Gendering Emotion in Organizations

Citation

Jones, D. (2008), "Gendering Emotion in Organizations", Gender in Management, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 81-84. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542410810849141

Are women are naturally better managers because of their emotional abilities? This proposition is pervasive in popular culture. Just last week, I was asked by a local women's business magazine to comment on an argument that ran along these lines: that the twenty‐first century workforce needs a new type of leadership which is based on communication and on building positive relationships. Enter the women managers – who “naturally” have the more transformational and empowering management style that is needed. Result: a rosy picture of the future of women in management. What is wrong with this argument? In Gendering Emotions in Organizations, a series of authors take apart the assumptions that are taken for granted in making “natural” connections between women and emotion. Further, they argue that this kind of rhetoric may even damage, rather than advantage, women's position in management.

This book appears at a time when “emotion” as a workplace issue has been dragged from the margins into the centre‐stage, in both the academic and the popular management literature. It has been used in the service of various often conflicting agendas. Some critical accounts want to use theories of emotion to disrupt traditional rationalist management discourse (Fineman, 2003). In contrast, mainstream management writers want to know how to “manage” emotion to meet the strategic requirements of organisations (Ashkanazy et al., 2002, p. 8), in what some writers have called a “masculinization” of emotion. Emotion becomes individualised as a set of competencies which can be used by managers (Goleman, 1995). It should be a surprise that the long association of emotion with the feminine has been more or less ignored in much of this recent work – however, it has been. Lewis and Simpson's (2007, p. 1) book is placed in this gap, arguing that “the intricacies and complexities' of the relationship” between gender and emotion “remain underexplored”.

This collection “places gender at the centre of analysis” (p. 2). While they acknowledge that there has been a stream of work on emotion and organisations which has considered gender as a “subdivision” of the field – especially the material on “emotional labour” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 2) – Lewis and Simpson want to focus “in explicit terms” on “the gendered nature of emotions at work”. This focus inevitably requires a critical scrutiny of the stereotypical association of women with certain gendered emotional styles of leadership: “emotional, nurturing and caring” as opposed to male leaders who are seen as “rational, logical and independent” (p. 3). There has been a long‐running debate in feminism, especially in the last 15 years or so, about the truth and political value of this kind of argument. On the one hand, as the editors acknowledge, it has been important to recognise and value the different perspectives and values that women bring to work and organisational life. In fact, it has been argued that the marginalisation of women's perspectives has been inseparable from the marginalisation of emotion in organisational theory (Mumby and Putnam, 1992).

By the same token, we might expect that the increased recognition of emotion as central to management would lead to increased recognition for women as managers. However, a new appreciation of women's abilities as managers has not been a noticeable feature of management literature or of the workplace. And this recognition is largely absent from the management‐and‐emotions literature, as the editors of Gendering Emotions in Organizations point out. They argue that, we should be very cautious about using a theoretical framework which essentialises gender, keeping women and men in their traditional boxes, regarding them as “naturally” different. At first glance this framework seems to reflect women's accounts of their experiences, as shown in a range of research on women and leadership (reviewed in Lewis and Simpson's introduction). For instance, Burke and Collins' (2001) paper on “Gender differences in leadership styles and management skills” is in 2007, the most read article in Women in Management Review.

But the fact that (some) women report differences in leadership styles and values, differences which are linked to expressing and responding to certain emotions, does not make these “natural”. Lewis and Simpson take a different approach: they see emotions not as the product of gender, biological or otherwise, but rather as producing gender; as “cultural resources in the construction and reconstruction of gender identity” (p. 3). Following Judith Butler and other poststructuralist feminist theorists (Butler, 1990; Weedon, 1987), they treat gender itself as unstable, as the result of many overlapping processes of “doing” or “performing” gender difference. In these terms, “specific emotions and specific forms of emotional engagement are … part of “doing gender” (p. 3).

This proposition does not mean that we do not genuinely “feel” our emotions as they occur, but that, as feminists and as scholars, we can scrutinise the ways that these “feelings” are part of a gendered order. This order varies according to historical and cultural contexts. In these contexts, emotions and power relations are inseparable. Lewis and Simpson also argue that the “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” approach to emotion (Gray, 1992), rather than advantaging women in the contemporary workforce by underlining their emotional skills, has a counter‐effect. In practice, what are seen as women's “natural” attributes – abilities to nurture, care and express emotion – are “seen to be essentially feminine and hence devalued and invisible” (p. 3).

Occupations and jobs‐based around these attributes still tend to be relatively low paid and low status. Lewis and Simpson argue that recent feminist work on emotion in organisations highlights a “rewriting” of emotion in masculine terms. This rewriting is accomplished by an emphasis on “managing” emotions, and by the much higher value given to masculine than feminine emotional labour and emotion work. For the same reason, the “feminine” label is avoided by mainstream management writers who argue that practices such as empathy and cooperation should be central to “new” styles of management (Fondas, 1997). So, although it may seem logical that the new valuing of emotion in management theory and practice would advantage women managers, it does not.

The various chapters in gendering emotions in organizations develop and illustrate these arguments in a series of empirical contexts, suggesting “meanings that are attached to differences” and “how differences are constructed, evaluated and maintained” (p. 4). The two editors are both based in the UK, and the perspective of the book is, broadly speaking, “western”. More specifically, the 14 writers are nearly all based in the UK, with four from Australia, one from Canada, and one from Finland. While there is a strong interest in management, the empirical sites are not all management ones – for instance, “caring” professions such as nursing and teaching are included. They range from situations where gender is more obviously salient – women business executives or males in caring professions – to those where the gender issues are more subtle – as in how mistakes are handled, or how organisational violations are interpreted.

In their introduction, Lewis and Simpson tell us that “this book has emerged from a desire to incite debate … on gender and emotions” (p. 13). By showing how the domain of emotion is a place where gendered power relations play out in organisations, the book develops wider current debates about gender, work and management. The writers tease out and complicate “common sense” notions of emotion and of gender, and set out the social and political context in which emotions have been – in very controlled ways – welcomed back into management theory and practice.

They argue convincingly that this development does not necessarily usher in a happy new day for women in management – perhaps the reverse. This is not an argument that many advocates for women in management want to hear. It does not confirm the inevitable progress of women down the management pipeline. And it presents perspectives that are counter‐intuitive to more conventional ways of thinking about gender, emotion and the self. For this reason, it may be a useful way into current debates about gender, including and going beyond the organisational studies literature. It also serves as an excellent portal to the literature on emotions in organisations, and reminds us that whenever we read “emotion” gender is always present, whether clearly spelled out, erased, or written in the margins.