The Ambivalent Dynamics of Secretarial `Bitching': Control, Resistance, and the Construction of Identity

Patty J. Sotirin · Heidi Gottfried

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Gender Diversity and Inequality Gender and Feminist Studies Management and Organizational Studies

Abstract

We conceptualize bitching as an ambivalent communicative practice that takes place in and contributes to the construction of gendered organizational identities. Through interpretive analyses of in situ bitching among corporate secretaries, we show how the ambivalent dynamics of their collective bitching both maintained stereotypical gender attributes and destabilized the properly professional secretarial identity. By elaborating the ambivalent dynamics of bitching, we offer a more nuanced understanding of the interplay of control and resistance in the communicative construction of gendered workplace identities.

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1978Men and Women of the Corporation 1990Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics 1988Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory 1989Frameworks of Power 1990Modernity and Ambivalence 1992You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation 2002Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable 1986The feminist case against bureaucracy

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