Colonizing Family: A Feminist Critique of Family Management Texts

Abstract

There is a long tradition of applying managerial techniques and principles to more efficiently manage domestic and familial responsibilities. We argue that such appropriations of corporate practices, language, and thinking not only obscure distinctions between home and work but also integrate work values, patterns, and perspectives into everyday constructions of family life so thoroughly as to bring into question what a family is and what values, practices, and relationships make family life different from the corporate world. Using a feminist poststructuralist perspective, we analyze three texts illustrating the insinuation of managerialism into popular family management prescriptions. We conclude by critically examining four discursive strategies in these texts: (a) moral dichotomies; (b) managerial metaphors; (c) coopted concepts; and (d) emphasis on individualized choice. Our critique highlights the ironies that open these strategies to contestation and alternatives.

Acknowledgments

Paper presented to the International Communication Association conference held in New York City in May 2005. We wish to express our gratitude to our editor, Caryn Medved, for encouraging us to push our analysis further and to our reviewers for their detailed, thought-provoking, constructive, and challenging feedback on our original version.

Notes

¹Lifeworld refers to the structures and activities comprising our predominantly unreflective life-as-lived including cultural, personal, private, and intimate relations. The term is derived from the phenomenological concept of Lebenswelt used by Husserl to refer to the world of the natural attitude. Our argument draws on discussions of this term in critical management studies, particularly the Habermasian analyses of Deetz (1992) and Alvesson and Wilmott (1996), who critique the expansive encroachment of rational-economic relations of meaning and power into lifeworld relations and responsibilities, for example, the commercialization of childcare.