“Dragged in the Opposite Direction”: Identity Tensions Facing Women Academics in Management and Organisation

This chapter offers reflexive-reflective accounts of three women management academics. We draw upon socio-cultural perspectives of identity, to examine who, as management scholars, we think we are and should be—the ontological assumptions that underpin our self—and to what extent we are who we want to be (our assumed identity). We examine the multiple tensions that we have faced as we tried to craft a true self versus that self that has been expected by others, within our institutions and beyond. In our professional life we operate under multiple identity pressures and expectations—not just our own but a wider academic community, neoliberal university economics, students. We thus observe incidents where our assumed identity has been rejected and an identity ascribed to us, which we have accepted to varying degrees. As we have navigated these tensions there is though evidence to suggest that we have simultaneously disciplined ourselves, being complicit in constraining who we can become, and thus who we are as women academics. We note though that such tensions are of course apparent not only within the academy; that we are not in this way, distinct or “special”. We are for sure, not independent of the social pressures and norms that permeate all work. Indeed, such examples as these could undoubtedly be found in the life-worlds of managers and employees across organisations.