Gender, Power and Organization

A psychological perspective on life at work

Paula Nicolson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317537298
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Work organizations are a major site of gender politics for professional women and men, and although there are more women in senior positions than ever before, these increased opportunities have not been gained without psychological consequences. Evidence-based and theoretically driven, the new edition of Gender, Power and Organization raises important questions about gender and power in the workplace, and the psychology of women's advancement. Twenty years on from the first edition, it re-examines gender relations at work and asks why, despite many years of feminist critique and action, we are able to understand the dynamics of the workplace but fail to make them more representative. The struggles women face in professional and public life remain intense, not least because many men experience an increasing sense of threat to their long-term aspirations and professional positions.

Using examples from recent research and the author's own consultancy experience, this important volume offers a fresh exploration of the psychology of gender and power at work, from the development of gender identities and roles, to explanations of bullying and sexual harassment in the organization. It offers an accessible survey of the subject for professional managers and students of leadership, psychology, management, sociology, gender, and women's studies.

1
Biography, Biology and Career

Introduction

Below I set out the core theoretical framework, the material-discursiveintra-psychic (MDI) approach that I use to develop a psychological analysis of gender, power and organization in the fast-changing world of the twenty-first century.

• I review ways in which patriarchal organizations can be understood through an MDI lens.
• I also explore how biography, biology and career can be examined and explained through this framework.

In this chapter, biography, biology and career, the interrelationships between the gendered social context (from that of the family, the organization and the socio-political culture) and the developing individual woman and man are explored. Biography refers to an individual’s life up to the point of discussion and includes a sense of the meaning that person gives it. Biology refers to sex and gender as well as health. Career is primarily about work career but also about other aspects including informal organizational relationships and dynamics, family life and leisure.

Clues to gendered behaviours, power and social and organizational changes lie variously in understanding biographies, biology and career through a series of lenses that take account of how ‘family’ and ‘organization’ exist chronologically (Archer and Lloyd, 2002; Carter and Levy, 1988; Martin and Ruble, 2010); that is, how early socialization and family interactions and relationships impact on adult experiences, emotions and behaviour in work organizations (Carless, 1998; Eagly and Carli, 2003; Ely, 1995; Evans, 2002; Gerber, 1991). Thus, in a simplistic case, a girl might see the adult man/father as head of the household. A boy might see his mother or sister in need of protection (Dryden et al., 2009). As children develop and become independent of their family they shed (at least consciously) some of these ideas.

However, there is also a powerful level at which impressions and family power relations experienced and witnessed in infancy and childhood remain with us, outside chronological development and beyond what we might see as ‘rational’ thinking and behaviour. In other words, without a conscious awareness we frequently ‘bring our family to work’ (Ackerman, 1972; Bettman, 2009; Eriksen and Jensen, 2009; Goldner et al., 1990). A female manager, without thinking, might treat or experience her male boss as she would her older brother or father and so on. These relationships exist on an unconscious or at least semi-conscious level and are shot through with power and gender dimensions (Klein, 1946; Nicolson, 2012; Segal and Klein, 1973).

However, it is not just the individual who carries forward those early experiences. Families themselves have life cycles that in many ways mirror the processes that occur in organizations thus underscoring and emphasizing the early patterns in all of us that influence expectations of others and our relationships with them (Dallos and Draper, 2010). Dallos and Draper propose that families evolve and develop, and negotiate their way in their internal and external worlds. These interconnected areas are the social, cultural and spiritual; the familial (how relationships are managed within the family); and the personal (personal beliefs and experiences).

To take these ideas further, then, in what follows I develop this representation to set out the core theoretical framework, of a material-discursive-intra-psychic (MDI) approach as the means to analyse those interrelationships via a critical lens also involving psychosocial development and systems theory (Nicolson, 2014). Making sense of the story of each of our lives and decision-making, from our early days through various stages of our career, comes through an analysis and understanding of biology, psychology, culture, politics and history. These are the components described in the MDI approach.

We develop our biography, the story of our life, as we both live it and make our own sense of it, in the social, biological and psychological contexts we experience and inhabit. Further, we engage with our physical and social worlds through thinking, imagining and feeling and all of the others who interact with us in our worlds, families, school, social groups and in work organizations, are reflected upon and consequently influence us similarly. The MDI framework takes account of all these dimensions. So what do I mean by MDI?

The material

The ‘material’ is two-fold. It refers first to the physical social context in which we develop and live, involving ingredients such as the community, the quality of the built environment and our economic status; and second to the biological materiality of our bodies and health, which includes our sex, age, physical abilities, intellectual capacities and appearance (Luyt, 2003; Ussher, 2006; Yardley, 1996). These lists are not mutually exclusive.

The material context, represented by our own biological make-up including individual characteristics such as our sex, our body shape, size, colour, ethnicity and health, also includes the physical, economic and political culture that gives meaning to the biological. All of these elements, as you will see, are located within historical contexts, and different meanings are attributed to social and biological contexts over time.

The material context

Physical environment	Housing, family type and size, economic status, community, physical environment and location of the organization.
Biological environment	Genetic status, sex, ethnicity, appearance and the meaning we, and others, attribute to it.
Interpersonal environment	Number and quality of friendships, work culture, personal status, community culture and family. Power dynamics, communication strategies and patterns and relationships.

The material context is made up of overlapping elements and, as I suggested above, the material is not mutually exclusive but has common characteristics with the discursive and intra-psychic elements.

Gender (Ely, 1995) is an important part of the material context that also links with our discursive and intra-psychic status in that it forms a bridge between our understanding of our sex and what being a man or a woman means in the social context in which we live. Gender and its practices (that is, how we behave and think in gendered ways) have involved different experiences embracing different values across time.

To illustrate this there are many examples but I have chosen one from the nineteenth-century Spanish novel Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós. The former is born into poverty although possessed by physical beauty. This brings her to the attention of a rich, spoilt, society man, Juan who, despite having an affair with Fortunata resulting in her pregnancy, goes on to marry his cousin, Jacinta, a social equal. Despite their physical passion Juan does not continue the affair with Fortunata until she herself has married, which gives him (he thinks) protection against any demand she might make to have a legitimate relationship with him. Their relationship ends mostly in tragedy for all involved but Fortunata and several of the other women in this complex story identify female rivals for the love and attention of men as their enemy. Women in the nineteenth century practised gender in different ways from the late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century feminists, and did so according to the biological material conditions of their time such as their appearance and the socio-material conditions of their social and economic status.

A more contemporary example of how the material context impacts upon power is perhaps well illustrated by the British political elite in the early twenty-first century, most of whom are public school educated men from economically and socially privileged backgrounds. The more populist among them also appear to have appealing physical characteristics that suggest the ‘jovial man next door’ who might chat to you informally, or the humorous ‘rake’–both types of whom seem able to charm women and men in a non-threatening way. These men are portrayed as somehow ‘harmless’ as they are affable and apparently accessible. But this is not a reflection of reality in that such men, still representing a sexist patriarchal culture, are just as inaccessible and unrepresentative in the twenty-first century as they were in the nineteenth.

The discursive

The ‘discursive’ refers to the way our worlds and behaviours, or social practices, are talked about, portrayed and constrained by the dominant discourses in society (Foucault, 1982) so that some ideas, such as those about gender roles for instance, constrain our imagination and actions precluding alternative discourses (Bettman, 2009; Girard, 2009).

Gender, if you are thinking discursively, is a social construction in that it is subject to popular and influential belief systems, as with Fortunata above for instance, or the men who are ‘entitled’ to power. It is frequently suggested by the mass media, casually, that gender is ‘hard wired’ into our brains (Hyde, 2007; Schore, 2001). This discourse evolved from the relatively recent burgeoning of theories connected with the mapping of the human genome and the increased ability to use brain scanning to observe the effects of specific stimulation and patterns in brain activities (Baron-Cohen, 2004). But discourse, as a constraint on behaviour and psychological functioning, is not only related to contemporary technology as with the discourses surrounding the genome. Each historical period characterized by predominant value systems and political ideologies involves discursive practices that impact on how we act and think about our lives (Fine, 2011). As Cordelia Fine argues, ‘that there must be hardwired psychological differences between the sexes also appears to enjoy impressive scientific support’ (p. xxi) as the explanations fit neatly into a story that we can see represented in our lives at home and at work.

But discursive practices supported through popular rhetoric change over time. It is likely, for example, that a girl at school in the 1960s would have been encouraged to excel in needlework or cookery rather than technical subjects which might have made her think that an interest in engineering was undesirable. Similarly a boy might have been subtly discouraged from taking part in ‘softer’ school subjects such as art or modern languages, in favour of science through watching images on television or hearing discussion in which men were scientists and girls linguists. What we don’t know is how many female engineers might have reached the top of their professions today if a different set of messages had been around.

Contemporary rhetoric, to some extent, eschews the idea of feminism in favour of a belief that success in this apparent post-feminist era is up to each individual regardless of gender. This discourse is more pervasive in the twenty-first century than it was in the mid-1990s when this book was first published (Dias and Blecha, 2007; McRobbie, 2004).

Feminism, which for many, like myself, represented a means of asserting equality between women and men in a range of social and psychological spheres, has been subject to discursive change. It was in the 1950s a means of liberating women from domestic drudgery and demonstrating that women were as able as men to work successfully outside the home (Sayers, 1986); in the 1980s and 1990s it became a rallying cry for the ambitious woman to have faith in herself and her ‘sisters’ in arms (see Nicolson, 1996). By the twenty-first century feminism was, to some, discredited in that younger women were, paradoxically, influenced by the vision of themselves as equal and just as likely to succeed as their male counterparts. Sadly, and frequently, it isn’t until young women become mothers that they realise the extent to which they might have been duped by contemporary post-and anti-feminist discourse (Nicolson, 1998, 2003).

It is easy to see how a discursive perspective is also valuable to feminists. Post-modern critiques, which take apart, or deconstruct, ideas and meanings of taken-for-granted concepts such as ‘power’ or ‘marriage’ or ‘success’, enable the identification of linguistic repertoires leading to exposure of structural power relations (Edley, 2001; Wetherell and Edley, 1999). By this I mean that we can begin to understand the power of mere ‘talk’ as a means of influencing what we all take to be immutable social or psychological truths. This involves statements such as leaders are made not born, success is making more money than your colleagues, power means getting people to do what you want and so on. At various times in recent history all of these ideas have been influential and have had an impact on how we see ourselves and evaluate our behaviours in relation to others.

Thus, such an emphasis on language and power in discourse accounts for the continuity and contradictions in human interactions and emotion (Weedon, 1987). So, in the process of deconstructing the ‘subject-as-agent and the unitary individual… [discourse] provides a critique which gets underneath what is taken for granted by those terms’ (Hollway, 1989: 31). That is, we always need to look under the surface of what is being said and believed, particularly when it appears that an idea or a particular practice is indisputable.

It is also significant though to see how some feminists have found this approach to deconstructing gender–power relations to be unacceptable. Questions have been raised about the complex tension between a discursive approach to gender–power relations and the personal experience of subjectivity, or being a person with a sense of identity and continuity. My belief is that to exclude a sense of the individual from critical and feminist psychology is unproductive in the long term, and increases the widening gap between feminist psychologists and the women who might benefit from their analysis of gender–power relations (Dryden et al., 2009; Tunaley, 1994). However, I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and have therefore tried to emphasize the discursive context as important within a framework that also takes the bio-and socio-material and intrapsychic contexts just as seriously. Even so it needs to be stressed that the theory and practice of discourse analysis has been exceptional in denting the positivist barriers of academic psychology, while being mindful of the danger of losing its grounding in everyday life (see Lewis, 1995). For these reasons using discursive practices within the MDI framework takes the best processes of deconstruction of rhetoric and discourse but takes identity seriously as well (Nicolson, 2010).

The intrapsychic

The ‘intrapsychic’ refers to the world of conscious and unconscious experiences that comprise our internal worlds. These involve our sense of who we are, reflected in our biographies (Gough, 2004; Hyde, 2006; Theodosius, 2006), our emotional responses to relationships that seem understandable and those that are apparently irrational, and feelings that we cannot always explain to ourselves or to others (Segal, 1993). While this perspective owes much to classical psychoanalysis it goes beyond looking at defence mechanisms and the unconscious drives. To understand the impact of each of our internal worlds upon the ways we live our lives we need to revisit the very early minutes, days and months of life. Birth itself is a traumatic experience–passing through a narrow passageway into (frequently) a brightly lit, noisy environment where you are weighed, measured, cleaned up and eventually fed. The latter is something you need to learn fast if you are to survive. Equally you are dependent on the will and abilities of those adults who will keep you safe, warm and nourished. The uncertainty surrounding such early and highly dramatic experiences frame the ways in which we make sense of a whole variety of social interactions that eventually become part of our internal intellectual world. But the origins of these lie in a primitive, preverbal sense of trust and safety and from that a primitive feeling of our worth and who we are to become (Klein, 1953, 1959/1975).

It is clear also that a central task of infancy is making the most of opportunities to make attachments, if possible, to adults who are caring and interested in your welfare. If these attachments are positive then it is likely that throughout life such a person will have the desire and ability to work cooperatively with others whom they trust but do not entirely depend upon (Bowlby, 1988). Those of us who make positive attachments in this way are also likely to be empathic and understand others’ feelings, behaviours and motivations (Fonagy, 2000). For those who have negative experiences and experience neglect and/or abuse from those who are supposed to care for them may develop a disorganized attachment pattern which will not be particularly conducive to their development or careers (Bifulco et al., 2003; Shemmings et al., 2012).

Beyond MDI

In a variety of ways all individuals exist in some relation to their social context so that being comfortable with one’s own gender is a prerequisite for emotional health and there is evidence of distress for those who are not so. However, being an ambitious and successful woman has been seen as inimical to femininity, or at least it was in the late twentieth century.

How far have things changed? Can an MDI approach provide a means of making sense of the complexities of gender and power in contemporary ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: gender and career in organizations
• 1 Biography, biology and career
• 2 Femininity, masculinity and organization
• 3 Gender at work
• 4 Still in the shadow of the glass ceiling?
• 5 Sexuality, power and organization
• 6 Gender, power and leadership
• Conclusions
• References
• Index