| Entrepreneurs and small family businesses represent a statistically dominant form of organization yet are often not included within organizational communication and work-family research. For entrepreneurs within small family businesses, issues of work and family, identity construction, boundary construction and maintenance, and organizational control are particularly salient because the assumed distinction between work and family is problematic. I extend current work-family organizational communication scholarship by presenting my study of entrepreneurs within two small family businesses in which I focus on two main issues: (1) the ways that identities and boundaries are constructed by entrepreneurs within small family business and the implications for individuals' understandings of identity and organizational control, and (2) the ways that identity, control, and boundaries are produced by the practical strategies which entrepreneurs construct and engage in as they navigate their everyday life. Through the practical strategies I identify and the interrelationships among boundaries, identity, and control within small family businesses, I argue that current assumptions about work-family separation should be replaced by the metaphor of the entrepreneur as weaver and the small family business as fusion. These alternative metaphors provide a basis for theorizing the ways individuals situated within particular relationships, environments, and industries strategically create separation and integration within work-family processes, communicatively create, recreate, and challenge organizing processes, and produce meanings about entrepreneurship, work, family, and small family businesses. By focusing on the communicative and relational processes which produce meanings and understandings of work and family within everyday life, rather than viewing work and family as fixed, objective, and separate from each other, my study contributes to organizational communication and work-family theory and research by illustrating how work and family are communicatively constructed within a web of interactions and relationships and situated within particular historical, economic, organizational, and social contexts.Keywords: work/family, work/life, entrepreneur, identity construction, organizational boundaries, organizational control, metaphor... |
