organizational communication final

Engaging Organizational Communication Theory & Research: Multiple Perspectives

Feminist Organizational Communication Studies: Engaging Gender in Public and Private

Contributors: Author:Karen Lee Ashcraft

Edited by: Steve May & Dennis K. Mumby

Book Title: Engaging Organizational Communication Theory & Research: Multiple Perspectives

Chapter Title: "Feminist Organizational Communication Studies: Engaging Gender in Public and Private"

Pub. Date: 2005

Access Date: October 7, 2020

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9780761928492

Online ISBN: 9781452204536

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452204536.n7

Print pages: 141-170

© 2005 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Feminist Organizational Communication Studies: Engaging Gender in Public and Private

Feminist organizational communication studies: Engaging gender in public and private Karen LeeAshcraft

About 10 years ago, this would have been a short chapter—more like a wishful leaflet. A handful of essays, few appearing in our field's major journals, considered the prospect of feminist approaches to organizational communication (e.g., Buzzanell, 1994; Calás & Smircich, 1992; Fine, 1993; Marshall, 1993; Mills & Chiaramonte, 1991). Most of these works hovered at the conceptual level. Little, if any, published work applied feminist perspectives to empirical studies of organizational practice (for some exceptions, see Lont, 1988, and Seccombe-Eastland, 1988). As the mid-1990s drew near, feminist theory lingered on the fringes of the organizational communication literature, while feminist research was scarcely more than a promise.

Unlike most tales of disciplinary history, this one I experienced first-hand. As a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I was attempting to craft a research program around the study of gender and organization. My development as a scholar thus coincided with the emergence of feminism in organizational communication; that is, my academic identity and work were taking shape just as feminism was finding a foothold in the field (e.g., Ashcraft, 1998). Later in this chapter, I consider how my own efforts to study gender and organization affirm feminist interest in the political relations between private experience and public knowledge. For now, I'll begin by observing that, from my vantage point, the virtual explosion of feminist organizational communication studies over the last decade appears remarkable. Arguably, feminist scholarship has almost become part of the mainstream of our field, even as it simultaneously clings to a marginal position. It frequently fills our conference programs and graces our “top paper” panels, and it often appears in our major journals. Most textbooks and anthologies that survey organizational communication theory (such as this one) now attend to feminist perspectives. At least in my view, there can be little doubt that feminism is truly “gaining a voice” in our field (Buzzanell, 1994). As I explain in the conclusion of this chapter, I believe that the strength of that voice distinguishes communication from cognate areas of organization theory and research (for example, management and organizational sociology), suggesting unique opportunities for feminist communication scholars.

This chapter considers the development, momentum, and future of feminist voices in organizational communication studies. I am centrally concerned with scholarship that addresses social institutions as gendered formations and, more specifically, that takes communication as a pivotal process that organizes gender and genders organization. I begin by sketching the origins and history of this area of inquiry. Next, I outline key premises that tend to bind feminist organizational communication scholars. By exploring my own ambivalent experience as a scholar in this area, I seek to surface some of the complex tensions entailed in doing feminist theory. I conclude by considering the potential contributions of feminist communication theory to the study of organizing.

Choosing a Backdrop: The Politics of Origins (Or, Why Roots Matter)

The evolution of feminist organizational communication scholarship could be narrated in multiple ways. I might start, for example, with the rise of gender difference research, which arguably introduced gender as a variable relevant to predicting organizational behavior. A different account seems to hold sway among the organizational communication community, where feminist scholarship commonly appears as an offshoot of critical theory (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004). From this view, critical perspectives secured a place in organizational communication before feminist approaches and thus established a friendly intellectual setting for exploring matters of power, voice, identity, and so forth, as applied to the specific context of gender. Some feminist research implicitly supports this view by invoking critical theoretical constructs, such as ideology or hegemony, to investigate gendered organization (e.g., Clair, 1993). In this light, feminist scholarship looks like a subsidiary branch of critical organization inquiry, narrow in scope compared with the broader emancipatory agenda of the critical project (e.g., Alvesson & Willmott, 1992).

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Certainly, both of these accounts—and, no doubt, others—have merit. By telling a different story of origins, I do not mean to deny the influence of such vital movements as gender difference studies or critical organization theory. I grant the partial validity of many historical narratives, including the one I am about to tell. But I also take seriously the claim that how we narrate intellectual history shapes how we envision current relations and future possibilities. For example, to the extent that many organizational communication scholars see feminist approaches as derivative of the critical project, it is likely that feminist scholarship will continue to be cast in dependent relations with critical foundations. This view is consequential, for it preserves the troublesome notion that critical theory can be addressed to a universal (i.e., gender-neutral) human subject, whereas feminist theory is best equipped to inform the special case of gender. As Fine (1993) observed, organizational communication “researchers who espouse the utility of a feminist perspective in communication are frequently asked how their ideas differ from those of critical theorists. (Both feminists and critical theorists should be interested in exploring why the reverse question is never asked)” (p. 143). Mindful of this tendency, I situate feminist organizational communication theory as an extension of the larger feminist movement—an intellectual and activist tradition that can be seen as independent from and, at times, wary of critical theory (Clair, 2002). This alternative, seldom-circulated account of the origins of feminism in our field might enable different possibilities.

I begin with the question of what typically gets obscured when we raise critical theory as the backdrop for feminist theory. First, feminist organization scholars do much more than borrow critical concepts. They draw on another long-standing, independent tradition of accounting for relations of power: feminist theory. This tradition poses a fundamental challenge to any theory of power that claims gender neutrality. Accordingly, feminist organization theorists have demonstrated that critical and mainstream organization studies can function as unwitting allies in constructing men as universal working subjects; they have compellingly argued that refusing the relevance of gender amounts to denying a primary way in which difference, subjectivity, and domination are configured (Acker, 1990). Through this lens, feminist analyses of organization can hardly be seen as a gender-specific subset of critical theory. Rather, they emanate from a distinctive tradition that engages with the critical project around points of alliance and tension.

In many ways, feminist ambivalence toward critical organization theory stems from a general history of cautious engagement with academic pursuits. Without abandoning empirical claims altogether (Reinharz, 1992), feminists have usefully exposed the masculinist foundations of science and of varied methodological traditions (e.g., Carter & Spitzack, 1989; Mies, 1983, 1991). Feminist critiques have demonstrated how ostensibly objective procedures for generating knowledge perform and eclipse ideological functions. For example, the variable-analytic approach common to much research on sex differences in organizational communication serves to reify and naturalize a binary model of gender. Here again, feminist organization theory entails ambivalent relations with what some might call its ancestry. Although sex difference studies helped to bring gender to the organizational communication fore, many feminist scholars rightfully question the ideological functions and political consequences of this vast literature (Ashcraft, in press; Buzzanell, 1995; Calás & Smircich, 1993).

Feminist skepticism toward academic endeavors becomes even more apparent if we look beyond the scholarly exercise to organized political activism. This shift in view reveals that feminists were busy experimenting with alternative organizational forms just as critical organization scholars were beginning to envision them. Operating on the premise that bureaucracy is a masculinist form of organizing (Ferguson, 1984), many feminist movement groups developed functional communities that sought to minimize hierarchy and maximize egalitarian relations, to enact group authority via consensual decision making, and to value emotions and other so-called private matters as relevant political and organizational concerns (Ahrens, 1980; Iannello, 1992; Maguire & Mohtar, 1994; Morgen, 1994; Reinelt, 1994; Ristock, 1990; Rodriguez, 1988; V. Taylor, 1995). To be sure, other activist groups also implemented democratic, collectivist, and other participatory alternatives to bureaucracy (Kanter & Zurcher, 1973; Mansbridge, 1973; Newman, 1980; Rothschild-Whitt, 1976, 1979). Arguably, at least in the United States, feminist organizations negotiated greater institutional staying power, for they remain one of the longest-standing social movement forms designed around counterbureaucratic empowerment ideals (Ferree & Martin, 1995; Maguire & Mohtar, 1994; P. Y. Martin, 1990; Reinelt, 1994).

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By calling attention to feminist organizational practice, I do not mean to conjure romantic images of triumphant feminist efforts at social transformation. I do mean to support my case for the independent heritage of feminist perspectives on organization, as well as to suggest how this tale of origins reframes the dominant understanding of feminist contributions to organizational communication studies. First, feminist organizing reflects an entrenched feminist commitment to do more than talk within the walls of an ivory tower; it embodies the desire for tangible forms of justice that enhance the lives of real people. Although critical organization theorists share this dedication to social change, feminists arguably have done more to implement it. Indeed, that feminist experiments with practice largely preceded feminist theories of organization, while the reverse typifies critical organization studies, signifies an abiding ambivalence among many feminists about the simultaneous importance and impotence of “high theory” and philosophical reflection. Whereas critical organization scholars prioritized emancipation through ideology critique, feminists literally grounded their emancipatory interest in the trenches of practice. The contrast suggests that feminist approaches to organization exemplify a different sort of maturity—one that Fine (1993) calls “revolutionary pragmatism”—that critical organization scholarship has yet to develop and from which it could learn a great deal. The tensions, failures, ironies, and innovations of feminist organizing have produced a legacy of empirical insight about the practical pitfalls and potential of alternative organizational forms. Critical organization scholars, as well as others who study organizing, can learn much from these lived (and still- living) experiments (e.g., Ashcraft, 2001).

In sum, when we situate the larger feminist movement as the backdrop for feminist organizational communication studies, and when we expand the scope of our story of origins beyond traditional academic activities, we can begin to envision different configurations of perspectives or areas of inquiry (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004). We can imagine less dependent, more reciprocal relations between critical and feminist organizational communication scholarship, wherein the two converge, diverge, and mutually inform. We can see contributions once obscured, such as how feminist studies challenge even critical foundations and model the vital interplay of organization theory and practice. Thus, the brief history I narrate below begins with the broader feminist movements sketched here—with the enduring feminist tradition of theorizing patriarchal power, with feminist critiques of dominant modes of scientific knowing, and with feminist organizational practice. These formations helped to ground the emergence of a coherent feminist theory of organizing in the early 1990s.

The Development of Feminist Organizational Communication Scholarship: A Public Tale

As the 1990s approached, feminist perspectives did not hold much of a place in organizational communication studies. This is not to say that the literature was silent about gender, but that what little it did say reflected significant limitations. The most developed themes concerned the communicative tendencies and struggles of women in (or aspiring to) management. For example, numerous “glass ceiling” studies examined how women's language use, perceptions thereof, and resulting interaction patterns engender barriers to women's professional advancement (e.g., Horgan, 1990; Staley, 1988; Tannen, 1994; Wilkins & Anderson, 1991). A related strand of studies examined gender differences in organizational communication style, with particular attention to leadership communication. This work gradually moved from debating women's leadership capacity to documenting and, sometimes, celebrating or advocating “feminine styles” of leading (Natalle, 1996), which purportedly entail the creation of participative, collaborative, personalized relations that distribute power widely and enhance feelings of self-efficacy, team accomplishment, and community (e.g., Helgesen, 1990; Rosener, 1990).

Despite inconclusive empirical support, gender and leadership studies functioned in tandem with communication-centered glass ceiling studies to yield a crucial insight: Even perceptions of gender difference carry profound political consequences, because dominant norms of professional interaction and managerial communication tend to privilege masculinity and devalue habits associated with femininity. To the extent that codes of femininity and professionalism clash, women are more likely to experience the formation and maintenance of work and leadership identities as a tension-filled process (e.g., Jamieson, 1995; Marshall, 1993; B. O. Murphy & Zorn, 1996; Wiley & Eskilson, 1985; Wood & Conrad, 1983).

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In this way, early gender and organizational communication research began to merge questions of power with those of difference, yet it did so in limited ways. To begin, it imparted a binary model of gender difference in which men and women inhabit distinct speech communities that appear timeless, universal, and static. Such a model obscures historical and cultural variations in the construction of gender difference, as well as the dynamic, interactive processes wherein apparent differences are produced. Second, most of this research depicted women as different. Attending to gender meant attending to “women's issues,” while men were seldom marked as gendered characters. Third, early scholarship engaged the alleged difference of only some women yet treated “women's issues” as a uniform, coherent, and uncontested category of interests. In other words, the research tacitly represented the concerns of certain women—mostly white, middle-class, heterosexual professionals—as the universal concerns of working women. In light of these considerations, efforts to revalue so-called “feminine styles” of organizational communication become profoundly troublesome. Not only can they be invoked to justify a gender-based division and hierarchy of labor, but they also normalize white, middle-class expectations for communication practice (Calás & Smircich, 1993).

Finally, much gender and organizational communication research depicted difference as an individual and interpersonal matter. Although it toyed with systemic claims about the masculine bias of managerial and professional communication, this research typically conceived of people as the carriers of prejudice into social systems. This psychologized view of communication treats organization as a neutral setting or container in which humans enact and evaluate gender difference as they go about maintaining work relationships. Consider these common titles: “Gendered Issues in the Workplace” (Natalle, 1996), “Dysfunctional Communication Patterns in the Workplace” (Reardon, 1997), and “Communication in Corporate Settings” (Stewart & Clarke-Kudless, 1993). In each case, the preposition “in” depicts organization as a theater in which gender-related dramas occur, not an active player in staging such dramas. Certainly, as some of these citations suggest, this view is alive and well today.

The impetus for challenging the assumption that gender troubles stem from biased people within neutral organizations came from outside the field of communication and, specifically, from feminist interventions in the sociology of management. Acker and Van Houten's (1974) classic review of the renowned Hawthorne studies was one of the first published attempts to analyze the “sex structuring” of organization. The authors argued that organizations deploy gender as a central control mechanism, thereby generating apparent variance in organizational behavior according to sex. Around the same time, Kanter (1975, 1977) also theorized gender difference as a product of structural relations. She argued that women exist at a perpetual disadvantage, concentrated in the invisible and devalued infrastructure of organizations, or sprinkled as tokens near the top. Gender functions as a tool to maintain this hierarchy—chiefly by supplying potent images of how roles should be enacted and by whom. Significantly extending these structural analyses, Ferguson (1984) cast bureaucracy as an organizational form that institutionalizes male domination by binding managers, workers, and clients in dependent, subordinate relations and, in effect, “feminizing” them.

In a particularly influential essay, Acker (1990) argued that organization is not some sort of neutral housing in which gender trouble “happens” to rear its ugly head, nor does gender symbolism simply assist or metaphorically represent organization structure and its consequences. Rather, organizations are fundamentally gendered social formations, and gender is a constitutive principle of organizing. As it integrated and developed previous structural analyses into a radical, coherent theory of “gendered organization,” Acker's essay is often hailed as the catalyst for a major shift in scholarly interest—from the study of gendered behavior in organizations to the study of organization as a gendered social phenomenon in its own right.

Other scholars also led the shift. For instance, J. Martin's (1990) deconstruction of a narrative about one executive's maternity leave introduced many U.S. management scholars to the claim that gendered tensions are embedded in organization systems. Calás and Smircich (Calás, 1993; Calás & Smircich, 1991, 1993) took a leading role as well, exposing how management and organization theorists actively preserve, promote, and conceal gendered organization with both the form and content of their representational discourse. Also writing to a management audience, communication scholars Mumby and Putnam (1992) analyzed how gendered assumptions are encoded in organization theories, such as that of bounded rationality. Using feminist

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poststructuralist theory, the authors reconstructed an alternative theory of organizing they dubbed “bounded emotionality.” Anthologies based on international collaboration, such as The Sexuality of Organization (Hearn, Sheppard, Tancred-Sheriff, & Burrell, 1989), Gendering Organizational Analysis (Mills & Tancred, 1992), and Gender and Bureaucracy (Savage & Witz, 1992), also began to surface around this time, reflecting and shaping the shift toward studies of gendered organization.

In short order, communication scholars became part of these developments and began to contribute to the growing body of literature on gendered organization. In the Canadian Journal of Communication, for example, Mills and Chiaramonte (1991) characterized organization as a “gendered communication act”—as meta- communication, or a running commentary on appropriate interaction and identity formation. In other words, organization provides an abstract “map” of ideal relations among gender, power, and work; members draw on that map as a resource to guide the organizing process. By addressing the evolving relation between organization and everyday interaction, such analyses laid the groundwork for a communicative theory of gendering organization.

Generally speaking, however, the new thread of gender and organizational communication scholarship was not primarily billed as a “communication perspective on gendered organization” but, rather, as “feminist perspectives on organizational communication.” Indeed, the early 1990s saw a surge of essays addressed to this topic. Initially cited was Linda Putnam's (1990) conference paper on the utility of feminist perspectives to organizational communication scholarship and, specifically, to dispute process theories. Interested scholars also referred to a 1993 Communication Yearbook exchange (which followed an exchange at the 1990 meeting of the International Communication Association) between Judi Marshall, Dennis Mumby, and Connie Bullis. Based on personal experience and her research with women managers, Marshall (1993) began with a portrait of contrast between male and female values. Using this provisional picture as a base, she aligned most organizational cultures with male-dominated communication systems, identified resulting interaction patterns and dilemmas for women, and proposed an “equality for difference” agenda for feminist organizational communication scholars (p. 139). Among other issues of debate that characterized the exchange, Mumby's (1993) response sought to complicate Marshall's dual focus on difference and the experiences of women. Drawing on discomfort as a man attempting to engage feminism, he suggested a feminist perspective that resists the conflation of women and gender by addressing gender relations more broadly. Rather than seeking equality for difference, such a perspective would work to challenge current configurations of difference, undermining and revising the sort of binary, oppositional model (for example, masculine vs. feminine, public vs. private) employed by Marshall.

In some contrast with Mumby's approach, most of the essays emerging at the time linked feminist perspectives with issues pertaining primarily to women. For example, Natalle, Papa, and Graham (1994) opened their chapter in Kovacic's New Approaches to Organizational Communication volume, titled “Feminist Philosophy and the Transformation of Organizational Communication,” with a section on “the current status of women in organizations” (p. 245). Likewise, in her chapter in Bowen and Wyatt's (1993) Transforming Visions: Feminist Critiques in Communication Studies, Fine declared that feminist research begins with “the perspective of women's experience” and aligned feminist projects with “women's problematics” (p. 128) and “women's knowledge” (p. 129). Whereas Natalle et al. (1994) reviewed distinctions among liberal, radical, and materialist feminist theories, explaining the path to organizational justice envisioned by each, Fine's (1993) essay addressed more directly the field of organizational communication. Situating feminism as a distinct, up-and-coming theoretical trajectory in the discipline, she demonstrated how a feminist lens could be used to critique “traditional” research emanating from functional, interpretive, and critical perspectives.

Like Natalle et al.'s (1994) chapter, Buzzanell's (1994) influential synthesis article, titled “Gaining a Voice: Feminist Organizational Communication Theorizing,” integrated multiple feminist theories, albeit for a different purpose. Rather than emphasize organizational change, she stressed potential transformations in organizational communication scholarship. Specifically, she considered how the agenda and conduct of research might usefully shift if we challenged pervasive themes—such as competitive individualism, cause- effect/linear thinking, and separation or autonomy—with “feminine/feminist values” such as cooperative community, connectedness, and integrative thinking.

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As this selective review of essays from the early 1990s implies, most of the relevant works that surfaced around this time took the form of synthesis and agenda-setting pieces; that is, they endeavored to pave a path toward new terrain by surveying relevant theory and research, providing some sort of organizing framework, delineating the potential contributions of feminist perspectives, and calling for future research. With rare exceptions (e.g., Buzzanell, 1994), most of these essays appeared at conferences and in anthologies or special issues (addressed to, for example, feminist perspectives in communication studies or emerging perspectives in organizational communication). Themes characteristic of early gender and organizational communication research—such as the tendency to align gender with the concerns of white, professional women and to reify organizations as gender-neutral containers for human interaction—remained latent (and, in a few cases, blatant) in these essays, although some authors noted the need to challenge such assumptions. Fine (1993), for example, critiqued the managerial bias of previous work and directed attention to the gendering of organizational contexts; to the social construction of gender, race, and class; and to the case of multicultural organizations. Finally, and again with rare exception (e.g., Mills & Chiaramonte, 1991), most of the early-1990s essays emphasized the importation of feminist perspectives into organizational communication studies. Few authors explicitly considered what it might look like to develop a communication lens on the feminist claim that organizations are fundamentally gendered.

By the mid-1990s, then, the place of feminism in organizational communication was one of critique, theory, and promise. Feminist scholars had initiated a gendered analysis of “traditional” organization and organization theory; they had begun to conceptualize how feminism might disrupt and enrich the field; and some had even envisioned the kinds of theoretical alternatives feminism could yield. Although there was little published organizational communication research from feminist perspectives at this time, a few noteworthy empirical projects actually preceded the surge of feminist essays in the early 1990s. For example, Bate and Taylor's (1988) anthology, Women Communicating: Studies of Women's Talk, included several cases of organizational practice and, specifically, studies of alternative, feminist-inspired communities. Among them, Wyatt's chapter examined leadership patterns in a women's weaving guild; the Lont and Seccombe-Eastland chapters explored dilemmas of feminist ideology and practice at a record company and bookstore, respectively; and Taylor's chapter investigated the merging of feminist principles and bureaucracy in a Canadian government agency. Hence, consistent with my earlier claim about the “revolutionary pragmatism” (Fine, 1993) of feminist approaches, feminist communication scholars were studying alternatives to dominant organizational forms before they had even begun to systematically theorize those forms as gendered.

In the mid-1990s, a few empirical essays began to appear in the mainstream journals of the field. In just the next few years, a critical mass of research emerged that spanned diverse topical, theoretical, and methodological orientations. By the turn of the century, it was no simple matter to summarize the wide range of empirical projects. Here, I can offer only a brief sampling of key research areas. Among other foci, feminist organizational communication scholars have studied (a) how members craft gendered identities, relations, and cultures across varied work contexts (e.g., Ashcraft & Pacanowsky, 1996; Bell & Forbes, 1994; Edley, 2000; Jorgenson, 2002; Pierce, 1995); (b) the discursive dimensions of sexual harassment (Bingham, 1994; Clair, 1993; B. C. Taylor & Conrad, 1992; Townsley & Geist, 2000); (c) other organizational constructions of the public-private divide and, specifically, of relations among work, bodies, sexuality, maternity, and emotionality (Ashcraft, 1999; Gayle, 1994; Spradlin, 1998; Trethewey, 1999a, 2000, 2001); (d) the gendering of dominant and alternative/feminist organizational forms (Ashcraft, 2000, 2001; Buzzanell, Ellingson, et al., 1997; Maguire & Mohtar, 1994); (e) localized struggles and strategies of control and resistance (Holmer Nadesan, 1996; A. G. Murphy, 1998; Sotirin & Gottfried, 1999; Trethewey, 1997, 1999b); (f) the intersection of gender, race, and work (Allen, 1995, 1996, 1998; Ashcraft & Allen, 2003; Grimes, 2001); (g) post-Fordism, globalization, and/or postmodern organization (Gregg, 1993; Holmer Nadesan, 2001); and (h) representations of gender and work in popular culture (Ashcraft & Flores, 2003; Holmer Nadesan & Trethewey, 2000; Shuler, 2000; Triece, 1999). As these and other lines of empirical research crystallized, feminist scholars continued to take theoretical strides. To name just a few developments, they articulated feminist models of conventional conceptual domains, such as negotiation, leadership, socialization, and ethics (Allen, 1996; Fine, 2000). They complicated enduring feminist constructs like “the glass ceiling,” and they explored metatheoretical tensions and reached for new alliances, for example, with ecofeminism (Bullis, 1993; Buzzanell, 1995, 2000; Mumby, 1996).

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Until rather recently, most feminist research in organizational communication—with its central interests, usual choice of participants, and so forth—arguably supported the impression that feminist perspectives were predominantly about women. Many scholars had challenged this association at a conceptual level, increasingly advocating attention to gender relations, or the ways in which women/femininities are constructed in relation to men/masculinities (e.g., Alvesson & Billing, 1992; Buzzanell, 1994; Mumby, 1993, 1996). But few scholars had yet engaged the study of men as men. As part of a larger surge of academic and popular interest in masculinity, gender and organization scholars beyond the field of communication, and particularly from the European organization studies community, began to directly address the intersection of organization and masculinity (e.g., Alvesson, 1998; Cheng, 1996; Collinson, 1992; Collinson & Hearn, 1996a, 1996b). Explicit concern for masculinity took hold in the organizational communication literature toward the late 1990s and remains a growing research interest (e.g., Ashcraft & Flores, 2003; Gibson & Papa, 2000; Huspek & Kendall, 1991; Mumby, 1998).

This historical profile suggests that although feminist communication scholars were not the first to mark organization as fundamentally gendered, they quickly developed a robust and diverse body of theoretical and empirical work addressed to the matter. No longer a new or peripheral interest but still young in its scholarly life, feminist organizational communication scholarship now routinely appears in many of the high-profile journals of our field. In what follows, I suggest what unites the array of works identified by that label.

Shared Premises: What's Communication Got to Do with it?

One of the truisms of feminist scholarship is that feminism is plural. Although the category “feminist” is broadly applied to people and efforts concerned with gender inequality, myriad and competing analyses circulate within that community, generating a multiplicity of perspectives. Like any intellectual tradition, the history of feminist studies is rich with internal struggle—between epistemological and political imperatives, between symbolic and material realities, between deconstructive and reconstructive impulses, between conceptions of power as imposed and self-policed, between stable and fragmented accounts of “woman,” and so forth. Over the years, many scholars have organized feminisms into coherent frameworks (e.g., Jaggar, 1983; Tong, 1989), and several authors have applied these frameworks to the specific case of organization studies. Most commonly identified are such schools of thought as liberal, radical, cultural- revisionist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, socialist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, existentialist, and standpoint feminism (Allen, 1998; Buzzanell, 1994; Calás & Smircich, 1996; Mayer, 1995; Meyerson & Kolb, 2000). Although allies in some ways, these perspectives also differ widely in their accounts of gender, power, and knowing, as well as in their visions for social change and associated intervention tactics.

In projects relevant to the aims of this chapter, I have joined others in distinguishing among feminist perspectives somewhat differently—for example, in terms of (a) how they cast the relationship among gender, organization, and discourse and (b) where they sit along a continuum of modernist-postmodernist thought (e.g., Ashcraft, in press; Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Mumby, 1996). Consistent with those projects, I am less interested in reproducing typologies shared by the larger feminist and gendered organization studies communities, and more interested in identifying what—across feminist (meta)theoretical orientations—might distinguish feminist communication perspectives on organization. It is in that spirit that I identify key theoretical premises below. My sense is that the discussion to follow both reconstructs assumptions loosely shared by feminist organizational communication scholars and reflects my own sort of wish list.1

• 1. Gender is a primary way in which social identity and relations of power are configured. Theories that disregard this point—that suggest universal (i.e., gender-free) figures or interests—are neglecting a fundamental condition of contemporary social life and, most likely, obscuring their own gendered subtext.

• 2. Work is a key site for the organization of gender identity and power relations, and gender is a central mechanism and outcome of organizing work. For example, gender is used as a means

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to create divisions and hierarchies of labor (mechanism), and certain gendered arrangements become predictable as these divisions and hierarchies become institutionalized (outcome). Hence, organization is fundamentally gendered in process and product. As this premise implies, feminist organizational communication scholars tend to operationalize organization as workplace, even as most remain cognizant that “work” is an ideological construct that can function to erase women's labor (for more on this point, see premise 9).

• 3. Dominant configurations of gender systematically privilege men/masculinity relative to women/ femininity. Dominant forms of organizing, ranging from conventional bureaucracy to contemporary technocracy, serve as institutionalized “carriers” of gendered (dis)advantage and, therefore, cannot be presumed neutral.

• 4. That said, there is no neat picture of domination and subordination to be drawn. For one, feminist organizational communication scholars increasingly recognize that gender cannot be understood adequately apart from other primary ways of articulating identity and power, such as race, sexuality, class, and ability. Furthermore, even “rigid” systems of gender domination are fraught with contradiction and so supply at least some tools that can be used to undermine them. Put simply, relations of power yield loopholes and resources for resistance. As even these two observations suggest, organizational forms, gender identities, and power relations are neither static nor determined; they may reflect a predictable momentum, but they are always also contingent and shifting.

• 5. Gender, power, and organization are ongoing accomplishments, constantly achieved and destabilized in the mundane activity of everyday life. Thanks to this condition, social and organizational transformation is possible. Given the preceding premises, however, arriving at some utopian state of gendered organizational relations is not possible; and change is far more likely to be gradual, local, and cyclical (or nonprogressive) than revolutionary, universal, and linear.

• 6. Communication is the process through which gender, power, and organization are accomplished. Accordingly, it is a crucial site of control, resistance, and transformation. By “communication,” I believe most feminist organizational scholars in our field mean something along these lines: the dynamic, situated, embodied, and contested process of creating systems of gendered meanings and identities by invoking, articulating, and/or altering available discourses.

• 7. To mark communication as the central organizing process is not to deny material realities beyond communication. Rather, the claim is that communication mediates our knowledge of and relation to material conditions and, thus, merits particular attention. From most feminist perspectives, this is a crucial clarification, for it both avows gender as a social construction and affirms that systems of domination create enduring realities that affect women and men in tangible ways that transcend time and space.

• 8. Hence, gendered systems of privilege and oppression are not limited to the domain of symbols and discourse; they create institutional, economic, corporeal—in a word, lived—effects. Put simply, they are manifest materially, that is to say, in the “real world.” In light of previous premises (e.g., #5), activism directed toward improving “real-life” conditions for women and men is possible and vital. Consequently, most feminist organizational communication scholars are intensely committed to praxis, or the development of theories that move to reconstruct, not merely deconstruct, alternative ways of gendering organization.

• 9. Of particular concern is de- and reconstructing the relation between “public” and “private” spheres of human activity. The historical formation of the public-private split has produced enduring material consequences, including the exclusion and control of women in the public sphere; the denial of women's domestic work as legitimate labor; the devaluation of feminized labor in the public sphere; the isolation of women that encourages them to read patriarchal patterns as a private

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matter of personal experience, thereby minimizing organized resistance and public airing; the illusion of gender-blind bureaucratic objectivity and rationality, which depends on the organizational suppression of emotions, sexuality, and other feminized phenomena; the construction of work-family conflicts as a private responsibility—and the list goes on.

Feminist scholars apply these premises to the conduct of research as well. For example, they take theorizing as a kind of organizational communication practice—a meta-practice, perhaps—that also organizes gender relations but tends to cloak that function in a discourse of scientific objectivity. Accordingly, they tend to hold scholars accountable for practicing reflexivity regarding the relation between knower and known, or exploring relevant connections among one's personal experience, political location, and intellectual activity. In this sense, feminist scholars maintain not only that “the personal is political” but also that matters of ontology and epistemology are profoundly personal and political. With that in mind, I suspect my own history of affiliation with feminism and organizational communication could usefully complicate the account provided thus far.

The Development of a Feminist Organizational Communication Scholar: (How) Can Private Tales Inform Public Narratives?

My investment in the tale I have told thus far may already be transparent. As I noted from the outset, to claim feminist (rather than, say, critical) theoretical origins for feminist organizational communication scholarship is to argue for a certain kind of autonomy, legitimacy, and influence. Moreover, a brief glance at a recent book I coauthored with Dennis Mumby (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004) would reveal that much of the argument and premises outlined above support our vision for the field, as much as I sincerely believe that many feminist communication scholars share these basic commitments. In part, what distinguishes feminist theories is their willingness to acknowledge, without apology, the ideological and political dimensions of their discourse. The underlying rationale, of course, is that all theories harbor these features, though few are prepared to expose them.

Of course, the politics of intellectual pursuits run deeper than my preliminary admissions of personal investment would suggest. My own struggle to engage feminism in our field reflects some of the ways in which gender identities, scholarly selves, and institutional logics intersect, as well as the messy and ironic practices through which “real” people navigate such intersections.

As noted earlier, my development as a feminist scholar coincided with the history traced above. In 1993, I arrived as a PhD student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. When asked to describe my research interests, my catch phrase was something like “the study of gender and conflict in organizational settings.” Truthfully, I had little idea what that meant, and even less of a clue that gender was hardly on the register of mainstream organizational communication studies at the time. It didn't take long to figure out the latter. After a bit of nosing around, I got the strong sense that opting to study gender was like signing up to sit on the sidelines. From a management professor, for instance, I heard the sage tidbit, “Study something big and central first, because you can always switch to gender once you're established.” I didn't like that sort of advice, but I certainly understood it. After all, why cut myself off needlessly from a chance to play with the big boys (oh, and girls)?

But, for whatever reason, I couldn't shake the interest in gender. While supportive, my professors confessed that they knew little about feminism or gender, much less where to direct me for applications of these issues to organization studies. Although it was tangential to her own research program on computer-mediated communication, Brenda J. Allen graciously agreed to supervise an independent study on the matter. I began to find and read the early-1990s essays reviewed earlier, and thanks to a series of transformative conversations with Brenda J. that semester, I resolved to risk a marginalized academic identity. I chose a different spin from that advised by the management professor. Namely, I maintained that I had fortuitously joined the field just at the time that feminism was “gaining a voice” in organizational communication studies (Buzzanell, 1994), so perhaps I could have a hand in that process, or at least I could cast my work as on the cusp rather than peripheral (a fine line, to be sure). Consciously, I made two related decisions. First, I would try to situate my work as a kind of translation, bringing feminist insights to mainstream organization

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audiences. Second, in response to the abstract tone of many of the early-1990s critiques, in light of my increasing passion for ethnography, and because of my general inclination toward feasible “solutions” to “real- life” problems, I would try to distinguish my work as providing an empirical base and as emphasizing actual organization practice. In many respects, my work has been shaped by those goals ever since (e.g., Ashcraft, 2000; Ashcraft & Pacanowsky, 1996).

For the most part, I've opted to keep personal struggles with doing feminist research to myself, though I've heard that my ambivalence lurks in my scholarly writing. In a rare confessional moment several years ago, I wrote a piece about the development of my academic identity, which was published as part of a Management Communication Quarterly dialogue that grew out of a National Communication Association panel collaboration with Brenda J. (Ashcraft, 1998). There, I described the quandaries of a young woman grappling with the feminist moniker. I must confess that, on the few occasions I've had to re-read that piece, some embarrassment washes over me. Why should anyone care about another well-intentioned, white, middle-class, heterosexual woman's efforts to grapple with her part in privilege and oppression? While a critical process, its public airing can sound more cathartic and self-absorbed than insightful. I guess I'm never quite convinced that my private dilemmas amount to much more than that. What they offer to others or to the knowledge production process, how they inform the politics of public experience, how to articulate them without coming off as a self-indulgent whiner, how to minimize the risks of what feels like exposure—these and related doubts have long impelled me to avoid confessional discourse in favor of a realist representational voice (Van Maanen, 1988). Yet despite several problems I now see in my MCQ confessions, I must admit that some of the tensions I expressed there are even more pressing for me today. Upon reflection, I can see how they've shaped everything from the projects I've chosen, to the way I've written, to the professional identity and career path I've pursued ever since.

Take, for instance, my recent turn toward the study of masculinity. Beyond my intellectual interest, it was a sensible move for someone like me, who still feels like an ambivalent feminist and still resists what she sees as naively pro-feminine agendas. I've never been comfortable with what I perceive as the prevalent “feminist scripts” in our field (an insight about my reactions for which I thank Bryan Taylor), particularly when it comes to blanket celebrations or denigrations, respectively, of things associated with women and men, or to the proscribed role of sexuality and playful banter in organizational life. In this sense, my turn toward masculinity blends a healthy skepticism toward common renditions of femininity and feminism with a noxious strain of internalized misogyny, or at minimum, of internalized awe for many things masculine. At least, this is how I explain my internal feeling of pride and external display of disgust when I heard that a university colleague renowned for his sexism had pronounced, upon reading my proposal for a study of masculinity among airline pilots, “Finally, a gender study that's actually interesting!”

As that observation hints, I was drawn not merely to masculinity studies but to a project that hits ridiculously close to home: a study of gender, race, and class relations among commercial airline pilots. It's the cherished profession of my father, one of the most precious people in my life. Years of turbulent family relations and moderate health crises nourished between us a bond of rare intensity. Over the years, however, we've parted in politics—a painful split that continues to require periodic healing. In that light, my choice to pursue a project that takes a feminist approach to his profession looks odd indeed, as it requires me to direct a critical gaze at one of the things he holds most dear. From the study's inception, I knew he would be (and, I soon realized, has always been) my most difficult audience, the man about and for whom I write, even though he hasn't read a page of my work.

My father's not the only one in my family to don a pilot's uniform. His father and uncle were airline pilots as well—“pioneers” of flight, in many respects—and other male relatives flew for the military. The short version is that I grew up in the shadow of the pilot profession. As a little girl, I swelled with pride when the boys in my 3rd-grade class fawned over my father on career day. Then there was that smell on his overcoat each time he returned from a trip—an unforgettable potion of jet fuel, cigarette smoke, and what I took as unadulterated adventure. I used to watch my boy cousin don a uniform that hung off his little body, a captain's hat that eclipsed his eyes but not his satisfied smile. I learned to fly when I was 16 and briefly toyed with it as a possible career, until it dawned on me that life offered many important pursuits for a teenage girl, such as

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cheerleading and a vibrant social life. Maybe “stewardess” was more my style, I began to realize. It wasn't long before a close family friend slapped me on the back and teased, “Remember, kid, there's a reason they call it a cockpit.” The joke must have struck a chord with me, for that's exactly what I seem to be studying: how the airline cockpit came to live up to its name.

Obviously, then, I can no longer deny the relevance of my private entanglements with my public scholarship. Perhaps for that reason, I'm growing fairly confident that the airline pilot project will be my undoing (she says, only half facetiously). The men in my family seem to haunt the data—sometimes literally, as when I came across an archived news article in which Captain Ashcraft (my grandfather) explained why women make for shifty airline pilots. More figuratively, I see my father everywhere in the data, including my apparently effective, knee-jerk habit of performing “admiring daughter” when soliciting information from senior, white, male pilots. As the profile of participants continues to expand, so does the repertoire of identity performances. Racial questions, for example, were part of the study's original design. After writing with Brenda J. about racial representations in organizational communication studies (Ashcraft & Allen, 2003), I knew it was high time to take race seriously in my own empirical work. As I've begun to affiliate with minority aviation organizations and to interview African American pilots, I've been overwhelmed with the simultaneous negotiations of race, gender, sexuality, and class in which I've participated. Reflecting anew on my interviews with white pilots, I've begun to see vividly how the relational maneuvering of research yields just as much evidence as the content of conversations (Kauffman, 1991). I can't help but notice how, during interviews and aviation archive visits, I often feel like an interloper, treading carefully and longingly on borrowed space and alternating among girlish sweetness, unabashed flirtation, and playing as “one of the boys.” As I continue to gather data and anticipate the analytic process, I am beset by dilemmas of betrayal and loyalty, empathy and critique, compromise and confrontation. How can I weave an honest tale of dominance, entitlement, and exclusion when I also feel wonder, admiration, and envy? And then there's that familiar feeling that my research topic is second rate, or that I'm a wanna-be, a jealous critic—not a doer, not the real thing.

Without a doubt, the airline pilot project shatters all my comfortable notions of what counts as data. I simply can't refute that, as much as anything else, the research process has been about “selling” the worth and legitimacy of the project to diverse, at times competing aviation communities. And it's with some sadness that I realize, each time I make the case, that I'm also still trying to persuade myself. Never have I had my own judgments and projections, my own identity anxieties and ambivalences, my own participation in the power relations I claim to analyze, so clearly thrown in my face. Never have I understood how much these things necessarily infuse research, interpretation, and writing, and I suspect I've only begun to see. What little I've glimpsed thus far is teaching me how scholarly conventions and realist representations, for all their reassuring boundaries between self and study, private and public, obscure not only the politics of knowledge but also powerful evidence about what it means to do gender, race, class, and labor all at once.

The question, then, is not how I, as a white woman intimately tied to the profession I study, can possibly access or comprehend the masculinity and race dynamics at play. Instead, the question becomes, how can anyone? I suppose some feminist standpoint theorists might say that certain subject positions grant access to such knowledge. Or how about this: Maybe it's precisely in paying attention to how people variously positioned go about trying—to what that requires of participants and of us, to how we respond to those demands, to how we maneuver selves and affiliations that feel workable, to the ugly moments when it all breaks down—that we can begin to grasp those complex workings. A pithier version might be that we stand to learn a great deal when we take seriously the claim that we're doing what we study as we study it. How to usefully incorporate that awareness into scholarly writing—without, for example, awkward breaks or reckless narcissism—is another matter, one with which I continue to struggle (as you might have detected in reading this section). For that reason, I still sometimes fantasize that I'm the “real doctor” my mother wishes I were, complete with objectivity and detachment, possessed of patent knowledge and essential skills. Confronting the messy contradictions of feminist research is absurdly draining, and occasionally, I have to wonder with what payoff. I suppose time will tell if I'm up to these challenges, but it would be thinly veiled bravado if I claimed to be sure.

At its best, my tale of private struggle could be read to illuminate the complexity of engaging feminist

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organizational communication scholarship in “real life.” The narrative attests to, for example, (a) the contradictory ways in which practicing scholarship can reinscribe gendered organizational patterns; (b) the precarious and often taboo dances of gender, race, sexuality, and class entailed in academic identities, projects, and institutions; (c) the deeply personal agendas and implications of public faces and labor; and (d) the tendency to erase or obscure links between theories of gendered organizing, scholarly practices, and personal experience (e.g., to treat gendered organizing as something that occurs elsewhere and, thus, to let ourselves “off the hook”). Of course, I also realize that readers may form less forgiving interpretations of my tale. Though it certainly was not my intent, some may read my story as a misplaced diary excerpt or, worse yet, as a flailing apology for my own insecurities and failings. Whatever your take (and I hope it leans toward the more generous), let me be clear about my purpose in confessing here: to engage readers in a candid conversation about the ways in which our work identities and activities enact and inform the gendered dynamics we claim to study. At the heart of feminist organizational inquiry is the relationship between public and private spheres, and the mundane, deeply personal politics of research can illuminate the contradictions, ambiguities, and ironies that form the intricate layers of that relationship. For my part, I hope to encourage and enact more reflexive scholarship that embraces, rather than sidesteps or mourns, the practical conflicts amid which most people negotiate working selves. It appears that control and resistance, power and pleasure, innovation and inadequacy often dwell in the same moments, and it is in the face of such paradox that we all struggle to navigate “workable” symbolic and material arrangements. Far from disabling, these kinds of complications indicate promising future directions for feminist theories of organizational communication.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I rendered one possible portrait of the body of scholarship known as feminist organizational communication studies—its relation to other projects in the field, its origins and development, its binding premises, and its latent tensions. As noted along the way, my depiction departs significantly from more typical renditions. I suppose that whether my interpretation resonates with you depends on your response to my central claims: First, in the brief span of a single decade, feminist inquiries in organizational communication have moved from barely peripheral status to occupy a vital, thriving presence in the field. Moreover, it is possible and productive to see feminist theory as independent of and parallel to, rather than derivative of, critical organizational communication studies (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004). For instance, given its capacity to balance tricky theoretical tensions with steadfast commitment to praxis, feminism can serve as a model or guide for other critical projects. In addition, feminist voices arguably carry greater weight (or speak with more legitimacy, enjoy louder volume—proportionately, anyway) in organizational communication studies than they do in cognate areas of organization theory and research, such as management studies or organizational sociology. I believe that this particular strength suggests a timely opportunity for feminist organizational communication scholars to articulate their unique contribution to wider audiences.

Indeed, I sought to stimulate the development of that potential with this chapter. My attempt, in the third section of the essay, to distinguish assumptions shared by many communication scholars implied a related suggestion: the need for increased attention to communication as subject rather than merely object of study. In other words, I encourage the development of feminist communication theories of gendered organization, in addition to the more common emphasis on feminist perspectives in or on organizational communication.

Using my own experience as a source of illustration, I also suggested a need to address latent tensions haunting the relation between public and private domains, especially those surrounding the emotionality and sexuality of labor and research relations. The development of theories that respond to conflicted pressures endemic to everyday life may begin with candid assessment of our own working selves and communities. Clearly, we perform gendered organizing even as we investigate it. It becomes crucial, then, that we apply theoretical accounts of fragile identities and power relations, as well as the ongoing hegemonic processes that seem to secure them, to unravel our own tendencies toward binary and essentializing logics. In my view, it makes little sense to speak of who can legitimately do what sort of feminist scholarship and much more sense to examine how people, variously positioned, take on the dilemmas that beset most of us, albeit differently. In what ways, for example, might our own logics and practices of studying organization resist

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and reproduce gendered identities and institutions? Hence, I cautiously proposed that feminist organizational communication theory begin to include more systematically the sort of work experiences usually presumed private and reserved for personal sensemaking. Public reflection (not self-absorption, although a fine line may divide them) on the situated politics of doing scholarship can do more than disrupt safe yet tired professional scripts, stimulating complex, realistic responses to our own and other organizational communities. It can also yield a rich source of data that, as yet, remains largely untapped and underdeveloped in our analyses of gendered organizing.

Now, let's suppose that you resist some or all of these claims—that you find the portrait sketched here less than compelling. Very well, then, but do tell me more, for if it accomplishes nothing else, I hope this chapter will prompt you to engage feminist organizational communication theory and enliven the conversation.

Note

1. The reader may notice that I have omitted citations from this section, although varied inspirations for the premises identified may well be evident. However, by suspending the academic habit of assigning credit and aligning with some works while inevitably neglecting others, I hope to momentarily free the premises from entrenched theoretical “camps” and encourage readers to consider them at face value.

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Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wiley, M. G., & Eskilson, A. (1985). Speech style, gender stereotypes, and corporate success: What if women talk more like men?Sex Roles, 12, 993–1007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00288100 Wilkins, B. M., & Anderson, P. A. (1991). Gender differences and similarities in management communication. Management Communication Quarterly, 5, 6–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0893318991005001002 Wood, J. T., & Conrad, C. (1983). Paradox in the experience of professional women. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 47, 305–322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570318309374128 Wyatt, N. (1988). Shared leadership in the weavers guild. In B.Bate & A.Taylor (Eds.), Women communicating: Studies of women's talk (pp. 147–176). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

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