Women’s Narratives about Identity, Power and Agency within a Mining Organisation in South Africa

Abstract

Drawing on social constructionist and post-structuralist theoretical frameworks, this study examined the complexities that constitute women’s narratives within a mining organisation in South Africa. With specific reference to the social constructs of identity, conflict and power, the aims of this study were to investigate how women narrate their experience, the ways in which women live with the tensions of a workplace that is potentially both liberating and limiting and the implications of these tensions for women’s well-being, identities and social roles. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine women in management positions and were analysed using an inductive emergent thematic analytical method. The nature of identity that emerged from the participants’ narratives was viewed as an act of weaving together the multiple strands of the self, where participants recognised the points at which these multiple strands intercept and where they diverge. At each point of interception and divergence there were expressions of ambiguous identity or identity salience. Identity was seen to be mediated by the micro-physics of power and, within this framework, participants were seen to be agents in negotiating an authentic and egalitarian self, and a space for women in mining.