Competing Devotions

Career and Family among Women Executives

Mary Blair-Loy

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780674018167, 9780674010895
• eBook ISBN: 9780674262102
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The wrenching decision facing successful women choosing between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living.

Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. The professional level these women have attained requires a huge commitment of time, energy, and emotion that seems natural to employers and clients, who assume that a career deserves single-minded allegiance. Meanwhile, these women must confront the cultural model of family that defines marriage and motherhood as a woman's primary vocation. This ideal promises women creativity, intimacy, and financial stability in caring for a family. It defines children as fragile and assumes that men lack the selflessness and patience that children's primary caregivers need. This ideal is taken for granted in much of contemporary society.

The power of these assumptions is enormous but not absolute. Competing Devotions identifies women executives who try to reshape these ideas. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.

1

THE DEVOTION TO WORK SCHEMA

Schemas of devotion promise to provide meaning to life and a secure connection to something outside ourselves. The devotion to work and the devotion to family schemas are institutionalized: they create taken-for-granted rules of thought and behavior in everyday life (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). They also inspire moral and emotional commitments.

Families and firms are “greedy institutions” (Coser, 1974). If it were just a question of survival, families and companies would not demand so much of their members. They do so based on cultural schemas that give life structure and meaning. For example, a household of biologically related individuals does not inherently require an adult, usually a wife, to give most of her time and energy to her spouse and children. The schema of devotion to the family is a white and middle-class cultural model, rooted in the nineteenth century and flowering in the postwar baby boom era, specifying that it is desirable and worthwhile for women to spend most of their adult lives intensively caring for their families.

Similarly, one may work in a firm in order to earn money to live, but biological survival does not require sixty-plus-hour workweeks, all-night negotiations, extensive travel, or the willingness to use social connections for business ends. This is a middle-class, traditionally masculine, twentieth-century, urban model of an upwardly mobile managerial career (Whyte, 1956). “In the midst of organizations supposedly designed around the specific and limited contractual relationships of a bureaucracy, managers may face, instead, the demand for personal attachment and a generalized, diffuse, unlimited commitment” (Kanter, 1977: 63).

To comprehend why people launch and maintain demanding careers in the first place, we need to study the cultural understandings that inspire, organize, and justify career dedication. Without an analysis of powerful and partially internalized cultural schemas, we cannot fully understand why senior and autonomous professionals feel compelled to devote very long hours to their jobs.¹ As highly successful, career-committed women, female finance executives let us see the cultural schema of work devotion in its most distilled form.²

I examine work devotion as a cultural schema that orients female executives toward a preoccupation with their own advancement, defines their priorities, and evokes a passion for their careers. In contrast to scholars who emphasize employment as a domain of autonomy and independence (for example, Gerson, 2002) or commodification, the women I interviewed find work to be a site of intense relationships and personal transformation. The work devotion schema is the ideal dimension of social structure, the symbolic aspect of the institution of the capitalist firm (Sewell, 1992; Friedland and Alford, 1991). It gives meaning to and is shaped by the material dimension of the firm—the resources and patterned relationships of evaluation, compensation, and promotion.

First, I describe the work devotion schema as an ideal type or abstract model, my analytical construction of the schema’s defining characteristics. Next I show how it actually inspires and makes sense of career-committed women’s lives. Then I consider what happens when firms break their implicit promises to executives, and why some women continue to have faith in the schema while others grow disenchanted. This analysis reveals how the work devotion schema is interwoven into the organizational structures of advancement and reward.

Work Devotion Schema as an Ideal Type

For managers and executives, the work devotion schema is the symbolic dimension of the late twentieth–early twenty-first-century American capitalist firm. This cultural definition is buttressed by material resources and patterns of relationships. At a general level, long work hours among professionals are supported by the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which distinguished between hourly workers, eligible for overtime pay, and salaried workers, who are exempt from this extra compensation (Schor, 1991; Jacobs and Gerson, 1998). This law, combined with high salaries and expensive benefits, created a broad economic incentive for employers to hire fewer elite workers and expect them to work longer hours.³ Assessing elite employees by the “face time” they put in (Fried, 1998; see also Hochschild, 1997) or by the number of “billable hours” charged to particular clients (Epstein et al., 1995) reinforces the expectation. The fear of losing out in a competitive and turbulent economy compounds this pressure.

However, this model of intensive work commitment has become semi-autonomous from purely economic considerations and plays an analytically distinct role in shaping people’s understandings and actions (Wuthnow, 1996; cf. Schor, 1991; Hunnicut, 1988). At the same time, the cultural definition of work devotion remains empirically linked to a firm’s practices of evaluation, compensation, and advancement. I illustrate this later in the chapter by showing that the career-committed women at the pinnacle of their organizations tend to be the most zealous disciples of work devotion. Firm resources flow to those with the most devotion, and their devotion is reinforced by the firm’s faithfulness. The work devotion schema makes executives’ long hours meaningful. It defines what executive careers should be like and what, for the most successful respondents, these careers are like.

In other words, people who are preoccupied with career advancement rely on a shared schema to tell them that these concerns are meaningful and worthwhile. In his study of the lives of middle managers, Robert Jackall points out that “striving for success is, of course, a moral imperative in American society. In the corporate world, this means moving up or getting ahead in the organization” (1988: 43). The work devotion schema articulates this moral imperative that orients managers toward concern with their own advancement.

As a general model or ideal type, the work devotion schema implies a relationship between employer and manager, in which the manager’s allegiance will be rewarded with upward mobility, financial security, a positive sense of identity and recognition from peers, challenging and autonomous work, collegiality, and even transcendence. This schema shapes respondents’ objective job descriptions and opportunities at the same time as it influences their ambitions and desires. The schema creates normative expectations among managers and employers. It is assumed to operate until it is violated.

Devotion is generally first induced early in a manager’s career by the employer’s demands for wholehearted allegiance. If the manager provides allegiance and proves her trustworthiness, the firm will reward her with salary raises, promotions, and social status.⁴

As the organization bestows more rewards, it also makes increasing demands. Promotion into senior levels brings managers into the organization’s elite corps and gives them responsibility for leading the organization toward its goals. As the senior manager continues to express fealty to the firm, she receives growing rewards, including increasingly challenging and autonomous work. These responsibilities may require longer hours and closer involvement with colleagues and clients. Her work may take on a single-minded, emotional intensity that fuses personal and professional goals and inspires her to meet these goals. In some cases, this intensively devoted work and close association with colleagues allow her to lose herself in her work and at the same time induce a powerful sense of transcendence.⁵

The work devotion schema serves the employer’s economic interests, which are more or less tightly linked with those of senior managers through bonuses, stock options, or shares. Yet the devotion schema has a power beyond motivating productivity or veiling exploitation. The schema supports some behavior that actually contradicts economic rationality. For example, many firms are willing to tolerate high turnover among senior women rather than allow senior executives to violate the work devotion ethos by working part-time.

All career-committed respondents seemed to incorporate some version of the schema initially. In about half of these cases, their devotion to work has strengthened over time and has been amply rewarded. Their commitment remains firm.

In other cases, the centrality of the work devotion schema is most apparent when it is violated. Some employers break the schema’s promises, such as by demoting a partner or laying off an executive during a lean year. Coworkers can betray an executive’s trust. Sometimes firms simply demand too much and exhaust a manager’s dedication. Because the work devotion schema is central in organizing the executive’s role, its fracture can be devastating.

Elements of Work Devotion

The central elements of the ideal-typical devotion to work schema are the senior manager’s allegiance to the firm, the firm’s provision of an array of rewards, the intensity and evocation of a sense of transcendence, and the senior manager’s single-mindedness about her responsibilities.

Allegiance

Martha Ungbarsky, the CFO of an investment bank, expressed her allegiance to her firm with hard work, long hours, and fidelity: “I devoted my life to my career . . . I don’t have any other commitments.” Alice Witt, a senior vice president at another investment bank, says that management is expected to signal allegiance by financially investing in the firm: “I’m a stockholder in the firm. Whenever you become a VP, you start owning stock. Owning it is supposed to be a good thing. You show your confidence in the firm.”

Allegiance can also entail a loss of geographic freedom. Relocations are common among the women I interviewed. For example, Amy Peterson, then a partner at one of the largest public accounting firms, was asked to relocate from a small city to New York City, where there was a need for her specialty. She felt compelled to go, even though she and her husband were “outdoorsy people” and hated to leave their beloved rural estate and farm animals:

So they said, we really want you to go to New York . . . I went there kind of almost feeling I had to . . . You can say no maybe once or twice but then basically they’ll say, if you don’t go where we need you, it’s not in the spirit of partnership, and maybe you should think about doing something else . . . My career was the most important thing to me at the time, so we left.

She dragged her husband off to New York with her, where they both felt unhappily constricted by the urban lifestyle.

Rewards

For senior executives, allegiance to employer and career promises a multiplicity of rewards. Respondents appreciate their jobs’ financial compensation as well as value rewards more intrinsic to the work itself.

Financial Security and Independence

Financial rewards play a large part in respondents’ decisions to enter and to stay in finance-related occupations. These rewards are generous. Career-committed women in for-profit firms earned $125,000 to $1,000,000 in 1993.⁶ In past years, some made millions from the sale of stock; others look forward to future wealth when they sell current stock holdings.

Monetary rewards are important in other ways as well. Money does far more than provide a comfortable life. It also promises security in a chaotic world, cements one’s membership in a high status group, and provides a secure retirement.

Many respondents cherish their incomes because these incomes give them independence from men who might otherwise limit their autonomy. Women from the first cohort (born around World War II) and the second cohort (early baby boomers) were more likely than younger women to explain their decision to move into a lucrative career by their wish to avoid financial dependence on a man.

For example, the general manager of a financial services company, Louise Finch, ruefully remembered her economic dependence on her former husband while she earned a masters degree in library science in the late 1960s. “I had to ask my husband for money during my masters program. I will never do that again. I will never be a vulnerable person again.” Similarly, the corporate attorney Sarah Jacobs remembers how she had chafed under her former husband’s control over finances:

I hated having someone tell me what I can spend or not spend or ask me if I balanced his checkbook. Or said, gee, it’s too much money to spend X on a blouse. Or, why didn’t you go to seven different stores for a refrigerator where you could have gotten it cheaper? I consider that a basic element of control.

Leaving her husband and advancing her career were interrelated actions that led to her financial independence and “control” over her life.

Management consultant Mindy Stone still shudders when she remembers her mother’s economic vulnerability after her parents’ marriage ended. She shudders more violently when she recollects her own past economic dependence on a deteriorating marriage while she took a long, unpaid maternity leave.

He moved out, but he still paid the bills. He could always threaten not paying them or paying them late; he used that as a stick . . . But after several months, I really wanted a divorce. It became a dependency thing. I was dependent on him. This was absolutely what I had wanted to avoid.

The incomes produced by finance-related jobs were valued as protection from men using their economic power “as a stick” to limit the women’s autonomy. While executive men as well as women presumably value the consumer goods, high social status, and comfortable retirement that a high income buys, women particularly cherish the resulting freedom from patriarchal authority.

Status

Respondents frequently reported the desire for promotion to a higher level in the company. For instance, Penny Smith, now partner in a national public accounting firm, recalls being motivated by the hope of making partner and by enjoying the status of a recognized expert.

After I reached the manager level, I saw making partner was a possibility, and I worked my buns off. I was very determined . . . Once you start to specialize and learn an industry, you really get tied up in it. It becomes a big part of you . . . I gave speeches and wrote articles. It’s an ego thing, it gives you good self-esteem, if people see you as a recognized expert.

The desire for prestige may be common among men and women. But the desire to be recognized as an expert with her own achieved social status may have more salience for women, who traditionally have made do with the reflected social status of the men in their life.

For example, Laurie Goodman, a former treasurer of a Fortune 500 company, discussed how she had been motivated throughout her career by the desire for status and recognition.

It seems that for an awful lot of my career, I was fighting to get recognition and fighting to get the promotions and fig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Devotion to Work Schema
• 2 The Devotion to Family Schema
• 3 Reinventing Schemas: Creating Part-Time Careers
• 4 Reinventing Schemas: Family Life among Full-Time Executive Women
• 5 Turning Points
• 6 Implications
• Appendix: Methods and Data
• Notes
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index