“If Something Were to Happen”: Communicative Practices of Resilience in the Management of Work-Life Precarity

Abstract

A substantial body of literature considers the experience of precarious work in market economies. Only recently, however, have scholars of work begun to consider the impact of precarity in the workplace on work-life interrelationships. This study contributes to that research and expands its focus beyond the form of precarity represented by job insecurity to other forms of precarity that inhere in the management of work-life interrelationships for working families in industrialized nations. Taking a communication as constitutive of work-life interrelationships perspective, we identify four forms of precarity in middle class working mothers’ accounts of work-life, and then examine how these forms are communicatively managed through classed and gendered discursive and material/technological practices of resilience. Using Weick’s organizational sensemaking model, in particular his notion of “partial inclusion,” we discuss the implications that individuals’ practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity have for the individual-organization relationship among middle class working mothers.