FRAMEWORK
I have outlined the main benefits of drawing upon the concepts of gender- as-an-institution and institutional Work in the proceeding sections, emphasising the need for an institutional approach to change that appreciates the concepts of practice, agency, power and uncertainty. If we return to the questions that formed the basis of the literature review, and of the research questions at large, the complementary nature of the two bodies of theoretical literature becomes even more apparent. These questions ask (ow do organisations understand gender and translate it into CSR practices, and how does this then inform experiences of gender in the value chain? Central to this question is what gender is and how it can be informed changed maintained These questions and their answers help frame the Gendered Institutional conceptual framework within the canon of other institutional research.
99 The framework builds upon the literature review in Chapter Two, and the theories of institutional change outlined in this chapter. To re-cap, the key concepts used throughout the thesis are:
(1) Value chains and CSR as networks (2) Gender as an Institution
(3) Institutional Work as a means of gender change or stability.
As outlined in Chapter Two, CSR is increasingly considered and operationalised in a network approach, with various actors and organisations acting with and upon each other. Value chains, too, are best understood as networks of activity and organisations, working to produce an end product The network concept brings to the fore once again the individual actor within social exchanges. It is evident that exchanges of language, actions and discourses between these actors happen daily, across technologies, borders and cultures. Within this framing, institutional work for gender change or stability may occur.
In understanding gender as an institution in itself, as outlined in Section 3.1.2, the actor is once more given agency and power within theories of institutional change and maintenance. Actors in social life are given a starring role as they interact with one another and within institutional spaces, both being acted upon, and acting upon institutions. This two-way process is described by Giddens (1984) and Bourdieu (1977; 2001 and both have special mention for the insidious and especially powerful institution of gender Gender is everywhere influencing how we think, feel and act. Gender undoubtedly will have some effect on CSR, and the value chain, and the relationship between them. I am interested in how these relationships may be altered or maintained through actors practices
The final concept of institutional work helps craft a framework that may answer these questions in light of my own research context. Institutional work occurs as individual actors interact with each other
100 purposively, and in so doing, create, maintain or disrupt institutions. A hypothetical example could be that actors from one node of the value chain network issue a policy validating whistleblowing on sexual harassment. This is picked up by actors in another node, and responded to in a variety of ways. Gender, as an institution, is present throughout all of this, but could potentially be disrupted from its status quo by the policy. Or, gender could be maintained through an outright refusal of the policy by other actors. Or, conversely, gender could be maintained as the policy is enacted by all parties, but in so doing confirms the status quo of women as victim and men as aggressor. Theoretically, a new institution of gender could be created in response to such a development (or perhaps, new practices may hint at the creation of a new form of the gender institution). Thus the key aspects of this framework are that:
(1) Actors are agentic, engage in power relations and in their daily lives shape institutions through practice. This means institutions are not static.
(2) Gender is an institution, can change, and has changed in the past. (3) Actors working in networks, especially in a CSR value chain
context, often strive to affect change which has intended and unintended consequences on institutions.
In summary, the theories of institutional work and gender complement each other and add new avenues for exploration from their separate but similar bodies of literature. They share views on what institutions are, originate and change. They emphasise the importance of including human agency, power relations and the unintended consequences of institutional work within theorisations. Above all, both concepts appreciate that institutional change, whilst difficult, can occur, although there is much we still don t know especially in new contexts such as engendered CSR in the value chain.
101 Figure 3 helps visually demonstrate the relationship between my three main concepts. It shows the nested qualities of actors in networks, and the mutual feeding upwards and downwards of practices.
Figure 3: Diagram showing levels of the gender institution, and how it may be influenced through institutional work.
= Power relations (inherent in practices)
Source: Adapted from Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) and Connell (1987)
3.5. CONCLUSION
This chapter has covered a lot of conceptual ground, encompassing conceptualisations of gender, institutions, and power. I began with a brief definition of gender as a social construct, and posited a definition of gender as an institution as suitable to my thesis. In contrast, however, my review of the literature on gender and CSR revealed that conceptualisations of gender, (in)equality and power, concepts central to
Social Institut-ion Field Level Organ- isation Actors Practices: Gesture, language, text, dress, action, Organisational goals, values and practices Understanding & Experiences of Gender Regulations, Laws and policies.
102 the discussion of gender in society, were wide-ranging. Furthermore, institutional theory s capacity for bridging different levels of analysis had been mostly left untouched by scholars, and studies had neglected to explore the role of business organisations (and the people within them) in a value chain context. I then argued that an institutional approach to gender and CSR would help to fill some of these gaps in our knowledge. Drawing on institutional work and gender as institution concepts, I argued for the importance of studying practice, agency, power and uncertainty within explorations of institutional (gender) change.
The resultant conceptual framework I employ in my thesis contributes to the study of gender, institutions and CSR in a number of ways First studies into the doing or undoing of gender have tended to focus on institutional maintenance doing gender over change Stories of successful gender equality programmes rarely leave room for the failures or unexpected outcomes in their narratives (Benschop and Verloo, 2011). My framework is open to the uncertainty of institutional creation, maintenance and change. Given the newness of CSR, and the unknown effects of its practices on gender in the value chain, I am focusing on the processes of gendering CSR and open to the unintended consequences of actors action
Second, while studies on the doing/undoing of gender in organisations are rich and theoretically compelling, there is little research further down the value chain9, something my research aims to address.
As Holvino (2010) explains, gender and organisations literature must work on identifying and connecting internal organizational processes with external and seemingly unrelated societal processes to understand organizational dynamics within a broader social context My research answers this call with empirical research on how gender is conceptualised, and impacts upon, the value chain.
9 Joan Acker urges researchers to begin to explore the supply chain through a gender lens
that appreciates the discursive and interactive process of the meaning-making that perpetuates gender inequality (1998; 2012).
103 Third institutional work is complemented by gender theory s already developed approaches to power (Martin, 2004). Learning from the corpus of gender theorists who have explored gender change, power is a predominant concept that is understood as something both explicit (i.e. power inequalities between men and women writ large in legislation; physical power in violence against women) as well as implicit, made normal through learned behaviours, norms and utternances (i.e. men expected to earn more than women, women taking on pastoral roles more readily than men). My study contributes to the institutional work literature by incorporating the concepts of power relations imbued within institutions.
Fourth, and relatedly, both institutional work and social constructionist gender theory share an understanding that seemingly neutral institutional processes and practices are in fact embedded in hidden norms and values (Kenny, 2007:95). Institutions have a legitimating ideology which means they become institutionalised into the formal and informal patterns of social organisation (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Martin, 2004). A gender lens on institutional work and CSR can bring out power relations and disempowered voices further (Mackay, Kenny, and Chappell, 2011).
Finally, given the often intangible nature of institutions, and the largely taken-for-granted nature of their outward manifestations, my framework allows for the exploration of human practices and language as a means of empirically getting closer to the institution at hand. Therefore, measurement of institutions is best achieved through qualitative research techniques that seek to get up close and personal with everyday life (Dover and Lawrence, 2010; Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; Suddaby and Greenwood, 2009). In brief the fit between institutional work, gender as an institution and qualitative, intepretivist-informed research techniques is sound. The case study design for this thesis, and the
104 methodological techniques employed, are explored further in the next chapter.
105
CHAPTER FOUR:
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Having laid out the literature and concepts relating to my thesis, I proceed in this chapter to describe how I designed, carried out and analysed data in relation to my research questions. To re-cap, Chapter two reviewed and refined the concepts of the value chain and CSR, highlighting the need to capture the socially-constructed and contested nature of their respective application to the topic of gender. In Chapter Three I argued that an exploration of how gender is understood and translated into practices by business organisations in the value chain is a timely and necessary addition to management, and CSR research. A gendered institutional approach concentrates on actors and their practices and interactions in order to better understand how institutions, in this case gender, can be created, disrupted or maintained (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). As my research objective is to outline understandings and processes around engendering CSR in value chains such an approach is appropriate to my thesis. Focusing on micro-practices (language, action, thought, interaction) requires a methodology that shares ontological and epistemological assumptions about society and how we study it, and, as will become clear, privileges qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, research techniques.
In this chapter I explain how a social constructionist and interpretivist worldview complements my conceptual framework. Research techniques that include in-depth interviews, observation, documentary analysis and innovative focus group workshops within an embedded case study generate nuanced and detailed data in an under- researched area The organisations under study Braithwaite s Chocolate Company, Adwenkor and TradeFare10, provide a unique opportunity to
explore meaning, processes and narratives involved in institutional work
106 to disrupt or maintain gender, in the context of CSR in the value chain. At the same time the case provides tales of the successes, and failures, of
engendering CSR that other organisations can learn from
As noted in Chapter One, the thesis is imbued with a feminist sensibility and influenced by feminist theories but ) adopt gender as a more expansive term as it can be used to uncover much more than only inequalities between men and women. I am talking here about the need for intersectionality in research design, whereby it is appreciated that inequalities often lie at a nexus of identities and/or labels including ethnicity, gender, class, ability and so on (Walby, Armstrong, and Strid, 2012 (olvino ) reject the notion that women s experiences should be studied over and above men s for both men and women work in the case contexts chosen, and so both men and women are included in focus groups in the value chain. That is not to say that I do not appreciate traditional feminist research techniques in choosing qualitative, language-driven research techniques, but I position them as part of a wider philosophy of social constructionism and interpretivism. My conceptual framework fully recognises the gendered nature of the world, and the work we do within it, without the explicit use of feminist epistemology.
The chapter begins by describing the research philosophy behind my methodology (Section 4.1.), and introduces the embedded case study approach with details of the organisations involved (Section 4.2.). I outline my data generation research techniques and the reasons behind their choice, as well as the processes involved in each stage of data generation (Section 4.3.). I then introduce the data analysis approach I have adopted (Section 4.4.), and reflect on my position as researcher in the research design, methodology and analysis (Section 4.5.). I end with a summary of how my methodological approach to this study contributes to a credible, reliable and transferable piece of social science research (Section 4.6.), and
107 reflect on the research ethics pertinent to a study of gender and value chains (Section 4.7.).