Gender Bending and Bending Gender (Re)Creating Aesthetic Realities of Organization Practices

The following paper incorporates various writing genres including fiction, narrative, and scholarly discourse to demonstrate the potential importance of aesthetic theory for transforming gendered organizational practices. It starts off with Kelly‘s, a student of organizational communication, ―final exam‖ essay, which explores the gendered politics of promotion. Her professor‘s response explores the gendered politics of ―doing feminism.‖ Taken individually, Kelly and Dr. McGuire (re)create an aesthetic reality of traditional, essentializing organizational practices. Taken together, they (re)create aesthetic meanings that pose formidable challenges and potential transformations for the way we ―do gender‖ organizationally. In the end, this paper or ―petite narrative‖ stands as an aesthetic challenge towards transforming the way we ―do (feminist organization) scholarship‖ organizationally

A discursive approach to embedded gender relations in (Swedish) global restructuring

In this research, I apply a discourse-centered approach to the study of embedded gender relations in global restructuring. I identify the multiple discourses that frame particular organizational practices of an efficiency program and resultant competency development program for redundant workers who were laid off as a result of restructuring. In general, I found that contemporary discourses such as globalization and post-Fordism fail to accurately meet the situation of global restructuring as it is played out in concrete, gendered organizational practice and individual work lives. Instead, I demonstrate how these discourses are fraught with ironies and contradictions that contribute to the reproduction of traditional gendered relationships within these contexts of rapid organizational change. The main contribution comes from my ironic analysis that reveals the discursive spaces, most especially the discourse of competency, where normative, gendered meanings and organizational practices are disrupted and power interests temporarily exposed. These implications are consistent with the overarching theoretical framework of feminist poststructuralism that seeks areas and strategies for change within socially and historically situated discursive relationships, as well as the discursive framework that foregrounds tensions and irony