Labour and birth stories : a feminist poststructural reading of the discourse of work-family interaction

Abstract

A hermeneutic analysis of work-family interaction is undertaken from a feminist poststructural perspective to destabilize the definitions of 'work', 'family', and 'work-family' in organizational discourse. This hermeneutic inquiry begins by confronting mainstream human resource management literature with the lived experience of women and men to demonstrate that over forty years of empirical research has failed to adequately address the issues. A detailed review and subsequent critical analysis of the human resource management literature reveals a conceptually limited discourse that serves to obfuscate real social structures to the disadvantage of women. A citation analysis identifies seminal articles from which this literature draws its theoretical foundations, which then leads to analysis of the social, political and historical context within which this discourse emerged. This hermeneutic inquiry concludes by arguing the human resource management discourse emerged from and retains the repressive assumptions of the Cold War era and that no meaningful advances can occur in this field until the current discourse is dismantled.