‘In the Shadow of Men’: The Historical Construction of Educational Administration as a ‘Masculinist’ Enterprise

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how administration has been historically constructed as a masculine enterprise and different from teaching as a feminine enterprise. It draws from feminist critiques of labour process and market theory and critical culturalist perspectives of administrative and organizational theory to facilitate the author's analysis of this gendered division of labour in education. A culturalist perspective takes into account the subtle and contradictory ways that the gender regime of schools and bureaucracies works against women, about how ideologies of femininity and masculinity inform and are informed by the 'gender order', and in so doing become hegemonic in that they gain common consent by the masses regarding the 'general direction imposed on social life by the dominant group'. Teaching has long been an activity of women in the home and in the workplace. Organizational culture emerged as a central conceptual framework in 1980s business literature and in educational administration during the 1980s, often linked to increased productivity.

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