Cite: Blumen, Wives on Margins of Israeli High-Tech Industry

Blumen, Orna. “Home–Work Relations and the Spatialization of Care: Wives on the Margins of the Israeli High-Tech Industry.” Gender, Place & Culture 19.1 (2012): 102-117.

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2011.624737

 

Abstract

This study applies the concept of care to examine how home–work transitions of high-tech men affect others in these two places, namely their wives and managers. The high-tech industry is famous for its particularly demanding culture and masculine disposition, which contest daily involvement with family and domestic affairs. Care is conceptualized as a wide-ranging multifaceted notion that embraces work, morals, and policy, and is represented by the exchange of various tangible and intangible, resources across the home–work divide. In-depth interviews with 22 high-tech managers and 47 wives of high-tech engineers disclose a well-established reciprocity of care resources. The managers reward the wives’ nonmaterial support of the engineers/husbands with rhetorical recognition and nonfinancial benefits. The spatialization of care across the home–work divide is discussed, pointing to its hierarchical – not only contextual – relations.