Press & Reviews
ETHNOGRAPHY ATELIER PODCAST
Episode 13 - June 18, 2022 Research in Intimate Spaces
In this episode with Prof. Christine Beckman and Prof. Melissa Mazmanian, we talk about
the promises and challenges involved in conducting research in intimate spaces, such as in
people’s homes, instead of the workplace, where most organization and management research usually takes place.
Christine and Melissa reflect on the research for their recent book “Dreams of the Overworked” where they explored nine families in California and what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of growing expectations about one’s productivity amplified by smart devices.
Christine and Melissa share tips on the relational work in fieldwork, the value of working in teams to gain reflexive distance, and how observing work and organization topics from intimate spaces can bring new insights.
EUROPEAN GROUP FOR ORGANIZATIONAL STUDIES
Volume 3: Issue 10, October 2022Book Review: Dreams of the overworked: Living, working, and parenting in the digital age
Dreams of the Overworked is a beautiful text that succeeds in rendering the textures and feelings of the everyday struggles of middle- to upper-class American working parents. Beckman and Mazmanian analyse how these parents' lives are dominated by three collectively built expectations - the Ideal Worker, the Perfect Parent and the Ultimate Body.
Reviewed by: Anne Antoni, Grenoble Ecole de Management, France
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Volume 67: Issue 2, June 2022Book Review: Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age
Introduction: Managerial and organizational behavior scholars' interest in work and family struggles with a gendered lens has grown significantly over the past 50 years since Rosabeth Kanter published her seminal book, Men and Women of the Corporation, as well as a Russell Sage Foundation monograph on work and family policies in the United States. Dreams of the Overworked arrived at a perfect time to add to this legacy. Although it was written prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, its content has even more relevance at this moment as work-family issues from parenting to personal health, managing connectivity, and overwork have truly come to the forefront of organizational behavior and our lives.
Reviewed by: Ellen Ernst Kossek, Purdue University
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION
Volume 35: Issue 6, December 2020Book Review: Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age
With vividly told vignettes walking us through the lives of nine middle-class families in southern California. Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian argue quite thoroughly for the scaffolding role that communicative technologies play in connecting us to the other humans that make our lives possible. Unlike a number of previous works, the authors do not single out any of the three problem areas related to parenting (e.g. Lim. 2019), health (e.g. Lupton, 2016) or working life (e.g. Moore, 2017). This is an ethnoraphy of how these areas compound in the lives of individuals, and this enables the authors to make a truly holistic argument.
Reviewed by: Christoffer Bagger, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
FATHERLY
What Working Parents Need Above All Else Right Now, According to 6 Experts
Answers ranged from far-reaching policy changes to simple respites from the grind.
It’s easy to spot the problems working parents face under the pandemic. For months, parents have struggled with childcareshortfalls and gnawing anxiety while needing to do twice as much in half the time. For those who are working from home, every day is a short blur of Zoom meetings, chores, and remote learning supervision, occasionally interrupted by a doomscrolling session. For those still headed out of the home to work, it’s a struggle to find child care, make ends meet, or find any semblance of balance.
December 22, 2020
USC: THE PRICE OF POLICY PODCAST
Overworked: The Price of Parenting in a Pandemic
In this episode, Holly Milburn-Smith sits down with Dr. Christine Beckman to discuss her new book, Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age. They also talk about value of caregiving, the economic cost of parenting, and consider policy tools to support working parents.
December 14, 2020
STANFORD MAGAZINE
Book Review: Your Attention, Please
Working parents are bone-tired. That much is clear with two Southern California professors’ well-documented tour of our triple-crown quest to be the “Ideal Worker,” the “Perfect Parent” and the “Ultimate Body.”
October 6, 2020
NEW YORK TIMES: In Her Words
Ideal, Perfect, Ultimate: What Drives Parents to Seek the Unattainable?
Working parents toggle constantly among competing commitments, but many don’t want to do less; they want to do it all, better.
“The idea of doing less is just not coded into high-achieving people’s sense of self.”
— Melissa Mazmanian, an associate professor of informatics and organization and management at the University of California, Irvine
SEPTEMBER 1, 2020
USC PRICE NEWS
Can we be ideal workers, perfect parents, and ultimate bodies?
USC Price professor co-authors book with tips for living, working, and parenting in a digital and distanced world.
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve held Zoom meetings at our kitchen tables and on our living room sofas, featuring frequent cameos by our children, spouses, and pets. We’ve come to rely on virtual backgrounds and mute buttons to delineate our home offices from our home sweet homes. We’ve spent 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in front of our computers, and 5 p.m. to 9 a.m. within arm’s reach of our smart phones.
SEPTEMBER, 2020
FATHERLY
“You’ve Been Set Up to Fail”: What Modern Parents Face is Nearly Impossible
Modern parenting is hard enough. The expectations society sets for them make it nearly impossible to succeed.
Modern parenting feels like an impossible task. That’s because it is. Balancing the costs and responsibilities of raising kids alone is a struggle.
July 23, 2020
WBUR: Here and Now
Even Before Pandemic, Working Parents Struggled To Achieve The 'Dreams Of The Overworked'
It's no secret that parents are stressed out.
The fortunate ones are working remotely from home, trying to balance the needs of their jobs and their children being home 24/7. They are also facing the prospect that there will be limited or no in-person school again in the fall.
Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Tinku Ray.
JULY 13, 2020
THE ATLANTIC
This Isn’t Sustainable for Working Parents
The pandemic has already taken a toll on the careers of those with young children—particularly mothers.
Child care is the immovable object around which so much else in family life orbits, and when the usual child-care options disappear, something else has to give. During the pandemic, with schools and day-care centers closed or operating at reduced capacity, many parents’ careers—particularly mothers’ careers—are getting deprioritized.
JULY 9, 2020
THE ATLANTIC
What America Asks of Working Parents Is Impossible
More and more, the goals of being a dedicated employee and being a dedicated parent seem to be in conflict.
Three core myths animate much of American life, according to Beckman and Mazmanian, professors at the University of Southern California and UC Irvine, respectively. The first myth, they explain in their recent book, Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age, is that of the “ideal worker,” who “has no competing obligations that might get in the way of total devotion to the workplace.” The second is that of the “perfect parent,” who “always puts family first.” And the third is that of the “ultimate body,” which is cultivated through diligent dieting and exercise, and doesn’t deteriorate with age. “Achieving even one of these myths would be impossible,” Mazmanian told me in an interview, “but achieving all three is ludicrous.”
JUNE 24, 2020
WORK and LIFE WITH STEW FRIEDMAN
Ep 170. Christine Beckman: Living, Working and Parenting in the Digital Age
“Do you live in a world where work is endless, family is all consuming, and exhaustion is the norm? You are not alone.”
Christine Beckman
In this episode, Stew and Christine talk about the pluses and minuses of technology for working families, especially during these pandemic times, when so many are working from home for the first time and when parents are attempting to manage remote school work for their children. They discuss the ills and potential benefits of social media and strategies for harnessing technology as a force for good. And they address the ways both social policy and individual initiative can strength the social support, or scaffolding, working families need now more than ever.
JUNE 20, 2020
UCI PODCAST
Melissa Mazmanian on work and parenting in the digital age
“Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working & Parenting in the Digital Age” is a new book by Melissa Mazmanian, UCI associate professor of informatics, and Christine Beckman, professor of public policy at the University of Southern California. In this episode of the UCI Podcast, Mazmanian, who holds appointments in the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences and the Paul Merage School of Business, discusses her process of writing the book and how it relates to our lives in this time of global pandemic.
June 18, 2020
UCI News: Author Q&A
A New Perspective on Technology and the Realities of Work-Life Balance
Melissa Mazmanian and Christine Beckman’s new book detailing technology use by nine families explores how working parents navigate today’s digital world. Yet their findings move well beyond the role of technology, portraying a cultural landscape in which exhaustion is the norm, work seems never-ending and family is all consuming — even before a global pandemic started making everything more challenging.
June 11, 2020