Enacting leadership professional development and the impediments to organizational and industry change in rural and regional Australia

Abstract

This article considers the potential for leadership development programmes (LDPs) that focus on individual leaders as change agents to facilitate change in rural and regional industries and organizations over time. The large-scale study found that graduates returned to their workplaces following programme completion with a heightened sense of purpose and commitment to change. However, many female graduates in particular also found they were unable to lead change in the ways anticipated. The article draws on feminist organizational theory that sees organizations and industries as both gendered and gendering in terms of the production of particular leadership identities. The research confirms that gender change will not happen without executive leadership that removes structural and cultural impediments whilst proactively promoting inclusivity, but that even when all of those factors are present, change will not necessarily occur in gendered industries and organizations. The article concludes by identifying some factors that might potentially enable LDPs to better contribute to gender change in the future.

Rethinking how we work with Acker's theory of gendered organizations: An abductive approach for feminist empirical research

“…Most studies which cite Acker's framework do so within this process, exploring gendered divisions of labor at the workplace and individual (e.g., Rowlands et al., 2020) or sectoral level (e.g., Tatli & Ozbilgin, 2012). While some studies address divisions in physical space (e.g., Fagan & Teasdale, 2021), of allowed behavior (e.g., Forseth, 2005) or power (e.g., Simon, 2019), studies which deal with all four of the gendered divisions simultaneously are extremely limited (e.g., Price, 2008).…”

“…While Acker's theory is highly cited, of those studies that use her framework most do so only in part (Nkomo & Rodriguez, 2019). Most of these accounts have focused on the first of Acker's gendering processes (e.g., Rowlands et al., 2020) and to a lesser extent her second (e.g., Sayce, 2012). Few studies have looked at multiple processes (e.g., Pringle et al., 2017) and fewer still have used her framework in its entirety (e.g., Dye & Mills, 2012).…”