Note passing as gendered practices of public ambiguity in a hyper‐masculine organization

Abstract

This article explores a surprising and seemingly mundane organizational practice: passing notes during professional meetings. Based on 34 in‐depth interviews with women in a hyper‐masculine organization — the Israeli military — this study focuses on what I term gendered practices of public ambiguity. It demonstrates how these practices shed light on three interrelated paths to power at work: (i) practices of public intimacy between men; (ii) practices of women's degradation by men; and (iii) practices of recognition claims by women. The tension between the publicity inherent in the routine passing of notes and the ambiguity of their contents calls for a more nuanced theorization of gendered power practices, which transcends the accepted dichotomy of doing and undoing gender, reproducing or challenging the symbolic gender order. The findings show that gendered micro‐practices can become polysemic symbolic spaces in which women redirect the flow of power, if only temporarily and locally, and turn it into a multidirectional and multi‐agentic resource. The conceptual contribution of these findings is discussed in terms of the positioning of women in hyper‐masculine environments as pragmatic subjects who (re‐)construct mechanisms of power out of the restricted repertoire available to them.

Public intimacy in social media: The mass audience as a third party

“…The meaning of such a performance emerges only in and through the social interaction, reminiscent of the way that interactive message exchange is characterized by relatively spontaneous and unpredictable turn-taking, in which the content of the exchange is often clarified only after the other parties respond (Rafaeli and Sudweeks, 1997). I initially developed the concept of public intimacy to account for men’s friendship practices in semi-public settings (Kaplan, 2005) and expanded it to examine sociability in social clubs and organizations (Karazi-Presler 2020; Kaplan, 2014, 2018) as well as in televised media events (Kaplan and Kupper, 2017). Although the original formulation referred to offline face-to-face interactions, this concept is all the more relevant to online social media.…”

Gendered Power at Work: Constituting Moral Worth in a Hyper-Masculine Organizational Culture

“…Officially, therefore, while the military system is committed to gender equality and to fighting sexual violence, in practice, an unofficial but no less dominant cultural structure perpetuates power relations and 'sees' to it that women's recurring devaluations continue. It is a structure made of daily microinteractions, discursive patterns and physical and symbolic practices in the 'underbelly' of military culture (Tirosh, 2014) -a culture whose rules may be difficult to pinpoint but with which women must comply in order to survive in the military, and even in Israeli society after their discharge from active service (Karazi-Presler, 2020;Karazi-Presler et al, 2018).…”

Pandemic and macho organizations: Wake‐up call or business as usual?

“…Historically, hegemonic masculinity has been strongly tied to social institutions such as the family, religion and work (Connell, 1993). Similar to the military (Karazi‐Presler, 2020; Lee, Shirmohammadi, Baumgartner, Oh, & Han, 2019) and fire departments (Perrott, 2019), hegemonic masculinity is distinctively prevalent in police organizations (see O’Neill, Mars, & Singh, 2007). This makes police organizations an ‘overwhelming masculine institution’ (Willis, 2013, p. 80) where the cult of masculinity is the defining characteristic of the police occupational culture (Fielding, 1994; Smith & Gray, 1985), even though there are places of resistance (Dick, 2015).…”