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Mothering managers: (Re)interpreting older women's organizational subjectivity

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  • Leanne Cutcher

Abstract

This paper explores motherhood as an organizational subjectivity. Highlighting the experience of older women in a global engineering firm, and my own experience as an academic leader, the paper shows how the maternal body is culturally produced and how discourses of motherhood perpetuate highly gendered notions of who can give and receive care in organizations. This paper argues that the patriarchal construction of women as endlessly maternal, but never complete, limits the possibility for gendered agency. The paper calls for a reinterpretation of the maternal in organizations that would allow women to reclaim a feminine space where they can draw on the full repertoire of their embodied potentialities in order to experiment and assert their subjectivity. This reinterpretation of the maternal would also facilitate an uncoupling of notions of care and motherhood which would allow for a degendered reciprocal care offered and received by all members of the organization.

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  • Leanne Cutcher, 2021. "Mothering managers: (Re)interpreting older women's organizational subjectivity," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(4), pages 1447-1460, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:gender:v:28:y:2021:i:4:p:1447-1460
    DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12660
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Marjana Johansson & Sally Jones, 2019. "Interlopers in class: A duoethnography of working‐class women academics," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 26(11), pages 1527-1545, November.
    2. Susan Ainsworth & Stephanie Flanagan, 2020. "Contradictions concerning care: Female surgeons' accounts of the repression and resurfacing of care in their profession," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(2), pages 251-269, March.
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    Cited by:

    1. Krystal Wilkinson & Julia Rouse, 2023. "Solo‐living and childless professional women: Navigating the ‘balanced mother ideal’ over the fertile years," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(1), pages 68-85, January.
    2. Camilla Quental & Pilar Rojas Gaviria & Céline del Bucchia, 2023. "The dialectic of (menopause) zest: Breaking the mold of organizational irrelevance," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(5), pages 1816-1838, September.

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