Madness in their methods: gender blindness as discursive effect

Citation

Mills, A.J. (2011), "Madness in their methods: gender blindness as discursive effect", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 6 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/qrom.2011.29806aaa.004

Madness in their methods: gender blindness as discursive effect

Madness in their methods: gender blindness as discursive effect

Article Type: Commentary From: Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, Volume 6, Issue 1.

Introduction

“The gendering of organizational research methods” (GORM) is a fascinating read, not so much because of what it has to say but the way it says it. At first glance the paper seems to offer an account of how the adoption and use of research methods is shaped through gendered processes. This much is clear, not only from the title but also from a series of references to feminist theory, and discussion of the work of noted female organizational analysts. Indeed, if further proof was needed, the authors continually ask questions about the impact of gender on the processes of method choice and potential outcomes, reaching into the feminist literature for insights. Yet, despite these various cues, the paper has almost nothing to say on the relationship between gender and research methods. In essence, it is about the extent to which female more than male academics are likely to adopt qualitative research methods. It is an exercise in “body counting” rather than “a discussion of the social construction of gender at work” (Alvesson and Billing, 2002, p. 72).

To characterize the paper as “body counting” is not intended as a critique in itself: that has been well debated elsewhere (Alvesson and Billing, 2002; Konrad et al., 2005). What has proven far more intriguing is the way that the paper manages to engage at length with feminist theories of gendered relationships while systematically managing to ignore the issues raised: this is particularly the case in terms of the paper's central question of the impact of gender on choice of research methods. At an earlier point in time Hearn and Parkin (1983) may have termed this inability to deal with gendered processes “neglect”, while Wilson (1996) may have called it a form of “gender blindness”,

Building on Wilson (1996), gender blindness can be defined, in large part, as an inability to recognize that cultural processes serve to construct notions of male/female, masculine/feminine, and as an inability to recognize the far-reaching implications of these processes. In developing the notion of gender blindness, Wilson (1996) provided a number of examples of how gender was generally ignored in management and organizational analysis. What she did not develop at that time was analysis of how gender blindness is created and maintained. I think the GORM paper provides us with some interesting cues and it is to that analysis that the rest of this paper will be dedicated. In the process, I am also highly interested in how certain marginalizing notions of qualitative methods are developed. Again the GORM paper will prove instructive.

Gender blindness and GORM: a discursive approach

My approach to analysis of the GORM paper – appropriately enough for a qualitative research methods journal – draws on a feminist-informed (Weedon, 1997) use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1995). Viewing the GORM paper as a text (i.e. a bounded area within a field of enquiry), I ask questions about what subjectivities are constructed and privileged by the text (Foucault, 1965); what are the central elements involving the text's emplotment (White, 1985); what are the key tropes (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1999) used to construct the argument; and what types of rhetorical strategies are engaged in (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005).

GORM as text

On its own the GORM paper arguably provides an interesting example of the way that certain notions of gender and qualitative methods are utilized. It is a relatively self-contained text that affords the opportunity to explore certain processes in a bounded and limited way. However, its potential influence can be seen to rest in the fact that its speaks to and draws upon a broader research community that primarily treats gender as a variable, or some form of essential difference in the make up of men and women (Alvesson and Billing, 2002). In that regard it can be argued that the paper contributes to certain notions of gender (and qualitative methods). Thus, the text needs to be simultaneously read as operating in its own right but also as part of a broader text or discursive field. Arguably, blindness to gendered processes is reinforced through discursive forces that are reproduced through a focus on gender as variable in numerous individual texts such as GORM.

Subject positions

At least two pairs of subject positions emerge from the analysis of GORM. The central subject position (i.e. the one that is the main focus of the study) is that of the “feminist organizational scientist”. From a CDA perspective, the term “subject position” is used to denote an image or idea of a type of person who is constituted by rather than focused on within the text. Clearly there are people who, at times, may refer to themselves as “organizational scientists” but there are also those who would distain such a label. It is also clear that there are females who consider themselves organizational scholars and even female organizational scholars but there are also those who would neither self-identify as female organizational scientists or as organizational scientists per se. In other words, the seemingly unified notion of the female organizational scientist is a discursive effect of the text (GORM) that produced it.

The female organizational scientist is introduced early in the paper:

[…] suppose female organizational scientists choose one research method more often than male organizational scientists do (p. x).

We can note here that this introduces a second, and more privileged subject position, the “male organizational scientist”, who is cast as the norm, or point of departure. The following quote is one of several examples that reinforce the view that the “female organizational scientist” is less privileged than the “male organizational scientist”:

Our interest in this topic came from a hunch and a concern – a hunch that more women than men pursue qualitative research as compared to quantitative research and a concern, if it was true, for what that means for women in our field given the up-hill struggle many scholars encounter in trying to publish qualitative research […] (p. x).

The quote also introduces a secondary yet important pair of subject positions – the “qualitative researcher” and the “quantitative researcher”. Throughout the paper the latter is constructed as the norm or privileged position: it is the former that faces the “up-hill struggle”. While qualitative research is described as “heretical research” (p. x), quantitative research is characterized as “the preferred choice for both genders […] when studying gender issues” (p. x). The authors themselves identify with “quantitative analysis, specifically chi-square analysis, to determine statistically if the proportion of men and women engaged in qualitative or nonqualitative research differed” (p. x).

Emplotment

Emplotment refers to a story's plot and the way it is structured (White, 1973). In the GORM paper, the plot centers on the “female organizational scientist” and the degree to which she uses qualitative methods. Several plot constructions serve to center this story and to make it interesting and relevant. Those plot structures include the rooting of subject positions in individual and essentialist characteristics, contrasting subject positions, the creation of drama and mystery and a (methodological) solution for solving the mystery. As I hope to demonstrate, each of these plot structures serve to obfuscate gender dynamics.

The essentialist individual

Despite numerous references to gender processes the paper primarily draws on the notion of women as essentially different from men. This can be seen in the story's opening lines:

Suppose gender makes a difference. Suppose researcher gender influences one's choices about how to study organizations. Suppose female organizational scientists choose one research method more often than male organizational scientists do.

While the first two lines talk about gender the concluding line references females vs males. This approach is confirmed in the research design and the discussion of results. The design focuses on comparisons of female with male authors of qualitative studies in the journals of four “leading” management journals, finding:

an association between gender and type of methodology with female authors overrepresented and male authors underrepresented in the qualitative category as compared to overall authorship in these four journals (p. x).

The point is even stronger in the discussion of results when the authors state:

We began this study with a desire to know more about who is publishing qualitative research and to pursue our hunch that this choice of methodology tends to attract more women than men (p. x).

And where they argue that:

One plausible explanation for the over-representation of women in qualitative research has its roots in a feminist or “women's voice” perspective, which suggests that men and women often do not come to “know” things in the same way (p. x).

This focus on essential differences arguably discourages if not inhibits the story line from taking gender processes into account: individual “gender” differences are portrayed as relatively fixed, pre-existing conditions. The potential for a focus on gender processes is further reduced by the equation of “sex” (as the basic physiological differences between males and females) and “gender” (as culturally specific patterns of behavior that come to be associated to the sexes – see Oakley, 1981). As we have seen in several examples above, references to gender are ultimately linked sex differences.

Contrasting subject positions

as argued (and exampled) above, the use of contrasts between female and male organizational scientists provides a dynamic that tends to highlight sex rather than gender difference. This is reinforced in more nuanced ways through a linking of maleness with quantitative methods and femaleness with qualitative methods. This is at its sharpest when the authors attempt to explain their findings through reference to the feminist debate around separate knowing vs connected knowing. Ostensibly about ways of knowing, the argument turns into a distinction between quantitative and qualititative research. Thus, “qualitative research has many of the characteristics of connected knowing” involving “a more intimate relationship with the object of knowing” and seeking to “find ways to gain access to other people's knowledge and ways of thinking” (p. x). Quantitative (or “nonqualitative”) research, on the other hand, is viewed as having the characteristics of separate knowing, where the researcher maintains “distance from the object of knowing”, maintains “personal distance from the object and the argument”, and “learns the standards of authorities and applies those standards with rigor and dispassion” (p. x). It can be noted that the authors describe their own research project in terms that mirror the separate knowing approach; undertaking a quantitative study of qualitative methods (p. x); following “a careful procedure” (p. x); “thoroughly reviewing the coding of a third researcher” (p. x); etc. Likewise, one of their main conclusions links qualitative studies with feminine characteristics in the argument that:

One plausible explanation for the over-representation of women in qualitative research has its roots in a feminist or “women's voice” perspective, which suggests that men and women often do not come to “know” things in the same way (p. x).

Drama and mystery

The MacGuffin is a term that refers to elements that move a story along without being a necessary part of the plot (Truffaut et al., 1983). In this case, the MacGiffin is the authors continual reference to a gap in the literature as one of several conventions used to attract publication. Mystery is established through continual reference to the fact that the relationship between gender (viz. sex differences) and choice of research methods has not previously been considered. They suggest that while leading research methods scholars have hinted at the influence of personal characteristics on choice of research methods they have not considered gender (p. x). And, they stress that this potential link is “noticeably absent from the management literature” (p. x). The point is attenuated through insertions of drama into the text, calling their approach “unspeakable” (p. x), challenging “conventional wisdom” (p. x), “politically incorrect” (p. x), “provocative” (p. x) and a “hot-button issue” (p. x). However, this impression was achieved by first, simplifying the distinction between qualitative and quantitative research; second, ignoring a considerable body of feminist theorizing; and third, obfuscating the difference between gender and sex. These factors, as we shall see, simultaneously involved and contributed to a blindness of gender dynamics.

Solving the puzzle

Integrally linked to the other plot structures, particularly the mystery element, is the method of solving the puzzle. In this case, the preferred solution was linked to “quantitative analysis […] to determine statistically if the proportion of men and women engaged in qualitative or nonqualitative research differed” (p. x). It is not hard to imagine how this structuring element contributed to an inattention to gender dynamics. After the introduction and discussion of methods in the first third to half of the paper, feminist theories of gender construction – with one notable exception – are not discussed again. Instead, the findings section focuses on the relative authorship of qualitative research by women compared to men. As we shall see below, the interpretation of the findings leads to a search for explanations that support the focus on comparative sex differences.

Tropes and rhetorical strategies

A trope refers to a figure of speech; a way of speaking that appears to simply explain the facts of the story but which arguably constitute those facts (White, 1985). For example, the paper's opening supposition tries to suggest that the discovery of the facts (i.e. that a significant number of female compared to male organizational scientists prefer qualitative methods) began as a normal scientific process of deductive investigation that started with a theory (expressed as a “hunch”). In fact it could be argued that the authors' hunch actually led to the invention (rather than discovery) of the facts through the process of selecting one or two thoughts from a field of ideas and building a story around the pursuit of those thoughts (White, 1985). The so-called facts do not stand on their own but need emplotment to make them plausible to an audience (Weick, 1995).

The central trope used by the authors to ground the story is that of normal science. Despite the claim that their “interest came from a hunch and a concern” the scientific indexing throughout overshadows any concern with anything other than scientific outcomes. Indeed, “concern,” is barely used and, beyond one initial reference to the potential “up-hill battle” of female organizational researchers, become associated with scientific discovery. The following is an example: “What role does gender play in authorship of qualitative studies, and if gender does play a role, what might explain it?” (p. x).

This trope, and its underlying motivation, go some way to explaining the inattention to gender dynamics. Indeed the equation of women-female organizational scientists-qualitative research sets up a gender dynamic within the paper that is itself a powerful trope that becomes self-referential.

A third and lesser trope – irony – adds to the interplay between the other two tropes. The first example appears early on when the paper embraces Daft and Lewin's (1990, p. 6), otherwise ironic, notion of qualitative methods as “heretical research”; asking, do “women seem to be more drawn to ‘heretical research methods' […] than men?” (p. x). The phrase is repeated later on. The other major reference is where the authors “recognize the irony of conducting a quantitative analysis on qualitative publication trends” (p. x). Both uses of irony, however, seem more likely to marginalize qualitative research rather than problematize all research methodologies. In the words of Haraway (2004, p. 325), irony can be “a dangerous rhetorical strategy […] because it does things to your audience that is not fair”.

This leads us to rhetorical strategies or statements intended to persuade, more often by embedded references as overt pleading (Suddaby and Greenwood, 2005). The main rhetorical strategies in the GORM paper include those aimed at revealing the expertise of the authors and the value of their research project and findings. Three elements are worth pointing out:

1. 1.

   ignorance as confidence;

2. 2.

   inclusion by association; and

3. 3.

   clarification through simplification.

In the first element, the authors set out to convince the reader that there is an argument to be made for their research focus. In the process of claiming that studies of gender and research methods have not been done they overstate their case by ignoring key aspects of the literature. For example, the authors state (without citation) “we work in a profession that rarely speaks of gender” (p. x). This appears to be stated as if (a) it was a discovery of the authors because (b) no one else was making that point. They go on to say: “As we looked at the management and organizational literature, the silence on the topic of gender and research methods was palpable” (p. x). This may well be true in regard to their own narrowly focused project but ignores considerable feminist work on gender and research methods (Konrad et al., 2005). The authors also claim that “The gender conversation in the management literature has largely focused on theory, with little attention to methods or how gender may influence one's general approach to scholarship” (p. x). Apart from the fact that this completely ignores almost 40 years of feminist organizational analysis (Mills and Tancred, 1992), the rhetoric reduces the literature on gender and organizations to a “conversation” and marginalizes “theory”.

Perhaps uneasy about creating too much distance from feminist theorizing, the second of the rhetorical strategies associates the authors with selected but leading theorists in the field, including Acker, Calas, Ely, Ferguson, Gilligan, Martin, Reinharz, Smircich and many others. And this, for me, is the real irony of the paper because it manages to draw on a rich feminist literature without having much to say about the relationship between gendered processes and research methods. An exemplar of this irony is captured in discussion of Acker's (1992) work on gendered processes at work:

The feminist theorists define gendered processes as “advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine (Acker, 1992: 146)”. Could it be true that our research methods are gendered, as well? We undertook a study to explore this idea (p. x).

Reference to Acker serves as little more than a cloak around a narrow focus on sex differences and research methods.

Finally, simplification of gender, feminist theory and qualitative methods helps to reduce the potential complexity of concerns that a focus on gender and research might usually be expected to surface. Gender is reduced to sex differences. Feminist theory is reduced to a single variant, as exemplified in a reference to Roberts (1990) as providing a definitive definition (see footnote, p. x). The selection is likely not coincidental as Robert's (1990) talks in terms of “female interests” and “relations between men and women”. The recent debates about different feminisms (Calas and Smircich, 2005), that may have raised difference questions about gender and research, is completely left out of account. And the key discussion of qualitative methods also ignores well-established debates about the difference between positivist, post-positivist and post-positivist qualitative methods (Corman, 2000; Johnson and Duberley, 2000; Prasad, 2005). In the process, the authors reference forms of post-positivist qualitative research when discussing the fact that female organizational researchers are more likely to adopt qualitative methods, yet reference examples of positivist qualitative research when discussing the success of selected female researchers. Now that is an interesting “finding!”

Discursive effects

In summary, in an attempt to convince about the viability of studying gender and research methods and of, what turned out to be, very limited results, the GORM paper produced several discursive effects, including the creation and marginalization of the female organizational scientist, the qualitative researcher and gender blindness.

Analysis of the GORM paper using CDA suggests that the latter, gender blindness (by which I include studies that view gender as a variable but in a context that is motivated primarily by scientific rather than feminist concerns), is an effect of gendered influences that are embedded in ways of emploting research projects. Gender blindness is not simply a problem of inattention or distraction, to be dealt with by attention to detail. Nor is it simply a problem of discriminatory attitudes. It involves the way we are taught to structure, design and emplot research projects. Thus in arguing that gender blindness is a discursive effect does end up signaling that there is a relationship between gender and research methods after all, but not one anticipated by the GORM paper.

Albert J. MillsSaint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada

Further reading

Bryman, A., Bell, E., Mills, A.J. and Yue, A.R. (2011), Business Research Methods, Oxford University Press, Toronto

About the author

Albert J. Mills, PhD, is Professor of Management at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada. His research interests revolve around the theme of human liberation and the impact of organization on people. He has co/authored and co-edited more than 20 books, including: Gendering Organizational Analysis (Sage, 1992), Gender, Identity and the Culture of Organizations (Routledge, 2002), Sex, Strategy and the Stratosphere: Airlines and the Gendering of Organizational Culture (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2006) and Business Research Methods (Oxford University Press, 2011). Albert J. Mills can be contacted at: albert.mills@smu.ca