Using any TWO (2) organizational communication processes or approaches discussed this semester, demonstrate using a case of y

Engaging Organizational Communication Theory & Research: Multiple Perspectives

Feminist Organizational Communication Studies: Engaging Gender in Public and Private

Contributors: Author:Karen Lee Ashcraft

Edited by: Steve May & Dennis K. Mumby

Book Title: Engaging Organizational Communication Theory & Research: Multiple Perspectives

Chapter Title: "Feminist Organizational Communication Studies: Engaging Gender in Public and Private"

Pub. Date: 2005

Access Date: October 7, 2020

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9780761928492

Online ISBN: 9781452204536

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452204536.n7

Print pages: 141-170

© 2005 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online

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Feminist Organizational Communication Studies: Engaging Gender in Public and Private

Feminist organizational communication studies: Engaging gender in public and private Karen LeeAshcraft

About 10 years ago, this would have been a short chapter—more like a wishful leaflet. A handful of essays, few appearing in our field's major journals, considered the prospect of feminist approaches to organizational communication (e.g., Buzzanell, 1994; Calás & Smircich, 1992; Fine, 1993; Marshall, 1993; Mills & Chiaramonte, 1991). Most of these works hovered at the conceptual level. Little, if any, published work applied feminist perspectives to empirical studies of organizational practice (for some exceptions, see Lont, 1988, and Seccombe-Eastland, 1988). As the mid-1990s drew near, feminist theory lingered on the fringes of the organizational communication literature, while feminist research was scarcely more than a promise.

Unlike most tales of disciplinary history, this one I experienced first-hand. As a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I was attempting to craft a research program around the study of gender and organization. My development as a scholar thus coincided with the emergence of feminism in organizational communication; that is, my academic identity and work were taking shape just as feminism was finding a foothold in the field (e.g., Ashcraft, 1998). Later in this chapter, I consider how my own efforts to study gender and organization affirm feminist interest in the political relations between private experience and public knowledge. For now, I'll begin by observing that, from my vantage point, the virtual explosion of feminist organizational communication studies over the last decade appears remarkable. Arguably, feminist scholarship has almost become part of the mainstream of our field, even as it simultaneously clings to a marginal position. It frequently fills our conference programs and graces our “top paper” panels, and it often appears in our major journals. Most textbooks and anthologies that survey organizational communication theory (such as this one) now attend to feminist perspectives. At least in my view, there can be little doubt that feminism is truly “gaining a voice” in our field (Buzzanell, 1994). As I explain in the conclusion of this chapter, I believe that the strength of that voice distinguishes communication from cognate areas of organization theory and research (for example, management and organizational sociology), suggesting unique opportunities for feminist communication scholars.

This chapter considers the development, momentum, and future of feminist voices in organizational communication studies. I am centrally concerned with scholarship that addresses social institutions as gendered formations and, more specifically, that takes communication as a pivotal process that organizes gender and genders organization. I begin by sketching the origins and history of this area of inquiry. Next, I outline key premises that tend to bind feminist organizational communication scholars. By exploring my own ambivalent experience as a scholar in this area, I seek to surface some of the complex tensions entailed in doing feminist theory. I conclude by considering the potential contributions of feminist communication theory to the study of organizing.

Choosing a Backdrop: The Politics of Origins (Or, Why Roots Matter)

The evolution of feminist organizational communication scholarship could be narrated in multiple ways. I might start, for example, with the rise of gender difference research, which arguably introduced gender as a variable relevant to predicting organizational behavior. A different account seems to hold sway among the organizational communication community, where feminist scholarship commonly appears as an offshoot of critical theory (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004). From this view, critical perspectives secured a place in organizational communication before feminist approaches and thus established a friendly intellectual setting for exploring matters of power, voice, identity, and so forth, as applied to the specific context of gender. Some feminist research implicitly supports this view by invoking critical theoretical constructs, such as ideology or hegemony, to investigate gendered organization (e.g., Clair, 1993). In this light, feminist scholarship looks like a subsidiary branch of critical organization inquiry, narrow in scope compared with the broader emancipatory agenda of the critical project (e.g., Alvesson & Willmott, 1992).

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Certainly, both of these accounts—and, no doubt, others—have merit. By telling a different story of origins, I do not mean to deny the influence of such vital movements as gender difference studies or critical organization theory. I grant the partial validity of many historical narratives, including the one I am about to tell. But I also take seriously the claim that how we narrate intellectual history shapes how we envision current relations and future possibilities. For example, to the extent that many organizational communication scholars see feminist approaches as derivative of the critical project, it is likely that feminist scholarship will continue to be cast in dependent relations with critical foundations. This view is consequential, for it preserves the troublesome notion that critical theory can be addressed to a universal (i.e., gender-neutral) human subject, whereas feminist theory is best equipped to inform the special case of gender. As Fine (1993) observed, organizational communication “researchers who espouse the utility of a feminist perspective in communication are frequently asked how their ideas differ from those of critical theorists. (Both feminists and critical theorists should be interested in exploring why the reverse question is never asked)” (p. 143). Mindful of this tendency, I situate feminist organizational communication theory as an extension of the larger feminist movement—an intellectual and activist tradition that can be seen as independent from and, at times, wary of critical theory (Clair, 2002). This alternative, seldom-circulated account of the origins of feminism in our field might enable different possibilities.

I begin with the question of what typically gets obscured when we raise critical theory as the backdrop for feminist theory. First, feminist organization scholars do much more than borrow critical concepts. They draw on another long-standing, independent tradition of accounting for relations of power: feminist theory. This tradition poses a fundamental challenge to any theory of power that claims gender neutrality. Accordingly, feminist organization theorists have demonstrated that critical and mainstream organization studies can function as unwitting allies in constructing men as universal working subjects; they have compellingly argued that refusing the relevance of gender amounts to denying a primary way in which difference, subjectivity, and domination are configured (Acker, 1990). Through this lens, feminist analyses of organization can hardly be seen as a gender-specific subset of critical theory. Rather, they emanate from a distinctive tradition that engages with the critical project around points of alliance and tension.

In many ways, feminist ambivalence toward critical organization theory stems from a general history of cautious engagement with academic pursuits. Without abandoning empirical claims altogether (Reinharz, 1992), feminists have usefully exposed the masculinist foundations of science and of varied methodological traditions (e.g., Carter & Spitzack, 1989; Mies, 1983, 1991). Feminist critiques have demonstrated how ostensibly objective procedures for generating knowledge perform and eclipse ideological functions. For example, the variable-analytic approach common to much research on sex differences in organizational communication serves to reify and naturalize a binary model of gender. Here again, feminist organization theory entails ambivalent relations with what some might call its ancestry. Although sex difference studies helped to bring gender to the organizational communication fore, many feminist scholars rightfully question the ideological functions and political consequences of this vast literature (Ashcraft, in press; Buzzanell, 1995; Calás & Smircich, 1993).

Feminist skepticism toward academic endeavors becomes even more apparent if we look beyond the scholarly exercise to organized political activism. This shift in view reveals that feminists were busy experimenting with alternative organizational forms just as critical organization scholars were beginning to envision them. Operating on the premise that bureaucracy is a masculinist form of organizing (Ferguson, 1984), many feminist movement groups developed functional communities that sought to minimize hierarchy and maximize egalitarian relations, to enact group authority via consensual decision making, and to value emotions and other so-called private matters as relevant political and organizational concerns (Ahrens, 1980; Iannello, 1992; Maguire & Mohtar, 1994; Morgen, 1994; Reinelt, 1994; Ristock, 1990; Rodriguez, 1988; V. Taylor, 1995). To be sure, other activist groups also implemented democratic, collectivist, and other participatory alternatives to bureaucracy (Kanter & Zurcher, 1973; Mansbridge, 1973; Newman, 1980; Rothschild-Whitt, 1976, 1979). Arguably, at least in the United States, feminist organizations negotiated greater institutional staying power, for they remain one of the longest-standing social movement forms designed around counterbureaucratic empowerment ideals (Ferree & Martin, 1995; Maguire & Mohtar, 1994; P. Y. Martin, 1990; Reinelt, 1994).

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By calling attention to feminist organizational practice, I do not mean to conjure romantic images of triumphant feminist efforts at social transformation. I do mean to support my case for the independent heritage of feminist perspectives on organization, as well as to suggest how this tale of origins reframes the dominant understanding of feminist contributions to organizational communication studies. First, feminist organizing reflects an entrenched feminist commitment to do more than talk within the walls of an ivory tower; it embodies the desire for tangible forms of justice that enhance the lives of real people. Although critical organization theorists share this dedication to social change, feminists arguably have done more to implement it. Indeed, that feminist experiments with practice largely preceded feminist theories of organization, while the reverse typifies critical organization studies, signifies an abiding ambivalence among many feminists about the simultaneous importance and impotence of “high theory” and philosophical reflection. Whereas critical organization scholars prioritized emancipation through ideology critique, feminists literally grounded their emancipatory interest in the trenches of practice. The contrast suggests that feminist approaches to organization exemplify a different sort of maturity—one that Fine (1993) calls “revolutionary pragmatism”—that critical organization scholarship has yet to develop and from which it could learn a great deal. The tensions, failures, ironies, and innovations of feminist organizing have produced a legacy of empirical insight about the practical pitfalls and potential of alternative organizational forms. Critical organization scholars, as well as others who study organizing, can learn much from these lived (and still- living) experiments (e.g., Ashcraft, 2001).

In sum, when we situate the larger feminist movement as the backdrop for feminist organizational communication studies, and when we expand the scope of our story of origins beyond traditional academic activities, we can begin to envision different configurations of perspectives or areas of inquiry (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004). We can imagine less dependent, more reciprocal relations between critical and feminist organizational communication scholarship, wherein the two converge, diverge, and mutually inform. We can see contributions once obscured, such as how feminist studies challenge even critical foundations and model the vital interplay of organization theory and practice. Thus, the brief history I narrate below begins with the broader feminist movements sketched here—with the enduring feminist tradition of theorizing patriarchal power, with feminist critiques of dominant modes of scientific knowing, and with feminist organizational practice. These formations helped to ground the emergence of a coherent feminist theory of organizing in the early 1990s.

The Development of Feminist Organizational Communication Scholarship: A Public Tale

As the 1990s approached, feminist perspectives did not hold much of a place in organizational communication studies. This is not to say that the literature was silent about gender, but that what little it did say reflected significant limitations. The most developed themes concerned the communicative tendencies and struggles of women in (or aspiring to) management. For example, numerous “glass ceiling” studies examined how women's language use, perceptions thereof, and resulting interaction patterns engender barriers to women's professional advancement (e.g., Horgan, 1990; Staley, 1988; Tannen, 1994; Wilkins & Anderson, 1991). A related strand of studies examined gender differences in organizational communication style, with particular attention to leadership communication. This work gradually moved from debating women's leadership capacity to documenting and, sometimes, celebrating or advocating “feminine styles” of leading (Natalle, 1996), which purportedly entail the creation of participative, collaborative, personalized relations that distribute power widely and enhance feelings of self-efficacy, team accomplishment, and community (e.g., Helgesen, 1990; Rosener, 1990).

Despite inconclusive empirical support, gender and leadership studies functioned in tandem with communication-centered glass ceiling studies to yield a crucial insight: Even perceptions of gender difference carry profound political consequences, because dominant norms of professional interaction and managerial communication tend to privilege masculinity and devalue habits associated with femininity. To the extent that codes of femininity and professionalism clash, women are more likely to experience the formation and maintenance of work and leadership identities as a tension-filled process (e.g., Jamieson, 1995; Marshall, 1993; B. O. Murphy & Zorn, 1996; Wiley & Eskilson, 1985; Wood & Conrad, 1983).

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In this way, early gender and organizational communication research began to merge questions of power with those of difference, yet it did so in limited ways. To begin, it imparted a binary model of gender difference in which men and women inhabit distinct speech communities that appear timeless, universal, and static. Such a model obscures historical and cultural variations in the construction of gender difference, as well as the dynamic, interactive processes wherein apparent differences are produced. Second, most of this research depicted women as different. Attending to gender meant attending to “women's issues,” while men were seldom marked as gendered characters. Third, early scholarship engaged the alleged difference of only some women yet treated “women's issues” as a uniform, coherent, and uncontested category of interests. In other words, the research tacitly represented the concerns of certain women—mostly white, middle-class, heterosexual professionals—as the universal concerns of working women. In light of these considerations, efforts to revalue so-called “feminine styles” of organizational communication become profoundly troublesome. Not only can they be invoked to justify a gender-based division and hierarchy of labor, but they also normalize white, middle-class expectations for communication practice (Calás & Smircich, 1993).

Finally, much gender and organizational communication research depicted difference as an individual and interpersonal matter. Although it toyed with systemic claims about the masculine bias of managerial and professional communication, this research typically conceived of people as the carriers of prejudice into social systems. This psychologized view of communication treats organization as a neutral setting or container in which humans enact and evaluate gender difference as they go about maintaining work relationships. Consider these common titles: “Gendered Issues in the Workplace” (Natalle, 1996), “Dysfunctional Communication Patterns in the Workplace” (Reardon, 1997), and “Communication in Corporate Settings” (Stewart & Clarke-Kudless, 1993). In each case, the preposition “in” depicts organization as a theater in which gender-related dramas occur, not an active player in staging such dramas. Certainly, as some of these citations suggest, this view is alive and well today.

The impetus for challenging the assumption that gender troubles stem from biased people within neutral organizations came from outside the field of communication and, specifically, from feminist interventions in the sociology of management. Acker and Van Houten's (1974) classic review of the renowned Hawthorne studies was one of the first published attempts to analyze the “sex structuring” of organization. The authors argued that organizations deploy gender as a central control mechanism, thereby generating apparent variance in organizational behavior according to sex. Around the same time, Kanter (1975, 1977) also theorized gender difference as a product of structural relations. She argued that women exist at a perpetual disadvantage, concentrated in the invisible and devalued infrastructure of organizations, or sprinkled as tokens near the top. Gender functions as a tool to maintain this hierarchy—chiefly by supplying potent images of how roles should be enacted and by whom. Significantly extending these structural analyses, Ferguson (1984) cast bureaucracy as an organizational form that institutionalizes male domination by binding managers, workers, and clients in dependent, subordinate relations and, in effect, “feminizing” them.

In a particularly influential essay, Acker (1990) argued that organization is not some sort of neutral housing in which gender trouble “happens” to rear its ugly head, nor does gender symbolism simply assist or metaphorically represent organization structure and its consequences. Rather, organizations are fundamentally gendered social formations, and gender is a constitutive principle of organizing. As it integrated and developed previous structural analyses into a radical, coherent theory of “gendered organization,” Acker's essay is often hailed as the catalyst for a major shift in scholarly interest—from the study of gendered behavior in organizations to the study of organization as a gendered social phenomenon in its own right.

Other scholars also led the shift. For instance, J. Martin's (1990) deconstruction of a narrative about one executive's maternity leave introduced many U.S. management scholars to the claim that gendered tensions are embedded in organization systems. Calás and Smircich (Calás, 1993; Calás & Smircich, 1991, 1993) took a leading role as well, exposing how management and organization theorists actively preserve, promote, and conceal gendered organization with both the form and content of their representational discourse. Also writing to a management audience, communication scholars Mumby and Putnam (1992) analyzed how gendered assumptions are encoded in organization theories, such as that of bounded rationality. Using feminist

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poststructuralist theory, the authors reconstructed an alternative theory of organizing they dubbed “bounded emotionality.” Anthologies based on international collaboration, such as The Sexuality of Organization (Hearn, Sheppard, Tancred-Sheriff, & Burrell, 1989), Gendering Organizational Analysis (Mills & Tancred, 1992), and Gender and Bureaucracy (Savage & Witz, 1992), also began to surface around this time, reflecting and shaping the shift toward studies of gendered organization.

In short order, communication scholars became part of these developments and began to contribute to the growing body of literature on gendered organization. In the Canadian Journal of Communication, for example, Mills and Chiaramonte (1991) characterized organization as a “gendered communication act”—as meta- communication, or a running commentary on appropriate interaction and identity formation. In other words, organization provides an abstract “map” of ideal relations among gender, power, and work; members draw on that map as a resource to guide the organizing process. By addressing the evolving relation between organization and everyday interaction, such analyses laid the groundwork for a communicative theory of gendering organization.

Generally speaking, however, the new thread of gender and organizational communication scholarship was not primarily billed as a “communication perspective on gendered organization” but, rather, as “feminist perspectives on organizational communication.” Indeed, the early 1990s saw a surge of essays addressed to this topic. Initially cited was Linda Putnam's (1990) conference paper on the utility of feminist perspectives to organizational communication scholarship and, specifically, to dispute process theories. Interested scholars also referred to a 1993 Communication Yearbook exchange (which followed an exchange at the 1990 meeting of the International Communication Association) between Judi Marshall, Dennis Mumby, and Connie Bullis. Based on personal experience and her research with women managers, Marshall (1993) began with a portrait of contrast between male and female values. Using this provisional picture as a base, she aligned most organizational cultures with male-dominated communication systems, identified resulting interaction patterns and dilemmas for women, and proposed an “equality for difference” agenda for feminist organizational communication scholars (p. 139). Among other issues of debate that characterized the exchange, Mumby's (1993) response sought to complicate Marshall's dual focus on difference and the experiences of women. Drawing on discomfort as a man attempting to engage feminism, he suggested a feminist perspective that resists the conflation of women and gender by addressing gender relations more broadly. Rather than seeking equality for difference, such a perspective would work to challenge current configurations of difference, undermining and revising the sort of binary, oppositional model (for example, masculine vs. feminine, public vs. private) employed by Marshall.

In some contrast with Mumby's approach, most of the essays emerging at the time linked feminist perspectives with issues pertaining primarily to women. For example, Natalle, Papa, and Graham (1994) opened their chapter in Kovacic's New Approaches to Organizational Communication volume, titled “Feminist Philosophy and the Transformation of Organizational Communication,” with a section on “the current status of women in organizations” (p. 245). Likewise, in her chapter in Bowen and Wyatt's (1993) Transforming Visions: Feminist Critiques in Communication Studies, Fine declared that feminist research begins with “the perspective of women's experience” and aligned feminist projects with “women's problematics” (p. 128) and “women's knowledge” (p. 129). Whereas Natalle et al. (1994) reviewed distinctions among liberal, radical, and materialist feminist theories, explaining the path to organizational justice envisioned by each, Fine's (1993) essay addressed more directly the field of organizational communication. Situating feminism as a distinct, up-and-coming theoretical trajectory in the discipline, she demonstrated how a feminist lens could be used to critique “traditional” research emanating from functional, interpretive, and critical perspectives.

Like Natalle et al.'s (1994) chapter, Buzzanell's (1994) influential synthesis article, titled “Gaining a Voice: Feminist Organizational Communication Theorizing,” integrated multiple feminist theories, albeit for a different purpose. Rather than emphasize organizational change, she stressed potential transformations in organizational communication scholarship. Specifically, she considered how the agenda and conduct of research might usefully shift if we challenged pervasive themes—such as competitive individualism, cause- effect/linear thinking, and separation or autonomy—with “feminine/feminist values” such as cooperative community, connectedness, and integrative thinking.

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As this selective review of essays from the early 1990s implies, most of the relevant works that surfaced around this time took the form of synthesis and agenda-setting pieces; that is, they endeavored to pave a path toward new terrain by surveying relevant theory and research, providing some sort of organizing framework, delineating the potential contributions of feminist perspectives, and calling for future research. With rare exceptions (e.g., Buzzanell, 1994), most of these essays appeared at conferences and in anthologies or special issues (addressed to, for example, feminist perspectives in communication studies or emerging perspectives in organizational communication). Themes characteristic of early gender and organizational communication research—such as the tendency to align gender with the concerns of white, professional women and to reify organizations as gender-neutral containers for human interaction—remained latent (and, in a few cases, blatant) in these essays, although some authors noted the need to challenge such assumptions. Fine (1993), for example, critiqued the managerial bias of previous work and directed attention to the gendering of organizational contexts; to the social construction of gender, race, and class; and to the case of multicultural organizations. Finally, and again with rare exception (e.g., Mills & Chiaramonte, 1991), most of the early-1990s essays emphasized the importation of feminist perspectives into organizational communication studies. Few authors explicitly considered what it might look like to develop a communication lens on the feminist claim that organizations are fundamentally gendered.

By the mid-1990s, then, the place of feminism in organizational communication was one of critique, theory, and promise. Feminist scholars had initiated a gendered analysis of “traditional” organization and organization theory; they had begun to conceptualize how feminism might disrupt and enrich the field; and some had even envisioned the kinds of theoretical alternatives feminism could yield. Although there was little published organizational communication research from feminist perspectives at this time, a few noteworthy empirical projects actually preceded the surge of feminist essays in the early 1990s. For example, Bate and Taylor's (1988) anthology, Women Communicating: Studies of Women's Talk, included several cases of organizational practice and, specifically, studies of alternative, feminist-inspired communities. Among them, Wyatt's chapter examined leadership patterns in a women's weaving guild; the Lont and Seccombe-Eastland chapters explored dilemmas of feminist ideology and practice at a record company and bookstore, respectively; and Taylor's chapter investigated the merging of feminist principles and bureaucracy in a Canadian government agency. Hence, consistent with my earlier claim about the “revolutionary pragmatism” (Fine, 1993) of feminist approaches, feminist communication scholars were studying alternatives to dominant organizational forms before they had even begun to systematically theorize those forms as gendered.

In the mid-1990s, a few empirical essays began to appear in the mainstream journals of the field. In just the next few years, a critical mass of research emerged that spanned diverse topical, theoretical, and methodological orientations. By the turn of the century, it was no simple matter to summarize the wide range of empirical projects. Here, I can offer only a brief sampling of key research areas. Among other foci, feminist organizational communication scholars have studied (a) how members craft gendered identities, relations, and cultures across varied work contexts (e.g., Ashcraft & Pacanowsky, 1996; Bell & Forbes, 1994; Edley, 2000; Jorgenson, 2002; Pierce, 1995); (b) the discursive dimensions of sexual harassment (Bingham, 1994; Clair, 1993; B. C. Taylor & Conrad, 1992; Townsley & Geist, 2000); (c) other organizational constructions of the public-private divide and, specifically, of relations among work, bodie

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