Abstract
This essay explores “othering” processes revealed in discourses about women, work, and leadership. Fifteen years ago, when I began to study women in management, I encountered a broad literature on gender and leadership that, among other things, advanced a “distinctly feminine” approach to leadership.1 The feminine model was intended as a counternarrative to the dominant masculine approaches that stifle women’s values. However, models of feminine and masculine leadership were based on the socially constructed identities and cultural values of Western, white, middle-class women and men, but presented as race-neutral, universal depictions of how the leadership process is accomplished. Broadly defined, leadership is a process of influence between leaders and followers in the pursuit of goals. Theories of leadership attempt to explain how that process unfolds to yield the most effective outcomes. But the meanings of “organizational leader” also take on high symbolic importance in Western culture.2 Organizational members come to expect leaders to look, act, and think in ways that are consistent with certain iconic images.
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Notes
Sally Helgesen, The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership (New York: Doubleday, 1990); M. Loden, Feminine Leadership or: How to Succeed in Business Without Being One of the Boys (New York: Times Books, 1985); J. B. Rosener, “Ways Women Lead,” Harvard Business Review 68 (1990): 11–12.
J. C. Rost, Leadership for the Twenty-First Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991).
Patricia S. Parker, Race, Gender, and Leadership: Re-envisioning 21st Century Leadership From the Perspectives of African American Women Executives (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005), 4–10.
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); D. K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14 (1988): 42–72; S. M. Nkomo, “The Emperor Has No Clothes: Rewriting ‘Race’ in Organizations,” Academy of Management Review 17 (1992): 487–513; B. Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1988).
Henry Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); J. Kotter, The General Managers (New York: Free Press, 1982).
Darlene Hine and Katherine Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 5.
Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family From Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1988); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got The Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
Patricia S. Parker, African American Women Executives within Dominant Culture Organizations: An Examination of Leadership Socialization, Communication Strategies, and Leadership Behavior (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Austin: University of Texas, 1997).
Ibid., 107.
Ibid., 101–102.
R. Weitz and L. Gordon, “Images of Black Women among Anglo College Students,” Sex Roles 28 (1993): 19–34.
Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 30.
Latinas and African American Women at Work: Race, Gender, and Economic Inequality, ed. I. Browne (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).
R. Arnold, “Black Women in Prison: The Price of Resistance,” in M. Baca Zinn and B. Dill (eds.), Women of Color in U.S. Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 171–84.
C. C. Holcomb-McCoy, and C. Moore-Thomas, “Empowering African-American Adolescent Females,” Professional School Counseling 5 (October 2001), 19–27.
S. Fordham, “‘Those Loud Black Girls’: Black Women, Silence, and Gender, ‘Passing’ in the Academy.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24 (1993): 3–32; Sheila Radford-Hill, “Keepin’ It Real: A Generational Commentary on Kimberly Springer’s ‘Third Wave Black Feminism?’” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (2002): 1083–90.
Patricia S. Parker, “Learning to Lead: The Contemporary Context of Leadership Development and Career Socialization for African American Female Adolescents in Low-Income Neighborhoods in North Carolina” (Unpublished essay), Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005.
Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, The Unknown City: The Lives of Poor and Working-Class Young Adults (Boston: Beacon, 1998).
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© 2007 Celia R. Daileader, Rhoda E. Johnson, and Amilcar Shabazz
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Parker, P.S. (2007). Race, Gender, and Leadership: (En) Countering Discourses that Devalue African American Women as Leaders. In: Daileader, C.R., Johnson, R.E., Shabazz, A. (eds) Women & Others. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607323_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607323_7
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