Secret fathers: Navigating fatherhood through workplace performance
通过民族志方法研究英国高压法律行业的父亲如何运用策略误导同事以为他们不是父亲，揭示他们在职场前台扮演理想员工、将父亲身份隐藏为黑暗秘密的现象。
How do fathers navigate work and family in light of the conflicting ideals associated with breadwinning and involved fathering? Utilizing an ethnographic methodology and drawing upon Goffman’s work concerning dramaturgy and secrecy, we answer this question. We discover how fathers employed within the high-pressure UK legal profession develop a suite of strategic tactics to mislead colleagues into assuming that they are not fathers at all. We untangle and reveal how fathers achieved these impressions, highlighting the complex nature of covering and counter-uncovering moves that men used to conceal their paternity. We show how, when performing on the organizational front stage, fathers adopt the role of job-oriented ideal-worker, casting fathering, in Goffmanian terms, into the shadows as a dark secret (Jaworski, 2021). As a result, men restrict ‘involved fathering’ to the backstage of their home settings. In offering new perspectives on the choices that fathers make in relation to how they navigate the contradictory ideals of traditional and involved fatherhood, our paper challenges prevailing notions of workplace fatherhood, illuminating how fathers experience and respond to workplace glorification of the ideal-worker image, with important implications for theory and future research on work and family, and fathering practices.