Pauline Leonard

Place, Space and Time: Contextualizing Workplace Subjectivities:

This paper explores the relations between management discourse and employee subjectivity in the process of organizational change, drawing on a new empirical study of doctors and nurses working in the British National Health Service (NHS). It builds on recent critiques of more muscular accounts of discourse to examine the manoeuvres made by working subjects in response to managerialist discourses of the entrepreneurial self. While others have shown that alternative discourses including gender, age and profession are important here, this paper argues that we must pay attention to the spatial and temporal contexts within which such generic discourses are received and understood in order to interpret the practices of subjectivity and power in organizational life. We suggest that this approach allows new insights to policy concerns in the NHS; to our understanding of the nature of work subjectivities; and to sociological understandings of organizational power.

Gender, Power and Organisations

This important text offers an overview and synthesis of theory and research into the gendered dimension of organisations, exploring how gender difference is constructed within organisations and intertwined with organisational power relations. Assuming little prior knowledge on the part of the reader, it examines a series of key areas of substantive interest in the study of organisations, bringing to bear a wide range of social and feminist theory in understanding the processes in play.

Spaces of Identity

It is 4.30pm in the Accident and Emergency department at Lakeside. The waiting room is half-full and has an un-nerving sense of tension and boredom. Each time the doors open, heads turn with curiosity and apprehension. AE unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. I try to make myself as inconspicuous as possible: there seems no legitimate way for me to occupy this space. Based in the centre of the room, the all male group of doctors inhabits the space with ease. In between periods of urgency, communicated largely through speed of movement rather than speech, the doctors’ gather at their station, backs outwards, quiet, intently focussed on each other. The nurses do not enter this huddle but continue with their routine business. As the doctors’ conversation turns to plans for the evening’s entertainment, one stretches his arms above his head and pushes his chair out to stretch his legs and, doing so, blocks a main thoroughfare. A nurse side-steps smartly to avoid him. He doesn’t notice her.

Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations : Working Whiteness

Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organisations offers a timely and contemporary discussion of the role of organizations in maintaining or challenging structures and cultures based on racism and discrimination. It offers a key exploration of the relations between whiteness, identity and organization in migratory contexts. It delves into the experiences of expatriates in Hong Kong and the ways in which new identities are constructed in the destinations of migration by exploring the renegotiation of white identities and racialized relationships, and the extent to which colonial imaginations still inform contemporary organizations. By drawing on existing theoretical and empirical material on post-colonialism, identity-making, privileged migration, relocation, transnational work and organizations, this volume brings disparate discussions together in a new and accessible way. It will appeal to a range of sociology scholars as well as to those working in the fields of migration, gender studies, and cultural geography. Contents: Introduction; Contextualizing whiteness and work; Researching white identities; Becoming a white expatriate; Organizing whiteness through organizational practice; Gender, work and expatriate life; Expatriate places and spaces; Returning home; Bibliography; Index.

'Playing' doctors and nurses? Competing discourses of gender, power and identity in the British National Health Service

This paper adopts a feminist poststructuralist approach to demonstrate the ambiguities and complexities which exist in the relationship between work and subject. Recent studies in organizational sociology have argued that the discourses of work, and changing working cultures, have had a powerful effect on the production of subjectivities. New forms of working behaviour have been constructed as desirable, which often draw on personal qualities such as gender. This paper draws on research conducted with doctors and nurses in the British National Health Service to reveal the ambiguities which exist in the ways in which individuals position themselves in relation to these discourses. The discourses of work and organization are constantly mediated through, and destabilised by, the intertextuality that exists with competing discourses such as those of professionalism, gender, home and performance. Although organizational discourses are clearly powerful in the construction and performance of subjectivities, the interplay between discourses means that these are constantly destabilised and undermined.

Migrating identities: gender, whiteness and Britishness in post-colonial Hong Kong

This paper explores the ways in which notions of nationality, whiteness and gender are drawn upon by British expatriate women in the construction and performance of their identities in post-colonial Hong Kong. A British colony since the mid-nineteenth century, Hong Kong was returned to China in the 1997 handover to become a ‘Special Administrative Region’. Now, as the administrative workings of empire are receding, so too are the expectations about race and nationality which went with them. For the white British, the opportunities to reconfigure discourses and subjectivities of whiteness are there, although the findings of this research reveals the unevenness of take-up. The paper draws on a broad feminist post-structuralist approach to reveal the ways in which four different British women migrants position themselves in the changing landscape. The approach shows important patterns of difference and diversity between the women in the performances of gendered Britishness and whiteness, and in the extent to which these are used to redefine or challenge the memory of relations established through imperialism.

Work, identity and change? Post/colonial encounters in Hong Kong

This paper explores the shifting, multiple modalities of Britishness, colonialism and whiteness in a changing social landscape. Set in postcolonial Hong Kong, it draws on research with white British expatriates to explore the ways in which identities and relations are changing since the handover from British to Chinese rule. For many British expatriates, the decision to migrate was a career and lifestyle choice, motivated by a desire to progress within their lives. However, once there, Hong Kong offers a new racial context in which identities are to be performed, meaning that the negotiation of new lives is not a simple or abstract transnational transposition. In addition, the dynamic social and political context of Hong Kong is mediated through expatriate contexts in diverse and complex ways. Colonialism can be seen to persist in many of these contexts, suggesting that postcolonial ways of being a British expatriate in Hong Kong are still very much in process.

‘The New Degree?’ Constructing Internships in the Third Sector

The recent economic recession has impacted substantially on the graduate labour market, with many graduates now struggling to find secure employment in professional careers. In this context, temporary, unpaid ‘internships’ have emerged as increasingly important as a ‘way in’ to work for this group. Yet while there has been much media and policy debate on internships, academic consideration has been scant. This article begins to address this knowledge gap by drawing on a study of interns in a third sector environmental organisation. The research findings reveal that unpaid internships were rationalised through a complex mix of political motivations, career ambitions and lifestyle aims, but these intersected in important ways with social class. These findings are not only of empirical interest, contributing to our knowledge of graduate negotiations of precarity, but also of theoretical value, extending our understanding of young people’s agency and motivations in transitions into work.

Gender, power and organisations : an introduction

Gender and Organisation: Introducing Power Organisational Structures Organisational Cultures Gender and Management in Organisations Sexuality and Organisation Challenging Gendered Organisation Power, Gender and Organisation

Citizen participation in news

The process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, making comparison of news systems difficult. In particular, it is problematic to distinguish the levels of citizen involvement, and therefore the extent to which news production has genuinely been opened up. In this paper we perform an analysis of 32 online news systems, comparing them in terms of how much power they give to citizens at each stage of the news production process. Our analysis reveals a diverse landscape of news systems and shows that they defy simplistic categorisation, but it also provides the means to compare different approaches in a systematic and meaningful way. We combine this with four case studies of individual stories to explore the ways that news stories can move and evolve across this landscape. Our conclusions are that online news systems are complex and interdependent, and that most do not involve citizens to the extent that the terms used to describe them imply.