Maternity management in SMEs: a transdisciplinary review and research agenda

This paper provides a transdisciplinary critical review of the literature on maternity management in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), embedded within the wider literatures on maternity in the workplace. The key objectives are to describe what is known about the relations that shape maternity management in smaller workplaces and to identify research directions to enhance this knowledge. The review is guided by theory of organizational gendering and small business management, conceptualising adaptions to maternity as a process of mutual adjustment and dynamic capability within smaller firms’ informally negotiated order, resource endowments and wider labour and product/service markets. A context sensitive lens is also applied. The review highlights the complex range of processes involved in SME maternity management and identifies major research gaps in relation to pregnancy, maternity leave and the return to work (family-friendly working and breastfeeding) in these contexts. This blind spot is surprising as SMEs employ the majority of women worldwide. A detailed agenda for future research is outlined, building on the gaps identified by the review and founded on renewed theoretical direction

Expressing anxiety? Breast pump usage in American wage workplaces

This article considers the potential and problems for women seeking to combine breastfeeding with wage labor outside the home through the use of breast pumps. After locating the breast pump within cultural, historical and legislative contexts of shifting views about infant nutrition on the one hand and trends in women's participation in the wage work force on the other, we unpack how this technology has re-shaped the landscape of choices about infant feeding in the United States. Using disciplinary lenses of science and technology studies, feminist geography and women's studies, we examine how the breast pump has reshaped workplace experiences after childbirth. Based on interviews and survey data with respondents in Albany, New York across a range of class and racial backgrounds, we submit that while the breast pump does allow some women to combine breastfeeding and wage work outside the home, the advantages of breast pumps are constrained both by cultural attitudes about pumping as an activity, the lack of a sufficient legislative framework, as well as by the way workplaces themselves are designed

Expressionists of the twenty-first century: the commodification and commercialization of expressed breast milk

Breast milk expression has been promoted as liberating for women and as offering them more choices, but there has been little research on women's experiences of it and even less critical commentary on the consequences of its incorporation into mainstream behavior. Drawing on narratives of women in the United Kingdom about breastfeeding, we explore the increasingly popular practice of expressing and feeding expressed breast milk. We argue that breast milk has become commodified, breastfeeding commercialized and technologized, and the mother–infant relationship disrupted. We suggest that breastfeeding as a process is being undermined by vested interests that portray it as unreliable and reconstruct it in artificial feeding terms, so playing on women's insecurities. The major beneficiaries of expression are fathers who want increased involvement in infant care and commercial enterprises that aim to maximize profits for shareholders

Environmental reproductive justice: intersections in an American Indian community impacted by environmental contamination

In order to fully understand the impact of contamination on Indigenous communities, this paper explores how intersectionality has been integral to the development of environmental justice (EJ) and reproductive justice (RJ), and how considering the ways in which these two frameworks then intersect with each other is necessary to more fully explicate how toxicants have threatened the reproduction of human beings and tribal culture. The concept of environmental reproductive justice (ERJ), or ensuring that environmental issues do not interfere with physical or cultural reproduction, involves expanding reproductive justice to include a deeper focus on the environment, and to include the reproduction of language and culture as concerns, in addition to the reproduction of human beings. ERJ also aims to expand the framework of environmental justice to more closely consider the impact of environmental contaminants on physical and cultural reproduction. Through the example of Akwesasne, a Mohawk American Indian community located downstream from industrial sites on the New York/Canadian border, this paper explores how the concept of ERJ can be utilized to understand the unique situation of American Indian communities who are arguing that justice necessitates going beyond equal protection

Work-life balance and parenthood:a comparative review of definitions, equity and enrichment

This review investigates the problems of definition and inequity with which the literature on parenthood and work–life balance is beset. It analyses research trajectories first within the established disciplines of organizational psychology and the sociologies of work and family practices, and then within the newer field of management studies. Gender, class and difference are singled out as troubling themes, especially in relation to fathers and impoverished parents. A tendency towards mono-disciplinarity is observed within organizational psychology and sociologies of work and family practices. The review offers explanations for the historic but narrow definition within organizational psychology and sociologies of work and family practices of work–life balance as affecting mainly heterosexual dual-career parent couples. The authors show how this narrow definition has led to inequities within research. They further identify as limiting the definition of work–life balance to be always ‘problematic’, rather than enriching, among employed parents. Consequently, a three-factor framework is recommended, through which future studies may address the problems of definition and equity in work–life balance literature, including: a broader definition of work–life balance to include marginalized parents; the defining of parenting and employment as potentially life-enriching; and a commendation of the transdisciplinary approach within management studies as poised to move debate forward

Managing the Maternal Body: A Comprehensive Review and Transdisciplinary Analysis

This paper comprehensively reviews transdisciplinary and critical perspectives on the employed maternal (pregnant and post-birth) body in the context of management studies. It highlights the disparities between equal opportunities policies and everyday management practices in relation to pregnancy and new motherhood. In so doing, the review examines the contradictions between equal opportunities policies aimed at protecting pregnant and newly maternal employees and the discouraging treatment that such women receive in practice at work. In analysing the disparity between policy and practice, the review identifies gaps within the field of research on the employed maternal body. It then shows how perceptions about the pregnant and newly maternal body are based more on myth than on evidence. In keeping with policies encouraging family friendly working practices and aimed at enhancing parental health, the paper argues that research on the maternal body is integral to management studies