About the Authors
About Us
In 2010 we started talking about collaborating. As management scholars and sociologists, we had both conducted qualitative fieldwork in organizations – observing, interviewing, and hanging out in workplaces. Christine had a long standing interest in gender dynamics. Melissa had spent many years examining how information technology affects social dynamics. We shared an interest in how work enters home (and vice versa). What would it look like to really understand the everyday lives of working professionals? We both wondered what it would look like to study people inside their homes.
Rarely had “work-life balance” been observed outside of the workplace. Could we do this ethnographically (in other words simply “hang out” with people outside of work)? Who would welcome us into their homes? What would we observe? Where should we start?
We began to brainstorm our ideal research project: spend time in a workplace, garner enough trust that people welcome us into their homes, and focus on families with young children (we suspected these parents would experience clear tensions between work and family). Looking back, we were equal parts naive and optimistic. It took 10 years to get to this point. But we did it.
In the intervening years we spent time in a special organization (Silver Lake Hospitality – as you will read about in the book). We followed nine families home and spent numerous hours with each of them. Hours that were illuminating, emotional, exciting, and mundane. We got to know each of these families intimately and learned to care about each of them. In the meantime, we were raising our own families, relying on our own structures of support, and progressing in our careers as professors. In order to make it all work we have learned to rely on each other. This has been a journey of partnership. We were colleagues. We have become the closest of friends.
In the book we tell the stories of nine real families. But these stories resonated with us. In trying to understand the lives of those we studied, we learned more about our own marriages, parenting styles, career choices, and beliefs about food and exercise. We also began to more fully appreciate our scaffolding: our friendships, our extended families, and our support structures.
We hope you do as well.
Christine & Melissa
Christine M. Beckman
is Professor and Price Family Chair in Social Innovation at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy.
Melissa Mazmanian
is Professor in Informatics at the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.