Work-Family Conflict : Fighting the ‘Good Fight’ (特別寄稿「国際ワークショップ環太平洋圏におけるワーク・ライフバランス」 )

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The experience of work-family conflict, and attendant negative outcomes, for women who attempt to balance the often contradictory and competing identities of mother and employee is ever-present and indeed escalating. In this article, I adopt a feminist poststructural lens to focus on the discursive field of work-family interaction, which has historically been dominated by a discourse of work-family conflict, and more recently by a discourse of work-family balance or integration. I argue for a return to, and a poststructural turn upon, the discourse of ‘work-family conflict’.Rather than a focus on how to satisfy priorities of the two domains, I argue that theexperience of work-family interaction is frequently experienced as negative becauseof an escalation of the ‘occupation’ of the family domain by the encroachment ofthe work sphere. Women experience conflict because they are in a battle to defendthe importance of the family and their identities as mothers. A return to ‘conflict’,calling for a focus on the temporal, spatial and affective occupation of the family domain as a key dimension in the experience of work-family conflict, highlights the role of language in the construction of the subjectivity of working mother as defender. Work-family conflict is herein conceptualized as a state of war and thedomain of the family is the battleground.
2009-03-26