EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The becoming of worker mothers: the untold narratives of an identity transition

Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo, Lorena Carrasco, Zehra Ahmed, Alice Morgan, Kim Sznajder and Leonie Eggert

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Worker mothers still struggle to find a good balance between their care and work identities. Most research on motherhood at work focuses on how organizational structures can enable professional women to find a balance between caring and work identities neglecting their personal experiences and how they understand themselves in relation to both motherhood and work. We propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity tensions that professional women experience during their transition into motherhood and how they manage it. To explore this question, we conducted a qualitative study over 2 years with worker mothers in Latin and North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. The thematic and narrative analysis of 80 individual narrative interviews shows the emergence of two coexisting identity narratives. The first narrative understands motherhood as a linear process, where women experience liminality, uncertainty, and identity loss but eventually return to work after having aggregated their new worker mother identities during maternity leaves. The second coexisting narrative challenges this linear and finite view by highlighting the transition to motherhood as a continuous, liminoid, and never-ending process. The two narratives are contextualized and managed differently according to the different cultural, historical, and social contexts where they are developed; the overall results present motherhood as a ‘liminoid’ experience that requires constant identity work to navigate the tensions emerging between potentially new and customary identities and behaviors in work contexts.

Keywords: identity work; liminality; motherhood; narratives; worker mothers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2023-12-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hme and nep-sea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Gender, Work and Organization, 5, December, 2023. ISSN: 0968-6673

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120782/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:120782

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:120782