Gender, Power and Organisations

Citation

Tremaine, M. (2001), "Gender, Power and Organisations", Women in Management Review, Vol. 16 No. 2, pp. 93-94. https://doi.org/10.1108/wimr.2001.16.2.93.1

Just when you thought you had read everything you ever needed to read about gender and organisations, here comes another book. You might make the mistake of thinking you don’t need to read this one, because it will inevitably go over the same old ground. In fact, this book is different. For a start it is beautifully written. Every point is explained in a clear, accessible way and the argument it sets out is logical and reassuringly easy to follow. Because the authors do not assume that their readers will have prior knowledge, the book offers a breadth of understanding of the debates to all comers; the student, the manager, the policy developer or the academic. Naturally readers will tend to have a partial perspective of gender depending on their lived experience and exposure to ideas. People’s attitudes vary depending on the times they have lived through and their disciplinary and ideological background. A liberal feminist who has experienced the rise of feminism in the 1970s and is comfortably entrenched in the ranks of a bureaucratic organisation will see the relationship between gender and organisation differently from a younger radical feminist who works for a non‐profit women’s group such as women’s refuge.

Inevitably, each person’s perspective will make some features of the gender landscape seem blindingly obvious. But the idiosyncratic nature of that perception is usually hidden from the individual, who can be quite frustrated when others fail to share the same viewpoint. This book helps each of us to fill in the rest of the gender landscape. As you read, the book shows the reasons why other people see gender differently and gives a far more developed understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your own approach – what it explains and what it leaves unexplored. Basically, the book develops a gender map, which is valuable even for experts in the field. Going over the ground in a methodical way, can give new insights and strengthen your understanding of the structure of the debates and the way they relate to each other. Another impressive feature of this book is how much it covers without, at any stage, degenerating into superficiality. Being able to explain complex ideas simply is an impressive attribute and Halford and Leonard manage not only to do this, but to do it using words in a very economical way.

With such an aptitude for clarity and economy in their writing style, it is perhaps not surprising that the authors have also structured the book well. They foreshadow points to be made, cross‐reference sections of the book where the same idea is mentioned and order their material to help link related ideas and summarise the ground covered at the end of each chapter. At the outset, they present an explicit structure to encompass the logic of their argument as it is revealed chapter by chapter. The benefits of the careful framework, are that the book is accessible to a far wider audience than many gender books, which can be quite theoretically opaque and discouragingly jargon‐ridden to the uninitiated.

From the very first page, Halford and Leonard make it clear what they are trying to explore in terms of men, women and organisations by describing the contemporary gender profile. They construct a collage of statistics and other evidence, which shows that on one hand the feminist revolution has made a difference in terms of the number of women in the workforce and yet, on the other hand, stubborn patterns of gender inequality and discrimination still remain. In the first chapter, they outline their goal as finding out more about the complex and contradictory picture of women, men and work and claim that a fuller explanation will need to pay more attention to power and the way it operates. Understanding the way power interacts with gender and organisations will help in gaining insights into the reasons for the confusing contemporary situation and the reasons why no single answer seems to explain all the complexities of gendered organisations.

Chapter one outlines the reasons why liberal, structural and poststructural perspectives on the relationship between gender and organisation give only partial explanations. They are typically presented as competing whole answers, but in fact are limited in scope and need to be taken together as explaining different parts of the problem and integrated with theories of power. The chapters that follow also examine power from different standpoints. Chapter two looks at the operation of power in organisational structures, chapter three explores power and organisational cultures and chapter four analyses leadership and power. Sexuality and its effect on power in the organisational setting is investigated in chapter five. The last two chapters deal respectively with the strategies that have been used to challenge the way gender operates in organisations and the synthesis of the argument for seeing power as central to the understanding of gender and organisation.

The authors are particularly adept at weaving in the points and ideas of other writers so that each finds a place within their argument. For example, Judi Marshall’s work on reasons why women in top leadership positions choose to leave their organisations is mentioned, along with Rosemary Pringle’s work on secretaries and their experience of power and sexuality in organisations. Influential writers such as Kanter and Rosener are placed within the theoretical perspectives related to their arguments. Links are made to the work of theorists such as Weber and Taylor and it is helpful to be reminded that some of the ideas of the organisation as a rational, objective entity have been absorbed into management perspectives without any knowledge of the many criticisms of this powerful concept.

The book brings together material from many sources. The index alone would be a good reason for buying it. Yet, this book does much more than merely draw together useful references. It expands our understanding of the way the elements of the gender and organisation relate to each other. Throughout the book, the authors of Gender, Power and Organisations are attempting to help us see that oversimplifying the complex issues involved in gendered organisations will not help us to understand the way they work, or why change is so hard to achieve. We will simply end up with a map which leaves out some of the most important topographical features and wonder why there is a mountain in the middle of what should be a flat plain. Each small piece of the complex picture is valuable to gain a new depth of understanding. As Halford and Leonard state:

Many existing accounts offer clear, but partial, explanations of particular aspects of the relations between gender and organisation … our analysis is multi‐perspectival, pulling together a mix of evidence and explanations … (p. 215).

But they argue that the notion of power is the conceptual glue holding all the ideas and arguments together in the complex and often contradictory gender picture. It is power which links the relationships between gender and organisation in a dynamic tension. However, this book goes far beyond allowing its readers to wallow in any misleading oversimplifications such as assuming that power is monopolised by men in an organisation, showing that everyone is using power in some way. To use an example quoted in the book from Pringle’s work (1989), a female secretary may comply with the expectation that she will make coffee, and bring coffee to her male boss. But she can also make sure that it tastes horrible by putting too much sugar in or leaving the sugar out, if she wants to express her displeasure.

It seems almost carping to complain about a book which has so many of the desirable features missing from other books, but I feel I have to mention the proof‐reading errors. There are several missing words or repeated words and in one case a missing footnote number. These can all be puzzled out from the context, but it seems an unnecessary blemish on an otherwise well‐produced book. Personally, I would also like page references when points are being cross‐referenced, rather than just being referred to other chapters “for a fuller discussion”. The other small quibble, is that as the authors outlined their project, they seemed to foreshadow setting out a blueprint for further work and exploration of the area in the future, yet instead the book seemed to end rather abruptly and a little feebly with the statement that:

… to what extent the picture of gender and power achieves substantial and systematic change will remain one of the key research questions for organisations as we enter the new millennium (p. 234).

I would have expected a more defined direction for possible change. Nevertheless, these are picky little points when you are presented with a book that is so satisfyingly holistic in its style and scope and explains so much of the big, intractable question about gender and organisations, “why, if so much has changed, does so much stay the same?”