Premium
Doing Gender, Practising Politics: Workplace Cultures in Local and Devolved Government
Author(s) -
Charles Nickie
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
gender, work and organization
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.159
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0432
pISSN - 0968-6673
DOI - 10.1111/gwao.12042
Subject(s) - undoing , politics , masculinity , context (archaeology) , gender studies , government (linguistics) , political science , local government , sociology , doing gender , public administration , psychology , law , linguistics , philosophy , psychotherapist , paleontology , biology
This paper takes a workplace perspective to explore the ways in which institutional arrangements influence the doing of gender and the practising of politics. It compares the workplace culture of the N ational A ssembly for W ales ( NAfW ) with that of local government in W ales, showing that the culture of the NAfW is experienced as less masculinized than local government and that women, and men, are less constrained to perform an aggressive, confrontational masculinity. This suggests that, in new political institutions, practising politics may be less closely tied to a particular way of doing gender and as a result may challenge the gendering of politics. Theoretically the paper engages with debates about doing, redoing and undoing gender, arguing that in order to understand how change can be brought about, attention needs to be paid to the structural context within which gender is done as well as the interactional level of doing gender.