Discourses of fatherhood in leadership and organisations
The aim of this dissertation study is to increase understanding of men’s work-family relationships by examining fatherhood, especially in leadership and organizations from a gender perspective. In this study, discourse analysis is used. To gain a multidimensional understanding of the issue in question, the study is implemented on three levels: micro, meso and macro. The research material consists of 59 interviews with fathers and 67 media articles concerning fatherhood in organisations and leadership. This thesis consists of an introductory essay and three empirical studies.
It is often claimed that in the context of organisations and leadership, fatherhood is generally ignored. According to the critical organisational research perspective, workplaces are gendered and certain masculinities have become represented as the organisational ideal. My results show that on the micro level, father managers continue to construct their fatherhood mainly by drawing on traditional masculine ideology. However, this study also shows that some father managers have broken with tradition and do gender differently. From the meso perspective, my results show that some leadership practices relating to men’s work-family balance are supportive and encouraging, but the traditionally masculine management culture is still alive in many respects in organisations, and that hinders men’s opportunities and willingness to take up involved fatherhood. On the macro level, my findings show that fatherhood in Finnish working life seems to be in transition: although traditional fatherhood is still strongly positioned around men's work-family relationships, involved fatherhood is increasingly present in societal-level discourses, which offer men both the possibility of redoing gender and the possibility of multiple patterns of masculinity. It can be concluded that leadership as well as organisations in general, still tend to value traditional masculine ways of working, and this pressures fathers to pursue masculine ideals and limits their opportunities to have a good work-family relationship.
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Jyväskylän yliopistoISBN
978-951-39-8365-9ISSN Search the Publication Forum
2489-9003Contains publications
- Artikkeli I: Kangas, E., Lämsä, A.-M., & Heikkinen, S. (2017). Father Managers (Un)Doing Traditional Masculinity. In A. Pilińska (Ed.), Fatherhood in Contemporary Discourse : Focus on Fathers (pp. 17-30). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- Artikkeli II: Kangas, Emilia; Lämsä, Anna-Maija (2020). Leadership practices in relation to men's work-family balance in Finnish organizations. Community, Work and Family, Early online. DOI: 10.1080/13668803.2020.1728231
- Artikkeli III: Kangas, E., Lämsä, A.-M., & Jyrkinen, M. (2019). Is fatherhood allowed? : Media discourses of fatherhood in organizational life. Gender, Work and Organization, 26 (10), 1433-1450. DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12352
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