Gender, Culture and Organizational Change

Putting Theory into Practice

Catherine Itzen, Janet Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134832613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

An engaging contribution to the increasing body of knowledge about gender and organizations, Gender, Culture and Organizational Change examines gender-based inequality in organizations and considers how sexual and social relations between women and men based on sexuality, power and control determine the cultures, structures and practices of organization and the experiences of men and women working in them.
Gender, Culture and Organizational Change represents a decade of experience of managing change and implementing theory in public sector organizations during a period of major social, political and economic transition and analyses the progress that has been made. It expands to make wider connections with women and trade unions in Europe and management development for women in the "developing" countries of Africa and Asia. It will be valuable reading for students in social policy, gender studies and sociology and for professionals with an interest in understanding the dynamics of the workplace.

Part I
Gendering organizational culture

Chapter 1

Gender and cultural change

Janet Newman

This chapter provides frameworks for exploring the gender dynamics of organizational culture, and identifies ways in which these dynamics are shifting as public sector organizations respond to external change. It explores some of the tensions in theorizing culture, and in bringing about cultural change.

The focus on culture in this volume signifies an increasing recognition of the importance of the cultural practices through which gender relations are both reproduced and changed. ‘Organizational culture’ is usually defined in terms of shared symbols, language, practices (‘how we do things around here’), and deeply embedded beliefs and values. Each of these domains has to be understood as gendered, and together they constitute an important field in which gendered meanings, identities, practices and power relations are sustained. Culture has become a salient issue for analysing gender relations and organizations for several reasons.

First, organizational cultures have been highlighted as a significant barrier to change. Even in organizations where equal opportunity initiatives are well developed, their cultures may be resistant and intractable. The informal organization may continue to transmit cultural messages about the ‘proper place’ for women; and a gendered hierarchy, with men mainly at the top and women mainly at lower levels of an organization, may be sustained and reproduced through cultural messages about the value of male and female labour. Other informal hierarchies are held in place alongside those of gender. Culture is the site where, for example, the wider ideologies of racism and homophobia become lived out in organizational discourses and practices. Interventions which stop at the level of the formal organization (for example the production of new policies and procedures) are, as a result, likely to be limited in their effectiveness.

Second, experience has shown that a focus on ‘numbers’ alone is not enough to bring about organizational change. The appointment of more women to senior levels, or the recruitment of women to non-traditional areas of work, is only part of the solution. Where women face hostile cultures, the pressures are great and an undue amount of energy has to be expended in developing strategies for survival. There may also be hard choices to be made about how far to adapt to the ‘malestream’ culture which they face, rather than developing alternative ways of working and opening up the possibilities of change for other women.

At the same time, public-sector organizations have been going through a period of massive cultural change, attempting to become more ‘responsive’, ‘flexible’, ‘customer oriented’ or ‘businesslike’ in their approach. This has a number of implications for women as both users of, and employees in, public-service organizations. Such changes can transform existing structures and hierarchies, and open up spaces in which women can seek to influence the organization of the future. Women often articulate strong support for many of the values which (at least on paper) underpin change: for example, those of developing a stronger service orientation, empowering ‘front line’ staff, and developing flexible and creative responses to new agendas such as the environment, health and community safety. They are also committed to the more effective management of change, based on better communication, longer-term planning and greater involvement of staff and users in decision-making. Other aspects of cultural change may, however, create new barriers to women’s voices being heard, and will certainly disadvantage women as the prime users of many public services.

These changes, partial shifts and combinations of cultures mean that any agenda for change needs to reflect the particular cultural configurations of an organization at a given moment in time. Analysing its cultural patterns is an important starting point; and I want to give a brief account of some approaches to cultural mapping which have been developed with women staff in workshops and training programmes.

DECODING THE SYMBOLS: MAPPING AND UNDERSTANDING CULTURE

Cultural mapping can be based on surveys, questionnaires, interviews and group discussions, producing a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. Other chapters of this volume (e.g. Itzin; Parkin and Maddock) outline formal and broad-based approaches through ‘equality audits’, surveys and interviews. Here I want to focus on qualitative techniques which produce rich and illuminating data.

Cultural imagery

Culture is slippery and elusive; because it is part of taken-for-granted, everyday reality, it is hard to see. To capture it, one has to draw on the senses, to ‘tune in’ to the sounds, to bring the chaos of images into some kind of focus, and to use intuition to produce some kind of Gestalt from a host of fragmented incidents and impressions. These can be surfaced through collecting anecdotes and stories, exploring language, studying informal routines and work practices, and analysing the ‘high-profile’ symbols of corporate imagery and official statements. When groups of women are asked to capture their experience of their culture visually, they have produced a host of powerful images: for example, gardens in which some flowers are watered but others left to wither; peacocks which strut grandly and make a lot of noise but which have no brain; octopuses with most of their limbs lopped off or with stunted growth; and multitiered edifices with foundations built on women’s labour, with isolated women teetering precariously on their fragile foothold near the top.

Brainstorming

Another approach is to brainstorm a list of ways in which the gender dynamics of an organization are experienced, and how these are changing. A list produced by women in one local authority is shown in Figure 1.1. Each item was written on a separate ‘postit’, and these were grouped to show the interrelationships and connections between them, and to highlight recurring patterns.

Figure 1.1 Brainstorming the Culture

Many of these items reflect the division of labour and typifications of ‘women’s work’ of traditional public-sector bureaucracies, in which women’s work is less valued than men’s, but in which some women, as well as men, support the traditional divisions of labour. Other items show lines of movement, with more women gaining entry to jobs previously held by men, and more women coming through into middle management. Some items seem to reflect the emergence of a more ‘competitive culture’. This is reflected in comments such as ‘Work at the “front line”…seems to be getting harder’ and ‘The management style is getting more macho’, but is also evident in the notion that there is more scope and visibility for some ‘enterprising’ women, many of whom, however, do not want to be identified with ‘women’s issues’ because they are managing to succeed on male terms.

Other items from this list seem to reflect something rather different, arising from contemporary patterns of change. The new chief executive has stated his support for the promotion of women to senior levels; there is some positive action training; new agendas are emerging about services to women in the community; and importance is being placed on the development of new human resource strategies.

While most of these sound positive, other aspects of change are less so. The power of the centre to enforce and regulate equality policies is declining, and it is evident that change has led to great increases of pressure on women (and men) in senior posts at the centre. Other potentially positive aspects are limited in their effectiveness because of the legacy of the traditional culture. Newly appointed women managers have to fight hard to gain acceptance, despite support from the top. There is still a belief that managment is essentially a male function. In other areas, the emergence of a competitive ethos means that the chief executive’s support on women’s issues may not be enough to ‘transform’ business managers (although they may well learn to speak the right language).

This analysis suggests that, on the one hand, change is not impossible. There are lines of movement, and new spaces are opening up in which women may be able to shape some of the organization’s change agenda. On the other hand, it under-scores the message that change is unlikely to progress smoothly.

The next section suggests how this kind of work can be built into an analysis of new cultural forms and configurations of gender cultures.

GENDER AND CULTURAL CHANGE: THE ‘NEW MANAGERIALISM’

Shifts in the managerial regimes of public-sector organizations have had profound implications for gender relations, and for the patterning of male and female identities. I want to explore the gender relations of three cultural forms. The first is the traditional culture, based on a mix of administrative and professional regimes; the culture which characterized many of the old public-sector bureaucracies. The second is the competitive culture, resulting from the introduction of a competitive and business ethos into the public sector, in which parts of an organization are exposed to external competition and/or are set up in relations of internal competition. The third is the transformational culture, based on the application of a‘new managerialist’ ethos to the public sector. None of these exists in pure form in any one organization; they are overlaid on each other in complex ways. But before exploring such patterns of intersection, I want to suggest the different ways in which these three cultural forms are gendered.

The gender relations of ‘traditional’ cultures

The traditional culture is based on a mix of administrative and professional discourses, each delivering its own language, imagery, values, relationships and ways of doing things. Each offers particular identities within a hierarchy. Administrative discourses offer functionally specialized identities (finance, personnel) and a hierarchy of clearly defined grades and status positions. Professional identities are tied to the profession itself (social worker, doctor, etc.) and through a hierarchy of expertise and experience within an organization.

These cultures are organized around gender in two ways: hierarchically, with women at lower grades and tiers; and through the definition of jobs as ‘women’s work’ or ‘men’s work’ (across both horizontal and vertical divisions). The gender typing of jobs has traditionally been fairly strong, with women occupying the functional specialisms (such as personnel) or service professions (such as nursing, social work, teaching of young children) most closely associated with female roles. This strong gender distinction between jobs has, traditionally, meant that women were frequently found in senior positions in some settings (such as hospital matron, infant school head, personnel manager). However, there was always an invisible hierarchy operating between sectors, with male-dominated professions generally accorded more pay and status than traditional female professions, whether occupied by men or by women. Similarly the male-dominated function of financial management has tended to be accorded more pay and status than personnel management. This is not, however, just a matter of occupations being based on gender stereotyping (number focus for men, people focus for women), but one of the value placed on different kinds of work. As ‘people’ management has become linked with resource use (‘HRM’), and has become part of larger departments associated with more strategic roles, so it has tended to become the province of male rather than female managers.

‘Traditional’ cultures, then, have tended to be based on a sexual division of labour reflecting traditional views about appropriate male and female roles. They have also tended to be hierarchical, with strong degrees of role distance and expected deference between high- (typically male) and low- (typically female) status jobs—for example between medical consultant and nurse, between manager and secretary. But the gendered basis of this culture goes far beyond the sexual division of labour. It is also built on sets of gendered and sexualized meanings operating within the workplace, which set up ‘invisible’ hierarchies between male and female roles and the men and women who occupy them.

Women in traditional regimes are offered quasi-familial roles and identities around a core of male hierarchies and privileges. Women managers, for example, can act as ‘mothers’ (the kindly personnel officer or line manager concerned with staff welfare); as ‘aunts’ (the older, probably single, woman allowed senior status but little real power); as ‘wives’ (the supportive secretary or assistant); and as ‘daughters’ (allowed some privileges on the expectation that they will eventually ‘leave home’ and therefore present little real challenge). A few women may be admitted to the ranks of the ‘lads’, and can be found in more collegial roles: as ‘fun-loving sister’, or as ‘tomboy’, able to join in and laugh with the lads (even if sometimes at other women’s expense).

Those who take on any other kind of role (for example those who adopt a more sexualized, un-daughterly presence, or who break the rules of permitted sisterly behaviour by talking about ‘women’s issues’) are seen as troublesome and ‘difficult’. Black women are rarely admitted to the family at all; but many occupy positions outside these Anglocentric familial relationships. Black and white working-class women occupy an organizational sub-class (perhaps below stairs?) in typing pools, print rooms, canteens and other predominantly female collective spaces—all, of whatever age, consigned to the status of ‘girls’ and addressed only by first names. Class, race and generation, then, underpin the hierarchy of female roles in the traditional regime of public-sector bureaucracies. But these bureaucracies have themselves been the target of change, and these social divisions are being realigned in complex ways.

The gender relations of ‘competitive’ cultures

A decade of change has led to the emergence of new elements of organizational culture in the public sector. The form these take, however, has depended on the way in which organizations (and units within them) have responded to the restructurings and changes of recent years. We can, for example, identify different responses to exposure to external or internal competition. ‘Being competitive’ is not an objective set of attributes, but depends on subjective understandings of how the business world works. Much of the public sector has so far tended to operate on images of that world as requiring hard, macho or ‘cowboy’ styles of working. It is as if the unlocking of the shackles of bureaucratic constraints has at last allowed managers to become ‘real men’, released from the second-class status of public sector functionaries through exposure to the ‘real world’ of the market place. The focus is on cutting costs rather than adding or retaining value; the approach to change is that of ‘slash and burn’; people are seen as costs rather than assets; and the dominant management style tends to result in an impoverished organizational culture.

The gender relations of the macho cowboy regime are less familial than those of the traditional bureaucracy. Many of the old patriarchs and benevolent paternal figures are being dethroned (made redundant) or depowered (through restructurings which break up some of the old fiefdoms and power bases). In competitive cultures, power lies where the action is—where people do business. Informal hierarchies develop around the jobs...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Gendering organizational culture
• Part II Strategies for organizational change
• Name index
• Subject index