ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author uses autoethnography to explore issues of work-life balance and family communication, tracing his narrative inheritance of conventional understandings about work, family, and identity. The author's own experiences provide room for interrogations of the ways scholarship often juxtaposes the concepts of family and work, and how these concepts are further problematized when examining communication in a family business. Such an examination also provides significant implications for the ways communication scholars might investigate these concepts in the future, and the ways they might think about their own approach to work. Once a concept new to organizational studies, work-life balance continues to be re-thought in the wake of evolving business practices and technological advances. Attitudes toward work-life balance are gendered and fraught with power relations. Because organizations, family-owned or not, continue to blur the boundaries of home and work, almost any such activity today can qualify as self-enhancement: physical exercise and reading among them.
