Narratives by women managers about spousal support for their careers

Abstract
In this article we present a qualitative study of spousal support for the careers of women managers. The research material consists of the narratives of 25 women managers in Finland. The study has two main implications. Firstly, unlike previous studies, we use a narrative approach to demonstrate that a woman manager's career and spousal support are experienced as ambiguous and evolving over the career. The support was constructed by the women managers as flourishing, irrelevant, deficient or inconsistent. Secondly, to increase our knowledge about gender relations, we combine discussion of the topic with gender order analysis and suggest that gender order is critical for an understanding of the nature of spousal support. We conclude that a male spouse who is willing to break the traditional gender order and provide his wife with various forms of support is often constructed as having a positive influence on the career of his woman manager wife. The study calls attention to families as sites of doing gender.
Main Authors
Format
Articles Journal article
Published
2014
Series
Subjects
Publisher
Elsevier
The permanent address of the publication
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-201306202026Use this for linking
Review status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0956-5221
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2013.04.004
Language
English
Published in
Scandinavian Journal of Management
Citation
  • Heikkinen, S., Lämsä, A-M. & Hiillos, M. (2014). Narratives by women managers about spousal support for their careers, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30 (1), 27-39. doi:10.1016/j.scaman.2013.04.004
License
In CopyrightOpen Access
Copyright© 2013 Elsevier Ltd. This is an author's final draft version whose final and defenitive form has been published by Elsevier.

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