Ideal or Idiosyncratic? How Women Manage Work-Family Role Conflict with Focal and Peripheral Role Senders

To provide insight into women’s approaches to managing the work-family interface, I introduce the concepts of focal and peripheral role senders and illuminate the importance of their interplay in the enactment of women’s domestic roles. At the core of my theoretical model is the process by which focal and peripheral role senders embrace or reject an ideal enactment of domestic roles and the women’s strategies women use to either acquiesce to ideal roles or acquire idiosyncratic roles. This paper examines the husband as the focal role sender, consistent with the literature’s focus and the pervasiveness of husbands in my data, and considers peripheral role senders, such as parents and in-laws, who also influence women’s role enactment, either by amplifying or muting the husband’s preferred role enactment. This research contributes to existing theory by introducing the importance of focal and peripheral role senders, illuminating how these multiple senders and their interaction influence women’s strategies to deal with role conflict, and documenting how women’s strategies subsequently influence their career trajectories.