Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work [Paperback]

Joyce K. Fletcher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 22, 2001

With its move from hierarchical to team-based structures and its dismantling of functional barriers, the organization of the future is touted as a radical departure from traditional models. The worker of the future, we are told, must be a collaborative team player, able to give and receive help, empower others, and operate in a world of interdependence. This new worker needs relational skills and emotional intelligence--the ability to work effectively with others and understand the emotional context in which work takes place. Paradoxically, the very skills that give organizations a competitive advantage may be precisely those that prevent individual employees--especially women--from advancing.In this book Joyce K. Fletcher presents a study of female design engineers that has profound implications for attempts to change organizational culture. Her research shows that emotional intelligence and relational behavior often "get disappeared" in practice, not because they are ineffective but because they are associated with the feminine or softer side of work. Even when they are in line with stated goals, these behaviors are viewed as inappropriate to the workplace because they collide with powerful, gender-linked images of good workers and successful organizations. Fletcher describes how this collision of gender and power "disappears" the very behavior that organizations say they need and undermines the possibility of radical change. She shows why the "female advantage" does not seem to be advantaging females or organizations. Finally, she suggests ways that individuals and organizations can make visible the invisible work--and people--critical to organizational competence and transformation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Joyce Fletcher delineates the emotionally supportive, sometimes selfless behaviors that create the social glue that gets tasks doneand holds teams, even whole organizations, together. She then shows,with devastating clarity, how organizations ignore and devalue thesesame behaviors in those crucial moments when rewards and promotionsare handed out. This book will open the eyes of those who did notunderstand these disappearing acts, and it will make those whosecontributions have been 'disappeared,' feel—at long last—recognized and appreciated." Joanne Martin , Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior, Graduate School of Business, StanfordUniversity

"Here is something truly new. This book can change our understandingof what work is and how it can be best done. It offers both aprofound vision and clear practical applications." Jean Baker Miller , Director, Jean Baker Miller Training Institute, Stone Center, Wellesley College

About the Author

Joyce K. Fletcher is Professor of Management at the Center for Gender in Organizations, Simmons Graduate School of Management, and Co-director of Working Connections Project, Jean Baker Miller Training Institute, Stone Center, Wellesley College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (January 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262561409
• ISBN-13: 978-0262561402
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #292,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding knowledge-intensive work, November 23, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work (Hardcover)

This book contributes to our understanding of gender and work, and this is important. But I want to draw attention to this book's more general value for anyonet concerned to understand the changing nature of work in our times.

Today, as more and more work situations involve knowledge-intensive, fluid environments where the old principles of command-and-control are ineffective, those of us connected to such environments are scrambling to understand how to achieve effective performance in a game where the only thing we know about the rules is that the old rules don't apply. In this scramble, we are continually brought back to the most fundamental question of organizing: what actions produce value; what actions are irerelevant to or destructive of value? Dr. Fletcher's book has the potential be important in helping us to act purposefully and successfully to create effective systems in this turbulant environment.

What we see as `real work' reflects only a portion of the work-related activity in organizations. For the most part, it reflects the portion that was of interest to the employers who created the industrial system of the early part of this century. As we face the challenges of knowledge-intensive work in fluid, underdetermined and rapidly changing environments, we are being forced to create another reality of work. The critical factors for working successfully simply do not lie within the area lit by the spotlight of industrial reality. But how do we take off blinders we have worn for a century to see things differently?

I can think of no better way than to challenge our thinking with explorations of what, for lack of a better term, I might call alternate realities. Dr. Fletcher's book is such an example. While it is highly informed by theory, it is a case study and illustrates its points with dozens of concrete examples. For the reader with an open mind who is prepared to be challenged, this book should stimulate a better understanding of how we might come to see the critical-but-hidden qualities that determine the success or failure of knowledge-intensive work.

More importantly, Dr. Fletcher demonstrates that what is invisible is not merely overlooked. It comes to be invisible as the result of systematic processes that `disappear' it. The lesson for us -- whether we understand it specifically in regard to gender or with reference to other factors shaping work in our time -- is that we cannot merely change organizations by `thinking outside the box' (to use a particularly unoriginal cliche for original thinking). We must first learn to SEE the box, to see the forces that sustain the box, to resist and change those forces.

At the turn of the last century, work was re-invented by employers, workers and experts on organizing, who produced a new reality of work. At the turn of the present century, this process is happening again. In this book, Dr. Fletcher makes a potentially important contribution to this immense, but necessary, task.

Roy Jacques, author `Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge From the 19th to 21st Centuries'

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Recommended, April 26, 2005

By 

Chris James - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work (Paperback)

I recommend this often. Fletcher opens our eyes (those of us that had them closed anyway) to deeply ingrained biases that unfortunately go untested in the corporate world vis-a-vis gender equality. I was only dissappointed that she implicitly seems to argue that the old male-oriented structures in the workplace be revamped to allow room for women at work, rather than offering a completely "new" model of workplace democracy more in tune with our times.