Angelika Sjöstedt Landén

From ethnographic 'self'-discovery to processes of identification

Descriptions of the research experience are vital to ethnography and have often been mediated through the writings about the researcher ‘self’. Consequently, the concept of self has taken up a central position in literature on ethnographic work. In order to renew the discussion on the ethnographic researcher position, I intend to explore further what status is given to such descriptions and notions of self. In this article I analyse how researcher identity claims were made through the practice of ethnographic description drawn from field notes produced during a study of a Swedish workplace. Building on the results of the analysis, I suggest that the ethnographic researcher will not be able to discover her self in the process of research. Rather, I argue, researcher identity is constructed in ethnographic research practice where the researcher goes into processes of identification.

A Fantasy of the “Ambitious Young Girl” as Flexible Knowledge-worker Subject

One of the paradoxes of the so-called flexible work environments of late capitalism is that, at the same time as tribute is paid to organizational and work-force flexibility in terms of increased empowerment and freedom for workers to make their own decisions, there is also a strong emphasis on controlling their work. These ways of governing and controlling work have been problematized within critical organizational studies and analysed and conceptualized as audit regimes and audit cultures. Furthermore, feminist research highlights how the hegemonization of flexible work ideologies may result in declining health for employees and increased gender inequalities in the labour market. This article contributes to these critical strands of research by examining some of the gendered aspects of the ideological forces that work to install everyday work practices of “flexible subjects”. The analysis is done by studying the means of knowledge-work fantasies, and especially the ideological forces behind the fantasy of the “ambitious young girl”. I draw on feminist critiques of neo-liberalism and neo-liberal practices and, more specifically, theories of the professional investment that is supposedly common in neo-liberal discourses. The source material that laid the foundations for this article was gathered from within a more extensive ethnographic study where I followed the relocation of a knowledge-intensive civil service agency from the capital of Sweden to a smaller town northwest of the capital. The analysis shows that, in the process of moving work-place, employees became invested in a fantasy of “ambitious girls”, a fantasy that entailed certain expectations of flexible and mouldable civil service workers in neo-liberal times.

Gender as headline and subtext: problematizing the gender perspective in an occupational health project

The focus of this article is on how a “gender perspective” becomes lifted to the headlines as a solution to an organizational problem. The purpose of this article is to problematize how a gender perspective was employed in the everyday practices of an occupational health project in a Swedish municipality. The projects stated aim was to construct and implement a new model for occupational health, targeting the municipalitys employees, and gender equality was seen as one means of reducing sick leave among the staff. Our focus was the participants’ perceptions of their participation and their reflections on the content and practices of the program. The information was gathered from focus-group interviews with participants in a management training program (MTP) and a rehabilitation program (RP) and from documents produced within the project. Drawing from feminist writings on gender subtexts defined as a set of concealed power based processes (re)producing gender distinctions in organizations, we have explored how power structures are created based on socially constructed differences. Our results demonstrate how gender knowledge could reproduce inequality and hierarchical distinctions between people in different positions in working life.