Mommy bloggers as enterprising individuals - exploring 'new' forms of gendered labour across virtual spaces where entrepreneurship, self-promotion and digital technologies intertwine (Esitys WORK Conferencessa, Helsinki 14.-16.8. 2019)

Abstract

<p>Despite an ever-growing interest in digital labour and ‘digital-materialisms’, the research fields of mom blogging, mumpreneurship and self-employed motherhood remain narrow in the field of management and organizational studies. This paper delves into the communicative practices of mom blogging as a multiple and intriguing site for performative identity work. Building on the literatures on digital labour, blogging and mumpreneurship combined with insights from the more critical literature on identity work in organizational studies, we empirically explore how six popular Finnish mom bloggers seek to construct, communicate and navigate their fleeting and fragile identities as mumpreneurs – mothers and (micro-)entrepreneurs – in and through their personal blogs. Specifically, by conducting critical media analysis, we focus on the co-creation and re-creation of identities, as well as the insecurities, tensions and complexities involved in mom blogging as seemingly flexible and fun yet exhausting and boundaryless realm of identity work that brings the spheres of motherhood, self-entrepreneurship and lifestyle intimately together. This paper develops a dynamic understanding of how digital technologies, dominant expectations and normative idea(l)s relating to both (self-)entrepreneurship and motherhood come to shape, discipline and construct contemporary maternal entrepreneurial subjectivities. Finally, we argue for the need to further study precarious and intimate forms of identity work in the digital sphere from more diverse and intersectional perspectives. </p>