Identity/subjectivity -- some issues in research

1. Identity/subjectivity -- some issues in research Jill Blackmore

3. Feminist position • Ongoing sociological theoretical dilemma is relationship between agency and structure: • structural functionalist (role) • interpretivist(constructivism) (identity) • post structuralist (subjectivity) • Feminists struggle with issues about capacity to produce social change individually and collectively and gender inequalities that are social, cultural and structural

4. Role: ‘fixed place’, predetermined/ accommodating according to socialisation and structures of society • Identity: socially constructed but also implies some ‘essential centre’ • Subjectivity: multiplicity of positions, positionality, situated, contradictory, paradoxical… • Are we describing how we are or what we experience?

5. Feminist dilemma 1 • “with regard to issues of gender, a more rounded conception of agency is crucial in explaining both how women have acted autonomously in the past despite constricting social sanctions and also how they may act now in the context of processes of gender restructuring” (L. McNay 2000, Gender and Agency 5) • “we are in fact multiple and contradictory subjects, inhabitants of a diversity of communities … constructed by a variety of discourses, and precariously and temporarily sutured at the intersection of these positions” (D. Massey 1994, 6-7).

7. Materialist Feminism with just a hint of post- structuralism • macro structural shifts in relation to micro political activities in organizations and to individual agency • Educational restructuring, as organizational life generally, is gender inflected, in that the objectives, priorities and processes of reform, despite the gender neutral discourses, are highly gendered in their assumptions, values, practices and, therefore, effects • technologies of the market and management have produced new work identities that are gendered, “raced” and classed • “reciprocal dialectical and mutually defining character of symbolic/discursive and material conditions of organizing” as both “macro political arrangements and the micro practices work on identity, body and sexuality” (Ashcraft and Mumby 2004, 123). • ‘But if our lives as agents is recognised as a set of practices rather than structure or unreflective cognition that is determined elsewhere, then structures can be understood as hierarchical relationships of power and processes that reinforce or subvert social relations’(Blackmore and Sachs 2007).

8. Thus social movements such as feminism in the professions or the media, can impact on institutional practices with regard to ethics and equal opportunity through their extra-institutional discursive power. • Organizational cultures differ in terms of their gender regimes, but are also shaped by the wider “grammar of the social structures” (Blackmore and Sachs 2007) • Subjectivity is produced through discursive regimes that are mobilised organisationally and extra-organisationally

9. What about Context? How to understand it? As structures, structuration, discourses? • Context shapes possibilities : how? Structures function to position individuals (Marx- economy; Weber - bureaucracy…) • Discourses arise out of material conditions (ie social, cultural and economic) and in turn have material effects • Individuals and groups can position themselves within discourses to gain agency in specific contexts, but are also constrained by discourses in particular ways • Policy as discourse (Ball ), hegemonic discourse producing the ‘popular commonsense’ (Gramsci)

10. Feminist dilemma 2 • Given the assumption that social change is possible, how do we understand the relationships between agency and structure • Given the politics of feminism, commitment to equality, is there any essentialist self? • How do we incorporate this in post structuralist accounts? e.g. Foucault- ethics, telos, self care…moral subjects Telos: the type of person(leader) one wants to be, working on the self-- sense of moral purpose- where does this come from? Legacy of Enlightenment thinking- universalisms or reflexivity ie how one understands relationships through lived experience?

11. A theory of agency • needs to explicate how leaders produce change within particular conditions of possibility and constraint that are not just treated as exogenous to gender identity formation ahistorically. • recognize both the durability of gender identities and the potentialities for their reconstruction, as well as address issues of intentionality and reflexivity • McNay (2000) three foci on agency and change: • the relation between the material and the symbolic dimensions of subjectification; • the issue of identity and coherence of the self; • the relation between psyche and the social.

12. “While all social practices are linguistically mediated, they are not necessarily linguistic in nature; patterns of employment discrimination or economic exclusion are deeply sedimented, complex and reproduced in ways that a linguistic model does not adequately capture” (McNay 2000, 14).

13. Gender identity, while “durable”, is “not immutable” and is capable of re-formation Although subject formations receive their shape from prevailing social conditions, certain predispositions and tendencies may still continue to effect embodied practices long after the original conditions of emergence have been surpassed. This durability partly suggests that a coherent sense of self is not just an illusion but fundamental to the way in which the subject interprets itself over time (McNay from Bourdieu).