Mary Blair-Loy has a B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and an M.Div. from Harvard University. She uses multiple methods to study gender, work, and family, with a focus on how human agency is constrained and enabled by social and cultural structures. She studies elite workers in demanding and compelling jobs. Her book, Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives (Harvard University Press), shows how the morally and emotionally salient cultural schemas of work devotion and family devotion help structure the institutions of the capitalist firm and the nuclear family in the U.S. and help shape women’s actions. Competing Devotions won the 2005 William J. Goode Book Award, sponsored by the ASA Section on the Family. Her forthcoming work addresses these issues among male executives. Further, Blair-Loy analyzes the causes and consequences of the institutionalization of contested work-family olicies in a large financial services firm with Amy S. Wharton and studies organizational ideologies with Wharton and Jerry Goodstein.
