Calendars and keys: The classification of “home” and “work”

This article presents a discussion of the relationship between classification systems and individuals' everyday activities. The concept of “boundary work” is defined as the practices that concretize and give meaning to mental frameworks by placing, maintaining, and challenging cultural categories. “Home” and “work” provide a case study for examining boundary work across a range of realm relationships, from those that are highly “integrating” to those that are highly “segmenting.” Boundary practices involving calendars and keys, clothes and appearances, eating and drinking, money, people and their representations (like photographs and gifts), talk styles and conversations, reading materials and habits, and work breaks (including lunches and vacations) are discussed. Mary Douglas's work on categorical purity helps illustrate the relationship between cognitive order and visible behavior seen in the boundary work of home and work. This article includes material that was published in a larger study,Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries Through Everyday Life (1996 University of Chicago Press), after it was presented at the 1995 Eastern Sociological Society meetings in Philadelphia.     

Structuring Culture for Change: Strategy,Participation, and Collective Purpose in a Japanese Factory

Organizational culture in Japanese firms has often been used as an independent variable to explain both economic success and, more recently, economic troubles. The Japanese work ethic and lifetime employment stand in for culture in the former case and Japanese reliance on rigid traditions and hierarchy stand in for culture in the latter. This article examines a Japanese factory campaign designed to prepare for recent and ongoing challenges to employment practices and business strategies by strengthening culture and creating new values. Factory managers worked to create support for their goals in face of department, section, and worker responses ranging from enthusiasm to apathy or opposition. An analysis of this campaign shows that culture is a social process, not a given body of knowledge and practice. It also shows how that process is carried out within a particular economic institution by particular actors.