Sexuality and the experience of sexual minorities in the workplace are under-researched areas. The research reported here - a case study in one government department in the UK - utilizes a discursive research method to uncover a theme that is at the centre of this experience - silence. In-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with individuals eliciting their stories on their experience as lesbians and gay men in the workplace, and these stories were then used to promote more general discussion within focus groups. Understanding silence in the research process with relation to both the researcher and the respondent was found to be vital for research in this area, and the article raises issues to do with uncovering previously silenced voices. Silence also emerged as a recurrent theme in the research and found that there were many ways in which this silence can play an integral role in organizational discourse and the creation of social identity. We have therefore suggested that silence could be referred to metaphorically as ‘negative space’, as this term helps to emphasize the multifaceted nature of silence. The research highlighted reactive silence and the absence of response, silence as a form of suppression, of censorship and of self-protection and resistance. It also concludes that silence, in all its changing forms, influences and contributes to the creation of social reality and gay identity for lesbians and gay men in the workplace.
The paper has three main objectives. The first aim is to examine and clarify the burgeoning stakeholder literature that currently seeks to inform management practice, corporate governance and public policy with particular emphasis on the UK. We do this by continuing the process of clarification started by Donaldson and Preston (1995), focusing mainly on the political and practitioner literature generated within the UK. We begin this task by setting out a critique of stakeholding and develop this by using four key themes of enquiry. First, we examine stakeholding's conceptual confusion; second, we outline and develop criticism of its underlying pluralist assumptions; third, we consider the problems of implementation; and finally, we assess some of the key arguments concerning its potential impact on business performance and competitiveness.The second aim is to develop and examine the central criticisms of stakeholding from both the neo-liberal and Marxist/radical perspectives. By so doing we identify the key theoretical and practical issues which stakeholder proponents must address if they are to convince sceptics of the model's validity.The third aim is to develop a conceptual framework capable of illustrating the different stakeholder perspectives and assumptions on which they are based. This consists of five continuums: the first locates authors on a left-right political continuum; the second distinguishes between those authors who use stakeholding primarily for analysis and those who use it to formulate and prescribe specific courses of action; the third differentiates between intrinsic (good in itself ) and instrumental (means to an end) motives; the fourth identifies the various levels of proposed intervention; and the fifth illustrates the different degrees of enforcement advocated.We believe that this framework provides a clear illustration of our arguments and serves as a useful instrument for clarifying the stakeholder concept. In addition, it is used to position or map the work of key authors within the stakeholder debate and we believe it may provide a more coherent basis for future research and debate.
Debates on the impact of management ideas tend to assume a mechanistic view of knowledge with its value or threat conceived of in terms of the extent to which it is directly applied in practice. This is echoed in policies and practices of management education in terms of an emphasis on practical relevance. Such debates typically neglect processual views of knowledge and, in particular, the existential and associated emotional aspects of ‘acquiring’ knowledge—learning as becoming. This article explores managers’ reflections on the consequences of studying a range of explicit management ideas within the context of the MBA. Some direct translation, combination and application of ideas is evident, along with the more indirect discursive construction of an identity as ‘strategic’ or managerial in content. However, the reverse is more evident, where opportunities for application to organizational practices are seen as inappropriate or impeded within the organization. Instead the principal outcome of ideas acquisition and the process of ‘acquiring’ them is an (albeit necessarily precarious) sense of ‘self-confidence’, which is reinforced through discourse. The MBA thus becomes a means for acquiring appropriate language fluency in management and the self-confidence to gain legitimacy and social privilege in senior management. The article points to the analytical value of exploring the translation of knowledge beyond that of the transformation of ideas and of the discursive content of identity towards the existential-emotional transitions associated with ‘identity work’. It also has significant implications for our understanding of management, management education and the centrality and boundaries of knowledge as an organizing concept.
This paper is about 'coming out' and the process of disclosure and non-disclosure of minority sexual identity in organizations. The process of 'coming out' is important for the individual lesbian or gay man since it is concerned with the discursive recognition and renegotiation of their identity. The study uses storytelling and a double narrative approach, where 92 individuals were interviewed to produce 15 stories of coming out, which were used for discussion in focus groups. The research took place within 6 organizations -2 emergency services, the police and the fire service, 2 civil service departments and 2 banks. A conceptual framework is developed to explain the process of disclosure, showing it to be a continuing process rather than a single event. The concept of performativity is used to explain how in coming out the discursive practice and the telling of sexuality performs the act of coming out, making it an illocutionary speech act, and one which is made as an active or forced choice. The performative and perlocutionary speech acts interact with available subject positions thereby impacting on the individual's subjectivity. Sexuality is an under-researched area of diversity in work organizations, as well as being one of the most difficult to research, so the level of access afforded by this research and the framework it produces provides a significant contribution to our understanding of minority sexual identity at work.
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