Paaige K. Turner

Unbounded Motherhood: Embodying a Good Working Mother Identity

Organizational values demand that working mothers separate the maternal from the professional. Due to the nature of maternity leave in the United States, however, working mothers who are breastfeeding have little choice but to bring motherhood into the workplace. In investigating the ways women navigate this situation, we found that to maintain their reputations as good workers participants practiced bounded motherhood at work, constraining breastfeeding practices to preserve norms of professionalism. However, participants sometimes practiced unbounded motherhood wherein their inter/actions disrupted organizational orders by merging motherhood and work in material ways. This embodiment of a good working mother identity expands the repertoire or action for working mothers and contributes to a re-meaning of the relationship between work and motherhood. This study demonstrates one means for making breastfeeding while working more feasible as well as to how workers’ bodies can be sites of resistance and reinforcement of gendered symbolic orders in organizations.

A Meaning-Centered Approach to Customer Satisfaction

We propose a meaning-centered approach to understanding customer/patient satisfaction grounded in the hermeneutical tradition and informed by concepts highlighted in Herzberg’s two-factor motivation and hygiene theory. Current research in customer satisfaction conceptualizes satisfaction as a stable, singular construct driven by expectations and relies predominately on quantitative assessments. We argue that conceptualizing customer satisfaction as the relation of meanings experienced by customers and incorporating qualitative forms of assessment contribute additional insights into customers’ lived experiences of customer/patient satisfaction. Specifically, based on observations of and interviews with patients at a medical facility, we argue that customers are simultaneously satisfied and dissatisfied and, moreover, the relation of satisfaction and dissatisfaction forms a system of meaning upon which they draw when making behavioral decisions. Finally, we articulate how taking a meaning-centered approach to customer satisfaction can enhance both theorists’ and managers’ ability to understand what it means to create satisfaction.

‘I had the luxury . . .’: Organizational breastfeeding support as privatized privilege

To make the combination of breastfeeding and work feasible, women who return to work full time in the USA need some measure of organizational breastfeeding support. Yet, many organizations do not have lactation policies in place, co-worker and supervisor communication can be discouraging, and predominant cultural Discourses in the US position breastfeeding at odds with organizational values, often requiring women to define and negotiate support themselves. Drawing upon Structuration Theory, we analyzed interviews conducted with US women who breastfed and worked to illuminate the meanings they held for breastfeeding and organizational breastfeeding support and how those meanings challenge and reproduce social systems that make breastfeeding and working a potentially difficult combination. We argue that their construction of breastfeeding support as a privatized privilege re/produces cultural Discourses that marginalize women’s bodies in organizations. In order to engender support for all bodies that challenge the borders between public/private, feminine/masculine and personal/professional, meanings must be changed at both macro and micro levels of communication.

Body of Research Impetus, Instrument, and Impediment

The ways our physicality matters as we move through the world in our own bodies of research is often veiled in the body of qualitative research. In this article, we lift the veil, striving to flesh out the body of research on reflexivity by examining how our own researcher bodies have figured into our work. Specifically, we narrate and reflect on ways we have experienced our bodies as (presumed) impetus for, instrument of, and impediment to qualitative research concerning birthing, breastfeeding, and transgender identities. We explore how our insider/outsider bodies made for particularized yet parallel experiences, which together illustrate the complexity of the relationships between researcher, participant, and the creation of knowledge. From this, we suggest that qualitative researchers examine how their bodies/selves might muddy traditional research roles and rules. Finally, we propose Mixed bodies triangulation, as a way to bring together different ways of knowing in embodied, reflexive research.

Is childbirth with midwives-natural? the gaze of the feminine and the pull of the masculine

Joining the ongoing dialogue regarding the need for reflexivity in qualitative research, this tale of the author’s “natural” childbirth and subsequent research into the field of midwifery explores the tension between postmodern and modern aspects of her Self. The former accepts a lived experience of fragmented, separate selves and partial truth, whereas the latter wants an integrated, whole Self and absolute truth. Using introspection, this tension is understood in terms of two different forms of cultural patterning, the female gaze and the masculine pull. Moreover, the author believes that the term natural serves as a self-contained opposite that allows mothers and researchers to bridge these two cultural patterns.

The Breast Is (Always) for Sex: Breastfeeding Discourse in Response to May 21, 2012 TIME Magazine Cover

Controversial media representations of the female body can reflect, reproduce, and even challenge ideological systems or Discourses (Jones, 2003; Louw, 2001). This article interrogates the discourse surrounding TIME Magazines recent cover regarding attachment parenting, which featured a mother breastfeeding her toddler. The analysis of 1 online comment board shows that, although multiple meanings were present, the talk regarding the cover was overwhelmingly informed by the Discourse of (Hetero)Sexuality, which defines breastfeeding as a sexualized act only appropriate in private and for children of a certain age. This backdrop of sexuality for breastfeeding is significant not only for mothers’ choices and practices regarding nursing, but also for policymakers who seek to support breastfeeding. In addition, the findings reinforce the importance of attending to the interrelations within and between macro- and microlevels of discourse in investigating symbolic systems through which meanings are constructed.

A Woman With a Plan: Recognizing Competencies for Ascent to Administration in Higher Education

Despite progress, women are still disproportionally underrepresented in leadership positions in higher education. Women must contend with a glass ceiling, which we argue is constituted by discourses of impossibility and femininity. These discourses discourage women from recognizing their qualifications, continuing to develop skills, and making a plan that would position them to obtain leadership positions in colleges and universities. Although the problem has been articulated before, little practical information is offered to help women navigate it. To rectify this, we identify and outline competencies needed for advancement in higher education and suggest strategies for recognizing, tracking, and developing relevant skills. Aspiring women leaders need an understanding of the problems that keep them from advancing, an awareness of the competencies needed for administration, practical tactics for acquiring such proficiencies, and a sense that their goals are attainable. In sum, they need a plan

You Are Doing It Wrong Voicing Child/Research Birthing Choices

I, as have many other qualitative researchers, diligently report my demographics at the time I conduct and write my research in an effort to acknowledge that the researcher’s voice is part of the meanings he/she creates. While doing so acknowledges key elements of my positionality or research self, it invokes a modernist conceptualization of voice as stable and time as linear while simultaneously reifying social constructs of the body. In this article, I take up the question, “How can voice be partial while still contextually situated?” I present an introspective tale of the way my shifting self/body wrote my experiences of others’ births. Through the incorporation of flashbacks and flash forwards I offer an articulation of the folding nature of time as well as an exemplar of how the recognition of one’s own bodily experiences can engage the meanings present and absent as one works the limits of voice.

How George Bush Silenced Anita Hill: A Derridian View of the Third Persona in Public Argument

Drawing upon Derrida ‘s concept of differance, this article presences the evocation of specific third persona as an act of public argumentation by President Bush during the 1991 Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation proceedings allowing him to silence and negate Anita Hill and her supporters while avoiding any explicitly negative claims.