The Paradox of Individual Diff erences and Group Identity in One Person

136 10. The value of seeing gender as a ‘doing’ Elisabeth K. Kelan and Julia C. Nentwich INTRODUCTION Seeing gender as a social practice has been a burgeoning topic in research on gender at work in recent years. This rel ects a theoretical shift in gender studies towards constructivist and post-structuralist approaches. However in much research on gender at work, gender is still seen as a variable or a property of persons. In this chapter it is argued that such a view theo- retically narrows the impact that research on gender at work could have. First, approaches to gender at work are reviewed to show that most studies have focused on a limited array of theories. Second, theories of gender as a social practice arising from gender theories are outlined. Subsequently, the application of those theories for research on gender at work is highlighted before we draw some conclusions and stress the implications that seeing gender as a social practice may have. TUNNEL VISION? Studies in the i eld of gender at work are l ourishing. Studies have focused on gender dif erences in relation to job satisfaction García-Bernal et al., 2005; Mason, 1997; Okpara et al., 2005 and management and leadership styles Helgesen, 1990; Rosener, 1990; Eagly and Johannesen-Schmidt, 2001; Hau-Siu Chow, 2005. Studies also dealt with equal opportunities Strachan et al., 2004; Burke, 2005; Metcalfe and Afanassieva, 2005 and issues around family friendliness Grover and Crooker, 1995; Greenhaus, 1999; Konrad and Mangel, 2000; Linehan and Walsh, 2000; Lewis, 2001; Veiga et al., 2004, work–life balance Drew and Murtagh, 2005 and working hours Simpson, 1998. Another prominent area of research is related to women’s careers Simpson, 1997; Duignan and Iaquinto, 2005 and women’s networks Ibarra, 1992, 1993. Metaphors such as ‘glass ceiling’ or ‘sticky l oor’ have reached prominence Powell, 1999; Baxter The value of seeing gender as a ‘doing’ 137 and Wright, 2000; Wirth, 2001; Cornelius and Skinner, 2005 as have social psychological research approaches on stereotypes which aim at explaining the discrimination of women at work Heilman, 2001; Kray et al., 2001, 2002; Schein, 2001; Roberson and Kulik, 2007. The aim of most studies is thus to identify dif erences and some- times also similarities between groups of men and women. Researching ‘gender’ is often equated with researching ‘women’ and sometimes, but less frequently, ‘men’ as pre-established groups. Researchers split their samples based on gender, and gender then becomes a variable that is used in models to test what impact it has on other elements under research Harding, 1986; Alvesson and Billing, 2002. Such a perspective certainly has value in that it highlights gender dif erences and is a leap forward from earlier studies in which gender was not deemed important at all compare Acker and Houten, 1992. However, such an approach does not allow testing for similarities, which means that gender is always conceptualised as dif erence Hyde, 2005. While such a perspective can be important to describe today’s situation of women and, to a lesser extent, men at work, this research is problematic as it may lead to essentialism. Essentialism would mean in this case to reproduce gender dif erence which is the expected outcome of research. In other words, we might i nd what we were looking for Gof man, 1977; see also Ofori-Dankwa and Ricks, 2000. Only a few studies question the assumption that there are things like a ‘female’ management style Wajcman, 1996 or something like ‘feminine leadership’ Billing and Alvesson, 2000; Fletcher, 2004. The idea of a ‘female management style’ is often based on the assumption that a generic woman enacts this style. Thereby any dif erences among women are disallowed Marecek, 1995, p. 163. If there is a generic woman enacting a certain type of management style, potential individual dif erences between women are glossed over as preference is given to seeing women as a group. Second, talking about gender is very often simply equated with women while men are rarely talked about or analysed. Women are thus constructed as a problematic group, while men in management tend to remain the unquestioned taken- for-granted norm Calás and Smircich, 1992a, 1992b, 1993; Collinson, 1992; Kerfoot and Knights, 1993, 1996; Collinson and Hearn, 1996; Martin and Collinson, 2002. From a gender studies perspective, the understanding of gender predom- inant in management research is built to a large degree on early feminist work in which it was central to make women’s voices heard and to make political claims on behalf of women Gilligan, 1982; Hartsock, 1987. However, within feminist theory this understanding has been widely criti- cised as essentialist. The ‘woman’ constructed through these approaches