Competing Devotions Final Paper

Competing Devotions: Gender, Work, and Family in the Lives of Female Executives Author’s Name The Institutional Affiliation Course Number and Name Instructor Name Assignment Due Date Summary This book explores the cultural understandings of devotion, focusing on two schemas: commitment to one’s job and devotion to one’s family. The ‘job dedication’ schema/theme requires significant time commitment and emotional attachment to one’s current company or profession, making it difficult for individuals with caregiving obligations to achieve top positions. In a family devotion schema or theme, women experience satisfaction in the creative and personal aspects of ‘intensive motherhood,’ and that family responsibility is supposed to supersede all other life responsibilities. This cultural model of family, which views marriage and motherhood as women’s core occupations, presents a challenge for these women. Regarding family, this ideal offers women the possibility for creativity, engagement, and economic gain. It is based upon the view that children, who are perceived as helpless, have no selfless, patient male figures who are expected to be the primary nurturers. A significant portion of modern society views this vice as a virtue. Although these generalizations hold significant power, they are not universally applicable. In the book Competing Devotions, you can find female CEOs working to change these views. The notable contribution to this book is the cultural explanation by Blair-Loy and her massive explanation of how a female CEO, regarded as the product of advanced liberal feminism, uses and reproduces these two contradictory schemas. Two predefined groups—career-committed women and family-committed women who abandoned full-time business careers after having children—organize the book’s five empirical chapters. Despite facing significant opposition, these innovators, empowered by new ideological and material resources brought about by historical transformation, can potentially redefine the nuclear family and capitalism. Instead of serving as a source of culture, these mavericks, who often face significant opposition, can potentially redefine both the nuclear family and capitalism. Blair-Loy’s cultural analysis considers how women business executives transform and revise polar patterns, as well as how they implement and practice these patterns in their everyday lives, who are hailed as the epitome of liberal feminism, is one of the remarkable aspects of the book. The first two chapters explain that women from both groups can live Their lives and make Their identity in Different, More Developed, and without-bound contexts. Chapters three and four primarily concern the challengers: women who respect their families and work part-time in high-rank positions, mothers who pursue their professional ambitions and reinterpret their family orientation schema to accommodate their professional focus. The book serves as a crucial reminder that work and family contingencies, along with their interpretations, greatly influence employees’ career ambitions and motivations. Yet, the most important shortcoming of the book is that it does not attempt to provide a comparative perspective. This is so because it considers only middle-class professionals in the United States. Furthermore, it does not consider the cultural schemas that build the life story of working labor-class moms in countries that are more inclusive of women in the workforce. Synthesis Capitalism has transformed the household divisions of labor and responsibilities. Hartmann (1981) argues that we should view the family as a battlefield, a theater of intricate and diverse battles and goals. Marxist feminists assert that patriarchy and capitalism serve as the drivers of production, causing disruptions, conflicts, and revolutions within that society. Therefore, this pressure inevitably changes the social structure, with the family playing a crucial role for both wage-earning and non-wage-earning members. This research addresses the role of the family in production and redistribution, its relationship with the state, and the changes in ...