Family Ties: Balancing Commitments to Work and Family in Dual Earner Households

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. This paper examines the process by which married men and women form and balance work and family identities. Hypotheses derived from alternative conceptualizations of the commitment process are tested with data from the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey. We find thatfor both men and women, engagement in work and family roles leads to identification with those roles. However, the process of identity formation differs for men and women in ways that correspond to gender-based differentiation in household and workplace activities. Married women employed outside the home give precedence to family in balancing work and family identities, while married men may have the discretion to build identification with work and family roles without trading one off against the other. Despite differences in the process of commitment formation, our results suggest that when men and women engaged in similar work and family roles they are almost equally committed to those roles. and labor force activities, while work in the human capital tradition attempts to understand the decision-making process that leads to an allocation of time and effort to work and family roles (e.g., Mincer and Polachek 1974;Becker 1981Becker , 1985England and Farkas 1986). Sociologists have examined the consequences of women's dual roles in terms of role strain or "overload" (e.g., Rapoport and Rapoport 1969; Scanzoni 1978; Geerken and Gove 1983). However, the personal bases upon which individuals choose to allocate time and other personal resources between work and family spheres has received far less attention (Aldous 1982;Johnson and Firebaugh 1985;Kanter 1976;Pleck 1983). As individuals allocate time and energy to work and family roles, they come to identify with those roles. Labor force and family behaviors build commitments to work and family identities. Those commitments in turn provide the personal bases for attributing meaning to dual roles, identifying conflict between them, and forming intentions regarding future role behaviors. Accordingly, in this paper, we examine the process by which married men and women form and balance work and family identities. CONCEPTUALIZING COMMITMENTCommitment has been defined as the binding of an individual to behavioral acts (Kiesler 776

Consequence of Gender and Job Characteristics with Normative Commitment

“…A third set of studies (Bielby and Bielby, 1989;Bruning and Snyder, 1983;Fry and Greenfeld, 1980), including another meta-analysis (Aven et al, 1993), report no sex differences in organizational commitment especially after controlling for job related variables, again with supportive evidence from individual studies conducted subsequently (Ngo and Tsang, 1998;Korabik and Rosen, 1995;Siguaw and Honeycutt, 1995). Further, a meta-analytic study by Mathieu and Zajac (1990) found that women are more affectively committed to the organization than men.…”

Institutions as reference points for parents-to-be in European societies: a theoretical and analytical framework

“…The identity formation model (Bielby and Bielby 1989) assumes that new ways of enacting motherhood and fatherhood lag considerably behind in historical perspective, as individual processes of reconstructing work and parenting identities are embedded in persisting traditional institutional contexts. The countries analysed in this book vary in the degree to which they support traditional gender ideologies.…”

Identity in Transition: Women’s Narrative Identity Work on the Path to Professional and Mother

“…While pregnancy and childbirth are recognized as a significant, identity-altering transition in women's lives and have received substantial scholarly attention, combining career and family has not been conceptualized in this way. Identity-based investigations of combining career and family have been grounded in the assumption that, for women, work and family represent separate, competing identities (Bielby & Bielby, 1989), assuming that women are oriented toward one identity domain over the other, rather than conceptualizing the crafting of a combined career and family life as identity work.…”

“…The dominant competing identities perspective is supported by studies that indicate women are much more likely to make work-family identity trade-offs than men (Aryee & Luk, 1996;Bielby & Bielby, 1989;Rothbard & Edwards, 2003). For example, Lobel and St-Clair (1992) conceptualize and measure career identity salience and family identity salience as occupying opposite ends of a single spectrum.…”