Disciplined freedom, branded authenticity, and dependable independence: how tensions enact flexibility in lifestyle blogging careers

ABSTRACT

Analyzing 219 blog posts from 52 self-employed women lifestyle bloggers in North America, this study shows how these digital professionals navigate tensions and communicatively constitute work flexibility. In their narratives, women bloggers employed tension management approaches such as reframing, continual connections, and reflective practice in response to tensions in enacting temporal–spatial, identity, and financial flexibility. Specifically, women followed oxymoronic constructions – disciplined freedom, branded authenticity, and dependable independence – to embrace and transform competing poles of fluidity↔structure, authenticity↔marketability, and independence↔interconnection. Expanding work–life research to the self-employed digital labor context, this study responds to recent calls to uncover more-than tension management strategies in empirical settings and contributes to a tension-centered, contextual, and processual analysis of workplace flexibility construction.

KEYWORDS:

• Workplace flexibility
• blogging career
• tension
• more-than approach
• work–life
• women’s digital labor

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor, Dr Debbie S. Dougherty, and the three anonymous reviewers for their insights in improving this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We acknowledge that it is difficult to know how much of what the bloggers wrote are authentic reflections of their lives and how much are carefully crafted rhetorical artifacts designed to present specific online personas, which can be a limitation of the study. Nevertheless, women bloggers’ constructions of their careers (i.e. what tensions they chose to discuss and how they articulated their tension management strategies online) are the focus of the study and offer valuable insights to unpack the constitutions of flexibility in professional blogging careers.

2. Although either-or and both-and approaches were present in the data, the more-than approaches were most salient following the recurrence, repetition, and forcefulness criteria by Owen (1984). More-than tension management strategies were employed most frequently across bloggers and were emphasized as primary ways to live with tension. Literature endorsed the more-than approach as a more effective yet less frequently used way to respond to tensions, compared to the other two approaches (Putnam et al., 2016). We suspect that the more-than approaches emerged to be the most salient in our sample because the majority of our participants have been experienced in managing and living through these tensions and they are trying to offer lessons learned and useful suggestions for aspiring bloggers in their blog posts.

3. Oxymorons are figures of speech that contain seemingly contradictory elements (Oxymoron, 2017).

4. We use the word “bloggers” in the findings to refer to the women lifestyle bloggers that we sampled.

5. Although financial precariousness is an issue that bloggers discussed, it is important to note that the bloggers sampled seem to have higher socio-economic status and many of them described relying on the financial support of a husband or long-term partner when they started blogging full-time.