Introduction to the Handbook of Research Methods on Gender and Management

Abstract

The motivation for this Handbook is to provide an essential resource for researchers in gender and management, and for those in other fields of study including adult education, leadership, culture, media and politics. Gender and management research is challenging, conducted in a wide range of geographical and organisational contexts, approached from individual, organisational and social levels of analysis. In this Handbook, contributing authors are unified in understanding gender as a complex, dynamic, socially constructed phenomenon, (re)created through processes and practices that maintain difference. This understanding brings attention to the ongoing ‘doing’ of gender, and how it is socially situated in our everyday practice, including in organisational and workplace contexts. Typically focused upon deeply embedded social issues and structural inequalities, gender and management research is concerned to make these issues and inequalities explicit within a particular socio-cultural and political context, and to provide understandings of how and why they persist in order to inform action for change. Gender and management scholars therefore require a repertoire of methodologies and methods capable of getting under the surface of everyday discourses, practices and processes, organisational routines and systems to access how gender organises, shapes, operates and influences. Evidencing the broad reach and fundamental importance of gender and management research, contributors to the Handbook are internationally diverse and draw on multiple disciplines in their research. These include management; leadership; organisation studies; public administration; sport; critical policy; entrepreneurship; accounting; sociology; cultural studies; adult education; ethics; philosophy; human resource development; media studies; and science and technology studies. The Handbook encompasses methodologies and methods that probe, explore and unearth gendered behaviours, interactions, systems, processes and practices. These include methods and approaches rarely utilised in gender and management research such as oral history, institutional ethnography, and quantitative methods for mining large volumes of data. Our categorisation of chapters emphasising either the autoethnographic, practical, critical or methodological acknowledges a primary focal point in each of the studies. However, we recognise that this is by no means a perfect categorisation and that the chapters, reflective of the multiplicity of gender and management research, may easily span different categories. Nonetheless, we hope this categorisation, and the acknowledgement of their interconnections, is helpful in recognising how gender and management research cannot work in isolation from the broader socio-cultural context, but must continually strive to challenge, question and call to account the wider systems in which we work and live.