Angela Trethewey

Resistance, Identity, and Empowerment: A Postmodern Feminist Analysis of Clients in a Human Service Organization.

This article presents the results of a postmodern feminist analysis of interview and observation data collected at a Womens Social Service Organization (WSSO)‐a social service organization designed to assist low‐income, single parents in obtaining education and job training to support their families independently of welfare. Many authors (e.g., Ferguson, 1984; Fraser, 1989) argue that clients in human service organizations, like WSSO, are often positioned by organizational discourse as passive, deficient, and depoliticized recipients of predefined services. Clients, however, are rarely completely passive; their marginal voices resist dominant organizational discourses in a plurality of ways. In the spirit of Foucaults (1978, 1979, 1980) genealogy, this study aimed to give voice to the submerged voices of clients in a human service organization and to locate and learn from their struggles against power. More specifically, it articulates the local, immediate, and fragmentary forms of client resistance at ...

Reproducing and Resisting the Master Narrative of Decline Midlife Professional Women’s Experiences of Aging

This exploratory study provides an analysis of midlife professional women’s experiences of growing older at work. The master narrative of aging as decline encourages midlife women to experience and articulate growing older in terms of loss, isolation, and diminished material resources. Yet women do not simply reproduce the decline narrative, they also offer resistant stories. Analysis of women’s narratives suggests that increasingly, midlife is represented as a feature of one’s identity to be managed effectively. Specifically, entrepreneurialism has colonized the aging process such that the individual is now positioned as the locus of her own problems and solutions in relation to the seemingly inevitable decline that begins at midlife. In contrast, this analysis attempts to make explicit the economic, organizational, and discursive bases of aging. Finally, the article brings the politics of midlife professional women’s aging to the fore, highlights implications for theory and practice, and suggests directions for future research.

Isn't it ironic: Using irony to explore the contradictions of organizational life

This study brings together two promising strands of research in organizational communication‐postmodern theories and contradiction‐centered analyses of organizational discourse and practice by employing irony, as articulated by postmodern and/or feminist scholars, as a theoretical lens to analyze the contradictions that structure a social service organization. While many scholars have pointed to ironic organizational outcomes (e.g., agencies that foster client dependence while claiming to encourage independence), few have teased out the discursive complexities that create those ironic conditions (Fraser, 1989; Trethewey, 1997). This case study shifts our focus away from manifestations of contradictions toward the theoretical tools, namely irony, with which we can better understand how ambiguities and paradoxes structure organizational reality.

Performing the enterprising subject: Gendered strategies for success (?)

For women in contemporary corporate life, negotiating and performing a “professional” identity is a process requiring much time, energy, and self‐surveillance. Yet, many women feel compelled to undertake this project despite the challenges it poses. These women often turn to popular success literature for strategies to help them craft and enact successful identities. In this essay, we analyze the popular success literature and compare its prescriptions for success with the voices of actual, successful career women. We explore the paradoxes and contradictions within and across these discourses in our efforts to deconstruct masculine constructions/performances of professionalism.

On collective mind and conversational analysis: Response to Cooren

The authors note an important problem with Cooren’s (2004) argument that processes of representing, subordinating, and contributing, accomplished routinely in “mundane” conversations, constitute collective organizational mind as discussed by Hutchins (1995) and especially Weick and Roberts (1993). The authors show that everyday conversations can easily exhibit evidence of those three processes and yet amount to heedless, self-centered exchanges and that the lone or unvoiced activities of members can exhibit the essence of the kind of collective mind that generates high reliability organizations (HROs). Therefore, analysis of local conversations is inadequate to demonstrate the existence of collective mind and to explain the high reliability of HROs; such analysis needs supplement by evidence that the conversation contributes to a pattern of institutionalized system-level distributed heedfulness.