“The cut and thrust of industrial relations” – bullying by another name?

an article by Pat Drake (Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia) published in Gender in Management: An International Journal Volume 33 Issue 1 (2018)

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to offer a feminography, that is a “narration of a female self in a feminist age” (Abrams, 2017) by presenting a conceptual analysis, derived from experience, of email providing a form of discourse – that the author calls finger-speak – through which unexamined gender positioning caricatures a person’s identity. In so doing, the paper provides an illustrative case of a female manager being positioned through email to “know her place, perform it and feel it” (Hey, 2011).

Design/methodology/approach
An analysis of email foregrounds “finger-speak” as a form of digital conversation and through which people in universities may be positioned publicly but without their consent in relation to unexamined norms and assumptions. For women, it is argued, these norms are ageist and sexist. In this paper, fragments of finger-speak are collated to provide a reading of how mixing gendered norms with apparent differences of opinion constructs, via unexamined sexism, a public identity and then undermines it.

Findings
Through the case presented, the author argues that, because of a shared but unarticulated shadow over women as leaders, email lays the ground for subsequent scapegoating in such a manner that the woman takes responsibility for structural challenges that rightly belong to the organisation.

Originality/value
The contribution that email makes to constructing female identity in public is new, complementing other work that publicly characterises women leaders, through film (Ezzedeen, 2015), and through published writing such as autobiography (Kapasi et al., 2016). Emotional work undertaken by women in university leadership is so far under-represented in public, and email is a site through which this work becomes visible.

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Read it and weep: why is replying to emails so hard?

an article by Amelia Tate published in the New Statesman

Replying to emails is not, technically, hard. You click a button marked “Reply”, press some plastic keys, give your screen a quick glance, and hit another button marked “Send”. Yet despite the fact it’s not physically challenging in any remote, back-in-my-day-we-had-to-walk-15-miles-through-the-emails way, replying to the unanswered messages festering in your inbox can feel psychologically daunting.

For me, emails are like a playground game of “hot potato”. Someone unimaginably irritating has the audacity to chuck you one, you fling it out of your hands as quickly as possible, and spend the rest of the game (the game is your life, friends!) dreading the moment it’s going to get thrown back. Yet despite the fact I feel better if I reply to emails quickly, most of my days are spent being a digital dawdler, wasting hours holding the potato (to clarify, the potato is still a metaphor).

Why do I do this? Why is replying to emails so hard?

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