‘Full-timer in a Part-time Job’: Identity Negotiation in Organizational Talk

In this article I explore the ways in which people talk about part-time work, with a particular focus on links which people make between working time, gender and professional identity. I investigate how women and men working part-time in financial sector organizations talk about their career, and their orientations to paid and unpaid work, and also how colleagues of these people talk about them. The analysis shows the links which participants routinely make between full-time work, professional commitment and gender. I demonstrate the ways in which participants negotiate with difficulty the category of ‘part-timer’, and in particular the problematic use of this category for men. The constructions of work, time and gender raised by the researchers are compared with the way participants themselves orient to categories, and implications for the research interview context are considered.