A tale of the field: reading power and gender in the learning organization

Abstract

In this article, I will argue that learning organizations that claim certain emancipatory promises in principle continue to ignore issues of gender, which, in practice are a distinctive and defining feature of our workplace contexts. Applying a feminist–Foucauldian interpretive framework, I intend to demonstrate and analyse the material workings of power, and how power relations work to produce both people and actions in organizations, which contributes to reproducing a patriarchal system, through a recounting of my own experiences as a Learning and Development manager implementing a change program at Xtrading Worldwide. In particular, by means of an auto-ethnographic account, I intend to illuminate the manner in which this patriarchal system not only contradicts the philosophy of the learning organization, highlighting its embeddedness within contemporary capitalist and managerialist discourse, but also how it works to produce both subordinated women and behaviours, which continues to exclude them from occupying levels of seniority in organizations.