Managerial discourses of work and eldercare: (re)producing, resisting, and negotiating boundaries between private and public

Abstract

Organizations are sites of intense discursive battles between dominant discourses that reinforce existing structures and processes and emerging discourses striving for change to the status quo. This tension is particularly evident in the everyday organizational discourses about the relationship between the public and the private. Individuals balancing work and family demands, for instance, potentially engage in multiple discourses. The foundations for some of these discourses are normative and reflect the dominant views and at other times focus on change through critical and emancipatory constructions. Using a discourse analytic approach, this paper explores some of the ways in which the discourse of managers produces, re‐produces and resists traditional public/private dichotomies. More specifically, this paper considers four aspects of interview texts: (1) the discursive constructions of managerial talk that draw upon traditional, normative discourses about the separation of the public and private; (2) the discursive strategies managers use when offering advice to employees about balancing work and eldercare; (3) the discursive constructions of managers whose advice espouses organizational prescriptions for balancing work and eldercare but whose experiences reflect a more complex experience that simultaneously resists organizational prescriptions and sustains traditional understandings; and (4) discourses that resist the dominant discourses: surfacing plurivocalities in managerial discourse. Finally, the paper considers the role that managerial discourse may play in employee utilization of work–family policies.