“They Allowed”: Pentadic Mapping of Women\u27s Maternity Leave Discourse as Organizational Rhetoric

This study expands applications of Burkean pentadic mapping from traditional rhetorical texts, such as speeches and written documents, to interview discourses. This methodological adaptation assists scholars in understanding openings and closings, that is, opportunities and constraints, in discourses in a variety of communication areas. In particular, pentadic mapping is a way of discovering discursive paths for empowerment and transformation. This study examines the interview discourses of 21 nonmanagerial women who have taken at least one maternity leave. Pentadic mapping of the discourses suggests that leave-takers in pink collar occupations primarily (re)create an organization-as-scene dominated pentad favoring organizational motives. The discourses suggest alternative pentads, terms, and ratios that represent potentials for feminist transformation for leave-takers

The Good Working Mother: Managerial Women’s Sensemaking and Feelings About Work-Family Issues

We use a sensemaking lens to explore how women managers experience and articulate work–life concerns upon their return to paid work following maternity leaves. We focus on 11 women who held different types of managerial positions, including vice presidents, circulation managers, and human resources experts. We found that our participants re‐framed the good mother image into a good working mother role that fit their lifestyles and interests. To accomplish this reframing, participants engaged in three thematic processes supportive of the good working mother image: (a) good working mothers arrange quality child care; (b) good working mothers are (un)equal partners; and (c) good working mothers feel pleasure in their working mother role. These themes and image were both ironic and fragile constructions of working motherhood. Because these themes and images enable participants to make sense of and establish the worth of working motherhood to family members, friends, acquaintances, organizational members, and community members, they provide a reason why middle‐ or upper‐class working and stay‐at‐home mothers may be in conflict about work and family choices

Standpoints of Maternity Leave: Discourses of Temporality and Ability

Our standpoint analysis of 21 women in pink-collar occupations displays how these workers both adhere to and challenge maternity leave discourses by rhetorically positioning their leaves as time off and (dis)ability. They both acknowledge the advantages of and resist discourses of time and (dis)ability by constructing complicated, contradictory, and ironic knowledge that such language both secures their leaves and revokes their images as competent workers. This study illustrates how standpoint analyses can inform changes in organizational policy and workplace practices for mothers employed in pink-collar occupations based on common knowledge and differences in local-specific experiences. Beyond providing such analysis, this study also contributes to greater understandings of the “rhetorical reproduction of ideological systems and logics of contemporary culture” constituting mothering rhetorics