Before industrialization, notions of the self were largely fixed and mainly unitary; an individual’s self-definition came largely from his or her craft, locale and family and did not vary much throughout the course of life. In contrast, classical management theories regarded the individual as an inhuman cog in a complex machine, a state accomplished through the bureaucratic separation of the personal and public self. In recent years, powerful organizations have lost a great deal of their ability to control what individuals can become, thus allowing for a broader range of employee identities.
Interestingly, many young people are seeking to reintegrate their work selves with their personal selves, producing a greater continuity of identity across public and private contexts. This trend is propelled by a growing desire for authenticity or being real and honest is how we live and work with others. Whereas earlier notions of identity referred to an individual’s ability to look inside oneself to find one’s real self, contemporary ideas of authenticity focus much more on the ethics and consistency of one’s behaviors. In other words, we must reveal our true selves not only in personal relationships and during our personal time, but also through our choices of professional and organizational affiliation. Overall, there is not a clear, consistent or consensual model available.
The proliferations of multiple possible identities makes it even more critical that we select some “horizons of significance” toward which to orient ourselves. Not all identities however are equally welcome in the world of work. For many reasons, organizational members use identity markers to create and highlight differences between people, and then use these marked differences as reasons for treating them differently.
Alvesson and Wilmott, describe several specific practices that organizations use to “make” members’ identities, including:
1. Defining the person directly: Those who are described as midlevel managers, as opposed to senior-level managers, have their leadership capacities curtailed, by definition.
2. Defining a person by defining others: Many organizational members create positive identities by contrasting their positions with the positions of others.
3. Providing a specific vocabulary of motives: Organizations often explicitly describe the motivations that drive their ideal employees.
4. Explicating morals and values: Organizational cultures routinely offer employees an explicit set of guiding values such as innovation, customer service, or efficiency that they may use to craft and/or regulate their identities at work.
5. Knowledge and skills: Having access to specific knowledge or the skills necessary to execute a specific process or practice enables organizational members to define themselves in particular ways.
6. Group categorization and affiliation: When organizations foster feelings of “us” and, often less explicitly, “them,” they generate feelings of community, belonging, and loyalty.
7. Hierarchical location: One of the central ways that we answer the question “Who am I?” is by figuring out the superiority/subordination dynamics between ourselves and others. Those relations are often both symbolically and materially reinforced in organizations.
8. Establishing and clarifying a distinct set of rules of the game: Organizational communication creates and naturalizes rules and taken-for-granted ways of doing and being.
9. Defining the context: Organizational leaders often define the environment in which employees operate. When globalization, excessive competition, and rapid and unpredictable change are said to mark the environment, then organizations tend to value those who are adaptable, aggressive and entrepreneurial.
A focus on gender as a difference that makes a difference organizational life points to the complexities of identity construction. One of the key reasons that feminist organizational communication scholars have been interested in the question of identity at work is because of the marginalization women have experienced historically in public organizational life, particularly through wages, access, and mobility inequities. Feminist research takes on a variety of forms and is influenced by several different traditions.
Whereas liberal feminists are most interested in changing government and company policies to level the playing field for women in organizations, radical feminists might be more interested in dismantling those very organizations and replacing them with feminist-inspired, nonhierarchical structures. Feminist scholarship on identity, particularly in the context of organizations, is united by the assumption that the socially constructed split between the public sphere of work and the private sphere of home has led to significant symbolic and material consequences for both men and women.
The public/private split has resulted in several implications for men and women in contemporary organizational life, including the
• exclusion and control of women in the public sphere;
• denial of women’s domestic work as legitimate and values labor;
• devaluation of feminized labor in the public sphere • reduction of men’s participation in domestic work and family life;
• construction of work/family conflicts as a private problem rather than a public or social issue. One direct outgrowth of their interest in this divide is focused attention on work/family conflict or, more recently work/life conflict.
The term work/life conflict refers to the simultaneous influence of work on members’ lives away from work – at home, at leisure, and in families and communities – and the influence of personal life responsibilities and aspirations on members’ experiences at work. Karen Ashcraft (2004), a leading feminist organizational communication scholar, outlines four approaches or “frames” that are particularly relevant to questions regarding the public/private spheres, work/life balance and gender concerns. Work/life identities are ongoing accomplishments that are continually informed and constructed by discourses of gender, power, and organization. Yet, each frame adopts a different way of considering the relationships among communication, gendered identity and the organization. Each frame also constructs the “problem” of gender in a particular way, and in doing so, also suggests a potential solution to the “woman question” at work.
Frame 1: Gender Differences at Work
The first frame assumes that gender is a “socialized but relatively fixed identity…organized around biological sex and which fosters fairly predictable styles, therefore are outgrowths of gendered socialization and are made manifest in organizational contexts. Sociologist Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation provides a comprehensive view of how gendered identities, learned in childhood, drive men and women’s conversational styles. Men treat conversations as a hierarchically ordered space in which they can demonstrate and vie for status; women treat conversations as a web-like space in which they can demonstrate and vie for connections.
Men seek status by engaging in report talk, a style of speaking that emphasizes:
• demonstrations of knowledge, skill and ability
• instrumentality
• conversational command
• direct and assertive expressions
• abstract terms over personal experience Women use conversations to build relationships using rapport talk. Rapport talk emphasizes:
• demonstrating equality through mat
ching experiences • providing support responsiveness
• conversational maintenance
• tentativeness
• personal, concrete details
Tannen claims that when women share their troubles with a conversational partner, they often hope to hear messages of support, reciprocity and connection. When sharing their stories with other women, they often receive precisely those messages, however, when sharing problems with male conversational partners, women often receive solutions and directives. Similarly, when men engage in troubles talk with women, they are often disappointed with women’s tendencies to immediately match troubles. While much of the early research treated women’s communication style as a deficit or a liability at work, some scholars attempted to demonstrate the utility, perhaps even the superiority of women’s ways of knowing, being and leading.
Further, in contrast to traditional models, narratives by and about women tend to value:
• fluid boundaries between personal life and work life
• relational aspects of work
• a balanced lifestyle
• a nurturing approach to co-workers
• a network of relationships within and outside the organization
• a service orientation to clients
• work as a means of developing personal identity
Frame 2: Gender Identity as Organizational Performance
Treating gender as a fixed biological or learned source of communication behavior overlooks the ways individuals create their gendered identities through communication in everyday interactions. Karen Ashcraft’s second frame foregrounds gender as an ongoing accomplishment, as an identity that is accomplished through “doing” rather than “being.” Feminist scholar Judith Butler suggests that we do gender in an through everyday performances or micropractices that are carried out to the organizational stage. Micropractices refer to the moment-to-moment behaviors, actions and communication messages that we use to bring ourselves into being in everyday life. Overall, gender is not an essential or “natural” or fixed aspect of our identity, “but practices learnt and enacted in appropriate occasions.”
Frame 2 suggests that gender is an aspect of our identity that is negotiated and renegotiated anew each day, across a variety of contexts. Thus, how a person performs masculinity or femininity will change depending on the context. One of the main questions is why do organizational members go to such lengths to perform “appropriate” gender identities? The answer is that successful gendered performance is richly rewarded. Those who fail to perform their gender correctly are routinely punished. There are severe penalties for failing to enact or perform an appropriate organizational gender, including lack of upward mobility and less access to employment. Employees who embody a preferred gender identity and are more attractive than their counterparts are more likely to receive job offers and higher starting salaries.
Another current inquiry that points to the performed character of identity is emotion labor. Emotion labor refers to a “type of work wherein employees are paid to create a ‘package’ of emotions.” Emotion labor can be damaging over time as employees become estranged from there “real” feelings after performing “fake” commodified, instrumental and organizationally controlled feelings. Moreover, extensive emotion labor has been linked with increased stress and burnout.
Frame 3: Gendered Organizations
The assumption is that organizational forms or structures, “like gender identity – are constantly in process, brought to life, sustained and transformed by interaction among new members. Simultaneously, organization guides interaction, predisposing and rewarding members to practice in particular ways.” Here, gender is a fundamental feature of organizations that influences identities in a variety of taken-for-granted ways. In a foundational essay, sociologist Joan Acker argued that far from being “neutral” backdrops, organizations are themselves gendered structures that reflect and reproduce patriarchy or the systematic privileging of masculinity. To say that an organization is gendered means that “advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between males and female, masculine and feminine.”
The gendered organization emerges out of at least five processes, including:
• The social construction of divisions of labor, positions, and types of work along gendered lines, The types of work that women and men do are often differentiated in organizations such that women assume support roles and men assume leadership roles.
• The social construction of symbols and images that reinforce gender divisions. Images of leadership often rest on a masculine model.
• The mundane communication interactions between men and women, men and men and women and women often reproduce gender divisions in ways that reinforce men’s powerful position. Women’s speech is often presumed to be ill suited to organizational life.
• The ways in which individual actors often take up identities that reinforce the three processes described above. Career choices, style of dress, interaction patterns and everyday performances result in gendered identities.
• Gender is, then, a fundamental element in “organizational logic” or a “gendered substructure that is reproduced daily in practical work activities.”
Frame 4: Gendered Narratives in Popular Culture
Frame 4 directs our attention outside the organizational context to the broad social discourses that shape both gendered organizational forms. This frame "shifts attention from communication in organizations to communication about organization or how a larger society portrays and debates its institutions and the very notion of work" and workers.
The assumption is that social texts that exist outside the organization, such as those found in popular culture, reveal and reproduce cultural understandings about the nature of work, life and identity. In other words, the meanings we assign to ourselves, our work and our organizations are significantly influenced by the texts - films, books, television shows, news reports, magazines, fashion and even scholarship - we consume in our everyday lives.
Through these processes, organizational structures, jobs and even bodies are gendered in specific ways. For women, embodying the “ideal” worker is difficult, as that which is associated with the private sphere and domesticity is excluded from organizational logic. Thus, women’s bodies – female sexuality, their ability to procreate and their pregnancy, breast-feeding, and child care, menstruation and mythic emotionality are suspect, stigmatized and used as grounds for control and exclusion.
information taken from Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint by Eric Eisenberg, H.L. Goodall Jr. and Angela Trethewey
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