Ebook: Change In The Feminine : Women In Change

Change in the feminine: women in changeThe feminine fascinates us. We are drawn to it and we retreat from it. We cherish it andwe victimise it. From Jean Baudrillard who warns us of its playful seductiveness toVirginia Woolf who anxiously questioned the trappings of “what is a woman?” thedebates surrounding changes in, and of, the feminine permeate all avenues of socialand organizational existence. We are bound by its history and exited by its potential torewrite history.We try to emancipate it, and yet, we continue to appropriate it as other.In management, the role and trends surrounding women’s employment, their workingexperiences and the significance of organizational culture have been long documented(Gherardi, 1995; Ledwith and Colgan, 1996; Maddock, 1999; Vinnicombe et al., 2004;Vinnicombe, 2003). Women’s apparent changing status and role in the city (Darke et al.,2000), transport (Grieco et al., 1989, 1996), health (Bolton, 2005), trade unions (Colganand Ledwith, 2002, 2005), academia (Eveline, 2004), entrepreneurship (Bruni et al.,2005) and the sex industry (Nencel, 2001; Brewis and Linstead, 2000) have been richlydocumented. This issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management bringstogether contributors with an interest in gendering change management.There has been considerable interest in attempting to survey the impact, or lack ofit, of often radical organizational changes – such as restructuring, downsizing,virtualisation, globalisation, managing diversity and equal opportunity legislation –on the “glass ceiling”. Findings seem to indicate that the representation of women inmanagement positions has changed relatively little in most occupations. The“feminisation of management” has been said to challenge masculinist practices oforganizational life by offering new possibilities for women as their “special” skills andqualities are recognised and rewarded. Postmodern critiques of paying heightenedattention to women and the workplace processes of feminisation suggest that wemerely reinforce the dominance of masculine representations of organization andmanagement by recognising its “other” as subordinate. Changes in masculinities havebeen noted as men seek to acquire some of these essential feminine skills forthemselves. Yet the feminine is itself not fixed and things clearly are not staying thesame with femininity. Something is happening, but what is it?This special issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management notonly analyses the position of women involved in change but also in how our understanding of “the feminine” feeds into and is being changed by contemporaryorganizational experiences. Whilst we are interested in the position, experiencesand accounts of women engaged in transformative processes, we wish to consider“the feminine” as a quality which may be possessed and expressed by those whoare not necessarily biological women. With this dualistic focus, then, this issueChange in the Feminine: Women in Change offers some of the latest thinkingaround feminine managers managing change as in the case of Miller’s study ofmale managers managing change femininely; feminine change agents – internal orexternal consultants – facilitating change as Linstead et al. and Baxter andMacLeod contest; feminine entrepreneurs as in Hytti’s narrative study of Marge;work by feminine theorists theorising change as in Eveline and Tyler’s feministphilosophical treatment of change management; and feminist critiques of managingchange as in Rippin’s autoethnographical study of Marks and Spencer. In each oftheir ways the contributors to the issue explore the feminine from differenttheoretically diverse fields from operations management to critical managementstudies; the ground breaking ideas of De Beauvoir to feminist treatments ofDeleuze and Guattari; and methodologically from action learning to narrativeresearch. Yet all the contributors recognise the feminine as abject.The issue begins with a review piece by Steve Linstead, Jo Brewis and myself toscope the arguments around the broad area of gender and change. This paper offers acritical review of existing contributions to gender and change management and indoing so highlights how organizational change needs to be read more readily from agendered perspective. The paper acknowledges that gender has received little attentionregarding the change management side of managerial practice and questions how menand women both cope with and drive change and whether the differences are morethan superficial; the concept of gender is read into management theory to demonstratehow gender affects the way managers think and act; the gendering of management isdiscussed to critique traditional and dominant conceptions of masculine and femininevalues which rely on static conceptions of gender to argue for more attention to be paidto the dynamic, the genderful. The paper concludes by outlining future research areas.Melissa Tyler’s paper “Women in change management: Simone De Beauvoir andthe co-optation of Otherness” offers us a critical reflection of the sexually differentiatednature of organizational change management discourse. In doing so Melissa draws onwhat she argues has been largely under-theorised work of feminist Simone DeBeauvoir’s analysis of woman as other developed in The Second Sex. Tyler argues that“the incorporation into organizational processes of what have come to be regarded aswomen’s tacit skills in people and change management relies upon a co-optation ofwomen’s ascribed otherness, as outlined by De Beauvoir; one that reifies a hierarchicaldistortion of sexual difference rather than provides the basis for a genuine valorisationof femininity”. Tyler enables us to see the relational nature of the feminine – thefeminine is both appropriated, repressed and oppressed and at the same time it has thepotential to challenge, resist and subvert organizational norms by being wonderfullyand powerfully seductive and transgressive.Taking the theme of woman as other further, Ann Rippin offers a novel and texturedaccount of change in one of the UK’s most recognisable brands, Marks and Spencer asout third paper in the issue. In this paper Ann genders change by storying the history,development and fall of M&S to provide a gendered reading of the M&S story which she uses for her managing change teaching. This paper explores the genderednarratives of change management at Marks and Spencer and uses them as a lens toconsider the gendered nature of the change process itself. Two extant stories: SleepingBeauty and the Trojan War are taken, along with the cultural archetype of theAmerican West gunslinger to explore the gender aspects of change. The Marks andSpencer case is analysed using the corollary patriarchal narrative of Sleeping Beauty, astory whose organising logic is revealed as one of concern for patriarchal lineage, andlegitimate succession. Ann’s analysis highlights how this narrative is saturated inmisogyny, aggression and violence. This violence, which is shown to characterise theMarks and Spencer case, is amplified in the second narrative, the Trojan War, in thehighly personalised battles of the u¨ber-warriors of The Iliad. The paper, which drawson the Marks and Spencer principals’ memoirs and biographies and employing acombination of autoethnographical approaches and narrative analysis, concludes thatviolent, hyper-masculine behaviour creates and maintains a destructive cycle ofleadership lionisation and failure at the company which precludes a more feminine andpossibly more effective construction of change management.The fourth paper in the issue “New Meanings for Entrepreneurs: from risk-takingheroes to safe-seeking professionals” offers us a narrative study of a femaleentrepreneur which is a very under represented area in the change literature. Ulla Hyttiargues that “viewing entrepreneurship in the context of shifting career roles andprofessional identities, gendered organizational life and in the current societal contextregarding working life (ageing, gender discrimination) provides us with new lensesand enables us to perceive entrepreneurial identity as fluid and emergent. In this paperidentities, organizations and societies in change form the basis for entrepreneurship inour current lives”. Ulla’s treatment of entrepreneurship as a social process constrainedby time and place allows it to gain new meanings and understandings of security,reliability, risk-moderation that it has not previously seen to possess. The paperpresents the connections of time and place for entrepreneurship; first, bydemonstrating how entrepreneurship as a phenomenon reflects the time and place ofinvestigation; second, how time and place are applied as important elements in theindividual story presented in the paper, and, third, how readings of time and narrativeare applied to make sense of entrepreneurship in the story. As a result, the paperrefuses the research of entrepreneurs as a general overriding category and the quest forthe “Theory of Entrepreneurship”.The fifth contribution by Sallyanne Miller entitled “Men working differently:accessing their inner-feminine” presents an account of the development of groupsengaged in an action learning project focussing on improving service quality andleadership development. The groups comprised male managers working in a largeAustralian bank whose values and norms were dominated by discourses of traditionalhegemonic masculinity. Analysis of the groups’ processes reveals the connectionbetween the development of the groups in relation to authority, and the changes in themanagers’ behaviour over a period of 12 months during which they began to behave inways typically characterised as feminine. The paper concludes that a significant factorin developing men’s management and leadership capabilities is peer learning,and engagement with authority in ways that are not dissimilar to the experiences ofthe adolescent and young adult in relation to peers and parents. In this way, this paperoffers a further development of Reid’s concept of the “Authority Cycle”. Recognising the gender-blind nature of the field of operations, the sixth paperbrings gender to the forefront of managing change in operations environments. LynneBaxter and Alasdair McLeod paper “Shifting forms of masculinity in changingorganizations: the role of testicularity” employs an under-utilised concept oftesticularity put forward by Flannigan-Saint-Aubin (1994) to explain a shift inhegemonic masculinities in two organizations which were unusual in being successfulin realizing their aims for quality improvement. Their two case studies instigatedchange processes, which created opportunities for women employees, sometimes at theexpense of men. Lynne and Alasdair’s paper contrasts findings from previous studiesthat has discussed whether organization change can represent a feminising of theworkplace to argue that organizational masculinity remained unchallenged.Flannigan-Saint-Aubin’s concept argues for positive aspects of masculinities in agrowing literature which has a tendency to focus on the negative. Lynne and Alasdair,drawing extensively on Flannigan-Saint-Aubin concept of masculinity, argues that“masculinity is experienced as constant insecurity in the face of feminine absorption”(Flannigan-Saint-Aubin, 1994, p. 245). Lynne and Alistair argue that shifts in genderperformance are a useful way of exploring organization change.To conclude this issue the final paper by Joan Eveline “Woman in the ivory tower:gendering feminised and masculinised identities” investigates “the forces, intensitiesand desires shaping and reshaping what the feminised leader can represent in arestructuring organization” – namely a university akin to Eveline’s extensiveempirical work on women in academia in Australia. Eveline is concerned in this pieceto explore the gendering that a woman vice-chancellor which in itself a rare sampleundertakes as a feminist and masculinist leader and change agent. In this paperEveline not only explores the gendering of change through presenting rich narrative ofa female Vice Chancellor, she draws on Gatens and Deleuze and Guatarri, toempirically explore gender as change. This paper makes an important contribution togendering the change management literature at the level of female change agents.Eveline reminds each of us how society at large and the experiences of the everydaynot only shapes our experiences as gendered subjects which produces and reproducesdiscrimination, she reminds us that resistance, however subtle and disguised, has thepotential to challenge gender inequality even when it is in our own backyard.All we need is a politics of care, a deep concern for the other, the other within. Thefeminine. Alison Linstead Previously published in: Journal of Organizational Change Management, Volume 18, Number 6, 2005