Books: Competing Devotions
BUY THIS BOOK
Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives
Harvard University Press, 2003, 2005
> William J. Goode Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Family Section in 2005
> Listed as one of “The most-cited works in Sociology, 2012 edition”
> Recognized as a “Top Ten Landmark Contribution” to Work-Family field in analysis by Hill et al. in 2018
The wrenching decision facing predominately white, professionally successful women choosing between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of studies, which often propose individual- or interactional-level analyses and cognitive strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create identities for many women and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living.
Mary Blair-Loy develops an innovative theoretical approach focused on “cultural schemas of devotion,” which are historically rooted, taken-for-granted models of a worthwhile life that structure cognitive maps, emotional maps, and moral commitments. In this interview-based study of predominately white finance executives, she discovers two cultural schemas. Each schema is both compelling and coercive.
The “work devotion schema” defines professional work as a calling. It gives meaning and purpose to the huge commitment of time, energy, and emotion that seems natural to employers and clients, who assume that a career demands and deserves single-minded allegiance. Women executives embrace this schema alongside their men colleagues, who have the enormous advantage of having others in their families — mostly women — handle the caregiving and other reproductive labor.
Meanwhile, these executive women must also confront the “family devotion schema,” which defines marriage and motherhood as the primary vocation for white women. 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 by many professionals and by social institutions.
The power of these cultural schemas is enormous but not absolute. Competing Devotions identifies women executives who try to reshape them. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, work to redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work–family conflict and gender inequality for many professionals. At the same time, they depend upon the caregiving labor of other women — often poorly paid women of color — to make possible their own innovative professional and personal successes.
Multibook Reviews
The More They Change, the More They Stay the Same?: Understanding Family Change in the Twenty-First Century
A review essay on 12 seminal books, Suzanne Bianchi, Contemporary Sociology, 42(3), 2013.
The Myth of Balance
Ruth Milkman, The Women’s Review of Books, 22(3), 2004.
Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform
Toni Calasanti and Jennifer Jebo, Gender and Society, 2004.
Singly Reviewed
Organization Studies
Michal Frenkel, 27(1), 2006.
Contemporary Sociology
Louise Roth, 33(4), 2004.
American Journal of Sociology
Anita Ilta Garey, 109(6), 2004.