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Julie Monroe

Julie's subject area is Leadership, Work & Organisation. Julie's PhD project title is 'Technology at work and domestic labour: A critical exploration of gender, class, and work-life articulation [2022]'. Read more about Julie's research.

Project title

Technology at work and domestic labour: A critical exploration of gender, class, and work-life articulation [2022].

Supervisors

  • Professor Steve Vincent
  • Dr Ana Lopes

Contact

Email: j.monroe@ncl.ac.uk

 

Julie Monroe

Project description

There is a lot at stake for women who have unequal care responsibilities, particularly for those in WC jobs. Yet social norms are malleable and those that confine women to reproductive and domestic roles may be reshaped to open opportunities for a gender equal sharing of domestic work. My thesis develops a realist theory of intersectional positionality to explore gendered and classed dynamics affecting employees’ work-life articulations.

New technologies like mobile apps have a significant role to play in regendering care (a social phenomenon that can alleviate women’s unequal share of unpaid work in the home). For example, in my study one participant describes receiving a task from his partner, in worktime, via a virtual assistant, which redirects him to a supermarket during his drive home. Thus, his partner is freed from food shopping, and we see how tasks can be shared across the work-life boundary. Another participant uses a robot hoover to clean up while he and his partner are at work.

These examples, and many more, illustrate the potential of mobile technologies to contribute to defeminising work that is unpaid. With a proliferation of apps created to remotely manage household tasks, we see the potential of internet to address inequalities associated with gender difference.

While still a doctoral researcher, I began to develop impact opportunities through a research partnership with two UK based ECRs - Dr Marta Cecchinato at Northumbria University and Dr Paolo Gerli at Edinburgh Napier University - to evaluate digital solutions for work-life boundary management.

Lifetime’ is an interdisciplinary interinstitutional technology design project that connects research about gendered inequalities at the work-life boundary with research on organisational and social aspects of information technology. Lifetime spans the disciplines of Computer and Information Sciences and Design-led Innovation to highlight gendered inequalities in digital wellbeing relating to internet technology use for work-life articulation.

A key achievement of the Lifetime pilot study has been the development - with our industry partner Indigo Multimedia - of an online co-design workshop that has enabled knowledge exchange between designers, researchers, and prospective end-users (i.e., parents and carers combining paid and unpaid work).

In January 2022 I received a HASS Research Institutes Pioneer Award for a new project Regendering care: Organizational technologies, Gender and Working Life. I am the Principal Investigator for this comparative study of digital wellbeing and work-life management which considers the differential experiences of dual-earner couples in the UK and Indonesia.

Research Awards

2022    HASS Research Institutes Pioneer Awards 2022, Newcastle University

2022    HASS Faculty Impact Fund, Newcastle University

2021    International Partnership Seed Fund, Newcastle University

2020   ESRC Accelerating Business Collaboration fund, Newcastle University

Research grants

Newcastle University Business School Research Scholarship

Publications

Monroe, J., Vincent, S. and Lopes, A. (2022) 'Critical Realist Metatheory and the Sociology of Organisations: Using contrastive explanation to explain personal internet use at work', in Godwyn, M. (ed.) Research Handbook on the Sociology of Organizations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 475-490.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wih7ArAAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao