Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
6-2017
Abstract
Recent research on unemployment has not sufficiently acknowledged how unemployment reverberates within families, particularly emotionally. This article uses data from more than 50 in‐depth interviews to illuminate the emotional demands that men's unemployment makes beyond the unemployed individual. It shows that wives of unemployed men do two types of emotion work—self‐focused and other‐focused—and both are aimed toward facilitating husbands' success in the emotionally arduous white‐collar job‐search process. This article extends research on emotion work by suggesting that participants perceive wives' emotion work as a resource with potential economic benefits in the form of unemployed men's reemployment. The findings furthermore suggest that as a resource, wives' emotion work is shaped by the demands of the labor market that their husbands encounter.
Keywords
dual-earner, emotion work, qualitative research, unemployment
Discipline
Family, Life Course, and Society | Work, Economy and Organizations
Research Areas
Sociology
Publication
Journal of Marriage and Family
Volume
79
Issue
3
First Page
636
Last Page
656
ISSN
0022-2445
Identifier
10.1111/jomf.12385
Publisher
Wiley: 12 months
Citation
RAO, Aliya Hamid.(2017). Stand by your man: Wives' emotion work during men's unemployment. Journal of Marriage and Family, 79(3), 636-656.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2553
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12385