Women's Leadership: Sociological Constructions of Women's Leadership

Citation

Bierema, L.L. (2010), "Women's Leadership: Sociological Constructions of Women's Leadership", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 34 No. 8/9, pp. 875-877. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090591011081039

Book synopsis

This book provides a needed alternative understanding of women's leadership and leadership development based on critical questioning of mainstream and traditional conceptions of leadership. The book was inspired by a lack of critical work on women's leadership, the dominance of leadership as understood in the context of business, the need to challenge masculine models of leadership, and the persistent lack of equality for women in the workplace. The book was guided by providing fresh insights to several questions: Why are women still seen as “out of place”? What is currently being written and said about women leaders? Why does the leadership literature continue to be dominated by representations of the leader as individual (male) hero? How are women leaders represented? What can we learn about leadership by studying in alternative settings? How can we further the development of new approaches to leadership? How can we better reflect women's experiences of leadership in the practice of leadership development? To answer these questions, the authors provide a complete review of current literature, examine empirical research, and analyze implications for leadership identity and leadership development.

The book will be of interest to aspiring women leaders, women leaders seeking career progression, leaders wishing to influence change, researchers seeking alternative understandings of leadership, and learning and development practitioners who wish to sharpen the social, political, and cultural elements of their practice.

The book is seven chapters arranged in three parts. Chapter 1 highlights the limited empirical base forming our understanding of women's leadership, particularly how women become leaders. The chapter also documents how leadership development is drawn from a narrow stream of research. Stead and Elliott critique the empirical base for its individualistic focus, detachment from social context, and overestimation of the power and influence of individual leaders. They suggest that the literature is limited by its assumption that leaders are “white, western and male … [working in] large, modern, western organizations that seem impervious to external influences” (p. 164). Instead, the authors explore post heroic models of leadership and argue that leadership is a shared, relational social process bounded by context that is not gender‐neutral. Chapter 2 builds on the critiques put forth in Chapter 1 by illustrating media and academic interest in women's leadership, in spite of the paucity of empirical research on women leaders. This lack of empirical data has created stereotypical, individualistic interpretations of women leaders. The chapter highlights common stereotypes (Queen Bee, Iron Maiden, and Selfless Heroine) underscoring the social interpretation of women leaders as “out of place.” The chapter's analysis calls for more in‐depth, critical studies of women leaders since the leadership experiences that don't fit the masculine model are silenced. Chapter 3 draws on the authors' in‐depth interviews with nine women leaders from a range of settings to provide a narrative account of their leadership experiences. The analysis includes “The Leadership Web,” a model that shows how women's leadership is influenced by a range of interconnecting dynamic relationships between others, work, and place. Chapter 4 draws on the authors' and other studies to show how gender matters in leadership and functions as a “basic pillar of organizing” in social context. The chapter focuses on “doing gender” (how gender is created through social interaction) and “gendered processes” (practices, policies and procedures that impact women leaders) in organizations. Chapter 5 synthesizes the literature, research, and arguments in the previous chapters and illuminates how discourse organizes gender identity. The chapter explores the relationship between broader societal narratives of gender and dominant discourses in organizations to help us understand how certain (male) discourses of leadership identity become privileged. Chapter 6 takes a practical approach to answering the questions that have been raised in the book by presenting the authors' alternative model of women leaders' learning and a practical example of their own women's leadership development model. The authors suggest that women learn to negotiate leadership in two important ways:

1. 1.

   the ability to recognise the impact of gender on their position as a woman leader; and

2. 2.

   the ability to “story” themselves as leaders.

Their development model is built around these assumptions. Chapter 7 provides a summary of the book and articulates implications on empirical, theoretical and practical levels.

Evaluation

As a scholar of women's learning and development for over 20 years, I can relate to the authors' own personal and professional exasperation with the empirical, theoretical, and practical understandings of women's leadership. I too have vacillated from despair over women's slow progress to utter inspiration over the stories of their challenges and achievements. Admittedly, I have become somewhat jaded by the same old leadership rhetoric that is steeped in masculinity that provides no models for change. This is the book on leadership I've been waiting for that has renewed my hope for creating critical, alternative understandings of leadership that can actually challenge inequitable organizational structures and asymmetrical power relations. The book provides a current scholarly examination of women's leadership, reports the empirical work by the authors and others, offers a robust and critical analysis of the research, suggests alternative ways of thinking about women's leadership, and provides a practical model for applying their alternative conceptualization of women's leadership. In particular, I would like to comment on how the book takes a comprehensive, critical approach to a difficult issue; provides an empirically‐based alternative model of women's leadership; and challenges us to develop more critical work that challenges dominant perspectives.

The emergence of Critical Management Studies and Critical HRD has inspired work that seeks to disrupt the status quo and challenge dominant ways of thinking and doing in organizations. Stead and Elliott do a commendable job of providing a critical analysis of literature, research, and practice. Not only does this book make an important contribution to the leadership literature from a critical perspective, it also provides an outstanding example of how to do critical research, theorizing, and practice.

The book offers a robust analysis of the theory and research related to leadership and uses the research of the authors and others to build alternative theory and practice models for developing women leaders. Their critiques illustrate how meta‐narratives of leaders are developed and how women do not fit the dominant model. They further show how leadership discourse creates socially shared meanings of the ideal (male) leader. Critical work determines that we move beyond critique to offer alternative conceptualizations and actions to address social inequities. Not only have Stead and Elliott challenged how we conceptualize leadership, they have also provided an alternative way of developing women leaders that acknowledges that leadership is a gendered, social practice that is significantly affected by social context.

Finally, Stead and Elliott challenge us to continue and expand their work through the development of a stronger empirical base for leadership and leadership development of a diverse workforce. They encourage the development of additional methodologies to build knowledge about gender, power, and leadership across a range of social settings. They also urge us to consider the broad diversity of organizations and how other non‐dominant social groups learn to be leaders in what remains a white, western, male‐dominated practice.

In the authors' own words

In conclusion, these discussions of leadership learning and development have demonstrated that women leaders' learning of leadership and their development requirements are neither gender‐neutral nor individual activities. Rather their learning and development are bound by their being women and bound by their relations to others and their social environment. As such women's leadership learning and development are interpreted as dynamic and shifting, social  concepts  calling  for  development  activities  that  focus  on  the  sharing  of  concrete experiences with a view to personal and organisational improvement. Attending to learning and development in this way, we argue, offers progression for women leaders by affording them  the  opportunity  to analyse their leadership practice and to identify positive ways of influencing and moving forward (p. 161).

About the reviewer

Laura L. Bierema is Professor of Adult Education and Human Resource Development at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. She received her BA degree (1986) in Human Relations from Michigan State University, her MLIR (Masters of Labor & Industrial Relations) (1988) from Michigan State University, and her EdD degree (1994) in Adult Education from the University of Georgia. Prior to her career in academia, Laura L. Bierema held a number of human resources and organization development positions in the US automotive industry.