The problem with women: a feminist interrogation of management textbooks

Williams, Kristin S.; Mills, Albert J.

doi:10.1080/17449359.2019.1598436

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…There is growing interest in using textbooks as data, particularly in ‘new histories of management’ research (e.g. Cummings et al, 2016; Williams and Mills, 2019). Within this approach, which we adopt in this article, textbooks are time-capsules that enable us to track changes in the conventional view of Management over time.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The forgotten ‘immortalizer’: Recovering William H Whyte as the founder and future of groupthink research

2022

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Irving Janis’s concept of ‘groupthink’, the idea that a collective desire for consensus overrides the realistic appraisals of alternatives and leads to poor group decision making, is a staple of social science textbooks. Despite gaining little support in empirical studies, Janis’s eight symptoms of groupthink remains a popular framework. What has been forgotten, however, is that nearly 20 years before Janis’s supposed invention, groupthink was coined by social critic William H Whyte, author of one of the 1950s, most influential books on management. Adding to the growing interest in a historical turn in Management and Organization Studies, we investigate how and why Whyte’s groupthink was over-written by a history that found Janis’s ideas more useful, and outline how recovering Whyte can add value to our thinking now.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The forgotten ‘immortalizer’: Recovering William H Whyte as the founder and future of groupthink research

2022

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“…Our interest in analyzing the social position of entrepreneurs as they are portrayed in management texts resulted in an extensive search from within a repository 3 of approximately 555 business textbooks with a range of focus and subject areas. Spanning nearly two decades, the collection, which began as a part of a much larger research collective studying North American textbooks from various disciplinary perspectives (e.g., agribusiness, sport management, and management history), has been used to contribute to important debates in MOS (e.g., Arseneault et al, 2019; Hartt, 2018; Weigand and Mills, 2015; Williams and Mills, 2019). The material spans every decade from the 1920s to the present and continues to be curated through solicited and unsolicited additions from publishers, discarded copies from colleagues’ office libraries and second-hand purchases from online bookstores.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Damsels in distress: Discourses of entrepreneurship in management textbooks

Richard

Deal

Mills

2021

Industry and Higher Education

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The purpose of this study is to provide insight into the discursive foundations of entrepreneurial identity for women in Canada by examining the social positions, representations and spaces they take in introductory business textbooks. We ask three questions: (1) What issues of power and discourses related to gender are subsumed in Canadian textbooks? (2) In what way is gender represented in texts of entrepreneurship in Canadian management education? (3) How are women portrayed in entrepreneurship texts? The data that we draw upon comes from 13 Canadian management textbooks that have been used in introductory business courses to teach students about the functions of business. By narrowing in on content in entrepreneurship education, we use poststructural feminism as a lens to interrogate gendered discourses that influence what and how students are taught about the ideals of entrepreneurship in undergraduate business programs in Canada. Our findings suggest that the entrepreneurship texts studied were overly gendered in masculine terms, serving to privilege the experience of male business while simultaneously marginalizing the representation of women entrepreneurs. We argue that marginalizing women in textbooks may form barriers to their interest and participation in entrepreneurial pursuits, and thereby call on scholars and practitioners to reconsider the importance of equality in materials used in the classroom.

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“…Women are presented as a special group, offering a specific kind of labour and constrained by the socio-politics of wartime life. We have seen similar efforts to constrain our understanding of the potential of women workers in management textbooks which supports a hegemonic exclusionary discourse of women in working life (Prieto et al;Williams & Mills, 2019). Nordlund edvinsson (2016) has a study which examines the role of married women to CeOs and family-owned business and the specific tasks that women were expected to provide in support of their husbands.…”

Section: Women In Gendered Rolesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…elsewhere, Williams and Mills (2019), writing in MOH, conduct a feminist poststructuralist 'interrogation' of management textbooks to reveal over time the discursive ways women have been socially constructed in organisational environments, including gendered roles and exclusionary practices which have been replicated and taken for granted over the span of 50 years. The sole poststructuralist account on discourse analysis and feminism, did not appear in BH until 2017 (Durepos et al 2017) around the same time as the Williams and Mills (2017) article appeared in JMH.…”

Section: What Is Happening In Other Business History Journals?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminist frustrations: The enduring neglect of a women’s business history and the opportunity for radical change

Mills

Williams

2021

Business History

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In response to a special call of 'bringing gender and feminism from the periphery to the centre of business history' , the authors undertake an in-depth appraisal of Business History's own record, as a key signifier of the field. The scope includes articles and reviews published between 2000 and 2020 and find 17 articles out of 918 (1.85%) and 99 reviews out of 2,217 (4.46%), with a downward trend from 2010 to 2020. To start, the authors engage with a critical question as to the definition of the field itself and explore what those internal to the journal have had to say about its definition. The authors then take a critical look at how women have been socially constructed as (a) historical actors, as (b) gendered roles and as (c) authors of history. To understand what has been included and neglected, the authors investigate and reveal clues as to the barriers and possible entry points.

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The problem with women: a feminist interrogation of management textbooks

Cited by 13 publications

References 20 publications

The forgotten ‘immortalizer’: Recovering William H Whyte as the founder and future of groupthink research

The forgotten ‘immortalizer’: Recovering William H Whyte as the founder and future of groupthink research

Damsels in distress: Discourses of entrepreneurship in management textbooks

Feminist frustrations: The enduring neglect of a women’s business history and the opportunity for radical change

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