Gender, Discourse and Organization: Framing a Shifting Relationship

Gender, Discourse and Organization: Framing a Shifting Relationship

Over the past thirty years, scholars have developed complex accounts of the connections among gender, discourse and organization. Increasingly, discourse is thought to constitute–not simply to reflect–gender, organization, and their seemingly inevitable intersection. Speaking generally, the cumulative impact of this shift in view is that it destabilizes enduring notions of organization and gender as fixed entities and identities that meet in measurable ways. It highlights how discursive activity continuously creates, solidifies, disrupts and alters gendered selves and organizational forms. As such, the discursive turn in this line of inquiry points to possibilities for revising relations of power.

Although many scholars have come to embrace the gender-discourse-organization link, they often diverge, at least implicitly, in how they cast the trifold relationship. Discourse, organization and gender alternately appear as figure and ground, producer and product, subject and context, leading and supporting character, and so forth. This chapter rests on the premise that while diverse views of discourse can enrich inquiry, a guide that characterizes common ways of seeing can enhance dialogue, clarifying points of agreement and tension among perspectives. Although several authors have reviewed literature on gender and organization (Calás & Smircich, 1996; Hearn & Parkin, 1983; Meyerson & Kolb, 2000; Mumby, 1996), few have directly considered varied conceptions of discourse across this work. This chapter is thus distinct in its focus on the relation between gender scholarship and the discursive turn in organization studies.

The chapter combs relevant literature with an eye for tacit depictions of the relationship among discourse, gender and organization. Specifically, I identify four prevailing ways of ‘framing’, or seeing, the nature and function of discourse; Table 12.1 condenses the key assumptions of each lens. With the term ‘fram ing’, I mean to avoid the image of durable mental maps and, instead, to evoke implicit [Page 276]viewpoints, shared by certain approaches to research, which illuminate particular features yet remain provisional, able to engage the alternate perspectives they obscure. As with any effort to categorize, my model assumes probable risks–for example, reducing complexity and diminishing some commonalties in favour of others. Certainly, I acknowledge the viability of other schemas, as well as the presence of overlap across my own categories. As elaborated in the chapter's conclusion, the four perspectives can be said to circulate in productive tension; they converge and conflict, calling attention to different facets of discourse and associated implications. Ultimately, my hope is that this effort to organize and simplify scholarship can stimulate new ways of seeing.

For each of the four modes of framing, I describe basic assumptions, illustrative literature, key contributions and troublesome matters. I order my discussion of perspectives in terms of their relative emphasis on ‘micro’ to ‘macro’ dimensions of discourse. A first perspective sees discourse as effect or outcome, stressing how gender shapes such organizational communication habits as linguistic choices and leadership tactics. The remaining three perspectives view discourse as constitutive, though in different ways. A second view underscores how everyday talk manufactures gender subjectivities, and so treats discourse as an ongoing, generative, interactive identity performance. Shifting to an institutional level, a third perspective views discourse as a narrative of gender and power relations that gels into organizational design and thereby fosters gendered interaction among members. Increasingly, this lens promotes a two-dimensional view of discourse an ongoing dialectic between the abstract ‘text’ latent in organizational form and the concrete ‘conversations’ that enact the text (e.g., Taylor, 1993). A fourth way of framing looks beyond organizations per se to inspect cultural discourses that arrange gender and labour. Through this lens, discourse is social text–large-scale formations or scripts that engender possible selves and social relations. Across gender and organization research, then, discourse carries at least four meanings: (a) engrained personal communication style; (b) the process of mundane interaction; (c) organizational form; and (d) societal narrative. The last three meanings are most germane to the discursive turn in gender and organization studies, for they inform the constitutive power of micro (i.e., interactional), meso (i.e., institutional), and macro (i.e., societal) levels of discourse.

...