The Problematic of Work Life Balance, Part 2: A Project of the Self

Here’s part 2 of Debjani Chakravarty’s  essay on work life balance. A PhD in the Women and Gender Studies Program at Arizona State Debjani ChakravartyUniversity who worked as a journalist and a social worker in India, Debjani is also an artist. You can view her beautiful artwork here. Comments below will thrill us both.

Neo traditional discourses and the media constructed mommy wars point at the fallacy of women having too much on their plates. The answer lies in choosing one role set, preferably home and child bearing over paid work. Motherhood is aligned with a discourse of citizenship and duties by the state. The question of a mother’s rights is articulated only by feminists in this post feminist era where women’s problems are framed as having solutions in increased consumption. The solution can range from taking a work life balance quiz in Cosmo or Oprah to setting up a home office with the latest technological gadgets. The question of work life balance becomes a project of the self, with the issue state and workplace policies not considered by the very women oppressed by multiple role expectations, smarting under immensely demanding gender identities.

Rose (1999) formulated a “critical sociology” of freedom using Foucauldian notions of genealogy and governmentality[1]. He offers alternative ways of thinking about contemporary regimes of government that launch projects of the self as a project put together for the greater common good. Women thus become, in Rose’s formulation: “self contained atoms of individualistic capitalism.” Rose writes, in a gender neutral (gender blind?) fashion:

“Are we to be governed as members of a flock to be led, as children to be coddled and educated, as a human resource to be exploited, as members of a population to be managed, as legal subjects with rights, as responsible citizens of an interdependent society, as autonomous individuals with our own illimitable aspirations, as value driven members of a moral community…..”[2]

And this exactly is what seems to be the problem with the work-life balance discourse. It germinates from the project of the self-governance, from the project of self responsibilization and autonomy that assumes certain conditions for autonomy that do not exist for many people. The state or the economy does nothing to create those enabling conditions. Women and minorities are left to their own devices to make the best of an unfair, inequitable system.

The Handbook of Girls’ and Women’s Psychological Health (2006) states: “A large number of empirical investigations have shown that employment can actually benefit women, including mothers, just as it can benefit men, including fathers.[3] Nor is it simply paid labor that fuels well being. A growing body of evidence shows that people who engage in multiple roles report better physical and mental health than people with fewer roles…..in practical terms having several roles provides important tools for both women and men to fulfill family obligations (354).”[4] The income, the increased social capital and social networks, access to greater information and socialization are processes that help people lead fuller lives. However, there need to be progressive family friendly social policies that facilitate a citizen and worker’s multiple roles. The labor market and households are parts of an interconnected system, and one’s performance in these cannot be judged on an individual basis. Yet social welfare and fiscal policies operate on the notions of traditional gender roles and public and private spaces.

McDowell (2004) argues that the dominance of an individualistic ethos pervades both the labor market and the welfare state, undermining notions of collective welfare and an ethic of care, within the wider context of the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology in global as well as national politics.[5]

If an ethic of care is to be (re)instituted, it will demand wide-reaching changes in the ways in which organizations and institutions operate at a range of spatial scales as well as new sets of responsibilities towards co-workers, members of households and the wider public. Work life balance is not so about individual choices and impossible goals, as it is about balancing individual rights and duties, it is about the state paying attention to lived realities of workers and parents.

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[1] Foucault’s (1991) notion of governmentality embraces a notion on power beyond a perspective that centers either on consensus or on violence; it links technologies of the self (self development, self discipline) with technologies of rule, the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state.

[2] Rose, N (1999)Powers of freedom. Cambridge University Press. Pp 41

[3] See, Worell, J & C. Goodheart (eds) (2006) Handbook of Girls’ and Women’s Psychological Health. NYC: oxford University Press

[4] Some citations taken out for purposes of flow.

[5] McDowell, L (2004) Work, workfare, work/life balance and an ethic of care. Progress in Human Geography 28,2 pp. 145–163