This article uses stories from organisations to show how the “Helvig Square” can be an accessible and stimulating tool for managers learning to manage paradox. Many of us have been socialised and educated into binary, “either/or” thinking. As managers we find it hard to cope with current management dilemmas, such as how to plan and stay flexible, how to devolve decisions and keep corporate focus. In this article we build on the work of Pascale who uses the concept of paradox and working with “contending opposites”. This is important thinking, but we show how people can still be entrenched in opposing camps and unable to engage in meaningful dialogue. We explore how managers can expand their thinking through using the Helvig Square. This framework provides a tool which represents the problem more fully, offers a means of analysis and enables a focus on action.
We aim to illuminate the construction of ‘whiteness’ in organizations, in order to contribute to changing power relations, and the enduring material inequalities they produce. We chart four cycles of inquiry, encompassing: gender and sexuality; ethnicity; surfacing issues of whiteness at work; and making sense of the whole, drawing on concepts of discourse, identity and hegemony. Our work with public sector managers and professionals (third cycle) highlights the taken-for-grantedness of whiteness: silence about ethnicity means that talk about ethnicity is ‘transgressive’; and silence about whiteness masks white power through normalizing whiteness. The discourse of neutrality is dominant. The article offers two helpful concepts: power/identity, to signify the intricate intersections of different identities with the complex manifestations of power within organizations; and silencing as a hegemonic discourse, policed through embarrassment, which perpetuates inequalities and conceals white power. The task of management educators is to draw attention to this discursive concealment, and model a process of surfacing both ethnicity and whiteness.
Summary This article uses experience from a management development programme (run by RIPA International in London) for women civil servants from the ‘south’ to explore how participants are required to be both ‘the same’ as male bureaucrats alongside whom they work; and the expectation that they are ‘different’ from their male colleagues; both expectations working to women's disadvantage. It shows how such a programme can challenge the concept of the ‘gender‐neutral’ bureaucracy through a process of sharing and legitimizing the experience of participants, and of making explicit the gendered power relations that structure the organization. RESUME La ‘comparabilité’ et la ‘différenciation’ des femmes bureaucrates: l'expérience dans un programme de développement des femmes dans l'administration. Cet article fait appel à l'expérience dérivée d'un programme de développement administratif (mené par la RIPA, à Londres) à l'intention des femmes fonctionnaires du ‘sud’ pour déterminer dans quelle mesure les participations sont appellées à être dans un même temps ‘comparables’ aux bureaucrates masculins à côté desquels elles travaillent et par ailleurs ‘différentes’ de leurs collègues masculins; l'une et l'autre de ces attentes aurait des conséquences négatives pour les femmes. L'étude démontre comment un tel programme peut servir à contester le concept des administrations ‘neutres au genre’ grâce à un processus de partage et de légitimisation de l'expérience des participants, lequel processus peut mettre en lumière le nuancement par le genre qui soustendent les rapports de pouvoir dans les structures organisationnelles. RESUMEN ‘Igualdad’ y ‘Diferencia’ para las mujeres burócratas; experiencia de un programa de desarrollo de técnicas de dirección para mujeres El presente artículo utiliza experiencias de un programa de desarrollo de técnicas de dirección (a cargo de RIPA Internacional en Londres) para mujeres funcionarias del ‘sur’, con el propósito de explorar la exigencia de que las mujeres sean ‘iguales’ a sus colegas masculinos; y al mismo tiempo, la expectativa de que son ‘diferentes’ (ambas expectivas redundan en perjuicio de las mujeres). Se analiza aquí la forma en la que un programa de este tipo puede desafiar el concepto de la burocracia de ‘género neutral’ a través de un proceso de compartir y legitimizar la experiencia de los participantes, y de referirse explícitamente a las relaciones de poder que estructuran la organización, y en donde siempre aparece el elemento de género.
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