Stop ‘helping’ me! Identity, recognition and agency in the nexus of work and care

Abstract

This article explores what it is like to be a ‘working carer’—that increasingly common category of employee who combines paid work with unpaid care.1 We draw on phenomenology for our initial motivation, epistemological assumptions and method of data analysis, and on critical sensemaking as a template for interpretation and theorization. In line with critical sensemaking, we see identity as a central feature of personhood, and we examine our participants’ identity work through the specific refractions of plausibility, context and agency. These highlight the inconsistencies and oscillations of identity work, and the ways in which it is influenced by competing discourses of the right kind of employee and the right kind of woman. We foreground the existential aspects of sensemaking, as participants struggle to come to terms with the impact of care on their own life-projects and search for meaning. This reflects our belief that experiential approaches to work-related issues have a vital part to play in a ‘turn to meaning’ in critical organizational research. Key implications for practitioners and campaigners are discussed, and policy makers urged to address the issue of working carer identification, recognition and support with greater sensitivity to the label’s psychological and existential implications.

The Function of Fear in Institutional Maintenance: Feeling frightened as an essential ingredient in haute cuisine

“…Scholars have also noted that institutional theory has failed to understand people and their passions as it has "become disconnected from its phenomenological roots" (Creed et al, 2014, p. 275;Hallett & Ventresca, 2006) and call for more phenomenological studies (Voronov & Weber, 2015). Although phenomenological studies remain relatively infrequent in organization studies, the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach has begun to demonstrate its potential to provide new insights into emotions within organizations (e.g., Gill, 2015a;Tomkins & Eatough, 2014). As with all methodologies, IPA possess certain limitations.…”

Pushing the Boundaries of Amnesia and Myopia: A Critical Review of the Literature on Identity in Management and Organization Studies

“…We are not in any way suggesting that all MOS literature tends to treat identity in this way, taking it as a given, for there are numerous exceptions to this charge (Casey ; Collinson ; Czarniawska ; Ekman ; Knights and Willmott /; Pullen and Rhodes ; Roberts ), among others. There are also many who do not necessarily challenge the preoccupation with identity, or critically examine its conditions and consequences, but do at least focus upon social and collective, rather than just individualistic, identity work (Mangan ; McCabe , ; Tomkins and Eatough ). That said, in the literature as well as in practice, while identity is often associated with social well‐being, this does not necessarily preclude it from being a resource for elevating the self over ‘other’, for all sorts of collective projects, even those reflecting charitable aims, can be a vehicle for rendering the self stable, secure and socially valued (O'Toole and Grey a, b; Weller ).…”

Moral Emotions and Ethics in Organisations: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…The concept of care (Fürsorge in German) plays a central part in sociology, including Heidegger's philosophy (Tomkins and Eatough 2014), and lies at the heart of Gilligan's (1982) pioneering work that established 'ethics of care' as a distinct field of both moral philosophy and moral psychology. In contrast to 'ethics of justice', ethics of care theorists argue for a different system of morality, one that does not rely on claims of universality, absolute judgments of right and wrong, and perfect virtues.…”