Communication and the Work-Life Balancing Act by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 7

It’s About Priorities

Adaptation Strategies of Dual-Military Couples

David G. Smith

Military service can influence life-course trajectories based on the timing of role transitions and the demands placed on service members and their families (Gade, 1991). Dual-military couples provide a special case of dual-career couples for this study, focusing on how these couples’ roles, role transitions, and timing of roles are shaped by the institutional and cultural structure of the military organization. Like other professions and occupations with a careerist focus (e.g. STEM), the military has created an implicit hierarchy of family types that gives privilege and power to those with a male breadwinner. While other occupations are better suited to the “scaling back” of careers, contract work or entrepreneurial opportunities as evidenced by recent trends of “mompreneurship,” the military’s “up or out” promotion system is strictly tied to career paths by federal law. Analyzing critical military work transitions such as joining the military, military occupational specialty, job assignments, and location selection and how they are interrelated to family role transitions can provide insight into how these couples’ decision-making communications are shaped by surrounding institutional and cultural structures (Gade, 1991; Kelty & Segal, 2013).

Societal norms for work-family relationships have continued to shift over the past five decades and provide the context for understanding work-family prioritization strategies. Where previously career priority was given to the male spouse, evidence suggests that we can no longer make this assumption (Pixley, 2008; Pixley & Moen, 2003). Indeed, recent Pew research shows that 40 percent of primary family breadwinners with children are women (Wang, Parker & Taylor, 2013). In addition to family types changing, there has been a downward trend in fertility and an increase in the median age at first childbirth which is of interest when considering the intersection of work and family roles (Altucher & Williams, 2003; Wang et al., 2013). While women’s work careers often appear disorderly and interrupted as compared to men’s work careers because of children and childcare, in today’s society more women are returning to work after childbirth (Moen, 2003). For dual-career couples, the demands of maintaining two careers and a family may impact the work and family goals, leading to new career pathways (Moen & Sweet, 2002). Further, as transformations in the labor force, economy, and the structure of work careers are encountered, new relational contexts for work careers can be expected (Moen & Han, 2001).

In particular, changes to the structure of work can be understood through the nature of the relationship between employee and employer that has changed dramatically over the last 50 years due to globalization, the service industry economy, and technological advances (Moen & Roehling, 2005). The old standard of continuous employment, job security, and an occupational career path has been replaced with restructuring, downsizing, mergers and layoffs (Moen & Roehling, 2005). This change in the work relationship, coupled with increased longevity and decreased fertility, has led to changes in the traditional lockstep career model: education-employment-retirement (Moen & Roehling, 2005). Where Social Security and retirement pensions led

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