Broadening Work-Family Conflict Scholarship: Gig Workers' Sensemaking of Context-Grounded Pressures

Abstract

Not all workers, navigating varying institutional contexts, experience work-family interface similar to a typical Western employee examined in the extant literature. In this qualitative study, drawing on institutional logics and sensemaking perspectives, we theorize the impact of institutional context on 64 App-based taxi drivers’ (ABTDs) work-family conflict (WFC) in a non-Western unconventional context. We contribute to work-family theory and practice by developing a process model that (a) identifies work and family pressures grounded in institutional context in which our participants navigated their work and family; (b) demonstrates how ABTDs make sense of context-grounded work and family pressures by interpreting them as first-order WFC and enacting them through the implementation of alleviating strategies at work or family; (c) conceptualizes first-order WFC defined as an incompatibility experienced when context-grounded pressures from one domain (e.g., work) constrain participation in the other domain (e.g., family), and (d) extends WFC to reflect how macro-level context can be manifested in workers’ WFC experiences.