The 21st century job market is characterized by a high degree of workforce mobility. Employees are often called upon to relocate to new communities to get jobs, keep jobs and advance in jobs. Family members who are not themselves part of the employer/employee relationship are affected when they must leave their homes and communities to accompany the transferred employee, and effort must be expended to re-establish both the family as a whole and each individual family member to the new home. The majority of corporate transfers are husband-centered as 83% of domestic corporate transferees are male. (Marshall and Greenwood 2002). Thus, it is primarily women and children whose lives are affected by an employer-employee relationship of which they are an unacknowledged participant. In addition to the home and community-related costs, transferred spouses often give up their own employment and interrupt their own career trajectories. The relocated employee has accepted new work but the family has also accepted the work of re-creating their daily lives. This study investigates what this work that I have termed "adaptation work" consists of, who does it, and what challenges and aids are encountered in carrying it out. The project used a qualitative methodology of in-depth interviews with husbands and wives who recently underwent an employee relocation. The research found that adaptation work is very real, very protracted, and very multi-faceted. Further, gender plays a prominent role in the definition and distribution of adaptation work such that employee relocation is a phenomenon rife with gender inequality and contributing to gender inequality. Adaptation work spans categories of productive and reproductive work. Productive work includes family members taking on activities to find new employment after the move or carrying out activities that maximize financial benefit to the family from move-related activities. Reproductive work makes up the majority of adaptation work, and it includes emotion work, kin work, household labor, child care, household management, and care work outside the home as a by-product of volunteerism and network building activities. Adaptation work also includes the important work of meaning making and identity formation. The research revealed four macro categories of adaptation work that relate to the following four important realms of social life - identity construction (Framing the Move), construction of home (The mechanics of physical relocation), construction of work (Defining or Re-defining the spouse's labor role), and construction of community (Building social connections and support networks). Definitions of adaptation work across gender reiterate the association of women with care work and emotion work. Women are more likely than men to recognize the need for the emotion work of renegotiating their own and their children's past relationships. Women are more likely to recognize the need to develop new social capital. Most importantly, women are more likely to consider the totality of effects of each adaptation action on different family members and then to define and manage work accordingly to maximize each family member's benefit and minimize each family member's burden.
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