Beyond Representations and Subjectivity: Gender Binaries and the Politics of Organizational Transformation
David Knights and Deborah Kerfoot
Department of Management
Keele University
ST5 5BG
Introduction.
The editors of this Special Issue raise the question as to whether binary thinking is a fundamental obstacle to gender equity. For in binary thinking, our subject matter is divided dichotomously between two polarities - men/women, or masculinity/femininity. Following Derrida (1988) and Irigaray (1980), they suggest that binaries always involve a hierarchy and, in the case under discussion, men and masculine discourses occupy the dominant centre of rationality, displacing women and femininity to the emotional margins of 'reality'. In short, what Derrida describes as masculine logocentric or legislative reason reduces the 'feminine' to an absent or wholly subordinate 'other'. Their argument is that despite a recognition that there are a multiplicity of masculinities and femininities (Brittan, 1989), these continue to 'exist in a binary relation to each other' (Linstead and Brewis, 2002) rendering the feminine subordinate. Their concern is to import the arguments of social science and philosophy into the study of gender at work in order to 'dissolve these gender binaries to further explore the fluidity of gender identity' (ibid).
Whilst we are sympathetic to these concerns to acknowledge and theorise the fluidity of gender identity, we wonder whether this objective of dissolution is possible within an epistemological frame of representation. What is likely is a mere deconstruction of the gender binaries. Our argument is that critique needs to go beyond representation in order to challenge the subjectivity that makes it possible. This requires us to occupy a space that stands between representations and their conditions of possibility. In our view, deconstructing the gender binary is simply to challenge the reification of the terms wherein male and female, masculine and feminine, or men and women are treated as absolute and unchanging. Dissolving the binary, by contrast, would presumably invite a collapsing of the terms so that they no longer sustain and reproduce the polarities between men and women, and between masculinity and femininity.
Our paper is divided into three parts as follows. First, we explore what is implied by the attribution of gender identities. Here we focus on the most dominant gender discourse within work organizations - that of masculinity. We seek to challenge this dominance because we think it is repressive in its consequences for others including the productive capacity of organizations. By productive capacity we do not merely mean more output at a lower cost but also less damaging social relations of production. In a second section, we examine the discourse within feminism that has surrounded the work of Foucault. This revolves around whether, given his neglect of issues of gender, Foucault is to be seen as an inspiration or a distraction for feminist politics. This debate is extensive and intense but we are less concerned with taking sides than with exploring how the various insights might be mobilised to examine discourses of masculinity for purposes of their disruption.
In the third section, we argue that this disruption is unlikely to be advanced if we remain caught within the representations of gender reflected in many feminist debates with Foucault. Instead, our concern is to occupy a space that resides between those representations and the subjectivity that makes them possible. For only then can we challenge the binary subjectivities that reflect and reproduce discourses of masculinity. Our radical epistemology has the potential not only to disrupt masculinity but also might be the way that gender binaries can be dissolved rather than merely deconstructed. While this would undoubtedly improve the experience of work for men and women, perhaps removing some of the most repressive effects of masculine dominated workplaces, it might also stimulate a more creative and productive mode of organising.
In a summary and conclusion we draw out some parallels between our analysis and Hekman’s (2001) strategy of developing a feminist alternative to the singular and unitary conception of truth, method, and morality. While supporting her destabilising of the hegemonic masculinity that reflects and reproduces mainstream conceptions of truth, method and morality, we suggest that our epistemological location between representations and the subjectivity that makes them possible provides a necessary complement.
Section 1 - Men and Masculinity
In recent years there has been a proliferation of interest in men and masculinity (e.g. Tolson, 1977; Cockburn, 1983; 1985; Brittan, 1989; Seidler, 1989; 199; Cohen, 1990; Hearn and Morgan, 1990; Rutherford, 1992; Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994; Connell, 1995). This interest has not gone on entirely uncontested (MacInnes, 1998) within the sociology of gender but could be said to have been fairly marginal with respect to the study of work organization and management (cf. Collinson and Hearn, 1996). Despite this, much of the earlier work in both organizational studies and in the feminist literature has, often unproblematically, tended to position men at the centre of their critiques (ibid.) of sexual inequality at work (Pollert, 1981; Cavendish, 1982; West, 1982; Cockburn, 1983; Wajcman, 1983; Westwood, 1984; Collinson et al., 1990). Similarly men and masculinity are the un- or under-theorised element in critiques of a patriarchal society (Walby, 1986; 1990) that perpetuate sexual discrimination and inequality.
Whilst mainstream writing on management and organisation has frequently served to deny or denigrate the significance of gender as a concept in the pursuit of `better' management practice, feminist insights have often focused on women and their experience of, and location within, (patriarchal) organisational stuctures and their differential status in the paid labour market. One result of this neglect of men, and in particular, masculinity as a core problematic is that whilst men and masculinity are central to any analysis, they "remain taken for granted, hidden and unexamined" (Collinson and Hearn, 1994:3). As we shall see later, like any other aspect of subjectivity, masculinity is a necessary presupposition for producing representations but it remains tacit and unspoken. The growing literature on masculinity and organisation serves as a corrective to this tendency, and reconfigures the debate in such as way as to render men and masculinity visible as objects of critical interrogation.
At one and the same time, critical discussion of men and masculinity in managerial and organisational locales has enabled the often-problematic aspects of masculinity to be illuminated, not least at the level of subjects themselves. In parallel, a related literature on men more generally (see for example Kaufman, 1987; Brod, 1987; Kimmell, 1987; Brittan, 1989; Segal, 1990; Connell, 1995) has signaled current problems with respect to men and masculinity. Although spanning a wide range of positions in the debate, this literature has been concerned to discuss men's experiences of `holding on to’ or changing their sense of masculine identity. Predominant conceptions of masculinity have variously characterised the consequences of masculinity synonymous with power, aggression and control. Often the `experience of masculinity' is delineated in terms of a sense of loss, inner trauma, emotional turmoil when a continuous and unending striving for the control of objects, people and events falls short of an ultimate conquest of the external world. Accepting the term masculinity as problematic, in that there are clearly diverse masculinities across racial and ethnic difference (Mercer, 1988) within and between countries (Gilmore, 1990) and across time and location, subsequent work on men and masculinity sought to escape the confines of dualistic gender essentialism. Moreover, beyond the obvious plurality of masculinites, the differing experiences of masculinity within the lifespan of individuals forced reconsideration of whether masculinity as an all-embracing descriptor for the behaviours of men was of any significant value. The work of Connell (1995, for example,) resonated with that begun by Brittan (1989) arguing that the failure to recognise masculine identities as plural could be found in the hitherto unacknowledged understanding that masculinity had been conceived as an internally undifferentiated category. Connell's contention was that the failure to recognise the complexities and differences amongst men had resulted in a skewed analysis of social relations and in the politics of the sexes wherein, as a consequence of this theoretical slippage, all men were pitted against all women. Whilst there are clearly multiple masculinities, culturally and historically, what remained at issue in the discussion and development of the literature on masculinity was the shared characteristics of these behaviours. Following the attempts of Carrigan, Connell and Lee (1987) to theorise men's (dominant) behaviour in terms of masculinity, the term `hegemonic masculinity' achieved prominence.
What we would want to describe, as discourses of hegemonic masculinity are what characterise most business and indeed non-commercial organizations. While tacit and non-explicit in their own terms, discourses of masculinity nonetheless prevail to structure and sustain behaviour of certain sorts. It is ordinarily behaviour that is technically rational, performance oriented, highly instrumental, devoid of intimacy yet preoccupied with identity, and driven by rarely reflected upon corporate or bureaucratic goals that are presumed inviolable. These masculine discourses thereby have the effect of constituting both managers and employees as subjects that secure their sense of identity, meaning, and reality through the rational, efficient and singularly uncritical pursuit of the goals and objectives handed down from above. Conditioned by this privileged and pervasive form of masculinity, the modern manager is ritually engaged in co-ordinating and controlling others in pursuit of the instrumental goals of production, productivity, and profit.
Our concern to disrupt masculinity is premised on the belief that left unchecked, such subjectivities and discourses are repressive in their consequences for self and others. Repressive for self in rendering the subject driven for no particular reason other than that of a compulsive, cognitive and goal-centred design on a heroic mastery of all it purveys. Repressive for others in reducing them to no more than instrumental resources in the pursuit of this purposive rational design on the world. We suggest that there are three interrelated ways in which masculine discourses and subjectivities are repressive both for self and others. These can be seen as related to the issues of instrumentality, intimacy, and identity respectively.
Instrumentality
Masculine discourses privilege instrumental rationalities that reflect and reinforce an effective attainment of ends through an efficient application of means. These rationalities are a condition and consequence of masculine preoccupations with success that sees no limits to control, competition, and conquest (Kerfoot and Knights, 1996). Lyotard (1984) described the preoccupation with instrumental reason or what he calls ‘performativity’ as that which is directed toward 'efficiency' and a concern with outcomes irrespective of the means to their achievement. In this sense, instrumentality is amoral having no concern with the ethical means to or outcomes of its achievement. It thereby represses the moral content of organizational life even though this can be self-defeating since, as Durkheim (1956) made clear at the turn of the century, there is an essential non-contractual or moral framework in all contracts. The labour contract is no different here and the instrumental repression of the moral framework can serve to undermine the inter-dependence and co-operation of organizational life.
Intimacy
A second repressive consequence of dominant masculine discourses is the structuring of relations in ways that feign intimacy while actually denying 'its' expression. In pursuit of its goals, the rationale of instrumental behaviour sustains a tunnel vision that displaces any sense of intimacy. It is a wholly disembodied way of relating to self and Other. Of course, subjects caught up in a masculine instrumental rationality follow the norms and niceties of polite interpersonal relations since this is seen to oil the wheels of communication as a necessary condition of securing outcomes that extend beyond the individual. Masculinity constitutes a mode of relating devoid of intimacy other than in ways that facilitate an expression of self, bound up in purposive rational instrumentality and a heroic mastery of 'reality'. In the workplace and especially within management, intimacy is denied legitimacy; it is understood to reside only in those 'private' places beyond the world of work. This is absurd and repressive both for self and other since intimacy cannot be segregated to its own private ghetto, as it is a part of what it is to be human. But this attempt to ghettoise intimacy could be seen to be a function of its mystery and hence its location in a space always beyond representation and mastery, where it perpetually escapes our grasp. Within masculine discourses, if something cannot be a target for mastery then it must be possessed and if it cannot be possessed then it must be banished to the margins where it is contained if not controlled[1]. As we argue later, this boundary where only that which can be represented counts as knowledge can be challenged. Intimacy otherwise constitutes a threat to the precarious sense of a masculine self, intent on instrumental control, competition, and conquest.
Identity
Masculine discourses would seem not only to invoke a preoccupation with control, conquest, and competitive success but also, and as a necessary accompaniment to these instrumental pursuits, self-mastery. This involves a compulsive preoccupation with identity for how else can self-mastery be recognised except through the mirror of narcissus confirming to us the sense that we have of ourselves? But narcissus is not simply the image in the water or its modern equivalent - the mirror[2]; it is mediated through our relations with others. Confirmation of self and identity is social and yet masculine instrumentality has already chased out the intimacy through which such confirmations from other might be plausible let alone sustained. The preoccupation with identity must then become as instrumental, compulsive, and self-defeating as the demands for control, conquest, and competitive success that it reflects and reproduces. By virtue of the difficulty if not ultimate impossibility of controlling how the ‘other’ perceives the self, identity always remain beyond reach.
Section 2 – Foucault and Feminism
This section begins by providing a somewhat truncated summary of the debate between feminist supporters and detractors of Foucault. This is done not because we wish to take sides for we remain ambivalent about the virtues and vices of theorising gender. We also want to avoid treating one or other of the opposing representations as a vehicle for the solidification and security of self or the shoring up of our own identities. Instead of placing a closure around one particular set of arguments, we hope to draw on the insights from both to set the scene for our analysis of an alternative epistemological space that is beyond representation in Section 3. From these critics and supporters, we pay particular attention to those that are either ambivalent or contribute to a discourse on masculinity. In particular, we want to claim that ambivalence has a radical intent since it facilitates a questioning that reaches behind rather than becomes locked into particular representations. Despite not taking sides on the specific issue of the critique or acceptance of Foucault's refusal to theorise gender, our analysis is informed by a Foucauldian injunction to think the unthought or, in our terms, to go beyond representation and subjectivity. At the same time, we draw on the critics in insisting that an analysis of gender is crucial to understanding contemporary organization(s) but, while retaining an ambivalence or scepticism with regard to all representations including gender, our focus is on disrupting the domination of masculine presuppositions and discourses. Our concern to disrupt the discursive dominance of masculinity is because we believe it to have repressive consequences both for its perpetrators (usually but not exclusively successful men) and its victims (often but not exclusively women). In seeking to bring about this disruption, we find Foucault’s (1973) early yet comparatively undeveloped discourse on epistemology is of particular value. Before turning to this alternative epistemological framework for studying gender, we discuss the debate between pro- and anti-Foucauldian feminists.