Gender and New Public Management: Reconstituting Academic Subjectivities

This article is located within the context of British Higher Education. It examines the ‘radical reforms’ of New Public Management (NPM) (marketization and managerialism) in the management of university organizations. The article has two main aims. First, to explore the extent to which NPM initiatives have influenced individual women academics’s day–to–day experiences of the gendered academy and their professional identities. Second, to understand individuals’ active responses to NPM to develop theorizing of individual resistance in public service organizations. Adopting a Foucauldian feminist framework, it is suggested that the introduction of NPM presents a site for political struggle for women academics. The article explores the gendered nature of NPM, to determine how, in three individual universities, different women academics have responded to the ‘managerialist challenge’. Finally, the article focuses on the ways in which different women academics might accommodate, resist, or transform the discourses of NPM, the factors facilitating this, and the material outcomes.     

Gender discourses in academic mobility

Despite increasing geographic mobility among academic staff, gendered patterns of involvement in academic mobility have largely escaped scrutiny. Positioned within literatures on internationalization, physical proximity, gender and parenthood in academic mobility and understandings of gender as a process enacted through both discursive and embodied practices, we use discourse analysis based on interviews with academics in New Zealand to examine differences in language that create differing realities with regards to gender and obligations of care in academic mobility decisions. The findings reveal how academic mobility is discursively formulated as ‘essential’ to successful academic careers, with the need for frequent travel justified despite advances in virtual communication technologies. Heteronormative discourses are shown to disrupt and fragment the opportunities female academics have to engage in academic mobility. However, we also uncover ways in which these discourses are resisted, wherein fathers articulate emotional strain associated with academic mobility. The article shows how discourse works to constitute the essentialization of academic mobility, and the uneven gendered practices associated with it, whilst also giving voice to gender inequities in academic mobility from the southern hemisphere.     

Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women‐only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace

Mentoring is widely acknowledged to be an important contributor to women's career success and progression, but women often struggle to access mentoring networks that can help sponsor and develop their careers. Formal mentoring programmes designed specifically for women help overcome this challenge, but such schemes may at the same time reinforce masculine discourses which position women as deficient in relation to the invisibly male norm that is implicit within contemporary working practices. Drawing on a formal women‐only mentoring programme built on gender‐positive goals to empower women to ‘be the best they can be’ within the events industry, this article considers the extent to which such programmes can both challenge and reproduce gendered discourses of business and success. Interviews with mentors and mentees illustrate how such programmes make gender visible within business and individual careers, but masculinist underpinnings of organizational discourses remain invisible, unacknowledged and thus largely unchallenged.     

Cosmopolitan militaries and dialogic peacekeeping: Danish and Swedish women soldiers in Afghanistan

Feminist security studies (FSS) scholarship advocates the analysis of women’s war experiences and narratives to understand conflict and military intervention. Here we add a non-great power focus to FSS debates on the gendered discourses of military interventionism. We zoom in on Danish and Swedish women soldiers’ reflections on their involvement in the ISAF operation in Afghanistan. Their stories are deconstructed against the backdrop of their states’ adoption of a cosmopolitan-minded ethic on military obligation. Both states employed women soldiers in dialogic peacekeeping in Afghanistan to establish links with local women and to gather intelligence, tasks that were less frequently afforded to male soldiers. However, feminist FSS scholarship locates military intelligence gathering within racial, gendered and imperialist power relations that assign victimhood to local women. This feminist critique is pertinent, but the gendered and racial logics governing international operations vary across national contexts. While such gender binaries were present in Danish and Swedish military practice in Afghanistan, our article shows that dialogical peacekeeping offered an alternative to stereotypical constructions of women as victims and men as protectors. Dialogical peacekeeping helped to disrupt such gendering processes, giving women soldiers an opportunity to rethink their gender identities while instilling dialogical relations with local women.     

Women Academics and Work–Life Balance: Gendered Discourses of Work and Care

This article examines how discourses of work–life balance are appropriated and used by women academics. Using data collected from semi‐structured, single person interviews with 31 scholars at an Australian university, it identifies and explores four ways in which participants construct their relationship to work–life balance as: (1) a personal management task; (2) an impossible ideal; (3) detrimental to their careers; and (4) unmentionable at work. Findings reveal that female academics' ways of speaking about work–life balance respond to gendered attitudes about paid work and unpaid care that predominate in Australian socio‐cultural life. By taking a discursive approach to analysing work–life balance, our research makes a unique contribution to the literature by drawing attention to the power of work–life balance discourses in shaping how women configure their attempts to create a work–life balance, and how it functions to position academic women as failing to manage this balance.     

‘Zealotry or Nostalgic Regret’?1 Women Leaders in Technical and Further Education in Australia: Agents of Change,Entrepreneurial Educators or Corporate Citizens?

Education has been restructured in many Western post‐industrial nation states during the 1990s. The Australian Technical and Further Education sector (TAFE) has been particularly susceptible to discourses of responsiveness to the market and the new entrepreneuralism. This article explores how women have been repositioned in contradictory and ambiguous ways as the new entrepreneurial middle managers by existing and emergent discourses that circulated in and through TAFE organizations. In turn, it points to how discourses of change management and client responsiveness took on particular readings within specific institutional and professional cultures of the eight Technical and Further Education institutions (TAFEs). At the same time, the restructuring that arose from the corporatization of TAFE, in a highly gendered process, through the twin strategies of marketization and the new managerialism produced new possibilities for individual women educators who moved up into middle management. Yet these individual women were positioned within highly masculinist ‘neo‐corporate bureaucratic cultures’ that co‐opted their passion for the capacity of education to make a difference and incorporated these new entrepeneurial work identities.     

A Critical Look at Staff Appraisal: The Case of Women in Scottish Universities

An analysis of appraisal of women staff in Scottish universities reveals two ‘puzzles’. First, although there is a general decline in the use of appraisal schemes in these universities, women staff still have a strong sense of being subject to a disciplinary technology. Second, although appraisal and the broader disciplinary technology disadvantage women, they still want to be appraised. This article uses the critical literature on appraisal, and particularly a Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power, to shed light on these apparent contradictions. Such an approach helps explain the first of these ‘puzzles’ but a basic conundrum for women remains — although there are demands for appraisal and normalization in the name of fairness and equity, such processes of normalization tend to be gender‐biased and hence should be resisted by women.     

Female narratives of ‘new’ citizens’ belonging(s) and identities in Europe: case studies from the Netherlands and Britain

Public discourses on citizenship, identity and nationality, which link geographical borders and the political boundaries of a community, are infused with tensions and contradictions. This paper illustrates how these tensions are interwoven with multilayered notions of home, belonging, migration, citizenship and individual's ‘longing just to be’, focusing on the Dutch and the British context. The narratives of a number of Dutch and British women, who either immigrated to the respective countries or were born to immigrants, illustrate how the growing rigid integration and assimilative discourses in Europe contradict an individual anchoring in national and local communities. The narratives of women participating in these studies show multilayered angles of belonging presenting an alternative to the increasing strong argument for a fixed notion of positioning and national belonging. The female ‘new’ citizens in our study tell stories of individual choices, social mobility and a sense of multiple belonging in and across different communities.     

Opting Out (Without Kids): Understanding Non‐Mothers' Workplace Exit in Popular Autobiographies

Since the term appeared in 2003, popular media and academics have been interested in the phenomenon of ‘opting out’ — elite women choosing to leave their jobs to stay at home with their children. Although it is unclear whether the opt‐out revolution actually exists, this conversation has resulted in a wealth of scholarship on women leaving successful jobs to care for their children, particularly how maternity might be a graceful time to exit gendered organizations. However, there is not scholarship considering women without children who opt out of the dominant career model. In this study, I look at three popular autobiographies of women who left successful careers to pursue alternative work (farming, baking). I found that the women sought meaning in their work, control over their labour process, and a new definition of success. These narratives provide broader insight into the constraints of the dominant career model and gendered organizations as well as the particular difficulties for non‐mothers to opt out.     

Discourses of Work–Life Balance: Negotiating ‘Genderblind’ Terms in Organizations

This article examines current debates about gender equality, work‐life balance and flexible working. We contrast policymakers’ and organizational discourses of flexible working and work–life balance with managers’ and employees’ talk about these issues within their organizations. We show how, despite the increasingly gender‐neutral language of the official discourses, in the data studied participants consistently reformulate the debates around gendered explanations and assumptions. For example, a ‘generic female parent’ is constructed in relation to work–life balance and flexible working yet participants routinely maintain that gender makes no difference within their organization. We consider the effects of these accounts; specifically the effect on those who take up flexible working, and the perceived backlash against policies viewed as favouring women or parents. We argue that the location of work–life balance and flexibility debates within a gender‐neutral context can in practice result in maintaining or encouraging gendered practices within organizations. Implications of this for organizations, for policymakers and for feminist researchers are discussed.     

Shamans’ Pragmatic Gendered Negotiations with Mapuche Resistance Movements and Chilean Political Authorities

In this article, I look at the ways in which gendered national discourses and the discourses of Mapuche resistance movements coerce and construct shamans (machi) and the ways in which machi appropriate, transform, and contest these images. I explore the contradictions between machi’s hybrid practices and their traditional representations of self and why they choose to represent themselves as they do. My interest lies in the ways in which studying gendered representations by and about machi, especially machi’s nonideological political practices, can contribute to current discussions of power and resistance, agency and structure, and the practice of power itself. Recent anthropological work has focused on the particular historical, social, political, and economic contexts shaping how and why indigenous groups decide to protect and promote particular images of themselves. I focus not on the community politics in which machi are involved, but on machi’s public faces in relation to national political figures and Mapuche political leaders such as longko.     

Subjectivation processes and gender in a neoliberal model of science in three Spanish research centres

From a Foucauldian approach, neoliberal rationality in science can be understood as a form of governance of the self that produces mechanisms through which the subject is constructed and subordinated at the same time. In this study we examine subjectivation processes and gender in centres of research created under neoliberal scientific rationality. We analyse 19 semi‐structured interviews of men and women researchers conducted in three highly competitive centres of excellence — a context rarely addressed in the literature of academic subjectivities. Following a critical discourse analysis, we show how subjectivation processes of neoliberal rationality result in two main discursive mechanisms of subjection that prevent or hinder alternative subjectivities and collective resistance, especially for women, presenting a double turn that we call: a ‘turn on oneself’ and a ‘gendered turn on oneself’. We conclude that these centres are spaces which provide the conditions of possibility to develop a scientific entrepreneurial self, excluding ‘other’ scientific subjectivities and preventing possible resistances that could emerge from them.     

Gender,visuality and violence: visual securitization and the 2001 war in Afghanistan

Visual securitization (the discursive processes by which images are assigned security implications) is integral to understanding how war and political violence is made possible. However, its insights have yet to be coupled with feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, which is alert to the connections between gender and (in)security. This article synthesizes these two research areas through Lene Hansen’s (2011) framework of visual securitization to investigate the gendered logics that underpinned the 2001 war in Afghanistan. By analyzing 123 photojournalistic images alongside American media texts and foreign policy discourse, I argue western images of Afghan women enacted a specific visuality through which they became constructed as a legitimate matter of security. The article makes two important contributions through this analysis. Firstly, it extends feminist understanding of the war in Afghanistan by demonstrating how the interplay between the visual and textual, and the gendered and racial logics operating within such interplay, visually produced Afghan women as a referent object of security. Secondly, this argument illustrates how gender can be critical in enabling the acceptance of visual securitizations, and how such securitizations can be enacted through gendered representations of insecurity and threat.     

Gender,Organizational Cultures and the Practices of Manager‐Academics in UK Universities

The article explores gendered management in UK universities in the context of moves to introduce new managerialism to higher education. Qualitative data are drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council funded project (R00023 7661) in which interviews were conducted with 137 male and female manager‐academics, from Heads of Department to Vice Chancellors, in 16 universities. The career trajectories of female and male manager‐academics are analysed to see if gender power relations, expectations and discrimination have affected their careers and organizational experiences. Also examined are whether and how gender relations and cultures are perceived to be relevant to management, the practices of women and men manager‐academics and the extent to which the differential value and status attached to teaching, research and management are gender‐related. It is suggested that women's participation in management roles, their perceptions of their practices and the expectations others hold of them are still marked by gender, even though some women have benefited, through promotion, from the greater emphasis on management now evident in UK universities.     

Global citizens,exotic others,and unwanted migrants: mobilities in and of Europe

This article reflects on Europe’s problematic relationship with its ‘others’, asking in particular how the idea of the ‘exotic’ – constituting one of Europe’s ‘imperial ruins’ – intersects with the figure of the Muslim migrant. The Muslim migrant has in the present become in Europe a potent marker of otherness, which reflects how some cosmopolitan aspirations are perceived negatively in European discourses, revealing how mobility itself is racilized and gendered. WoDaaBe Fulani migrants from Niger have historically occupied a subject position in Europe as identified with ‘the exotic’. The article discusses WoDaaBe temporary migration to Europe to supplement their income back home, and their intersecting positions as ‘exotic’, as Muslims and black Africans. While contemporary discourses tend to highlight Europe’s status as a site of equality, human rights, and cradle of civilization, some bodies are welcome within the space of Europe while others are not.     

The Production of the Female Entrepreneurial Subject: A Space of Exclusion for Women of Color?

SUMMARY

Using critical discourse analysis, this paper examines how the female entrepreneurial subject is constructed/produced within entrepreneurial discourses, how this subject is racialized, gendered and classed, and examines what practices contribute to the shaping of the female entrepreneurial subject. I specifically look at four areas/discourses central to entrepreneurship; that of independence, self-definition/self-monitoring, networking, and women's abilities as businesswomen. I contend that contemporary self-employment discourses mirror those of neo-liberalism/modernization where the notion of the independent liberal subject has the ability to self-determine and self-monitor, which is a sign of autonomy and mastery of the self. I also argue that the space of women's entrepreneurship legitimizes white middle-class women's experiences and excludes women of color from becoming active subjects in entrepreneurial discourses.     

‘It's not acceptable for the husband to stay at home': Taking a discourse analytical approach to capture the gendering of work

This article illustrates some of the ways in which the notion of (paid) work is actively being gendered, and how these gendering processes take place not only through organizational practices but also in discourses that circulate outside an organization in the private domain. Drawing on 15 in‐depth interviews with women who opted out of their own professional career in order to accompany their husbands on their overseas work assignment to Hong Kong, we demonstrate some of the benefits of using a discourse analytical approach to capturing and identifying the processes through which these women actively (although not necessarily consciously) gender the notion of work, thereby reinforcing the gender order and its male bias. We argue that identifying and making visible these gendered and gendering practices is an important component of, and a potential trigger for, change both in organizations as well as private contexts.     

War is where the hearth is: gendered labor and the everyday reproduction of the geopolitical in the army reserves

The feminized imaginary of “home and hearth” has long been central to the notion of soldiering as masculinist protection. Soldiering and war are not only materialized by gendered imaginaries of home and hearth though, but through everyday labors enacted within the home. Focusing on in-depth qualitative research with women partners and spouses of British Army reservists, we examine how women’s everyday domestic and emotional labor enables reservists to serve, constituting “hearth and home” as a site through which war is made possible. As reservists – who are still overwhelmingly heterosexual men – become increasingly called upon by the state, one must consider how the changing nature of the Army’s procurement of soldiers is also changing demands on women’s labor. Feminist IPE scholars have shown broader trends in the outsourcing of labor to women and its privatization. Our research similarly underscores the significance of everyday gendered labor to the geopolitical. Moreover, we highlight the fragility of military power, given that women can withdraw their labor at any time. The article concludes that paying attention to women’s everyday labor in the home facilitates greater understanding of one of the key sites through which war is both materialized and challenged.     

Gender and Sexuality in Discourses of Managerial Control: The Case of Women Miners

Mining scholarship has focused chiefly on capital developments, labour relations, changing technology, and global markets, ignoring the equally critical aspects of gendered organizations and their role in shaping the subjectivities of workers and managers. This article probes how gender and sexuality organize a mine site through organizational design and productivity management. It looks behind the rhetoric of equal opportunity, glamour mining and human resource techniques to explore the sexual politics of employing women as miners. In particular it scrutinizes the discourses of masculinity that produce ‘the woman miner’ in a context where the barriers between work and personal life are particularly mobile and highly contested. Equally crucially, it recounts some of the ways in which women have mobilized against systemic male dominance and privilege. The workplace in question is the world’s largest gem mine of its kind, a state–of–the–art computerized operation set in the remote Australian outback.