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Article Excerpt
Occupational discrimination and segregation along gendered lines continue to be seen as problematic throughout the UK (Halford, Savage, & Witz, 1997; Knights & Richards, 2003; Millward, Bryson, & Forth, 2000; Scott, 1994) and the USA (Cohen & Huffman, 2003; Maume, 1999). Women continue to be attracted to occupations that are considered to be women's work, such as clerical, secretarial and personal service work (Scott, 1994). Inequalities persist even when women enter traditional male domains such as management. For example, women are under-represented in managerial roles in 68% of workplaces, which, while showing an improvement over the last 10 years, continues to present a social justice problem (Millward et al., 2000).
The chief, albeit indirect, contribution that work psychology has made in attempting to address this problem lies within the field of personnel selection, where research has attempted to identify how selection decisions can be made in ways that minimize discrimination on the grounds of gender, race or other social categorization. The central assumption here is that if organizations can be encouraged to identify job and role requirements both objectively and accurately, a better match between the individual and the organization can be made at the point of selection (Silvester, 2003). It is further assumed that the chances of achieving this match can be enhanced by a better understanding of how bias influences the judgments candidates and assessors make of each other.
Underpinning these assumptions is the idea that the information, the variables, identified as central or critical to good selection decisions can be understood as relatively neutral. By neutral, we do not just mean objective because the subjective perceptions of both assessors and candidates have been acknowledged and accounted for in much contemporary selection research (e.g. Anderson, 2001; Herriot, 2004). Rather, we mean that the content of knowledge, skills and ability profiles, or of candidate self-perceptions, is treated as largely reflecting the reality of the role or the person.
In this paper, we have two related aims. The first is to argue that the variables that are central to the concerns of selection research ought to be understood as socially constructed and, more importantly, as situated. We additionally want to contend that this is not simply a matter of philosophical preference. Treating these variables as context-independent realities (whether subjective or objective) limits our understanding of the very processes which selection practices are intended to influence specifically those that are related to organizational attraction and adjustment. We will argue that in treating role variables (like competencies or job characteristics) as neutral, we are in danger of either privileging certain masculine modes of performance or reproducing the idea that women and men are naturally suited to some roles rather than others. In either case, the chances of achieving equality for women are undermined (Cockburn, 1991). This view is endorsed in a recent paper by Ozbilgin and Woodward (2004): 'In Britain, the standardisation of recruitment, career development and promotion procedures in recent years has not prevented managers from continuing to select employees who share their own characteristics, but paradoxically, it has actually legitimized gendered employment practices by cloaking them in spurious 'objectivity'' (p. 678).
The paper is structured as follows. In the first section, we present an outline of some of the central tenets of social constructionism. As Burr (1995) points out, there are many approaches within the social sciences that are referred to as social constructionist, but our particular interest lies in the opportunity social constructionism provides to deconstruct the taken-for-granted, illuminating how broader social processes of power and ideology are deeply embedded in what we take to be common sense. Next, we problematize the idea that the knowledge, skills and abilities that organizations identify as required competencies are neutral properties of role requirements, that are relatively context-independent. Drawing on the specific example of police work, we argue instead that competencies or role requirements are the products of specific and broad sociocultural influences, which both reflect and reproduce the interests of certain groups and which are enacted within particular cultural milieux. Specifically, we argue that women's interests may be compromised by the way that certain competencies are defined and interpreted. We then extend our argument to encompass the concept of identity, arguing that power and politics are likewise deeply embedded in individual identities. We argue that we need to problematize the taken-for-granted process of person-organization fit, which, we contend, reinforces the idea that women are men are naturally suited to certain roles and occupations, thus reproducing inequalities. In the final section, we present our conclusions and make an attempt to sketch an emancipatory agenda for work psychology research and practice.
In much of the discussion that follows, our focus is not on selection practices or processes per se. This is because we want to draw attention to the limitations of the reductionist approaches that characterize the vast majority of selection research (and, indeed, of work psychology research in general). To do this, we have drawn on critical management research, which treats organizational realities as constructed rather than pre-given and which, indirectly, sheds a great deal of light on the processes that, as we have already pointed out, are critical to selection research, namely, attraction and adjustment.
Social constructionism: An alternative to reductionism
Social constructionism challenges the notion of an objective (or even subjective) reality that is implicit in most reductionist accounts. Ontologically, the idea that there is a reality that can be either partially known (subjective reality) or fully known (objective reality) is open to doubt (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Instead, reality is seen as constructed and therefore multiple, and possibly conflicting. Language plays a central role in the social constructionist approach, seen as actively constructing the worlds that people inhabit rather than passively reflecting their nature. Social constructionism rejects the view that knowledge or truth is a product of essential or intrinsic characteristics of objects or events. All accounts of the world are constructed through culturally available discourses (Ball & Wilson, 2000; Dick & Cassell, 2002; Hollway, 1984; Karreman & Alvesson, 2001; Mama, 1995; Potter & Wetherell, 1987), defined as 'systems of statements which construct an object' (Parker, 1992, p. 5). Discourses are products of broader social relations, the outcomes of socially negotiated understandings. The study of meaning and sense making is therefore central to a social constructionist approach.
What it means to be a woman, for example, cannot be read-off from the biological characteristics of women, though these will clearly be influential and few social constructionists would deny this (Hassard, Holliday, & Willmott, 2000; Nightingale & Cromby, 1999). The salient and critical point is that our understandings of women as a social category are products of often contradictory discourses that compete to construct women in specific ways for particular purposes. For instance, patriarchal discourse constructs women as belonging in the home, best suited to having and raising children and attending to the domestic needs of the family. Feminists have argued that this discourse effectively 'keeps women in their place', reproducing male privilege and power. In turn, feminist discourses have challenged this view, constructing women as citizens with the same rights and privileges as men, able to choose not to marry, not to have children, to have a career and so forth. We will examine how discourses impact on individuals in due course.
The discourses that people draw on to construct the world are seldom neutral. They are products of power relations in society, operating to privilege some versions of reality and to marginalize, suppress or even pathologize others (Fairclough, 1992; Foucault, 1977; Jackson & Carter, 2000). Additionally, discourses are historically and culturally specific, changing over time and across space. Discourses are more than words (Fairclough, 1992; Grant, Keenoy, & Oswick, 1998). In giving meaning to the objects they construct, they are also productive of identities, relationships and practices, and it is through these processes that discourses are reproduced, resisted and changed. Thus, feminist discourse can be understood as resistance to patriarchal discourse (Friedland & Alford, 1991). It has also produced changes in female identities, giving widespread rise to aspirations beyond marriage and domesticity; it has additionally produced material changes in social practices, including equal opportunities legislation and the increasing participation of women within the labour market. Part of the social constructionist task is to identify the 'conditions of possibility' (Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984) for the emergence and take up of any given discourse, often attributed to large-scale material shifts in power bases (Foucault, 1977). Feminist discourse, for instance, gained a foothold during the two world wars when women were expected to take up jobs previously seen as the domain of men only.
A social constructionist perspective sees the individual's identity as constructed through discourse, not existing as a pre-given entity. This is quite a radical departure from...
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