Have you ever been at a conference, surrounded by really bright folks, when all of a sudden you got that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach because you knew that someone was going to mention "ethnographic" studies as the latest thing in work/family research, and you were clueless? Maybe not, but I have been there. There is a wonderful solution, a new book called "Weaving Work & Motherhood," by Anita Ilta Garey ($16 in softcover from amazon.com).
Garey interviewed 37 employed moms in a hospital in California to find out how they wove work and family. I still haven't figured out how to describe the difference between this sort of work (which is anthropological), and traditional qualitative sociology, but there is a difference.
Basically, Garey cuts the interviews in several ways: voluntary vs. involuntary part-time, night vs. day shift work, and sequencing working time arrangements over the life course. It is not the way any economist I know would've cut the data, but it works, and the respondents tell their stories in ways that make much sense. Moreover, the interviews are dropped in as they build the story, which means that some folks show up more than once, like life itself.
This is very rich stuff, and I hope to get a chance to read the book again because Garey provides the ideas that us numbers types should be looking at to generate hypotheses. I won't pretend to provide much of what is there now, but for an example, Garey argues that her subjects very much want to be, and be viewed as, both mothers and employees. As mothers who cannot be there 24-7 (not that anyone can), they employ the psychological pivots of "being there" when needed, organizing and creating "family time," and "doing things." She finds that her subjects divide their claims to being a "good mother" into these rationals.
My favorite part was probably how her subjects respond to the notion of "career," upon which Garey builds a wonderful discussion of class and gender.
The conclusion is about the need to define the problems of being employed and a parent as social and political. I might quibble with the treatment of non-parents a bit, but not much because Garey covers the issue well in the chapter on the life course.
So, if you don't want to be "caught out" in complete ignorance of what is going on in terms of "ethnographic" studies, here is your chance to solve the problem.
A great book, and highly recommended!
Reviewer: Bob Drago, Pennsylvania State University
Originally posted October 28, 1999, to the "Work, Children, and Family" newsgroup maintained at PSU
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