Positioning gender: analysing business managers’ talk in board meetings

 

Dr Judith Baxter

The University of Reading, UK

 

 

On what basis can the only female manager in an otherwise all-male team negotiate and maintain a powerful subject position? How pertinent are discourses of gender in terms of analysing spoken interactions within business settings? How do discourses of gender interact with other institutional and social discourses to support or undermine a female manager’s sense of professional identity?

 

This session intends to explore the ways in which spoken interaction in the public sphere is interwoven with a web of social and institutional discourses. These discourses work intertextually to position speakers variously as powerful and powerless —often shifting from one position to another in a matter of moments. For its methodology, the paper draws upon my recent work in feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA), which developed from an ethnographic study I conducted into high school students’ spoken interactions. This work is informed by Foucault’s (1972: 49) view of discourses as, ‘practices that systematically form the object of which they speak.’ In other words, discourses are systematic ways of making sense of the world by inscribing and shaping power relations within all texts, including spoken interactions.

 

My own approach to FPDA has evolved from the work of feminists such as Bergvall, Bing & Freed (1996); Davies (1992); Sheldon (1997); Walkerdine (1998); and Weedon (1997). The feminist focus in FPDA explicitly highlights the continuing ways in which females are constituted as less powerful than males in many public and professional settings. However, from a post-structuralist perspective, FPDA does not recognise females as disempowered victims but alternatively as complex and multi-faceted. FPDA helps to explain this by suggesting that the ceaseless interaction of competing discourses means that females will continuously fluctuate between positions of powerfulness and powerlessness both within the same context and across different social contexts. Such background details on the theory will be provided in the full paper.

 

The session will focus upon analysing an extract of spoken data taken from an ethnographic research study conducted in a British-based internet publishing company. The spoken interactions of the senior management team (six men including the Managing Director, and one woman) were observed and recorded during the course of a series of team meetings. This was followed by a series of audio-recorded interviews with several of the managers and other employees, in order to produce multi-faceted perspectives on the data.

 

With close reference to a sample of spoken interaction, I will consider the topic of gender and discourse on two levels. On the level of the individual subject, I will consider that the apparent success of the female manager in being able to negotiate a relatively powerful position for herself within the senior team, is simultaneously undermined by the play of gendered discourses. On the level of methodology, I will question how possible it is to identify with any confidence that particular discourses are at work within a given stretch of text. The session will thus point to the importance for analysts of drawing upon the diachronic as well as the synchronic dimension in carrying out a FPDA approach. Finally, I will refer to the text of the full paper, which assesses the value of FPDA as an alternative, complementary or additional method of discourse analysis alongside more established approaches such as Conversation Analysis (CA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

 

 

Publications

 

Baxter, J. (2002) A Juggling Act: a feminist post-structuralist analysis of girls’ and boys’

talk in the secondary classroom. Gender & Education 14, 1, 5-19

Baxter, J. (2002 a) Jokers in the Pack: why boys are more adept than girls at speaking

in public. Language & Education , 16, 2, pp. 81—96

Baxter, J. (2002b) Competing discourses in the classroom: a post-structuralist

analysis of girls’ and boys’ speech in public contexts. Discourse & Society 13, 6, pp. 827—842

Baxter, J. (2002c) Is PDA really an alternative? A reply to West. Discourse & Society 13

(6), pp. 853—859

Baxter, J. (in press) Positioning Gender: Feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis.

Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan