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Feminist liberate thyself

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In an influential article published in the Management Communication Quarterly in 1994, Patrice Buzzanell showed how multiple feminist theories can be integrated to provide insight into the consequences of gender interactions in everyday organizing processes. Buzzanell brought to the fore the powerful potential in feminist theory synthesis to shift the agenda and conduct of organizational communication research. She called for researchers to move beyond traditional organizational themes of competitive individualism, cause-effect linear thinking, and separation or autonomy toward feminist values of cooperative and collaborative community, connectedness and integrative thinking. Feminist theory encourages researchers and policymakers to examine how they themselves frame gendered notions of organizational processes and practices in their work. This action raises two fundamental questions about the meaning and purpose of work for researchers. First, is it feasible to decouple the conditions of conducting a professional career in academe from the dominant trends in organizations? So long as researchers remain concerned with analyses of organizations while remaining situated in organizational contexts where traditional gendered notions about the meaning and purpose of work and division of labor dominate, they are not going to be able to go beyond documenting efforts that are being undertaken to change a status quo that is manufactured to favor men over women. For example, how do feminist researchers reconcile with the fact that the remuneration offered to tenured and non-tenured faculty remains skewed in favor of male professors?

Second, organizations have their reputations as providers of equal opportunity to protect when they call for gender equality/equity in the organization. It is ironic that many of these organizations are dominated by White males who constitute the majority of the middle and upper levels of management and in many cases comprise the bulk of the shareholders. Asking White men to alter their perceptions of others in a specified setting without examining their conditions of privilege in other contexts is at best a sign of short-sightedness and at worst just plain insincere.

While disengagement provides theorists a way of creating alternative structures or ideologies based on a critique of the system, doing so also increases the risk of marginalization. Also, Buzzanell points out that attempts at reaching out to a larger population run the risk of diluting the feminist message and subsequent cooptation of feminist demands by opportunistic interests. Another question that arises in my mind is whether achieving equal or equitable representation of women is an end in itself. Numerical goals for achieving equity of representation are necessary yet insufficient conditions for progress toward equality. The underrepresentation that occurs is not just in numbers of females in the workforce but also refers to the marginalization of feminist values that promote a multifaceted life designed to accommodate work-family and work-life balance. The value of our contributions as theorists lies not just in our ability to identify with a particular ideology but in the enactment of our ideological principles. It might be naïve to suggest at this juncture that feminist theory succeeds when and where it is practiced, but it would certainly help newcomers to the feminist project if more experienced scholars outline and specify how feminism can be exercised in praxis.

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