Working for the Family

By Sandy MacDonald

The research reported here concerns employers who, while drawing on a rhetoric which appears to recognise their employees as having an identity other than their narrow work roles, in practice organised their workplaces in ways which strongly conflicted with an acceptable work / life balance. This seems to draw on a different, and earlier, employer tradition of responding to employees' gendered identities.

Two elements are touched upon but remain underdeveloped in most accounts of paternalism. The first is the use of the metaphor of the family to characterise management style and employment relations. Many accounts of paternalism barely seem to notice that it is a metaphorical account: for example the Collins Dictionary of Sociology defines it as 'a system by which a(n) ... organisation deals with its ... employees by deploying an authoritarian family model of relationships, i.e. the directive but benevolent father dealing with a child' (Jary & Jary, 1991, 456). The second aspect is related, and involves the failure to pursue the insight that fathers are masculine and that families tend to treat sons and daughters in distinctive ways. These are aspects of paternalistic management that will be pursued further in the study of hotel workers.

For staff members socialised into the family of the hotel and (as with other 24 hour operations e.g. hospitals) the need for some staff cover on a 24 hour basis, the matter of long hours was intensified by the notion of family. Leaving people in the lurch when there were busy times was frowned upon because it was letting the family down. This was done at the expense of real life families, whose well being was seldom given prominence, even rhetorically. Boundaries were not so much being blurred as redrawn. Work and home were contested sites in this environment. The evocation of a family metaphor as part of a wider set of paternalistic management practices thus appears simultaneously to recognise, and draw on, employees as part of a wider set of social relations while at the same time continuing to deny the legitimacy of commitment to anything other than one's waged work.

Gender, Work and Organisation: 4th Interdisciplinary Conference (Work/Life Balance Stream)

June 22-24th 2005, Keele