(176kb) (163kb) (195kb) (227kb) (177kb) (223kb) (154kb) (220kb) (189kb) (115kb) (104kb)Gill Coleman
PhD dissertation
Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice
University of Bath
Gill Coleman ©2001
Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with the author. The thesis is made available on the condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognize that copyright rests with the author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be made without the prior written consent of the author
INTRODUCTION
Dear Reader
I want to find some way to help you into this piece of work, and because it is a highly personal account of an action inquiry into my own professional and personal practice as a management educator, this does not feel easy to me. I am extending you an invitation, and at the same time I fear, a little, your reaction to what I have written, and doubt the extent to which my writing, because of its personal nature, may have resonance for you. So let me begin with some explanation of what follows, and set down my initial purposes in undertaking this piece of work.
During the period of this inquiry, between 1994 and the present, I have worked first in a university graduate business-education department, then in an independent educational organisation set up by the founder of a well-known British business. My first role involved me in setting up and co-ordinating an MBA in International Business, and the second is concerned with building a radical voice in business education, by developing and running education programmes focusing on social, environmental and ethical issues in business. Although the first job was in mainstream/conventional business education inside a university, and the second is essentially about developing an alternative to the mainstream, both have involved a mixture of activities which I might describe as educational/academic; entrepreneurial/creative; practical/problem solving; and management/leadership. Both have involved setting something up from nothing, taking an outline idea and - with others - bringing it about.
This is one way of describing what I have been doing, and hence what I have been writing about.
Another is to say that this inquiry is concerned with gender and management, and my struggle to express in my professional practice the values I hold, which are informed by feminist critiques of management and business practice. Its starting point is my personal sense of contradiction between my values and what I found myself doing. I began to pay attention to that sense of contradiction, and to interrogate it as a means of learning more about the way gender was being enacted in my organisational setting. This seemed to me to have a particular pertinence, since that setting was one in which education on the functioning of business organisations was taking place. Unable to either resolve or live with the contradiction I felt, I decided to leave that job, and was able to find one which offered new opportunities to participate in building an organisation which was committed to a different set of values. The second part of this account continues that story.
I have attempted to illustrate here the connections between my thinking and my actions, to question what it is I should be doing, and to look for ways in which the act of questioning offers different alternatives for future action.
This account is given in the spirit of feminist research - a notion which I will expand on in Chapters 1 and 2 - in the conviction that attention to my own experience is a source of information, provides data which can help me understand better some of the processes which compromise me, but may also have meaning for you, the reader. This is an account of one set of micro-experiences, which are reproduced in myriad different permutations. It is a piece of personal validation and actualisation, but set within a claim for the political relevance of personal experience.
And so I want to suggest a third way of describing this piece of work: this is an account of one person’s living with ambiguity. The two roles that I describe above, which form the basis for this inquiry, are notably ambiguous. The boundary between academia/thinking and management/doing is well established in our culture, professionally and conceptually - applied knowledge has a different and lower status than pure knowledge, analysis is seen as intellectually superior to practice. Feminist thinking challenges this demarcation, through the idea of praxis - and so does action research. My work has crossed this path, and continues to do so. I have noticed that people around me are often confused by my status (academic, or administrative? Is she in charge or not?), by my organisational affiliation (I have twice in this period been seconded from one organisation to another, retaining dual membership) by my level of authority (I have often been seen as my male colleague’s assistant). I have done little to clear such ambiguities, partly, I now realise, because I use them: elusiveness provides an element of space.
But there is another sort of ambiguity in this study, concerning its validity. The accounts themselves are tentative and localised in their meaning. Even I, as the author, am unable to give authoritative interpretations of some of the situations I am addressing, and that is not my purpose here: instead, through the inquiry process I have attempted to get better at the dance I feel I am engaged in, and in the process to seek to learn from this something about gender and management. What I have presented to you here is a selection of illustrations, stories, and reflections, which together constitute a picture indicative of the multiple realities I experience. I have selected them on the basis of the energy they seem to demand from me at any given time, their resonance for me - and with the full awareness that they represent no objective reality: they are indicative rather than representative. This multiplicity casts constant doubt on one of my starting questions - what should I be doing here? - and reflects back on issues of power, purpose, effectiveness. Writing through this has at times felt akin to unpicking a tapestry: undoing something which requires its knottedness to make sense.
In puzzling on how to begin to do this, I was helped greatly by John Rowan’s (1981) discussion of a dialectical approach to the research process. I had worked with this model before, when studying for my MSc at Bristol University. I enjoyed then its simplicity-with-depth, and used it to lend structure to my dissertation (Coleman 1990). I have drawn on it in a different way here, using it to help me locate my starting place, and finding now, as I draw this process to a close, it is again appropriate to map my movements during this inquiry, iterating between internal movements/reflective processes and outward movements/actions in the world.
Rowan captures the idea of ‘research as personal process’ (Reason and Marshall, 1987) by beginning and ending the research cycle with Being. For reasons that I will explore in the next chapter, resting in my own experience has been a major part of this inquiry process for me: but Rowan’s model also expresses a dynamic of contradiction and movement in the inquiry process: moving from one stage to another as each ceases to answer a question or meet a need; resting in Being leads to Thinking: the confusions of Thinking lead to a desire for a Project; the movement is then outward into Encounter, testing, which in turn requires the inward movement of Making Sense. The cycles involved in this process deepen the sense of inquiry: my mapping (see figure) suggests three iterations between encounter and sense-making before I felt ready to communicate (write) some sort of ‘conclusions’. But the other obvious thing about a cycle is that it has no beginning and end: it is continuous. And whilst writing - and deciding to stop writing – this representation of my inquiry, I have had a strong sense of attempting to pin down a moving process, which is as yet offering me no conclusion, no end, although many ‘findings’, and much movement, journeying on my part. I am ready to rest back in my Being, but as part of rhythm of inquiry.
In the text that follows, I will employ three different typefaces to indicate different ‘voices’, positions, from which I am writing:
I invite you to enjoy reading this piece of work, as I have enjoyed writing it.
Rowan says of the research cycle that it can be seen as depicting a dialectical process of engagement with the world. His description evokes beautifully the rhythm of the cycle, so I will quote it here at length:
"I start by resting in my own experience. But at a certain point my existing practices seems to be inadequate – I become dissatisfied. So the first negation arises – I turn against the old ways of doing things, a real problem has arisen. So I move into a phase of needing new thinking…..THINKING in this model is not the application of a technique to inert material, it is a creative process of invention and testing. It continually asks the question - ‘will this do?’ It is essentially an inward movement, gathering in information; but it is also a processing movement, adding and combining the new information into unfamiliar relationships, and trying it against some kind of template of what would be acceptable…..
At a certain point I abandon the gathering of more and more information. Thinking is not enough…..some action plan has to come into being. This may require some daring, some risk taking, some breaking of the bounds…PROJECT is essentially an outward movement…I have to bring into being a thought which contradicts the present reality, and has the power to bring into being a genuinely new situation – and there may be more than one way of doing this… it essentially involves plans and decisions….
But again at a certain point plans are not what is needed. Action itself is the thing to get into. In action I am fully present, here and now…I must be ready to improvise if unexpected reactions occur. ENCOUNTER is a movement of height and depth, like BEING, but it involves regular inward and outward moments…this is where I actually meet the other. I may get confirmed or disconfirmed…the comparison of what is expected with what is actual is potentially very revealing….
This goes on until I get to the point of feeling that action is not enough. I must withdraw and find out what this means....MAKING SENSE in this model involves both analysis and contemplation….
But at a certain point, after I have been immersed in this for some time, I begin to get dissatisfied. Analysis is not enough. I must start telling people what it means and how I have understood what we have been through….COMMUNICATION is again an outward movement. This is the stage where we have digested what has happened, and made it part of our new accommodation to reality. Our mental structures become richer and more complex. Our consciousness expands. I communicate with myself about what it all meant for me. I may communicate with others who were not involved….
At a certain point, however, I do not want to turn into a communicator, I want to get back to some real work, now that I have learnt what I have learnt….BEING is nether inward not outward, but represents a dimension of height and depth. It is here that I am a three dimensional human being most truly and most fully." (1981: 98-100)
| Being: | Chapter 1: | Making Choices: Research Approach - (176kb) |
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| Chapter 2: | Inquiry Methodology - (163kb) |
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| Thinking: | Chapter 3: | The Gendering of Organisations - (195kb) |
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| Chapter 4: | The Business of Business - (227kb) |
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| What Next? Thoughts on Agency and Change | |||
| Project: | Chapter 5: | Preface to the Accounts - (177kb) |
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| Encounter/Making Sense | (i) | Educational Practice (1) | |
| (ii) | Leaving | ||
| (iii) | Leaving: Commentary | ||
| Encounter/Making Sense: | Chapter 6: | (i) | Building a New Organisation (1) - (223kb) |
| (ii) | An Appraisal Interview | ||
| (iii) | A Crisis | ||
| Chapter 7: | (i) | A Crisis: Commentary - (154kb) |
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| (ii) | Thoughts on Inquiry | ||
| (iii) | Lunch Out | ||
| A Digression into Systems-Thinking | |||
| Encounter/Making Sense: | Chapter 8: | Educational Practice (2) - (220kb) |
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| Chapter 9: | Building a New Organisation (2) - (189kb) |
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| Being: | Chapter 10: | On Reaching and End - (115kb) |
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| Appendix: | MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice Course Outline | ||
| Bibliography - (104kb) |
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