Citation
Walker, R. (2009), "Voice, Visibility and the Gendering of Organizations", Gender in Management, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 146-149. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542410910938826
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2009, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
It is hardly news that not all books live up to the hype captured in cover endorsements. This one may be an exception. The promotional blurb tells us that Voice, Visibility and the Gendering of Organizations:
[…] is ideal for upper level undergraduate and Master's level modules on Gender and Organizations and Gender and Management, while it is also essential reading for academics and researchers of these subjects.
After reading the book, it is easy to support those claims, and to expand the recommendation to include those who (like me) are interested in questions of gender in organization studies, but whose other activities or research interests deflect from a deep engagement with the gender literature. For people like us, this book is a little gem.
For decades, writers and researchers have developed and drawn on a range of theoretical perspectives to help explain why women and men experience work differently, and to unravel the complexities associated with gender and organizations. In Voice, Visibility and the Gendering of Organizations Ruth Simpson and Patricia Lewis draw our attention to two interrelated elements – voice and visibility – to interrogate (or at least introduce and discuss) issues around gender, management, work and organizations.
Chapter 1 sets up a basic framework for the book – a simple matrix formed from the dimensions: voice‐visibility:surface‐deep. The authors position this matrix as an interpretive device rather than a powerful analytical tool, and it serves them well as a way into an array of studies and “understandings” of gender and work. Voice and visibility provide the main reference points for a discussion that goes far beyond these two aspects of the gender literature. This first chapter, for example, includes useful definitional insights into the term “gender”, introducing the fundamental difference between biologically based understandings of gender as a “fact” or “state” of being male or female, and the idea of gender as actively produced and contingent, a fluid “process” constantly negotiated and renegotiated in social space. Assumptions of stability versus notions of instability, dynamism and inconsistency are, unsurprisingly, a persistent feature of the book.
In Chapter 1, the authors delineate the three theoretical traditions that form an overlay of categories central to the book's ongoing structure and interpretations: liberal feminism, radical feminism and post‐structural feminism. These approaches are progressively explored in later chapters, and their contributions to the voice and visibility debates elaborated on. A liberal feminist perspective is equated with surface accounts of gender, and post‐structural feminism with deep representations (radical feminism being positioned as more surface than deep, but providing a link between the two).
Chapter 2 opens with the question: are women the new men? Here the authors explore some of the cultural obstacles to women's voices being represented in organizations where gender is ignored and men's voices dominate as the invisible norm. This chapter ranges over aspects of the “female advantage”. A discussion of how the widely lauded transformational leadership has been aligned with “feminine” attributes and leadership styles (offering women a “natural” advantage over men), is countered by insights into how “women's relational strengths within the ‘female advantage’ are represented as instrumentally useful – captured and re‐masculinized in the drive for performance, competitiveness and control,” thus silencing the female voice and its ability “to effect radical change” (p. 15). Particular emphasis is placed on the tensions that women must negotiate around discourses of “sameness” exemplified in conversations about equal opportunity or merit (“women can compete on the same basis as men”) and “difference,” exemplified by conversations which present women as different from men (girls on top). Adopting the rhetoric of “choice” emerges as one means by which women can manage these tensions.
Women's voice literature is positioned in this framework as a “‘surface’ conceptualization” (p. 17) of the body of work on gender and organization. It is in this discussion of women's voice that the usefulness of the conceptual framework begins to assert itself. The authors resist the tendency to interpret “surface” as “superficial” or “unworthy”, or to deride some literatures and exalt others. Rather, they position the various traditions in relation to the broader framework. This structure enables them to at once draw attention to the shortcomings of the women's voice literature, while also acknowledging the very real (and often positive) impact that this body of work has had on helping women and men accommodate “difference in their everyday lives, how they make sense of the opportunities available to them and how they view the significance of choice” (p. 17).
Chapter 3 moves on to determine the scope and meaning associated with “deep” conceptualizations of voice aligned with post‐structuralism. Assumptions underlying different understandings of power and gender are revisited. The point is made that:
[…] rather than having unitary definitions of masculinity and femininity […] post structuralism recognizes that there are a number of different masculinities and femininities which are produced in different contexts, some being more dominant or privileged than others (p. 24).
This chapter draws on the concept of discourse; accenting the ways by which some discourses shape our realities and how some discourses dominate and suppress others. The chapter spans a number of sections including “Gender as discursively produced”; “Discourse and identity”; and “Challenging the hegemonic discourse: the feminization of management”. The section on “Silencing through discourse”, illustrates the active “process of silencing” that serves to ensure that some voices within organizations are amplified, while some remain unheard.
Chapter 4, titled “Visibility: a surface state of exclusion and difference” stands in counterpoint to Chapter 5: “Deep conceptualizations of invisibility”. The content of both chapters serves to emphasize broad cultural assumptions and structural inequalities the ensure men and women have different types of experiences at work. The former chapter presents evidence of how heightened visibility can count against women, while men, even when they are in the minority, can be advantaged by their token status. Chapter 5 considers “The invisible privileges of masculinity” in the advantage gained by “men's invisible association with a universalized norm” (p. 50). Yet, just as gender is constantly evolving, so too is our understanding of organizational “normativity” (p. 58) which was once an area that was itself invisible, both to those who studied organizations and those who were members of organizations – males as well as females. For me, an intriguing aspect of Chapter 5 is the section relating to backlash politics and “struggles over normativity”. The framing of men as disadvantaged in the struggle for gender equality has been associated with the “competing victim syndrome”. As they vie to maintain organizational power:
[…] men and masculinity have a vested interest in being both visible and invisible, with victim visibility acting as a means of maintain victor invisibility. Through the backlash, struggle, men seek to maintain the advantages of invisibility while seeking to be made visible as a victim – rather than a victor who has managed to keep a firm grip on the materiality of his privileged status (p. 58).
Chapter 6 takes us into another domain from which to regard theoretical developments in gender studies, this time through the multiple lenses of masculinity studies. The authors align four of the main perspectives on masculinity with the voice‐visibility: surface‐deep matrix. Role theory is identified with the surface:voice nexus, the social relations perspective with surface:visibility, psychoanalytic accounts of masculinity are seen as deep:visibility and postructuralism as deep:voice. A summary table (Figure 6.1 “Masculinity studies through the concepts of voice and visibility”) captures the essence of those research perspectives. This table is the first of three helpful summary devices, the others encapsulating “surface and deep conceptualizations of voice and visibility” (Figure 7.1) and “gender and entrepreneurship through the framework of voice and visibility” (Figure 7.2).
As might be inferred from reference to these two tables, Chapter 7, the final of Voice, Visibility and the Gendering of Organizations, operates as a combination of review, application, and summary analysis. Here, the authors turn to questions of gender and entrepreneurship to demonstrate how their framework can operate as an “organizing principle” for another literature within organization studies. They also draw connections across and between surface and deep levels of conceptualization, to highlight paradoxical elements that the central framework enables us to recognize and accommodate. The book ends with the claim that “it is through exploring such interdependencies and tensions that we can develop a richer understanding of gender processes in organizations” (p. 91).
As a writing team, Ruth Simpson and Patricia Lewis offer the reader the gift of clarity. These authors have surveyed a vast and growing field of study and here they provide a path into that field which genuinely helps the reader make sense of a sometimes confounding array of research insights and perspectives. The voice‐visibility: surface‐deep matrix enables the authors to lead, even an inexperienced, unsophisticated reader through some of the intricacies of the gender‐organization maze – to help them establish a more critical insight into the organizational practices and processes which, on the face of it, might appear neutral and “ungendered”. And Simpson and Lewis are excellent guides, explaining their broad intention as to where they are taking you and what you will see. They use signposts effectively, acknowledging the way the various components of the landscape “fit together” to form a coherent picture, a way of seeing and understanding the gendered nature of organizations. The chapter openings and summaries foreground key themes, operating as effective reminders of ground already surveyed or that which is yet to be encountered. Such devices can sometimes seem boringly repetitive or patronizing, but that is not the case here. Instead, they serve to effectively reinforce the central message and the reader emerges with a clearer insight into gender as enacted in organizations.
Earlier, I supported the claim that this is a book suitable for a range of levels of engagement with the gender and organizations literature. What then, aside from the obvious emphasis on the “voice” and “visibility” issues, can this book offer the reader who is encountering the literature on gender and organizations for the first time? At the most fundamental level, a reader can hope to emerge with:
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an understanding of how others interpret and make sense of the gender construct;
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a sense of the power of discourse to shape our organizational experiences;
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a “once‐over‐lightly” of some major feminist perspectives on the gendering of organizations: liberal, radical and post‐structuralist; and
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an introduction to the evolving conversation regarding organizational masculinities.