Struggling to Manage Work as a Part of Everyday Life: Complicating Control, Rethinking Resistance, and Contextualizing Work/Life Studies

Abstract

In this paper, I suggest that we might further contextualize our understanding of how work and life are navigated by approaching it as a struggle through which control and resistance are accomplished as various meanings of work are negotiated. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected at a Swedish organization, I argue that a normative cultural expectation for lagom (moderation) functions both to control members and to enable them to resist managerial control. These findings suggest that by approaching control as potentially fragmented, resistance as unobtrusive, and work/life issues as situated, scholarship can illuminate how societies and organizations might equip individuals to successfully navigate work and life.

Keywords:

• Work/life
• Control
• Resistance
• Power
• Culture

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the Swedish Institute for the grant that funded the fieldwork in Sweden and to Mats Alvesson, Dan Kärreman and the group at Lund University for their collegial hospitality. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2009 International Communication Association. The author would like to thank Tim Kuhn, Dennis Mumby, Sarah Tracy, Rebecca Meisenbach, Kathy Miller and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback at various stages of the process.

Notes

1. Interviewing, the dominant methodology in communication-based work/life studies, is particularly helpful for understanding individual sense making around work and life but is limited in its ability to situate those experiences within organizational and societal contexts (especially when the individuals are from various organizations). Organizationally focused studies have used ethnography and interviewing. Studies considering the larger societal context have primarily used critical and rhetorical methods to interrogate texts, limiting claims about connections between macro-discourses and the lived experiences of people managing work and life. A notable exception is Kuhn's (2006) work, which drew upon interviews with members of two organizations to document intersections of various micro- and macro-discourses.

2. This is a pseudonym, as are all of the names of the individuals mentioned.

3. After some study, my Swedish abilities were still at the beginner level at the start of my fieldwork. However, my understanding of Swedish increased substantially during my fieldwork.

4. I often asked the participants to “Tell me what just happened” because they assumed I had not understood. As I began to understand the language, members were still unsure of my language abilities and thus were generally quite willing to report their interpretations about goings-on.

5. I encouraged participants to let me know if there was a word in Swedish that did not directly translate to English so that we could discuss its meaning.

6. By “embedded,” I do not mean to imply that unobtrusive resistance is necessarily hidden (Murphy, 1998; Scott, 1990). Hidden transcripts specifically refer to the ways that organizational members collude backstage to subvert authority, while performing appropriately in front-stage contexts. At SRI, unobtrusive resistance operated also in public, front-stage contexts as members pressured each other to enact the company view.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stacey M. B. Wieland

Stacey M. B. Wieland (PhD, University of Colorado, Boulder) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Villanova University. This paper emerges from the author's doctoral dissertation, which was completed under the direction of Dr. Tim Kuhn, and was awarded the 2008 W. Charles Redding Dissertation Award from the Organizational Communication division of the International Communication Association