This paper investigates how becoming a mother—and navigating such a complicated life transition—while pursuing an academic career impacts the way female researchers perceive themselves as acting subjects. By analyzing in‐depth virtual interviews with Italian female early career researchers, this work explores the relationship between fertility decisions, motherhood hardships, self‐identity, and career‐related experiences in the interviewees' biographical trajectories. Despite their consideration of childbearing as a mental and practical obstacle to scientific production, many of the interviewees ascribe positive career outcomes to the arrival of their first child. The reflexivity set in motion by the interview process allows us to observe the collected interviews as double‐layered narratives. The postponement of fertility choices and the presence of work‐family conflict tend to be described as ordinary facets of a common career pattern, intrinsic to the female academic working experience. Meanwhile, the positive impacts of motherhood on self‐identity and work‐related skills are recounted on a more individual level, framed as a sort of paradox, a personal journey of self‐discovery or—to some extent ‐ a heroic performance.
{"title":"Becoming a mother in neoliberal academia: Subjectivation and self‐identity among early career researchers","authors":"Concetta Russo","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13120","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates how becoming a mother—and navigating such a complicated life transition—while pursuing an academic career impacts the way female researchers perceive themselves as acting subjects. By analyzing in‐depth virtual interviews with Italian female early career researchers, this work explores the relationship between fertility decisions, motherhood hardships, self‐identity, and career‐related experiences in the interviewees' biographical trajectories. Despite their consideration of childbearing as a mental and practical obstacle to scientific production, many of the interviewees ascribe positive career outcomes to the arrival of their first child. The reflexivity set in motion by the interview process allows us to observe the collected interviews as double‐layered narratives. The postponement of fertility choices and the presence of work‐family conflict tend to be described as ordinary facets of a common career pattern, intrinsic to the female academic working experience. Meanwhile, the positive impacts of motherhood on self‐identity and work‐related skills are recounted on a more individual level, framed as a sort of paradox, a personal journey of self‐discovery or—to some extent ‐ a heroic performance.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140057442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ethnographic studies are practically invasive in nature in that they intrude into people's everyday experiences. It is therefore the duty of a researcher documenting experiences of women to pay attention to these forms of violence and undertake the labor of love that seeks to re‐member women's bodies and their stories in ways that restore their dignity and contribute to healing. African feminists have encouraged us to employ research methods that are able to engage stories of trauma and survival that are not triggering, invasive and limited. Intersectional feminism offers a qualitative analytical framework that aims at identifying the interlocked layered systems of oppression that affect the marginalized in society (Yuval‐Davis (2006). Similarly, in employing fragmented narrative as a methodology, there is a realization and acknowledgment of the superficiality of linear retelling as a mode of conveying psychological damage that exposes the relationship between silence, gesture and suffering in revisiting the site of trauma.
{"title":"Labor of love: Re‐membering dismembered bodies in community research","authors":"Hlengiwe Ndlovu","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13117","url":null,"abstract":"Ethnographic studies are practically invasive in nature in that they intrude into people's everyday experiences. It is therefore the duty of a researcher documenting experiences of women to pay attention to these forms of violence and undertake the labor of love that seeks to re‐member women's bodies and their stories in ways that restore their dignity and contribute to healing. African feminists have encouraged us to employ research methods that are able to engage stories of trauma and survival that are not triggering, invasive and limited. Intersectional feminism offers a qualitative analytical framework that aims at identifying the interlocked layered systems of oppression that affect the marginalized in society (Yuval‐Davis (2006). Similarly, in employing fragmented narrative as a methodology, there is a realization and acknowledgment of the superficiality of linear retelling as a mode of conveying psychological damage that exposes the relationship between silence, gesture and suffering in revisiting the site of trauma.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140025525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Enmeshed in the materiality of caregiving, becoming a mother changes how one relates to the world and others. These changes involve how a mother as subject is defined by others through cultural and societal idealizations of motherhood and parenting norms, but also through the leaking boundaries between the mother and other subjects as she is attuned to the needs of caregiving. In this analysis, I consider maternal subjectivity in terms of working as an artist-mother, defined as an artist who is also a mother and whose practice does not distinguish between these roles. In particular, I focus on the process of my development of a creative coding project, Emergent, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this analysis of the process of developing Emergent, I attend to the questions of maternal subjectivity that arose through its production, drawing from the embodied experiences of working as an artist-mother, in order to understand maternal subjectivity through the practice of computation. Here the work of producing art becomes the means of considering maternal subjectivity differently through embodied experience, as the labor affiliated with care-giving is entangled with the process of art making.
{"title":"MotherHack: Creative coding as an artist-mother","authors":"EL Putnam","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13114","url":null,"abstract":"Enmeshed in the materiality of caregiving, becoming a mother changes how one relates to the world and others. These changes involve how a mother as subject is defined by others through cultural and societal idealizations of motherhood and parenting norms, but also through the leaking boundaries between the mother and other subjects as she is attuned to the needs of caregiving. In this analysis, I consider maternal subjectivity in terms of working as an artist-mother, defined as an artist who is also a mother and whose practice does not distinguish between these roles. In particular, I focus on the process of my development of a creative coding project, <i>Emergent</i>, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this analysis of the process of developing <i>Emergent</i>, I attend to the questions of maternal subjectivity that arose through its production, drawing from the embodied experiences of working as an artist-mother, in order to understand maternal subjectivity through the practice of computation. Here the work of producing art becomes the means of considering maternal subjectivity differently through embodied experience, as the labor affiliated with care-giving is entangled with the process of art making.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139679575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The pandemic offered a unique opportunity to shift gendered expectations and create a more equal division of domestic labor in the home. As an organizational unit, the home represents a significant domain to investigate gendered power relations and transformations. Change was especially possible for couples where employed fathers, who typically left for work, began to spend far more time at home. Surveys show that the opposite happened, and the share of domestic work done by women increased. This article explores the social dynamics that drove these trends. We draw on in-depth interviews with 20 couples (for a total of 40 parents). We leverage the variation between the accounts of each partner in a couple to explore how gender contributed to inequality in the home during the pandemic. We show that the physical and symbolic division of domestic space contributed to heightened gender inequalities during the pandemic. We divide our sample into three groups: cases where paternal income exceeds maternal income, cases where maternal income exceeds paternal income, and cases with comparable income levels for both parents. We demonstrate how the division of space, both physically and symbolically, contributes to the ongoing gender inequality experienced by all three groups. Our results expand on quantitative studies which show that gender inequality deepened during the pandemic by revealing the mechanisms and lived experinces behind the trend.
{"title":"Closed doors: Domestic space, household labor, and the reproduction of gender inequality in the pandemic lockdown","authors":"Michelle Cera, Eric Klinenberg","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13116","url":null,"abstract":"The pandemic offered a unique opportunity to shift gendered expectations and create a more equal division of domestic labor in the home. As an organizational unit, the home represents a significant domain to investigate gendered power relations and transformations. Change was especially possible for couples where employed fathers, who typically left for work, began to spend far more time at home. Surveys show that the opposite happened, and the share of domestic work done by women increased. This article explores the social dynamics that drove these trends. We draw on in-depth interviews with 20 couples (for a total of 40 parents). We leverage the variation between the accounts of each partner in a couple to explore how gender contributed to inequality in the home during the pandemic. We show that the physical and symbolic division of domestic space contributed to heightened gender inequalities during the pandemic. We divide our sample into three groups: cases where paternal income exceeds maternal income, cases where maternal income exceeds paternal income, and cases with comparable income levels for both parents. We demonstrate how the division of space, both physically and symbolically, contributes to the ongoing gender inequality experienced by all three groups. Our results expand on quantitative studies which show that gender inequality deepened during the pandemic by revealing the mechanisms and lived experinces behind the trend.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139578525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the role of humor, specifically banter, in addressing gendered organizational tensions within the UK Fire and Rescue Service during a period of modernizing change. Such tensions reflect who holds authority and who is deemed to belong, and we explore how banter is used to both contest and confirm authority associated with the formal rank system and the informal, masculinist ideal-typical worker in this context. We discuss banter's various roles as a cohering mode of humorous workplace communication, one that can reduce tension and consolidate authority and belonging, as well as its boundary setting, testing, and crossing capacities. In terms of the latter, we ask whether banter can genuinely trouble masculinist organizational norms. We conclude that specific humorous episodes that go “beyond banter” create particular ambivalence, but their impact is significantly limited by widespread discursive acceptance of banter as a central and permissible communication mode in the Service's culture.
{"title":"Banter and beyond: The role of humor in addressing gendered organizational tensions and belonging within the UK Fire and Rescue Service","authors":"Anna Brown, Ruth Woodfield","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13110","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the role of humor, specifically banter, in addressing gendered organizational tensions within the UK Fire and Rescue Service during a period of modernizing change. Such tensions reflect who holds authority and who is deemed to belong, and we explore how banter is used to both contest and confirm authority associated with the formal rank system and the informal, masculinist ideal-typical worker in this context. We discuss banter's various roles as a cohering mode of humorous workplace communication, one that can reduce tension and consolidate authority and belonging, as well as its boundary setting, testing, and crossing capacities. In terms of the latter, we ask whether banter can genuinely trouble masculinist organizational norms. We conclude that specific humorous episodes that go “beyond banter” create particular ambivalence, but their impact is significantly limited by widespread discursive acceptance of banter as a central and permissible communication mode in the Service's culture.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139462625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fiona Bloomer, Danielle Mackle, Nóirín MacNamara, Claire Pierson, Stephen Bloomer
Analysis of the experiences and resulting inequalities in reproductive health in the workplace has generated studies of pregnancy, miscarriage, menstruation, fertility and menopause. One issue that has remained outside of this literature is abortion. How abortion is talked about (or not talked about), experienced and perceived as a workplace issue were the central questions in our research undertaken in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2017. Our study comprised a survey (3180 respondents) followed by a series of online focus groups (61 participants) with trade union members from a broad range of workplaces, with the aim of investigating how abortion was positioned in workplaces within legally restrictive regimes. We conceptualize how self-disciplining, silence and abortion stigma are reproduced in workplaces, drawing on a feminist Foucauldian framework to examine disciplinary power. We examine evidence of how, in conservative societies, abortion talk is suppressed, and we generate new theoretical knowledge on how disciplinary power undermines resistance to anti-abortion norms and demonstrate the function of the normalizing gaze in the workplace. We conclude by offering avenues for future research on abortion stigma and disciplinary power, to extend further knowledge and conceptual framing of abortion as a workplace issue.
{"title":"The workplace as a site of abortion surveillance","authors":"Fiona Bloomer, Danielle Mackle, Nóirín MacNamara, Claire Pierson, Stephen Bloomer","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13100","url":null,"abstract":"Analysis of the experiences and resulting inequalities in reproductive health in the workplace has generated studies of pregnancy, miscarriage, menstruation, fertility and menopause. One issue that has remained outside of this literature is abortion. How abortion is talked about (or not talked about), experienced and perceived as a workplace issue were the central questions in our research undertaken in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2017. Our study comprised a survey (3180 respondents) followed by a series of online focus groups (61 participants) with trade union members from a broad range of workplaces, with the aim of investigating how abortion was positioned in workplaces within legally restrictive regimes. We conceptualize how self-disciplining, silence and abortion stigma are reproduced in workplaces, drawing on a feminist Foucauldian framework to examine disciplinary power. We examine evidence of how, in conservative societies, abortion talk is suppressed, and we generate new theoretical knowledge on how disciplinary power undermines resistance to anti-abortion norms and demonstrate the function of the normalizing gaze in the workplace. We conclude by offering avenues for future research on abortion stigma and disciplinary power, to extend further knowledge and conceptual framing of abortion as a workplace issue.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139055869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A robust and important body of scholarship is exploring the multiple and layered complexities of mothering and paid work. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically contribute to this work by exploring how, at the level of the self, women with children understand themselves in relation to their paid work and their mothering. We have examined this focus using a post-structural feminist lens inspired by Foucauldian ideas related to the subject and technologies of the self. This perspective has focused our attention on the informal practices in an Australian university workplace, where we locate and problematize tensions between industrial and policy provisions designed to support mothers and mother's everyday workplace experiences. Our findings arise from focus groups, in-depth interviews, and our personal narrative accounts and elucidate how despite well-established policy supports, formal and informal workplace practices shape and discipline how mothers come to understand themselves and their paid work in the academy. We find that policy provisions for families in the workplace operate to conceal and legitimate gendered workplace practices, contributing to subjectivities formed through doubt, fear, shame, anxiety, isolation, and guilt. More productively, subjectivities were also born through agency, resistance, and revision, albeit wrapped by additional labor, personal, and professional costs.
{"title":"“Subjectivities, academic work and mothering practice”: Navigating obscure and unspoken disciplines","authors":"Michelle O’Shea, Sarah Duffy, Emilee Gilbert","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13105","url":null,"abstract":"A robust and important body of scholarship is exploring the multiple and layered complexities of mothering and paid work. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically contribute to this work by exploring how, at the level of the self, women with children understand themselves in relation to their paid work and their mothering. We have examined this focus using a post-structural feminist lens inspired by Foucauldian ideas related to the subject and technologies of the self. This perspective has focused our attention on the informal practices in an Australian university workplace, where we locate and problematize tensions between industrial and policy provisions designed to support mothers and mother's everyday workplace experiences. Our findings arise from focus groups, in-depth interviews, and our personal narrative accounts and elucidate how despite well-established policy supports, formal and informal workplace practices shape and discipline how mothers come to understand themselves and their paid work in the academy. We find that policy provisions for families in the workplace operate to conceal and legitimate gendered workplace practices, contributing to subjectivities formed through doubt, fear, shame, anxiety, isolation, and guilt. More productively, subjectivities were also born through agency, resistance, and revision, albeit wrapped by additional labor, personal, and professional costs.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139035814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The workplace is a key site through which sex and gender are organizationally produced and unequal gender relations take place. Technologies, which are embedded with and impacting gendered power relations, are also integral to work and workplaces worldwide. As nation-states promote technologies and rebrand themselves, how do technologies catalyze new forms of gendered embodiment and work—and how might this contribute to a nation-state's development plans and rebranding efforts? How do the intersections between states, labor, and technologies also reify inequalities, both in and beyond workplace settings? Based on 14 months of fieldwork and interviews with 62 participants, this article analyzes how Thai transgender women's work in the entertainment industry simultaneously advances technological growth and national rebranding efforts. In 2016, the Thai state launched “Thailand 4.0,” an economic plan centered on technological growth, alongside efforts to restore its reputation from a sex tourism destination. In this context, Thai transgender entertainers promote what I call “techno-professionalism,” or professionalism that is not only enhanced by technologies, but that also supports state development plans and rebranding efforts. The concept of techno-professionalism underscores how technologies figure centrally into new iterations of state development and nation-branding promoted in global workplaces, adding to our understanding of the linkages between gender, labor, and national development. By highlighting how state development plans intersect with technologies and norms of professionalism, this article reveals how the economy and professions are made up of intimate social relations, including gendered technologies and gendered social roles.
{"title":"Transitioning Thailand: Techno-professionalism and nation-building in the transgender entertainment industry","authors":"Reya Farber","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13104","url":null,"abstract":"The workplace is a key site through which sex and gender are organizationally produced and unequal gender relations take place. Technologies, which are embedded with and impacting gendered power relations, are also integral to work and workplaces worldwide. As nation-states promote technologies and rebrand themselves, how do technologies catalyze new forms of gendered embodiment and work—and how might this contribute to a nation-state's development plans and rebranding efforts? How do the intersections between states, labor, and technologies also reify inequalities, both in and beyond workplace settings? Based on 14 months of fieldwork and interviews with 62 participants, this article analyzes how Thai transgender women's work in the entertainment industry simultaneously advances technological growth and national rebranding efforts. In 2016, the Thai state launched “Thailand 4.0,” an economic plan centered on technological growth, alongside efforts to restore its reputation from a sex tourism destination. In this context, Thai transgender entertainers promote what I call “<i>techno-professionalism</i>,” or professionalism that is not only enhanced by technologies, but that also supports state development plans and rebranding efforts. The concept of techno-professionalism underscores how technologies figure centrally into new iterations of state development and nation-branding promoted in global workplaces, adding to our understanding of the linkages between gender, labor, and national development. By highlighting how state development plans intersect with technologies and norms of professionalism, this article reveals how the economy and professions are made up of intimate social relations, including gendered technologies and gendered social roles.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139035505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo, Lorena Carrasco, Zehra Ahmed, Alice Morgan, Kim Sznajder, Leonie Eggert
Worker mothers still struggle to find a good balance between their care and work identities. Most research on motherhood at work focuses on how organizational structures can enable professional women to find a balance between caring and work identities neglecting their personal experiences and how they understand themselves in relation to both motherhood and work. We propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity tensions that professional women experience during their transition into motherhood and how they manage it. To explore this question, we conducted a qualitative study over 2 years with worker mothers in Latin and North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. The thematic and narrative analysis of 80 individual narrative interviews shows the emergence of two coexisting identity narratives. The first narrative understands motherhood as a linear process, where women experience liminality, uncertainty, and identity loss but eventually return to work after having aggregated their new worker mother identities during maternity leaves. The second coexisting narrative challenges this linear and finite view by highlighting the transition to motherhood as a continuous, liminoid, and never-ending process. The two narratives are contextualized and managed differently according to the different cultural, historical, and social contexts where they are developed; the overall results present motherhood as a ‘liminoid’ experience that requires constant identity work to navigate the tensions emerging between potentially new and customary identities and behaviors in work contexts.
{"title":"The becoming of worker mothers: The untold narratives of an identity transition","authors":"Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo, Lorena Carrasco, Zehra Ahmed, Alice Morgan, Kim Sznajder, Leonie Eggert","doi":"10.1111/gwao.13098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13098","url":null,"abstract":"Worker mothers still struggle to find a good balance between their care and work identities. Most research on motherhood at work focuses on how organizational structures can enable professional women to find a balance between caring and work identities neglecting their personal experiences and how they understand themselves in relation to both motherhood and work. We propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity tensions that professional women experience during their transition into motherhood and how they manage it. To explore this question, we conducted a qualitative study over 2 years with worker mothers in Latin and North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. The thematic and narrative analysis of 80 individual narrative interviews shows the emergence of two coexisting identity narratives. The first narrative understands motherhood as a linear process, where women experience liminality, uncertainty, and identity loss but eventually return to work after having aggregated their new worker mother identities during maternity leaves. The second coexisting narrative challenges this linear and finite view by highlighting the transition to motherhood as a continuous, liminoid, and never-ending process. The two narratives are contextualized and managed differently according to the different cultural, historical, and social contexts where they are developed; the overall results present motherhood as a ‘liminoid’ experience that requires constant identity work to navigate the tensions emerging between potentially new and customary identities and behaviors in work contexts.","PeriodicalId":501466,"journal":{"name":"Gender, Work & Organization","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138535604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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