Dissertation: Is the Ideal Worker Still Real? Sources and Consequences of Men's Professional Identities
Description
My dissertation examines the implications of men's changing lives for their work identities and for gender inequality in organizations. Current theories of workplace gender inequality hinge upon the widely-shared cultural image of an "ideal worker," a fully-committed employee with no non-work responsibilities that constrain his or her availability for work. Gender inequality is explained by women's typical lack of fit with this image and men's typical congruence. While women's difficulties vis-a-vis this ideal are well-documented, men's experiences remain largely unexamined. Yet, several social changes, including the prevalence of dual-earner families and intensified fathering expectations, place men's true lives at odds with this image. Furthermore, recent studies suggest that certain men may stray from this image without penalty. These developments indicate that the ideal worker image no longer easily explains workplace gender inequality. I address these gaps between data and theory by conducting a qualitative study of men working at a firm where the ideal worker image was linked with success. Drawing on more than 100 interviews, performance data and secondary data, I have developed three papers that advance the literatures on gender, identity and institutions.
My first paper, "Passing as Superman: Men's Professional Identities and the Persistence of the Ideal Worker Image," explores how men incorporate the ideal worker image into their professional identities and the reasons for this image's salience. I find that while men associate this image with success, most craft deviant identities. In contradiction to prevailing theory, those who most match the ideal were not considered the best performers. I draw on the sociological literature on passing and impression management to explain men's successful deviance and show how the very ways in which men's identities conformed to or deviated from the image ultimately reified it as the firm's success narrative. This paper was published in the Best Paper Proceedings of the Academy of Management (2011), and is under review.
In a second paper, I examine how wives' careers influence their husbands' work identities. Existing research offers conflicting predictions: some work suggests men respond to wives' careers by working harder to maintain a "breadwinner" status, while other work indicates a less competitive relationship. As most research has relied on survey data, the interpersonal mechanisms underlying these conflicting results have been difficult to uncover. I marshal my rich qualitative data to offer insight into the complex relationship between spouses' careers, highlighting the roles of money, time and job prestige in this relationship. I explain my findings by drawing on social-psychological theories of gender and status inequality.
In my third paper, I move from the individual- to the organizational-level to consider the repercussions for firms of maintaining the ideal worker image as a standard of success when few men or women actually embody this image. I argue that this decoupling between the real and the ideal in employees' and organizations' approaches to work may seriously impact human capital dynamics within organizations by affecting recruitment, engagement, and turnover. I integrate insights from the work identity and institutional theory literatures to develop theory about the consequences to the organization of maintaining an ideal worker image and propose circumstances under which organizations are likely to change their images of the ideal worker.