The ‘Feminization’ of Management? Issues of ‘Sameness’ and ‘Difference’ in the Roles and Experiences of Female and Male Retail Managers

Explanations of women’s poor representation in senior management usually emphasize differences between women and men managers’ experiences, circumstances and aspirations, and the gendered character of organizational structures and processes. Whilst these may all disadvantage women, some writers have suggested recently that women managers may differ in style and orientation in ways particularly appropriate for today’s developing organizations. This paper explores issues of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ between women and men managers in retailing. Whilst both male and female store managers wanted to downplay gender differences and adopt a ‘gender neutral’ approach, they also associated a number of advantages and disadvantages with being a woman manager in certain contexts. Rapid sectoral change had caused companies to reassess the desired attributes and competences of managers; associated both with an enhanced valuing of ‘feminine’ qualities and with a more ‘objective’ and ‘clinical’ approach to assessment. Despite their equal numbers at entry points women remained poorly represented at senior levels, suggesting that subjective and informal processes were important determinants of women and men’s progress. Given management is inherently a process enacted by individual managers within a social context the extent to which it can be conceived in gender neutral terms is questioned since individuals are inevitably discussed and identified in terms of their gender.     

The Crafting of Community: Recoupling Discourses of Management and Womanhood

The construction of organizations around images of masculinity makes the position of ‘women managers’ a problematic one which calls for ‘remedial work’ (Gherardi 1995). Women managers have sought to reconcile their dualistic positions by deploying various individual and collective coping strategies typically articulated within the boundaries of their organizations. In contrast, we research a group of senior women from a British city in the Midlands who attempt to renegotiate their conflicting identities as ‘female’ and ‘senior managers’ by creating a collective forum outside their organizations. Through the construction of a ‘learning set’, they created a space where members could explore their terms of participation, as women and as managers, in their respective work organizations and in the local community. This space was articulated implicitly and explicitly around values typically associated with ‘community’ (e.g. sharing, support, trust, loyalty), a controversial concept in feminist politics. The article documents the (fragile and contested) processes by which these women mobilize the imagery of community in order to create a safe space where ‘remedial work’ could be performed. The conclusion stresses the ambivalent effects of the learning set in both reproducing and transgressing gendered positions.     

Gendered Meanings of Commitment from High Technology Engineering Managers in the United Kingdom and Sweden

This article considers why women managers are often perceived to be ‘less committed’ at work than men, through an exploration of male and female managers' meanings of ‘commitment’, to see whether their meanings are shared. Despite a large body of literature on the concept of commitment, managers' own meanings of commitment have not been reported. In general, engineers reported that they used the term ‘committed’ without defining what it meant. Their meanings were a broad composite of organizational and career commitment, focused on very strong affective commitment with almost no emphasis on continuance commitment, in contrast to the traditional (1979) definitions of commitment (Mowday et al. 1979). Results from this interview study of engineering managers and senior technologists (20 males, 17 females, 17 British, and 20 Swedish graduate engineers, from vice‐president to senior technologist) show that there are differences in male and female engineers' unprompted meanings of commitment at work, as well as differences in meaning between the three levels of management sampled. Females responded more often with less visible ‘commitment’ meanings such as involvement, being people‐concerned, and availability. More males (and top managers) used the term commitment to mean task delivery, being proactive, being innovative, adding value, and being ready for challenge. The gender differences identified in reported meanings could impact on the assessment of women's commitment, when evaluated for promotion, career development and professional chartered status by the mostly male engineering managers.     

‘Street-level bureaucracy,management and the corrupted world of service’

Lipsky's analysis of the implementation gap in welfare policy in ‘Street-level Bureaucracy’ focuses on the problem of front-line discretion but ‘brackets off’ the discretion of senior managers. In this paper I draw on a qualitative study to argue that senior managers can also exercise significant discretion and that their discretion can contribute to the conditions of policy confusion and contradiction, and resource inadequacy that characterise ‘the corrupted world of service’ of front-line discretion. In this context front-line discretion may be used by front-line staff to bridge the policy implementation gap created by senior managers.     

Woman as Manager: A Seductive Ontology

Much of the women in management literature has, quite rightly, problematized women's relationship to dominant masculinist organizational practices and cultures, these debates being underpinned by extensive data revealing women's extreme numerical marginalization at senior management level across both public and private sectors. One such site where women have long been under‐represented is education management. Recent research, however, indicates some significant shifts in this regard, specifically in the UK further education sector where the number of women principals has increased sixfold in the past six years. In one sense then, equal opportunity as a political objective might be seen as ‘working’ in one public sector site, with education management no longer a ‘gender exclusive zone’. Drawing on poststructuralist understandings of identity, this article examines this phenomenon with respect to the seductive aspects of management and the issues of ontological security which surround women and men's investment in ‘frantic organizational cultures’. The article discusses some of the tensions, ambiguities and opportunities which might exist for many women managers as they ontologically invest in the ‘secure systems’ of a masculinist organizational culture.     

“Do We Have A Customer?” — A Team Approach To Intake

This article examines some of the ambiguities surrounding requests for assistance in the voluntary sector. The authors have developed a team approach at the ‘intake’ stage for clients whose requests often demand a well-thought-out response in order, as Haley suggests we must, “to start well”. Some of the literature about ‘beginning with families’ is examined, and the complex issues of ‘engaging’ and ‘joining’ are discussed. It is suggested that not every ‘shopper’ is necessarily a ‘customer’ for our wares, but that they are almost certainly shopping for something. ‘Emergency’ and ‘crisis’ calls are distinguished, and different responses to each are indicated. Finally, the procedures used are described, within the context of this particular voluntary agency, so that readers may distinguish what could be applicable in different contexts.     

Equal or individual treatment: contesting storylines in needs assessment conversations within Swedish eldercare

This article examines the role of care managers and their work in putting policy into practice in micro-interactions with older people in Swedish eldercare. The care managers assess the individual needs of older people, and decide what type of social care and services will be given. Dilemmas in care management are often related to the gap between needs and resources. The aim was to study the positioning of care managers within different storylines advanced in needs assessment conversations. Positioning theory was applied to study discursive practices and discursive strategies within Swedish eldercare. Audio-recorded needs assessment conversations among care managers, older people and their relatives at care planning meetings in connection with hospital discharge were analyzed. Two overall positions were identified for care managers—as ‘professional experts’ and as ‘organizational representatives’—allowing the care managers to maneuver within two contesting storylines: ‘distribution of scarce eldercare resources based on the principles of eligibility and equal treatment’ and ‘older people entitled to eldercare according to their own perceived individual needs’. For social work, the results showed the importance of discussing how care managers might move towards exercising greater professional autonomy, becoming less dependent on their position in the organization.     

Leadership,Through Loss and Change: Management of Change Viewed as Challenges within a Couple Relationship*

This paper emanated from a Doctoral Thesis, which was an in-depth single case study of a frontline social work team based in the third sector. The research took place over a period of five months and included weekly visits to observe the day-to-day operations of the team, attending special events such as the Teams Away Day, Team Meetings and undertaking management consultation sessions with the Project and Deputy Managers. The thesis concludes that just as frontline staff require effective support, frontline managers also need space to effectively reflect on their experiences in role. The focus of this paper is the relationship dynamic between the managers, the team, senior management and the wider organisation as they dealt with the sudden announcement of the project’s closure. The paper makes use of ethnographic and psychoanalytically informed observations of the team’s ordinary day to day work processes, in addition, use was made of consultative interviews (MCI’s) with the managers of this service who were afforded space to think about their management roles. Aspects of thematic analysis informed by psychoanalytic theory were used to analyse the material.     

Working together, working apart: management culture in a manufacturing firm

This paper presents a case study of management culture in a manufacturing organisation. Its general aim is to assess the usefulness of the concept ‘culture’ as it applies to organisations. After first establishing that the organisational members had a sense that their organisation was an unique ‘family’ the article then proceeds to argue that this ‘togetherness’ was, in many contexts, divided. Managers also had a series of conflictual orientations to other members that were partially defined by the managers organisational role but were also underwritten by assumptions about organisational history, community, biography and profession. The paper concludes by suggesting that, at this level of analysis, managers are not often an unified block with a common identity and that management culture is hence best seen as a map of oppositions and commonalities that reflects the wider culture that the organisation is a part of.     

Up from Childhood: When African-American Enslaved Children Learned of Their Servile Status

There came a moment in enslaved children's lives when they perceived that they were ‘different’ from their white playmates: they became cognisant of being slaves. This moment was part of a three-part process, which must be studied collectively in order to understand its full impact on child-slave identity formation. The first stage comprised a period of ‘blissful ignorance’ and many children spent several years unaware that they were chattel. The second stage of development forced children to confront their servile status. This realisation could be an instantaneous recognition; however, the full repercussions took children much longer to understand. In the final stage, enslaved children questioned their identity; they had to ‘learn’ that they were racially different from others, and that by virtue of being different, they were inferior. This study further tests David Bailey's findings that the slave autobiographies portrayed a more ‘traumatic’ childhood experience than did the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews [David Bailey, ‘A Divided Prism: Two Sources of Black Testimony on Slavery’, Journal of Southern History 46, no. 3 (1980): 381–404]. But the sources do not necessarily tell two conflicting stories; rather the data collected by the WPA concur with the autobiographies. The age at which former slaves realised that they were enslaved greatly shaped their memories. Applying the three-stage theory to Bailey's findings suggests that many of the WPA interviewees were too young to have experienced stage two before Emancipation. Thus, their renditions of slavery correspond to the step one blissful memories from the autobiographers, suggesting that the two sources are perhaps not so antithetic when employed together.     

‘Next Steps’ for Equality?: The Impact of Organizational Change on Opportunities for Women in the Civil Service

The ‘Next Steps’ restructuring programme (1988) has had a fundamental impact on the management and organization of the Civil Service, and on the practice of equal opportunities. The fragmentation of the service into semi-autonomous agencies has resulted in greater managerial autonomy in relation to staffing issues. Equality initiatives such as part-time and flexible working patterns, ‘family friendly’ policies, women-only training programmes and the provision of nurseries are coming under threat due to increased discretion over decision-making in these areas. Other aspects of restructuring — such as ‘downsizing’— have resulted in a reduction of the middle management layer, making it more difficult for women to breach the ‘glass ceiling’ and access senior posts. The persistence of a hostile managerial sub-culture to equal opportunities has been instrumental in pushing equality issues to the bottom of the agenda in the current climate of change because of ‘more important’ organizational pressures. Within this context, equality of opportunity for women in the Civil Service has reached a critical stage.     

Markets,contingency and preferences: contemporary managers’ narrative identities1

We explore work identity amongst managers, a key group in the ‘new’ capitalism. Some existing accounts of such workplace identities emphasize new ‘cultures of control’, others focus on new requirements and possibilities of individual autonomy through reflective identity formation, while others identify a crisis in workplace identity formation. Focusing on these issues, we analyse the career narratives of 136 managers and show that our empirical data do not neatly fit any existing models. Managers’ career stories were dominated by a ‘market’ narrative, in which they placed themselves as strategic actors making choices in a social world constituted by market‐like interactions. We show that the market narrative frames how managers understand risks to their careers arising from the contingent actions of firms, and how it provides a space for managers to reflectively identify their preferences and pleasures. We consider the consequences of this analysis for contemporary understandings of work and identity.     

Professional discretion and length of work experience: what findings from focus groups with care managers in elder care suggest

ABSTRACT

Research has explored how care managers in elder care – who often function as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ – regard professional discretion. The way in which length of work experience affects care managers’ use of professional discretion remains, however, unexplored. This article present findings from 12 focus groups with 60 care managers. By bringing attention to how care managers experience the needs assessment process, this article sheds light on how these ‘street-level bureaucrats’ struggle when they try to balance their clients’ needs against institutional frameworks and local guidelines. Length of work experience seems to play a role in how care managers claim to use professional discretion. Experienced care managers describe how they deviate from the guidelines at times in order to create an increased scope of action in their decision-making process. Those with less time in the profession describe greater difficulties in this respect. Findings suggest that research should explore if length of work experience plays a role in the actual way in which care managers assess needs and make decisions. As such, they contribute to our understanding of how needs assessment processes are navigated by professionals while also pointing towards the nature of professional discretion in gerontological social work.     

Routes to Part‐Time Management in UK Service Sector Organizations: Implications for Women’s Skills,Flexibility and Progression

This article examines the implications of part‐time working for mothers, particularly with regards to their occupational mobility and acquisition of skills, in UK service sector organizations following the implementation of the Part‐time Workers’ Directive in 2000. Through qualitative interviews with women and their managers in five hospitality workplaces, this article explores whether part‐time workers are potentially the ‘losers’ in the ‘winner‐takes‐all’ approach to career development. Discussions focus upon the extent to which part‐time workers can access career paths or, alternatively, whether part‐time management positions are the reserve of highly skilled women who are able to negotiate reduced hours after obtaining a management position full time. In conclusion, this article distinguishes between two forms of working‐time flexibility, which are named optimal and restrictive. The implications of these alternative types of flexibility, in terms of access to skill acquisition and occupational mobility, are then addressed.     

Managerial Listening and Career Development in the Hospitality Industry

Recent research confirms that communication skills are essential to effective management practice. Less is known, however, about the specific communication activities associated with different levels of management and how these competencies affect career development. This paper reports findings from two related studies of hospitality managers. One reports the differences between middle and upper level managers' perceptions of the frequency and difficulty of specific communication activities. The second study examines upper level managers' perceptions of the communication skills most essential to their career development.

Findings suggest that listening is perceived to be more critical to managerial effectiveness as individuals move into senior level positions, and that listening is perceived by general managers as the most essential communication skill for their career development. The results of this research have implications for educators, practitioners, and consultants as they work to improve managers' communication competence.     

Case management for people with psychiatric disabilities in rural Sweden; experiences from the implementation of a national policy

The aim is to analyse the implementation of a case manager-model in rural Sweden. A sample of 15 case management teams was selected. Written materials were collected and interviews on location were carried out. Results: rural case managers design their work methods themselves, which entail several deviations from the national policy guidelines in this field. The case management boards have a low capacity to direct and manage the activities of the case managers. Consequently, case managers develop into ‘welfare entrepreneurs’. One salient risk is that teams become isolated from the surrounding welfare system. In conclusion, the Swedish version of case management in rural areas is a result of local processes of adaptation and negotiation that result in services that differ from those envisaged in national policy guidelines.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.     

The Gender Politics of Human Waste and Human‐as‐Waste: Indonesian Migrant Workers and Elderly Care in Japan

Significant decline in mortality and fertility rates has led to a rapid aging population in many parts of the globe. Coupled with a decrease in caring for one's senior parents at home, this condition creates a crisis in elderly care. Most studies on elderly care in Japan, the country with the highest percentage of senior people in the world, employ theoretical approaches rooted in the fields of aging and migration studies. This article offers a new perspective by not only focusing on the voices of the Indonesian women migrant care workers in Japan by way of in‐depth interviews, but also intersecting feminist and waste studies in its analysis. This different theoretical approach allows this article to argue that the politics of disposability in the ‘global care chains’ is a gendered and ‘affective’ phenomenon. Drawing from Jaggar's ‘emotional hegemony’ and Saraswati's ‘affective structure’, this article shows that emotions matter in constructing the disposability of these migrant workers and elderly people, particularly within the capitalist currents that drive the gendered supply chains.     

‘Belonging’ and ‘Otherness’: Sex Equality in Banking in Turkey and Britain

The struggle for sex equality at work has largely been achieved in the developed world, it is claimed. The number of well‐qualified young women entering white‐collar employment and achieving promotion to first‐line and middle management positions now matches or exceeds their male peers. Many young women have high career aspirations and argue that sex discrimination no longer exists. However, this perception is over‐optimistic. Major sex inequalities persist at senior management level in the salaries and benefits offered to female and male staff and in access to certain favoured occupations and sectors of employment. Questionnaires, interviews and documentary evidence from three Turkish and six British banks and high street financial organizations showed that their claimed commitment to equal opportunities by sex was not matched by their practices. Members of managerial elites (who were almost exclusively male) held firm views about the characteristics of ‘the ideal worker’, which informed organizational ideologies, including human resource policies and practices concerning recruitment and promotion. They also permeated organizational cultures, which affected employees’ working practices and experiences. The outcome of these internal negotiation processes was to differentiate between a favoured group of staff seen as fully committed to the companies’ values, who were promoted and rewarded, and an ‘out’ group, whose members were denied these privileges. This distinction between ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ is gendered not only along the traditional lines of class, age, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability, but also along the new dimensions of marriage, networking, safety, mobility and space. Despite local and cross‐cultural differences in the significance of these factors, the cumulative disadvantage suffered by women staff seeking career development in the industry was remarkably similar.     

Narratives of Spousal Support for the Careers of Men in Managerial Posts

This article analyses the narratives of men managers to see how they perceive their wives' support in relation to their careers. Our aim is to focus on different forms of spousal support and explore how the support can evolve in the course of the men's careers. We are also interested in what kind of gender relations men produce when narrating their experiences of spousal support for their career. The research material comprises interviews with 29 managers who are fathers. In contrast to many previous studies, the results here suggest that spousal support is not a fixed or uncomplicated phenomenon but is constructed as various and flexible by men: negotiated, enriching and declining. The narrative analysis, in which we detected three different story‐lines — romance, ‘happily‐ever‐after’ and tragedy — shows that the most positive narratives in terms of life satisfaction and career success were those in which spousal support was constructed as negotiated and men were willing to be flexible and adaptable in their gender relations with their spouse. More attention to a father's work and family integration is needed in the field of management and organizations.