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Structuring Commitments in Interrupted Careers: Career Breaks, Commitment and the Life Cycle in Teaching
Author(s) -
Healy Geraldine
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
gender, work and organization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.159
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0432
pISSN - 0968-6673
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0432.00082
Subject(s) - structuring , neglect , economic shortage , work (physics) , social psychology , psychology , demographics , sociology , public relations , political science , engineering , mechanical engineering , linguistics , philosophy , psychiatry , government (linguistics) , law , demography
Recent interest in work commitment has been within a unitary paradigm in both the sociological literature on women's commitment to work and in the human resource management literature on the need to generate commitment to work. The paper argues that the ‘commitment concept’ is a social construction with a multiplicity of meanings and that its usage is subjective, contradictory, temporal and frequently gendered. Debates focusing on the ‘masculine’ job model of commitment tend to provide only partial insights by an emphasis on the continuous, linear career and thereby neglect, or negate, the work commitment of women who take a career break. Drawing on a large study of professional teachers, the paper enables a comparison of commitment indicators between stages within a life history and between ‘returners’ and other respondents. The findings demonstrate how commitments change over time and indicate that the commitments of returners are the outcome of the interplay between ‘choices’ and the different structural conditions they encounter during their life cycle which may lead to ‘career curtailment’ or, in times of labour shortages, career opportunities.