This report reviews project activities from September 1998 through July 2001 and it summarizes the major project findings. The discussion of project activities is organized into three sections.  First, we review the activities of project development, participant recruitment, fieldwork and data management/analysis.  Second, we summarize the characteristics of each of the participating family and the fieldwork conducted with family members.  Third, we review the status of our efforts to disseminate information about the project.  These efforts include participation in conferences and workshops, reports and publications, and media coverage.  We adopt an inclusive approach to dissemination including information about the status of our earlier and ongoing research on the Silicon Valley region. 

The discussion of project findings recapitulates the team’s initial assumptions and questions and then describes the impact of fieldwork on them.  The project began with a provisional set of assumptions and questions that were grounded in both the scholarly literatures on work and families, and in the team’s previous research in the “Silicon Valley” region of northern California.  They were provisional in the sense that ethnographers must make some assumptions in order to initiative fieldwork, but those very assumptions become the object of revision as they are challenged by the realities of fieldwork.  Accordingly, modifications to how we think about a subject is itself an important product of ethnography, and so we present the revised conceptual framework that ultimately guided fieldwork.  The project’s major substantive findings are then summarized, as is our assessment of the project’s significance.  Finally, we comment on our future plans, including preparing a book manuscript, and their connections to this project. 

2. Project Activities

Development:  Project development centered on the challenges of conducting fieldwork with dual career middle class families, the complexity of whose lives render observation difficult.  Ultimately, fieldwork was divided into three phases that were in practice adapted to the circumstances of each family.  First, the fieldworker accompanied the individual family members during their days, often remaining with them for 10-12 hours at a time.  This first and most intense phase of fieldwork typically lasted 2-4 months, depending on the number of families under study and the schedules of the members.  The second phase focused on more collective “family” activities.  Finally, we remained in touch with family members for another four to eight months, asking about changes in the family and the work routines of its members, and visiting to capture important activities or events. 

Recruiting the Families:  Because we planned to study only twelve families, their selection was a critical issue.  Statistical sampling is both impossible and inappropriate in a project such as this, and so the theoretical bases of sampling must be explicit and justified.  A major goal was to maximize the variability within the sample along several dimensions.  Income provides a relatively poor criterion for middle class status in a region where the median house price hovers at about $500,000. Still, the team sought several families that articulated middle class values about lifestyle and education, but who were struggling financially to realize their aspirations.  A second dimension is loosely defined as ethnicity or ancestry.  Third, the team recruited families that provide a sample of workers from the public and private sectors, as well as from different industries. 

Fieldwork:  The project took the form of classic anthropological participant-observation.  Sometimes participation dominated, as a fieldworker joined a family at a party, Easter egg hunt, or holiday dinner. At other times, especially while a family member was at work or school, observation dominated.  The interplay of participation and observation was extremely fine grained.  For example, laws and occupational, professional or organizational policies and practices sometimes constrained fieldwork, as when English-Lueck shadowed a pair of attorneys or Darrah a fireman. In the former, English-Lueck could not be present during client meetings, nor could she have access to client materials.  In the latter, Darrah was always instructed where to stand and what to say to observers who did not understand his role.  In neither case, were Darrah and English-Lueck invited to participate in the work of litigation or fire fighting.  Yet the balance could suddenly shift from observation to participation.  Darrah, for example, shadowed someone at a corporate board meeting and was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement and admonished to remain silent, but within thirty minutes board members solicited his opinions about the organization of the company.   Thus, participant-observation often had a roller coaster quality of oscillations between involvement and detachment, coolness and intimacy, and informality and formality. 

3. Project Assumptions, Categories and Questions

This project began with a set of assumptions and questions about dual career middle class families that were based on a review of the literature and our own previous research in the Silicon Valley region (Work, Identity and Community in Silicon Valley).  This conceptual starting point was presented in the grant proposal and it is worth revisiting at this time. Specifically, we assumed: 
 

1. Although work can be characterized by some significant general trends, it is specific characteristics of work, jobs and careers that affect individual families.  Accordingly, these specific characteristics must be incorporated into analyses of the work-family intersection.

2. Just as the specific characteristics of work matter, so do the specifics of family life.  The specific and idiosyncratic needs, interests and schedules of children, other family members, and friends profoundly affects work and careers.

3. How work affects family and home life is difficult to measure. Number of hours worked is useful only as proxy for those effects.

4. Despite the relative emphasis in the scholarly literature and mass media (and by our interviewees) on the impact of work upon family, much from family and community life is imported into the workplace, too.

5. Families differ in how they manage the often-conflicting demands of family and work life, but all interviewees (who had local families) reported that such management takes a significant amount of time and effort.

6. The effects on children of family-work management strategies are often unexamined or they are reduced to gross indicators such as providing “quality time.”  The more subtle effects of allowing the household to be penetrated by demands for  “accessibility” or the incorporation into childhood of work-based rhythms, metaphors, and models are seldom noted by our interviewees, but they could be inferred from their stories about work and family.

This set of propositions itself reflects our own deeper assumptions about work and family, and how their intersection can best be studied. Specifically, it presupposes that work and family constitute clear and distinct cultural domains that are separable from each other, as well as other cultural domains. 

This initial framing of the intersection of work and family provided a useful heuristic for initiating fieldwork with the specific families.  However, ethnographic fieldwork typically involves much more than simply finding confirming or disconfirming evidence for a set of hypotheses.  Instead, a goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the research questions by a process of engagement with people in the field.  In the present project, this process took the form of exploring how family members defined and used the familiar categories of work and family in their own lives.  What each fieldworker encountered was a rich and complex reality that, not surprisingly, challenged initial assumptions and allowed the team to refine its assumptions and questions. 

4. Fieldwork and the Analytical Framework
 

After developing our initial conceptual framework we began fieldwork. The process of fieldwork affected the two ultimate outcomes of the project.  First, it challenged our original assumptions, categories and questions.  This is typical with ethnographic fieldwork: developing ways to reframe the research questions in order to produce new insights is a fundamental reason for using the methodology.  Accordingly, the team developed a more refined analytical framework that incorporated preliminary findings and original questions.  This analytical framework is thus one important product of the project.

Second, the fieldwork allowed the team to collect descriptive data about dual career middle class families.  These data themselves are diverse. They include detailed observations of the minutiae of everyday life that are the object of management efforts by the family.  Yet they also capture the significant events and issues that unfold over weeks or months, and that are invisible to shorter periods of observation.  They incorporate in situ commentaries by family members about their activities, which allows us to assess their salience to the individual and other people.  They include information that is only gleaned when there is a relationship of trust and mutual respect built up over time between fieldworker and family. Collectively, these data reveal patterns in the relationships between work and family that would otherwise remain obscure. 

The revised framework is built from five basic elements.  It reflects both the original research questions and the experiences we encountered during fieldwork.  It is useful insofar as it allows us to both address those original questions and to go beyond them to develop what we hope is a deeper and more sensitive analysis of dual career middle class families.  The framework rests upon the practices and narratives that we encountered from different family members.  We both describe those practices and narratives, the constraints upon them, and the relationships between them. This allows us to then examine three clusters of questions.  First, we explore the material infrastructure that allows family members to act and create their accounts, regardless of whether these are “work” or “family.” Second, we explicate the social and technological networks that extend from and connect the domains of work and family.   Finally, we trace the processes by which family members create individual and collective identities as family members and workers.  This approach allows us to avoid the analytical pitfall of assuming that family and work are similarly “real” and meaningful to each family member and the analysts.  Instead, we focus on practices and narratives that can seemingly flow across the familiar domains of work and family.  What constitutes these domains for specific families thus becomes an empirical task, not one that analysts or policy makers can take for granted.

5. Findings

The broadest and most significant finding of this research is that the content of “family life” is profoundly shaped by the realities of current work regimes, as well as the contours of imagined ones.  Families are thus sites of cultural creation in which the domains of work, family and community are selectively incorporated, separated and synthesized.  These processes profoundly affect how people define their families, what they consider to be appropriately “in” or “out” of them, and how they can navigate a landscape in which familiar guideposts are missing.  In effect, we argue that families are performing new and often hidden work in society that goes far beyond formulations in which families of known form and function are buffeted or threatened by the exigencies of work. Metaphors of “juggling” or “balancing” work and family become less useful in this world since their very constituent elements become problematical. 

Important implications of this analysis are that work does not simply threaten family, nor is family a refuge from the stress and strain of work. We were struck, for example, by the pervasive incorporation of devices, techniques and values from work into families.  People lament the demands of work, jobs and careers because of the strains they place on their families and they simultaneously draw upon the world of work to find better ways to address myriad family problems, including those induced by their jobs and careers.  The relationship between work and family in this formulation is less one of clear-cut opposition than of shifting ambiguities. Both jobs and careers and families and households drive the practices of everyday life, and they are both threat to and resource for those practices. 

The specific findings are organized into five sections: practices and narratives, constraints, infrastructure, relationships, and identity.  The central focus of our analysis is the existence of practices and narratives that are situated “in” neither the domains of work or family.  Rather, they draw upon and connect those familiar domains.  These practices and narratives result from creative acts by family members, but such creativity always exists within constraints.  Each family can be characterized by a constellation of such constraints, some of which are quite general and some of which are idiosyncratic.  Through their practices and narratives families create hidden infrastructures that allow people to act and believe as they do.  These hidden infrastructures include material, social and ideational components.  They are hidden in that people are largely oblivious to them and when they do see them it is usually from their own perspective.  The material infrastructure includes the configuring of the household and the workplace, as well as the provisioning of an information system that allows family members to be “in touch.”  The social infrastructure includes relationships established through “outsourcing” important services, the construction of social networks drawn from family members, friends and co-workers, and connections to institutions such as schools that provide essential services.  The ideational includes ideas about workers and family members, and more broadly, about people and how work and family produce them.  It also includes ideas about the family per se.  The ideational realm is centrally implicated as a resource through which identities for people and the family are created, negotiated and enacted. 

The findings that presented in the PDF version of the Sloan report are largely presented as analytical statements and conclusions with only brief illustrative examples.  These findings provide the basis for a book (and articles) that will present the lengthier examples that define ethnography and its capacity to allow us to enter different ways of seeing and enacting the world.

Click here for the full report in PDF. 

6. Significance of the Project

We believe this project matters for several reasons. 

First, the fieldwork captures data that are unavailable using other methodologies.  These data reveal that the impact of work and jobs on family (and the reciprocal impact of family on work) is far more complex and profound than indicated by measures of time “at work” and “in the family.”  Most significantly, work is shown to be not just a driver of stress and source of problems, but it is also a resource drawn upon to address myriad “family problems.”

Second, the fieldwork allowed the team to develop a conceptual framework that is grounded in the everyday lives we studied.  The most significant contribution of this framework is that it dissolves work and family as real, natural entities.  Instead, it focuses on narratives and practices that simultaneously draw upon and integrate the cultural domains of work and family.

Third, the project explicates the hidden material, social and ideational infrastructure that underlies work and family.  This infrastructure is a largely unacknowledged constraint on individual and institutional decision/policy making about work and family issues.

Finally, the fourteen families who allowed us into their lives suggests the variability in how work and family intersect, and they reveal the importance of seemingly insignificant, idiosyncratic factors in shaping the everyday lives of family members.  The importance of culture and class backgrounds in shaping practices and narratives is especially striking.

Click here for the full report in PDF

© Dr. Charles N. Darrah  . . .   darrahc@email.sjsu.edu

© Dr. J. A. English-Lueck . . .  jenglish@email.sjsu.edu

© Dr. James M. Freeman  . . .  freeman@email.sjsu.edu