Power, Politics and Exclusion in Organization and Management

Robert McMurray,Alison Pullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000063646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

There is a long tradition of research on politics, power and exclusion in areas such as sociology, social policy, politics, women's studies and philosophy. While power has received considerable attention in mainstream management research and teaching, it is rarely considered in terms of politics and exclusion, particularly where the work of women writers is concerned.

This second book in the Routledge Series on Women Writers in Organization Studies analyses the ways in which women have theorised and embodied relations of power. Women like Edith Garrud who, trained in the Japanese art of jujutsu, confronted the power of the state to champion feminist politics. Others, such as Beatrice Webb and Alva Myrdal, are shown to have been at the heart of welfare reforms and social justice movements that responded to the worst excesses of industrialisation based on considerations of class and gender. The writing of bell hooks provides a necessarily uncomfortable account of the ways in which imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy inflict unspoken harm, while Hannah Arendt's work considers the ways in which different modes of organizing restrict the ability of people to live freely. Taken together, such writings dispel the myth that work or business can be separated from the rest of life, a point driven home by Rosabeth Moss Kanter's observations on the ways in which power and inequality differentially structure life chances. These writers challenge us to think again about power, politics and exclusion in organizational contexts. They provide provocative thinking, which opens up new avenues for organization theory, practice and social activism.

Each woman writer is introduced and analysed by experts in organization studies. Further reading and accessible resources are also identified for those interested in knowing (thinking!) more. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology. Like all the books in this series, it will also be interest to anyone who wants to see, think and act differently.

1 Introduction

Power, politics and exclusion

Robert McMurray and Alison Pullen

Power and politics are an inescapable part of organizing. Organizations are political arenas infused by power, where authority and influence reside in the ways in which relationships are negotiated and formed. There can be no action in the absence of relations of power, and decisions and negotiations cannot be divorced from the play of politics in so far as resources and vested interests are always in play as stakeholders vie for supremacy. Drawing on psychology, sociology, politics, philosophy and history, our understanding of power in organization and management has become more nuanced. Unitary assumptions have been challenged by accounts of pluralistic interests, politics and non-decision-making power. Simplistic trait-based notions of individual power have been found wanting in the face of more relational accounts that stress the inter-relational spaces between people. Moreover, power is increasingly read as embedded within and reproduced by deep structures and discrete processes that both constitute and are constituted by interacting agents. This combination of actors, structures and processes produces an uneven distribution of opportunities, resources and outcomes. The evidence of these power relations is writ large in everything, from stories of heroic business leaders to the everyday coercion of unseen workers, to the accounts of sexual harassment at work and the aggregated demands of consumers.

Given the wealth of writings on “power”, one might question why the topic is tackled in this series on Women Writers in Organization Studies. Most literature on power assumes gender neutrality (Wilson, 1996), yet all too often accounts of power are written by men about men’s lives, and as such scholars of organization adopt gender-blind perspectives. Whether the focus is CEOs, industrial relations, labour process theory, change management, mergers and acquisitions or business history, there is a tendency to focus on the lives, experiences or theorising of men. While this is not always the case, it is fair to say that the experience and theorising of women is, taken as a whole, underrepresented. Where women are present in the analysis of their organizational lives, the focus tends to be on their representation – that is to say they are counted to determine how many women are in the organization. Much of the literature focuses on their relative subordination to men in male-dominated organizations. Consequently, many of us are blind to what it has meant, and continues to mean, to work, manage, lead and organize as women given that organizational textbooks continue to represent the lives of the neutral worker, manager and executive as default male. As importantly, not enough is read about alternative conceptualisations of the nature of work, organization and management – ­conceptions rooted in the theorising and experiences of women. This includes the ways in which women have organized to oppose their exclusion and assert their right to shape the world. Further, there is a growing body of feminist studies of organizations that explore feminist ways of organizing, thinking and writing.

Building on Beyond Rationality in Organization and Management, Volume 1 of the Routledge Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies series, this volume considers the ways in which women have created their own positions from which to challenge the power, politics and exclusion. In so doing, Volume 2 considers the life of Edith Garrud (trained in the Japanese art of jujutsu) who confronted the power of others in a literal and conceptual sense to champion feminist politics as a counterpoint to classical management thinking. Others, such as Beatrice Webb and Alva Myrdal, are shown to have been at the heart of welfare reforms and social-justice movements that responded to the worst excesses of industrialisation, bringing particular attention to issues of gender and class. Such writing has the benefit of dispelling the myth that work or business can be separated from the rest of life, a point driven home by the work of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a writer who considered power and inequality in the light of work–family dynamics. The scholarship of Hannah Arendt provides a sustained critique of sovereign power and how to challenge and transcend traditional and patriarchal forms of governance linked to values of control. Finally, and importantly, the writing and activism of bell hooks reminds us that issues of power, politics and exclusion are not only about class and gender, but also about race. Together, these writers challenge us to think again about power, politics and exclusion in organizational contexts. They open new avenues for organization theory and practice and social activism.

Given that this book is published 100 years after the granting of votes for (some) women in Britain, it is appropriate that we begin the volume with an account of the struggle, violence and opposition that shaped the suffragette movement. Reaching back to the late 19th and early 20th century, Simon Kelly describes the extraordinary life of a woman who wrote a limited amount, but nonetheless embodied a very particular and disruptive form of organizing and acting that fundamentally challenged the status quo: Edith Garrud. The status quo was represented by politicians and poets such as Ruskin, who lionised the apparent physicality, force, progressiveness and conquering abilities of men, while describing women as frail, beautiful, marginal, lacking in creativity yet capable of praising the achievements of men. In short, a woman was less than a man. Edith Garrud is described as resisting such positioning in cultural, political and legal terms. An expert in jujutsu, defender of the suffragettes, performer and political activist, Garrud co-opts the male art of fighting to construct women and women’s bodies as active, threatening and powerful in the face of male dominance. As Simon Kelly notes, rather than being seen as passive and possessable, women’s bodies become spaces for the practice of politics, resistance, identity and change. Edith Garrud trained women in the self-defence required to claim public space, while also offering suffragettes the physical means to counter the agents of an oppressive tate (not to mention casual and institutional sexual abuse). This then, is a story of heroic feminism capable of organizing and claiming space in the face of male/masculine opposition. It points to the possibility of resisting marginal positions and the different ways in which strength might be embodied and employed. This is not a chapter about organizing and managing per se. Rather, it invites us to reconsider how our everyday assumptions might marginalise and oppress those with whom we work, while highlighting the potential for the oppressed to oppose such action.

Where Edith Garrud can be characterised as a self-made publicist and business owner, Beatrice Webb has a rather different societal position. David Jacobs and Rosetta Morris’ Chapter 3 makes clear that Webb’s personal life of wealth and privilege was in stark contrast to her concern with equality and advancement. Spanning the roles of society hostess, charity worker, social scientist and social reformer, Beatrice eschewed mainstream concerns with elites and professions (a concern that persists today) in favour of understanding the structural conditions that maintain disadvantage and poverty. As with other writers in this series (see, for example, Kenny [Forthcoming] on Berlant), Beatrice Webb dared to look differently at work, often from the perspective of those at the bottom of society. While Webb was no radical, we learn that she was prepared to challenge extant theory, particularly neoclassical economics, based on first-hand observation and data collection. Beatrice Webb recognised that organizing, politics, power and justice are not distinct academic subjects but, rather, the intertwined processes embedded in social systems that maintain conditions of relative disadvantage. It is not surprising then that Beatrice Webb contributed to our understanding of economics, productive wages, welfare and political reform. Moreover, she employed her research and writing to actively campaign for the improvement of living conditions in each of these areas. Given that Beatrice Webb was acutely aware of the conditions that maintain disadvantage, it is ironic that those forces would see her marginalised – her full contribution written out of an arena dominated by men. Specifically, David and Rosetta say that Beatrice Webb was required to step down as the literary executor to British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer. The cause? Her marriage to Sidney Webb, a man with whose politics Spencer disagreed. Spencer felt that Beatrice’s association with Sidney would embarrass him. In response, Beatrice agreed to assist Spencer without ever being acknowledged. This rather prosaic point goes to the heart of how women’s work is often unacknowledged in, and written out of, academic labour and history. It reminds us of why chapters such as this are so important and calls for a corrective to histories and texts that are partial and exclusionary. We are all the poorer for such acts of exclusion.

It is unusual that Chapter 4 should introduce the work of a person who combines feminism and eugenic social engineering, but this is precisely what is on offer when Louise Wallenberg and Torkild Thanem consider Swedish politician and intellectual Alva Myrdal. Like many of the women in this series, Alva Myrdal’s life and work has been either under-recognised or forgotten. We learn that underpinning Myrdal’s politics was a relentless striving to create a classless society where women and men were treated as equals. Equality was to be based on the premise that a person’s abilities were a question of nurture – predicated on social and economic conditions – rather than nature. This was taken to imply a strong role of the welfare state if women were to fulfil their wider potential unfettered by the unequal distribution of domestic labour. Louise and Torkild describe Alva’s fight against the patriarchal construction of what she regarded as a “fake femininity” – which oppressed and subordinated women by reducing them to “mothers and wives” – a fully 20 years before Simone de Beauvoir articulated very similar ideas in The Second Sex. The result is a politics which positions the State as a central player in the transformation of work, organizing and business. Alva also fundamentally challenged essentialist conceptions of the role of women in Sweden. For many readers, the link to social eugenics in Alva Myrdal’s work will be rightly problematic. Even allowing for context, its fascist overtones speak to potential intolerance of difference, promoting as they do a concern with “efficient” human capital in its most unpalatable form. While such a position is framed in terms of the interests of society as a whole, it reflects a sentiment at odds with our understanding of the role of a compassionate welfare state. Indeed, as Louise Wallenberg and Torkild Thanem note, the Swedish government has latterly offered economic compensation to victims of Sweden’s coercive sterilisation scheme. And yet, Alva Myrdal was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and director of UNESCO who fundamentally challenged existing power ­structures. What this account of Alva Myrdal reminds us of is that ideas and the people who create them are complex, contextually bound and contestable. Like all writers, the authors studied in this book are not to be taken at their word, but are to be critically examined to determine the areas in which their thinking is to be judged wanting, but also those where their writing might enlighten our understanding of self in relation to other. In this sense, our writers mirror the complexity of the wider world and the power and politics that mark its course.

In Chapter 5, we move forward to the present day and cross continents to the USA. Deborah N. Brewis and Lara Pecis introduce Rosabeth Moss Kanter: an influential scholar and practitioner whose writing has contributed to our understanding of infrastructure, power, leadership, regeneration, gender, diversity, innovation and change. Recognising that a single chapter cannot hope to cover such a breadth of contribution, Deborah and Lara prioritise the contributions of two of Kanter’s books. The first, Men and Women of the Corporation, is presented as a nuanced account of the gendering of the formal and informal roles that shape the work of organizational actors and contribute to corporate functioning. Relational in outlook, Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s research is praised for considering how the structuring of roles, relations, hierarchies, practices and power not only determines but positively or negatively reinforces the life chances of different individuals. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which women, as a minority, suffer marginalisation and tokenism as a consequence of the over-representation of men and masculinity in our organizations. Here, Kanter refers to the repressive and self-regulating effects of the male gaze (as pertinent an issue now as it was in the 1970s) that categorises and entraps minorities in general and women in particular. Having considered the significance of Kanter’s contribution in this area, Deborah N. Brewis and Lara Pecis go on to consider how her works have been extended in respect of leadership, gender, embodiment and the fallacy of organizational neutrality. The latter part of the chapter considers Kanter’s contribution to our understanding of change and innovation arising out of the book The Change Masters: Innovations for Productivity in the American Corporation. The resulting analysis usefully extends our understanding of empowerment in organization studies and provides an account of innovation that foreshadows and informs research in organizational studies for decades to come.

Peter Bloom rightly describes Hannah Arendt as one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th century. Having outlined the broad sweep and significance of Hannah Arendt’s writing, Peter focuses attention on the ways in which her work illuminates our understanding of power and organizing. Chapter 6 presents a range of concepts through which Arendt interrogates our ways of being in the world (e.g. labour, work, action, vita activa ­organizing, the human condition, worldly alienation and vita management). Writing at a time of global upheaval and threat, Hannah Arendt is concerned with the ways in which politics and organizing restrict the ability of people to freely organize their work, life and actions. Rationality, probability, regulation, institutionalisation and quantification serve to limit space for individuality and difference as we are imprisoned by industrialisation, capitalism and marketisation. For Hannah Arendt, such limitations are not to be seen as an inevitable consequence of inviolable behavioral or institutional laws, but rather, as discursive accomplishments whose existence depends on practices of legitimation. The chapter leads us to question the power of late capitalism to define and limit us as human beings. As Peter Bloom notes, the challenge becomes one of conceiving modes of organizing that meet basic needs while promoting the individual freedom required to meaningfully create, relate and live.

Our exploration of power, politics and exclusion is brought to a close by Helena Liu’s powerful account of bell hooks. Traversing the boundary between academic theorising and public intellectualism over the last four decades, bell hooks’ extensive library has offered a bold, plainspoken critique of the hegemonic culture of violence in our societies. hooks’ writings engage in a politics of decolonisation, disrupting our internalisation of the dominant values embedded in what she poignantly calls “the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. Over more than thirty books, bell hooks has developed a vocabulary for naming what often remains unspoken. In particular, her work allows us to disrupt the silences in management-theorising and practice and challenge the ways we reproduce, if not glorify, systems of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy. hooks’ writing may prove uncomfortable reading for many, as it attacks the tokenistic self-interest of men who promote parity while leaving marginalising structures and patriarchal practices in place. Feminism is similarly critiqued in so far as it fails to account for race and lacks the radical thought required to engender fundamental change. bell hooks reminds us that the point of theorising and organizing is action. Helena Liu notes that, to date, such radical theorising and action have been conspicuous by their absence in management and organization studies. Patriarchy and white supremacy have for too long been unspeakable: silenced issues within the academy, workplace and society. The first step is to acknowledge the exclusion (and exclusionary effects) of these topics, coupled with a radical visionary feminist politics that has a non-dominating love at its root.

Taken together, the books in this volume encourage us to look again at the nature and effects of power on individuals, groups, organizations and society. They demonstrate the ways in which power and politics combine to marginalise, exclude and erase some whilst serving the interests of others. Further, these books bring to the surface the different ways in which power and exclusionary practices have, can and should be opposed for the benefit of all. Writing, and writing to educate, is a powerful practice which needs to be followed up by action.

References

• Kenny, K. (Forthcoming). Lauren Berlant: Cruel organizations. In McMurray, R. and Pullen, A. (Eds.), Morality, Ethics and Responsibility, Organization and Management, Routledge Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies. London: Routledge.
• Wilson, F. (1996). Research note: Organizational theory: Blind and deaf to gender? Organization Studies, 17(5), pp. 825–842.

2 Edith Garrud

The jujutsuffragette

Simon Kelly

The argument against Woman Suffrage which has always impressed me most is the physical force argument. First, the only stable force of government is the one which secures that the balance of political power is in the same hands as the balance of physical force. Second, by counting heads you secure a rough approximate index as to where government or policy has the physical force of the country behind it. In the last place, women as physical force units are not equal to men. Therefore, if you include women when you are counting heads, the result is not reliable as an index of the physical force in the country.

Alexander MacCallum Scott, Liberal MP for Glasgow Bridgeton¹

The words above epitomise the political strug...