Synergistic or Siloed? Communicative practices in dual-earner parents' boundary navigation and implications for gendered work-family experiences

Abstract

It is well established that in contemporary Western society, work and family (WF) are often navigated by both members of a parenting couple. However, existing understandings regarding the communicative processes by which both parents navigate, and relationally co-construct WF boundaries together, remain somewhat of a theoretical blind spot. This study provides insights into the relational communicative practices that coupled, heterosexual parents engage in when navigating WF boundaries. Our couple-level data collected during the UK Covid-19 lockdown period, in which both parents simultaneously experienced boundary disruption, explore the communicative practices or ‘tactics’ engaged in to relationally navigate boundaries in this context. Utilising a novel multi-method, qualitative approach constituting in-depth interviews and daily diaries, we extend the concept of communicative tactics put forward by Kreiner et al.. Specifically, our findings uncover new relational patterns of communicative tactics utilised for WF boundary navigation, which we term ‘synergistic’ and ‘siloed’ communicative modes. We demonstrate how the tactics of ‘expectation setting’ and ‘confronting violators’, alongside the novel communicative tactic we term ‘re-setting expectations’, can be enacted in very different ways depending upon the overarching communicative mode, thereby constituting distinct relational communicative approaches. We further demonstrate the role of (gendered) power dynamics on communicative practices revealing how such dynamics can impact upon prevailing gender (in)equality between parents. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for both future research and practice.