From Here to Eternity: Making Sense of the Gendering of Organizational Culture

Abstract

As was made clear at the beginning, this book is and is not about British Airways (nor for that matter about Air Canada and Pan American Airways). Clearly, the book is about these airlines in that it attempts to analyse the companies over time, but as case studies designed to shed light on the gendering of organizational culture per se. Certainly there is no intent to single out BA, Pan Am or Air Canada as exemplars of bad organizational practice; there is no evidence to suggest that any of these airlines has a worse than average track record on sex discrimination. BA, for example, appears to have been less willing to hire female clerical staff than other major companies in the 1920s, more advanced than many in the late 1940s with its equity imaging of female flight attendants, more willing to exploit eroticism in the 1960s, and yet among the 1990s leaders in adopting employment equity strategies. Rather, BA’s value as a case study depends on methodological issues, including the length of time that it has been in business; the fact that it is still in operation; its prominence as a major, internationally known company; the existence of a corporate archive; and the fact that it has been the subject of several written histories (see Chapter 1). On the other hand, the notion of organizational culture is only useful as a heuristic where it is able not only to identify processes common across organizations but also to make sense of localized realities. In that regard BA, Air Canada and Pan Am are not simply stand-ins for organizational culture but an important study of localized practices in an organization. As they are prominent organizations in the world of organizational realities, study of these airlines is also important in their own right for the light it can shed on the gendered influences of the major corporation.

The idea of multiple overlapping … discourses problematizes sharp distinctions between self and other … undermining oppositional rhetorical strategies.

Steven R. Corman (2000: 10)

Recognizing our differences and using those differences to push our own and others’ understanding does not mean that we must reject the notion of a common ground for organizational theorizing; instead, it suggests that any common ground we do develop will be provisional, partial, and subject to continual critique […] A politics of affinity recognizes that there is ‘nothing about being ‘’female’ that naturally binds women’; rather identities are conceived as the result of ‘contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and capitalism’… Feminist interested in creating knowledge for social change are left with the responsibility of building unities rather than naturalizing them.

Angela Trethewey (2000: 201–02)