life balance policies on the work and family practices of professional, dual‐earner parents with dependent children, by assessing the extent to which “well‐balanced families” have been resultantly facilitated. It poses two research questions: the first centres on how far work‐life balance policies have better enabled working parents to manage their commitments to employers and children, whilst the second focuses on how far parental and employer responses to work‐life balance policies may be gendered. The ultimate aim is to (re)‐articulate the importance of gender in the work‐life balance agenda.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws upon historical and conceptual research on work and family practices. It invokes gender as a lens through which notions of the “well‐balanced family” are considered.Findings – It is argued that work‐life balance policies have not led to well‐balanced, or “gender‐neutral”, work and family practices. This is for two reasons...

Work–Life Balance and Parenthood: A Comparative Review of Definitions, Equity and Enrichment

This review investigates the problems of definition and inequity with which the literature on parenthood and work–life balance is beset. It analyses research trajectories first within the established disciplines of organizational psychology and the sociologies of work and family practices, and then within the newer field of management studies. Gender, class and difference are singled out as troubling themes, especially in relation to fathers and impoverished parents. A tendency towards mono-disciplinarity is observed within organizational psychology and sociologies of work and family practices. The review offers explanations for the historic but narrow definition within organizational psychology and sociologies of work and family practices of work–life balance as affecting mainly heterosexual dual-career parent couples. The authors show how this narrow definition has led to inequities within research. They further identify as limiting the definition of work–life balance to be always ‘problematic’, rather than enriching, among employed parents. Consequently, a three-factor framework is recommended, through which future studies may address the problems of definition and equity in work–life balance literature, including: a broader definition of work–life balance to include marginalized parents; the defining of parenting and employment as potentially life-enriching; and a commendation of the transdisciplinary approach within management studies as poised to move debate forward.

Interviewing Fathers: Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork

This paper explores the dilemmas encountered carrying out empirical research using a feminist methodological approach. Specifically, I recount my experiences while undertaking qualitative research, in which I explored the experiences of employed mothers in the UK. At the beginning of my study, I adopted a feminist ‘position’. This paper explains how an initial decision to exclude men from the research sample proved more complex than anticipated, and was eventually reversed. The issue of equality between the researcher and participants is discussed and the question of whether the approach of the researcher should change, depending on the gender of the respondents, is considered. It is suggested that the experience of doing fieldwork may be different from the outcomes anticipated from the literature. In this case, the behaviour of male interviewees during the interview was very similar to that of female interviewees. Men were just as co-operative and articulate as women. This was not predicted on the basis of some of the existing literature on woman-to-man interviews. It is suggested that the application of epistemology in the field, especially in relation to woman-to-man interviewing, is complex, but that cross gender interviewing may be beneficial in terms of research outcomes.

Fatherhood and Flexible Working: A Contradiction in Terms?

This chapter derives from a desire to investigate the issues of modern fatherhood in the context of flexible working practices and gender; offering a broad-scale analysis as to the extent to which predominantly Western, employed, white-collar, middle-class fathers are embracing flexibility and under what familial and workplace circumstances. In so doing, we highlight the tensions and correlations between traditional notions of fathers as economic providers who go “out” to work and the emergence of late modern ideas concerning the dynamism between fatherhood and more flexible modes of working. Our focus on the work-life situation of fathers in senior roles is both timely and relevant to the growing body of research on work-life balance and male working patterns, which identifies white-collar fathers as under-researched and insufficiently catered for within policy.

Parents, Perceptions and Belonging: Exploring Flexible Working Among UK Fathers and Mothers

This paper advances knowledge regarding how fathers and mothers perceive and experience flexible working opportunities. It does this through applying the theoretical concept ‘belonging’ to ‘Parsonian’ classifications of parenting and work. In so doing it makes transparent the misconceptions and inequities which exist among parents and their organizational environments. Focusing initially on a qualitative study of fathers’ experience of working flexibly, the paper shows how fathers felt marginalized from the possibilities of flexible work due to line managers’ assumptions that men belonged to an ‘instrumental’ economic provider group. The paper contributes a new angle to debate by articulating how fathers perceived employed mothers as belonging to an ‘expressive’ child-oriented group, with privileged access to flexibility. However, drawing upon a study of maternity and flexible work we query fathers’ assumptions that flexibility was easily available to mothers, suggesting that fathers’ perceptions of maternal privilege were misconceived. While mothers were categorized as belonging within an ‘expressive’ group associated with childcare, they were nevertheless discouraged from accessing flexibility. Inequities between women and men (with regard to flexibility) thus appeared to be less significant than fathers supposed.

The price of love: the prioritisation of childcare and income earning among UK fathers

Shifting perspectives on how fathers ‘should’ practice childcare responsibilities, combined with changing household income patterns, indicate that balancing childcare and breadwinning is complicated for contemporary fathers. Drawing on qualitative discussions with 100 employed fathers in the United Kingdom (UK) and using notions of breadwinner (income-earning) and involved (hands-on) fathering as an analytical framework, this study examines how employed, married/cohabiting and lone UK fathers interpret paternity. It finds that breadwinning remains important for many fathers. However, there is a tendency among some men to prioritise childcare over paid work. The study therefore discerns patterns of continuity and change among contemporary fathers in their practices of childcaring and income earning. The study concludes that further research is needed, especially concerning lone fathers with resident children, who may be more involved with childcaring than is presently acknowledged.