Exploring Organizational Structures for Women in Academe: A Feminist Exploration of Career and Care

Ashton Mouton, Purdue University

Abstract

In 2008, Women’s Studies in Communication released a special issue entitled “Conversations and Commentary on Redefining the Professor(iate): Valuing Commitments to Care and Career in Academe” where the authors discussed how a lack of support for multiple and competing roles related to care and career responsibilities negatively impacted the careers of women faculty members. Today, women faculty members still experience more challenges associated with advancement, tenure, and promotion compared to their male counterparts and are also more likely to leave academia as leaks in the pipeline to pursue another career. Previous research has demonstrated that these challenges for women in the academy and subsequent leaks in the pipeline are due to organizational barriers rather than individual choices and abilities (McMurtrie, 2013; Slaughter, 2012). As such, this study employs two theoretical frameworks to explore career challenges in more detail. First, structuration theory (Giddens 1979; 1984) is utilized to examine the academic organizational structure, specifically how the duality of structure comes to bear on career trajectory for female faculty as well as their personal care work responsibilities. Structuration theory will enable the researcher to examine multiple levels of analysis within the academic organizational structure: individual, group, organizational, and interorganizational levels of analysis. Second, feminist intersectional theory is utilized to examine how the organizational structure is both gendered and leads to privilege of certain organizational members based on multiple facets of identity (Crenshaw, 1988; 1989/1993; 1991). Because a feminist intersectional framework allows the researcher to pay particular attention to identity and adds a layer of feminist critique when organizational members are marginalized, it is useful in the context of academe to discover barriers to career and care. Coupled together, structuration theory and feminist intersectional theory enable the researcher to understand what structures enable and constrain tenure/promotion and care needs/responsibilities and to be critical of those structures and who they privilege along the way. Three specific research questions were asked: (1) How is tenure/promotion enabled and/or constrained by the academic organizational structure?; (2) How are care needs/responsibilities enabled and/or constrained by the academic organizational structure?; and (3) (How) do female faculty members exert their agency to transform the organizational structure? Semi-structured interviews (n=49), in combination with document collection (n=433) and logging, were used to assess the organizational structure and the movement of participants through the structure. Analysis of the documents and interviews illustrate rules and resources that both enable and constrain tenure, promotion, and care work for female faculty. The study illustrates that formal policies at the macro level are enforced by rules and guidelines at the micro level (including rules associated with research, teaching, service, extension, and mentoring). There are also resources offered by the macro and micro structures (both formal and optional resources), which both enable care and career work when they are known and utilized, but also constrain care and career work when they are unknown or unevenly distributed. Identity is a major contributor to the experience and enforcement of the rules as well as the accessibility and availability of the resources. As such, it is clear that the organizational structure both enables and constrains tenure and promotion as well as care work.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Connaughton, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Aging|Communication|Gerontology|Individual & family studies|Public health|Womens studies

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