Amy S. Wharton

Long Work Hours and Family Life A Cross-National Study of Employees' Concerns

Work-family conflict is a pressing research and policy issue. The authors extend previous scholarship on this issue by studying elite employees’worries about the effects of longwork hours on those in their personal life. This issue is researched cross-nationally in a sample of managers and professionals based in the United States, London, and Hong Kong, all of whom work for one division of a high-commitment, global, financial services firm. Hong Kong respondents are more likely than those in the United States and in England to worry about work-family conflict when controlling for job and family characteristics. The authors argue that the meaning of family varies by national context, in part because of the emphasis in Hong Kong on the extended family as a robust institution with intense ties and obligations. In all three countries, women experience higher levels of work-family conflict than men do.

Doing for Others on the Job: The Affective Requirements of Service Work, Gender, and Emotional Well-Being

American workers face an economy that has shifted from the industrial production of goods to the postindustrial production of services. For many, job success depends on ones ability to produce speech, action, and emotion that symbolize a willingness to “do for” the customer or client. Such expectations comprise the affective requirements of todays service-sector jobs. Using a sample of employees within the health and banking industries, we examine the effects of affective requirements, interactive work, and other occupational conditions on womens and mens job-related emotional well-being. We find that when ones job success depends on being able to handle people well, both women and men tend to experience higher levels of inauthenticity and fewer positive feelings about their work. However, spending more time at work interacting with others and having greater control over that work tends to have the opposite effect on well-being. We also find that job involvement operates quite differently for women and men in ways that are sensitive to service-sector work conditions.

On the Front Line: Organization of Work in the Information Economy

The importance of customer service is widely emphasized in business today. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the organization and dynamics of front-line work. The volume is based on a four-year study of over a thousand employees and eight leading companies in the United States, Australia, and Japan. On the Front Line reveals similarities and differences found in work environments--such as variance in authority relations and division of labor--as well as significant contrasts between management approaches used in Japan and those used in the United States and Australia. By examining how work differs among service, sales, and knowledge-based settings, it also shows how bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, and network forms of organization coexist in the informational economy. This seminal analysis of work in the service sector offers both a benchmark for consultants working with customer-contact organizations and valuable information for anyone concerned with the changing nature of work.

Use of Formal and Informal Work–Family Policies on the Digital Assembly Line

This study compares work–family policy use among low wage, predominately female call center workers and their more highly paid managers. Both formal policies and the informal work–family arrangements that employees negotiate with their supervisors were examined. Consistent with the work devotion perspective, it was found that formal work–family policies are more widely used among hourly workers than managers, and those with better performance evaluations are less likely than their otherwise similar coworkers to use formal work–family policies. The ability to negotiate informal work–family arrangements and use them as a supplement to formal policies is also important to workers in this study, especially women with children and those providing care to people with special needs. Access to informal arrangements may be limited to the high performers, however. Overall, this research suggests that the work devotion framework, which derives from studies of elite workers, may be more broadly applicable than previously assumed.

STRUCTURE AND AGENCY IN SOCIALIST-FEMINIST THEORY

A long-standing debate in social theory concerns the relative merits of structural approaches versus those that highlight the social actor. This article examines how various feminist approaches to gender inequality have incorporated assumptions about structure and agency, and suggests that existing perspectives could be improved by linking gender as a structural property of social organization and as a property of actors. Suggestions for an alternative conception of gender that acknowledges both dimensions of social life are discussed.

Exploring the Relationship between Mission Statements and Work-Life Practices in Organizations

Corporate mission statements are ubiquitous, but their relationship to organizational practices, especially those noted for their high quality, remains a subject of debate. We use the case of work—life practices in publicly traded financial services firms to illustrate an innovative method for studying this issue. Overall, we find variation in the mission statements of firms in the same organizational field. We also find relationships between these statements and high-quality investment in work—life practices, as recognized by Working Mother magazine and Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini. The mission statements of firms recognized for their work—life initiatives were more likely than those of competitors to emphasize the value of employees and less likely to stress shareholder value. We identified four types of mission statements, a pattern which may reflect the dual influences of distinctive organizational commitments and pressure from institutional actors. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on work—life initiatives, strategic implementation, and organizational theory.

Mothers in Finance: Surviving and Thriving

This article explores two dimensions of well-being among five hundred finance managers and professionals in a large firm: higher income, which we regard as a proxy for career success, and work-family balance. These dimensions are partially incompatible: longer work hours are associated with higher earnings and with intensified conflict. Mothers are more likely than fathers to experience work-family conflict. Work that is overwhelming and unpredictable can exacerbate conflict, while workplace flexibility can alleviate it. Among men, using dependent care policies is associated with lower earnings. We find an earnings gap between men and women in the sample but no earnings penalty for mothers relative to other female respondents. Although women are less likely than men to combine parenting with careers at this firm, the mothers still at the firm may be unusually successful compared to their female coworkers.

JOB-LEVEL SEX COMPOSITION AND THE SEX PAY GAP IN A LARGE JAPANESE FIRM

While researchers are giving increasing attention to the sex pay gap in Japan, most work focuses on womens lack of access to long-term employment and seniority wages, thus neglecting sex-based wage inequality among regular workers in large firms. Analyzing data collected from a sample of regular male and female workers employed by a large, export-oriented Japanese manufacturing firm, we examine the sources of the sex pay gap among this group of workers. Consistent with previous research on regular workers in Japan, we find that age affects the wages of both women and men and that sex differences in age also help to explain the sex pay gap. In addition, however, we find that womens wages but not mens are negatively affected by the percentage of women in the job and by holding a job that is shared with nonregular workers. Moreover, we find that women are penalized more than men for these job characteristics. Hence, while female regular workers in Japan may be relatively advantaged as compared to other employed women, we find that they also experience a sex pay gap and that this gap stems in part from the wage penalties associated with working in a predominantly female job.

Work and Emotions

Sociological interest in work and emotions is flourishing. This enthusiasm has been shared by organizational researchers, whose field has experienced an “affective revolution” over the past few decades. Sociological and organizational approaches to emotion differ in scope and focus, but also have points of convergence. This chapter explores these issues by engaging both the sociological and organizational literatures on work and emotion. Two broad research areas are examined. One is the study of emotional expression, which encompasses efforts to understand more spontaneous and “extra-organizational” aspects of emotionality at work. The second focuses on emotional regulation, which includes emotional labor, as well as research on the regulation, structuring, and management of emotion. This review demonstrates that emotion has made its way into virtually every aspect of the study of work and helped reframe understanding of fundamental workplace processes, such as inequality, and outcomes like performance that are of particular concern in organizational research. The United States is now on the verge of a “new economy,” whose features diverge from the service economy of the past. Identifying what lines of emotion research are most critical to understanding the twenty-first century workplace is an important task.

The Sociology of Arlie Hochschild

Arlie Hochschild is one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her many contributions include her research on emotion and emotion work, the gender division of labor in the household, work–family relations, and the global dimensions of carework. A less visible aspect of Hochschild’s career involves her efforts to nurture, encourage, and engage those inspired by her work. This essay examines Hochschild’s influence as revealed in a new book on work and family life edited by two of her former students. The book offers a look at “Hochschildian sociology” as practiced by those who have expanded and built on her ideas.