Abstract
This is an insider‟s ethnographic account of a process of change for increased gender equality within a multi-cultural international development organization in South Asia. As the formally appointed Gender Specialist and the informal leader of the process, the author examines data from over seven years to analyse the actions of female and male staff that construct, maintain and alter the gendered culture of their workplace. This social process, described through the structural and cultural features of the organization, highlights the role of power, in its various dimensions, in maintaining gender inequalities within this context.
Drawing on practice theory, the author argues that individuals play a determining role in the reproduction and change of structural features of organizations by shaping and reshaping, creating and recreating identity through formal and informal policies and practices, including those of resistance. The text analyses how the powerful men of one organization allowed women‟s agency on terms they themselves dictated and controlled. . Behind the scenes, actions by men enacting hidden forms of power contributed to the neutral appearance of power and served to blind the gender advocates and other staff to the internal processes of discrimination. This blindness became apparent late in the process, when it became clear that as the prominence of gender issues increased, so did the resistance. When women‟s actions moved beyond what was considered acceptable, the result was a backlash against individual women and the gender mainstreaming agenda in general. In this way, the full extent and potential of women‟s agency was suppressed, and its significance therefore limited in impact. Structurally, therefore, INORG was ill-equipped to transform itself into a gender equitable organization, not just because it reflected the gender relations in the wider society, but because of the hierarchy and system of power that itself was a gendering process.
The cycle of control –resistance-counter control observed in INORG was one that brought women to a higher level of gender awareness and political action, but one that in the end was not able to significantly transform gender relations, perhaps due to its challenge to the hegemony of male power and management. And yet, given the symbolic value of resistance, women‟s acts of agency and resistance were laden with meaning, as women asserted their own views and identities. In this way, the women may have changed the organization in individual, fragmented and subtle ways, but the effects were small in scale and more cultural than structural. Yet the challenge to existing notions of gender identity that altered many women‟s sense of self and sense of gender fairness in the organization may never be erased and may serve to motivate further acts of resistance.
This research contributes to the understanding of processes of gendering within multi-cultural organizations by understanding how organizational change occurs through the resistance and subjectivity of actors, and therefore contributes to the literature on organizational change, gender and organizations, development studies, and feminist scholarship.
Throughout this narrative, the author retains a reflexive awareness of the tension between her role as a researcher who is subject to the conventions of analytical „objectivity‟ and that of an insider, an organizational member.
Author: Jeannette Gurung
