Filling in the gaps: Individual responses to institutional policies
Catherine Richards Solomon, Ph.D. candidate
Sociology Department, Syracuse University
Work/family scholars have increasingly paid attention to how college faculty negotiate work and family responsibilities. The primary inquiry has been into how female professors with children manage such duties. My dissertation, which uses feminist theory and symbolic interactionist perspective, extends previous work by examining how untenured assistant professors with and without children make sense of occupational norms and expectations when creating their professional and personal lives. These topics are explored using in-depth interviews with 37 male and female untenured assistant professors from two research universities in a northeastern state.
My research shows that these professors enjoyed how autonomous their jobs were, their flexible schedules, and the engaging nature of their work. Their occupation also had ambiguous and high expectations of productivity as well as a norm that work would be participants’ sole priority (Acker’s (1990) disembodied worker norm). Pressure to be disembodied workers came from internal and external sources and was tied to the sense of identity that participants got from their work. Career norms and expectations organized how these participants negotiated their professional and personal lives, as did their family circumstances, gender, and race. University work/family policies also played a part in how these workers made decisions about their personal lives.