Organizational Behavior in Margaret Atwoods Surfacing - Essay Example

Organizational Behavior in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. We are never really sure whether popular culture creates societalchanges or vice versa, but its influence is evident. In film and in music, this connection is very evident especially when it comes to gender and sexuality. In any event, the connection between gender and societal change is intertwined with organizational behaviour because of the changes in gender work distribution and freedom over the past century. Popular culture is meant to represent the common ground or the popular perception of culture but has the organization of society become too intellectualized If work is as much a part of our lives as eating and breathing is, then is work life itself a good reflection of our cultural make-up Gender and sexuality have both taken on new identities over the last century, thanks to war and depression, and this has also changed how the working world is comprised. Men and women are socialised in different ways, aiding the way they see themselves in later life. Little girls are dressed in pink, little boys in blue; little girls bake and sew while little boys fix cars and make furniture. The way we are told we should behave, is largely responsible for the types of vocations chosen by people and also why new world upbringing has led to current trends of women in previously exclusively male vocations such as engineering. Margaret Atwood writes a compelling, if rather disturbing account of gender and sexuality in the modern world where her chief character battles with her own stress in the new expectations of women in the modern world. Surfacing by Margaret Atwood is essentially a feminist manifesto that looks at the complexity of how society organizes its gender differences and sexuality. It is not an easy novel to digest neither does it attempt to dissipate the uncomfortable truths about life in the modern world. The characters all display complex psychological states, but most of all the state of mind and thinking of the main character expresses the difficulties in combining the old world with the new. It is a book about the past and the clashing of it with the present. Gender discrimination in the workplace or indeed in any situation, is not confined to females alone, but it is in the female world that the change has taken the greatest turn. This is because women in the workplace have had an affect both on men and women: men now have to share their workplaces with women and women have to contend with previously masculine issues. The problem with academic representations as opposed to popular writing is that the academia is unable to see the interpretive mode of translation. It is not possible for academic representations to see inside the person's actual being, making it difficult to determine what it is exactly that makes employees or ordinary people tick. Any number of aspects can affect the way the person reacts to the environment around them. The past, present and future are all parts of the human life cycle that affect the way organizations are perceived by individuals. The popular culture representation for this reason is more personal, more realistic. If we look for instance at the film Portrait of a Lady we see the difference between how women were perceived in the past and now how they are perceived today. There are two female characters in the book Surfacing, the narrator and Anna. Anna is the epitome of the old-world passive female mentality. Concerned most of all about her weight and her appearance, "I told her she should wear jeans or something but she said she looks fat in them."(Atwood, 1997: 5). On the other hand, the narrator writes about her lover, Joe whom she refrains from marrying, explaining his appearance, "with small clenched eyes and the defiant look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction. That's how he thinks of himself too: deposed, unjustly."(Atwood, 1997: 2). If we compare this piece of writing to the above example of Portrait of a Lady, we see the way in which gender roles have changed. The character in Portrait of a Lady married a man she thought she loved and who proceeded to live off her wealth, while the character in Surfacing does not find it necessary to marry for any reason. She also sees the man as a threatened 'species' which is an interesting way of looking at gender changes over time. There are clearly two types of people: those that conform to the norm and those that do not. In Surfacing, the narrator describes the old-world woman in the form of Anna and she is talking about Anna's make-up: "I realise I have never seen her without it before; shorn of the pink cheeks and heightened eyes her face is curiously battered, a worn doll's, her artificial face is the natural one."(Atwood, 1997: 37). On the other hand, the narrator feels differently about motherhood and feminine duties, she finds the idea of thoroughly female characteristics frightening and she speaks about the birth of her child as something she never wanted. She had been married before and it had not been a successful one. The organization of societal norms as seen from an academic standpoint largely dependent on what meets the eye in study situations and as Acker (1990) sees this, stereotyping the gender leads to any number of expectations about where a woman or a man should be in a cultural environment. Acker (1990) also recognises the potency of the male prerogative in the organizational setting, where the male standard is the one against which female is set (Acker, 1990: 140-150). Where the academic explanation for engendered organization is based on theoretical and empirical knowledge, the popular culture (the book) is based largely on the reality of how the person feels about their position. This draws a distinct parallel between the positivist approach and the phenomenological and does not often converge on one another. Ghorashi (2003) has a different explanation for engendering society and that is of otherness and of the manufacture of identity. In fact, identity is an ever evolving state of mind whereby the individual is always labelling new interactions between people and therefore building new ideas about others on the ever changing self (Ghorashi, 2003: 27). However, this may be a little of a 'catch-all' definition because, as we well know identity does not change by itself and requires precursors for the implementation of such change. Things that change people's identity include natural disaster, new inventions and more recently war. It is doubtless that World War I and II changed the social makeup of our society insomuch as the world was reliant on women to run large areas of the economic baseline while men were at war. If we critically examine both popular culture and academic sources, we are left with the same philosophical problem that has haunted the social sciences for centuries: nothing can be proved beyond reasonable doubt. On observing a social organization structure such as a business, we are faced with certain observable norms and we have to make deductions from these. Unfortunately the variable in the equation is the individual who may not necessarily behave in the manner appropriate for scientific inquiry. We cannot pass them off as an anomaly or as a 'once off' situation, because we are not in control of the individual. Some women may find that they are subjugated in their professional capacity while others may fit in perfectly well as managers. There is a difference in personality and personality cannot be determined by any set of rules that fit all humans. Popular culture sometimes exacerbates the stereotype issue but sometimes helps us to understand it, as is the case with Surfacing. Surfacing is set in the mid 1970's and relates to a certain genre of people whose identity is fixed by moral code. Despite this, the narrator is aware of her own personal plight to break free from her past and from the binds that force to behave as woman should. She does not want to get married and she does not want children. Gender is really about diversity, but sexuality is something that intervenes in attempts to amalgamate the two genders. According to recent research,"[C]hallenges are often addressed in terms of cultural differences in working habits and customs"(Sippola, 2007: 201). The problem with this take on diversification is that biology is also a key aspect in human beings. Sexuality is something we attempt to suppress for the sake of working environments, but the relationship between men and women is such that attraction and instinct are never far away. The academic research text is based on numbers but not on actual personal experience. The access-legitimacy paradigm as stated in Sippola (2007) surrounds the idea of breaking down barriers between different cultural or power relations, but this is not always possible from an emotional point of view. There are no paradigms in popular culture where the person is looking out from within their own glass menagerie. Where academic text differs from popular culture is that academics looks in from the outside whereas popular cultures looks out from the inside. Some theoretical schools see management and power empires in the same way as Habermas did, that is as a colonizing power. In these cases, there is an aspect of inclusion and exclusion where the majority 'colony' holds power over the minority group (Fenwick et al, 1998: 3). Genders are included in this colonizing potential and are strangely also seen Surfacing with the parallel of the colonization of Canada. A distinct hatred for the 'yanks' or any other American particle is shown in the writing. If we consider this counter-hegemony approach we also consider the same fear by the narrator of being 'colonized' by the male species. She is afraid of having to conform to what she is apparently supposed to want to be like or what society says she should do. This theoretical framework is really the most realistic way of looking at gender and sexuality in the workplace or any other social framework. Organizational behaviour tends to be very metaphorical, as is any social environment and what has happened is that social metaphor and more singular metaphors have melded into one another. For instance, the family metaphor that some organizations follow as seen in television soap opera's such as Days of our Lives and Dallas where the organization functions as a close-knit family has become apparent, but with discrepancies. The 'mother' or 'Hera' (mother goddess) figure is no longer concerned merely with being barefoot-pregnant-and-in-the-kitchen, but prefers a more hands-on masculine position within the organization. Gloria Steinem's writing has had a particular affect on the social system where women are concerned. Addressing the Senate hearing in 1970, she wrote about discrimination as a woman sees it. "During 12 years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country. I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places, and turned away from apartment rentals; all for the clearly-stated, sole reason that I am a woman."(Steinem, 1970). Despite Steinem's radical approach or rather, due to people like her, there has been a growth in female post-graduates and their careers. Between 2000 and 2001 there was a 97% growth in females enrolled in higher education settings (Purcell and Elias, 2004: 4). So the gender war continues as even today there are organizational struggles between female employees in management positions and their male counterparts. There are obvious differences between the genders and their apparent attributes including the woman as the carer and the man as the breadwinner, but these roles are rapidly changing to accommodate people such as the narrator in Surfacing. The making of organizational metaphor is clearly related to changes in society in general. We see in popular writing and film that the way organization is perceived and the way academics analyze it to be are based on the position you are in at the time. For instance, the writer will write from their own viewpoint or from the inside of the situation while researchers try to eliminate personal affects in order to keep the research pure. While this is necessary from an empirical point of view, it is unfortunately not always the way to understand the process of the production of organization. Organizations are produced in a manner that better serves the owner and for this reason, the personal narrative is not important unless it leads to a higher productivity. Women, for instance, may find it harder to maintain a career and look after the family and to make their lives more comfortable, changes to the organization's goals also have to change. The question is always whether it will be profitable for the organization to acquire regulations that support the diversity of their company In order to ascertain this we must look at the fact that today we are unable to discriminate between any minority group or gender; today we are given equal rights legally. The book Surfacing looks at one woman's battle against colonization and against the threat to her individuality as well as looking at the different types of man and woman that are present in our societies today. Organization in the written medium may be popular culture, but it is also the more emotive of the two types of writing and therefore is more realistic in terms of its personal representation. There is a definite purpose to academic study as it tries to make sense or formulae out of all the evidence presented to us. However, it misses out on the inside story to a large extent. Gender and sexuality are important aspects of the organization situation for many reasons but most all because the introduction of female employees to an organization can be an antagonist or have a buffering effect within the organization. References: Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: a theory of gendered organizations. Gender & Society, 4 (2), pp. 139-158. Attwood, Margaret (1997). Surfacing. Virago Press: London. Fenwick et al. (November 1998). Denotation and Connotation in Strategic International Human Resource Management: Can We All Speak and Teach the Same Language Working Paper in HRM & IR, Department of Management University of Melbourne. Ghorashi, H. (2003). Ways to Survive, Battles to Win. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc. Purcell, Kate & Elias, Peter. (March 2004). Researching Graduate Careers Seven Years On. Warwick Institute for Employment Research Paper 4. University of West England, Sippola, Aulikki. (2007). Diversity Management Paradigms and HRM: Implications of Cultural Diversity for Strategic and Operational HRM. LTA 2/07 p 193-222). http://lta.hse.fi/2007/2/lta_2007_02_a2.pdf Steinem, Gloria. (1970). "All Our Problems Stem from the Same Sex Based Myths." - Senate Address 1970. History Matters. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/7025/ . Read More