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MA in WRD
Home
About
MA in WRD

Emerging Adults and the "Ideal Worker"

With many Generation Zers reaching early adulthood, they now are in the phase of what is considered emerging adulthood, and insight into the “ideal worker” discourses that emerging adults are familiar with will be helpful for understanding how they interact in their workplaces, especially with their coworkers and managers.

Whether or not these emerging adult workers agree with the “ideal worker” discourses that they know, understanding which ones they recognize can set a foundation for the kinds of organizational and interpersonal discourses they’ll engage with in the workplace.

course
CMNS 573 Work/Life Communication and Wellness

instructor
Dr. Kendra Knight

term
Winter 2025

course summary
Work/life at all levels is enacted through communication, as individuals take up, contest, and re-inscribe work/life boundaries and negotiate work/life conflicts with other social and institutional actors. This seminar examines the communication theory and practice of work/life management at the individual, dyadic, familial, and organizational levels. Topics include family, health, and labor policy; organizational wellness initiatives and interventions; and the pursuit of personal work/life "balance" across the life course.

assignment
Fieldwork Synthesis Description

prompt
Two options below ask you to put your fieldwork experience in conversation with existing work-life scholarship (either in-class readings, readings suggested by your professor, or additional peer-reviewed sources you find) to move your work/life communication expertise forward. [Selected option: Convert your field observations into a mini research proposal. Identify some aspect of work/life negotiation that you would recommend for further systematic study with human subjects.]

Emerging Adults & "Ideal Worker"

"My research will further consider how emerging adults not only have to internally negotiate and grapple with these discourses but also engage them with others and their organizations. By doing so, I hope to reveal the ways in which emerging adults’ discursive moves impact others and the workplace norms."

"By considering emerging adults’ enactments of, or resistances to, work-related discourses in the context of their workplaces, we can analyze the ways emerging adults discursively (re)shape their workplaces."

View the proposal

Reflection

This fieldwork synthesis builds on the data from an informal survey I created as part of my final project for my sociolingustics class. I really enjoyed the opportunity to revisit this data with a different disciplinary and methodological lens: work-life scholarship in communication studies.

It was wonderful to realize how the work I was doing for my sociolinguistics project overlapped so much with work-life scholarship's specific focus on "emerging adults." Going through the survey responses again with knowledge about "ideal worker" scholarship offered me new directions for future research.

Although not a formal research proposal, I very much enjoyed the practice of finding texts and developing an annotated bibliography. The course readings offered a helpful model for what a paper of this proposed study might look like. As someone interested in qualitative research, I was excited to have had this opportunity to think in that direction.

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MA in WRD

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2025 Reina Ashley Nomura