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The Gendered Analysis of Institutions: a framework for research

Gender, Development and Organisations

Dr Anne Coles and others

This broad programme provides a framework for exploring the various ways in which institutions and organisational structures, both formal and informal, are gendered and the implications of this for social development.

Recent projects within the framework have included:-

Gender and aid organisations. Here interest has lain in the processes by which public and private organizations address gender issues in their development work. Work commenced with research on bilateral organisations and has been extended to include NGOs, voluntary institutions and other intermediate actors. The slippage between gender policies and gender sensitive project delivery, partly and partly only, as a result of poor cross-cultural communications, is one of the main themes explored. A further area of research has been the role of men in implementing gender policies.

Gender in Transition. Short assignments providing gender and poverty training in the countries of Central Asia involved an analysis of how national development NGOs perceive and address gender issues in their work. The results led to questioning the appropriateness of conventional gender and development theory and practice in these transitional situations. [The output of this project was a series of reports to INTRAC, Oxford, between 2002-2004.]

Gender, Transience and Identity. The pilot project began by studying issues of change and continuity in British diplomatic families, with study fellows contributing papers on Dutch and Ghanaian foreign service personnel in London. Key questions related to institutional belonging, representation and identity, as well as the impact of different social environments and structures. The project was expanded into a series of four IGS workshops on globally mobile professional families, latterly co-convened with Meike Fechter of Sussex.University.

Relevant publications

Coles, Anne and Meike Fechter eds Gender and Family among Transnational Professionals, London and New York, Routledge, 2007, particularly the chapters by Anne Coles, Rosalind Eyben, Leonie Gordon, Sue Jervis and RituVerma`.

Coles Anne and Tina Wallace eds Gender, Water and Development, Oxford, Berg, 2005, especially the chapters by Sarah House, Deepa Jashi, Umesh Pandey and Michelle Moffat and Tina Wallace and Pauline Wilson.

Coles, Anne ‘Profile of DFID and other aid agencies’ in Shirley Ardener and Fiona Moore eds Professional Identities: policy and practice in business and bureaucracy, Oxford, Berghahn, 2007.

Coles, Anne The Effect of Constant Migration: diplomatic life at the start of the new millenium, published report, London: Diplomatic Service Families Association, 2004.

Coles, Anne ‘Men, Women and Organisational Culture: Perspectives from Donors’ in Caroline Sweetman ed Men’s involvement in Gender and Development Policy and Practice, Oxford, Oxfam Working Papers, 2001

Email: anne.coles@qeh.ox.ac.uk

Business and Bureaucracy

Shirley Ardener and Fiona Moore

Shirley Ardener and Fiona Moore edited a book on Professional Identities; Policy and Practice in Business and Bureaucracy (Berghahn Books 2007). Based on work done in research seminars both at the IGS and at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, the book covers a variety of public and private institutions national and international, global contexts, in Africa, Europe, Israel and the US.

The book considers how working people, professionals, administrators and their clients are perceived in corporate settings, how they see themselves, and how they imagine others see them – and the consequences. It considers the lived experience of bankers, politicians, aid workers, academics, rugby players and civil servants negotiate their ways in institutions that are social constructions, partly of their own making.

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Chinese Women’s Organizing Traditions: indigenous feminisms, religious ideals, local developments

Dr. Maria Jaschok, in collaboration with Shui Jingjun , Henan Academy of Social Sciences

[Core project developed in 1999, in collaboration with Dr Cecilia Milwertz, NIAS, Copenhagen , under the title of: Local Ideals, Women’s Organizing Traditions and International Dependencies]

Description: Our work investigates women’s grassroots organizing activities, aiming to bring about both personal and social transformation. Our focus is on Chinese women as subjects and objects at the intersection of local, national and transnational forces of change. Of particular interest are the dynamic changes in the relationship between the state and diverse secular and religious traditions of women’s local activism, and between local activists and outside donors.  Our methodology is based importantly, but not exclusively, on ethnographic work and on collective and individual life testimonies. Selected case studies span a spectrum of types of women’s activism with concomitantly contrasting objectives, programmes, concepts and funding agencies.

Current collaborative project:  Female Ahong, Buddhist Nuns, Catholic Preachers, Believers and Sceptics: A Comparative Investigation into Chinese Women’s Lives and Public Participation in Kaifeng and Zhengzhou , Henan . This project forms part of a Ford Foundation Program (Governance and Public Policy) that supports research into the nature of political change in contemporary Chinese society, both in the formal and informal sectors. The deeply religious nature of much of rural and provincial society in China and the prominence of women in all major religious traditions, have made an investigation of diverse female religious organizations, their personal and societal impact, an investigative imperative.  Case studies comprise diverse local female religious sites within local forms of Catholic, Buddhist, Daoist and Muslim traditions. The study aims to fill a gap in scholarly knowledge of popular traditions of women’s activism.  

Significance of the project: to understand ‘development’ from within the local ideals as held and interpreted by female religious leaders and as practised by religious believers as members of female congregations; to understand the implications of local development for state and civil society relations in contemporary Chinese society; to understand local implications which arise from financial dependency on international donor agencies (a growing feature of emerging popular women’s organizations in China), among other areas of investigation

Issues: *Women as a discursive symbolic site of changing and diversifying concepts of liberation, sovereignty, development and human rights

*Tension between constitutional rights of religious freedom and local policies regarding religious worship and religious engagement in society

*Human rights as individual right to (religious) ‘self-constitution’

* Feminist ethnography and collaboration across boundaries

funding: Ford Foundation, Beijing ; Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Chinese government grant); Danish Social Sciences Research Council

research dissemination: research, workshops, tutorials, WAGNet postings    

academic network: Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Network (WAGNet): listserve and website (set up in 2001) Website address:  http://www.wagnet.ox.ac.uk/   

email: maria.jaschok@qeh.ox.ac.uk, maria.jaschok@chinese.ox.ac.uk

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Georgia

In 2008 Dr Janette Davies made two visits to Tiblisi to meet staff and students of the University of Georgia, and to participate in the process of setting up a Research Centre for the Study of the Caucasus and Black Sea Region. A recent Visiting Fellows, Tamta Khalvashi, has been made its first Director. Future possibilities of collaboration with this Centre are in progress. Prof Nuka Abakelia, also from Georgia is Visiting Fellow at IGS in Hilary 2009.

Majorca

Dr Jaqueline Waldren

Dr Waldren is continuing her extensive work on the study of migration in Majorca.

Email: jdwaldren@yahoo.com

Germany/United Kingdom

Dr Fiona Moore

Fiona Moore is developing her doctoral research on the deconstruction of the concept of the "Transnational Capitalist Elite," through the examination of the self-presentation of German transnational businesspeople in Frankfurt and London. She is also working to construct and maintain websites for both the IGS and the Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Network.

Relevant publications

Transnational Business Cultures: Life and Work in a Multinational Corporation, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005; “Symbols of Organization: Informal Ways of Negotiating the Global and the Local in MNCs.”

Global Networks 4 (2), 2004; “Global Companies, Local Symbols: an Ethnographic View of the Uses of Symbolism in a Multinational Corporation.” Graduate Journal of the Social Sciences 1(1), 2004; “Internal Diversity and Culture’s Consequences: Branch/Head Office Relations in a German MNC.” Management International Review, 2, 2003; "Telling it Like it Is: News Websites and Online News Providers," Global Networks, 2(2) 2002.

Email: f.moore@kingston.ac.uk

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Cameroon Studies

Shirley Ardener

Shirley Ardener continues extending earlier work by herself and Edwin Ardener in the field of Cameroon Studies. She focuses on the transition between pre-colonial and colonial periods, as well as on current socio-economic issues.

Her research on the archives of two Swedes, in particular Knutson and Waldau and their employees, in Cameroon, covering the period 1883-1923, and on the Cameroonian notables, farmers and traders they met, was published as Swedish Ventures in Cameroon 1883-1923; trade and travel, people and politics, (Berghahn Books).

The core of the book is an edited text of an MS memoir by Knutson, the traveller/trader. This has been augmented by archival research, fieldwork in Cameroon, and extracts from published sources, parts of which have been especially translated. Good descriptions of local life and conversations with notable Cameroon personalities of the time throw new light on the ethnography of the peoples on the Cameroon Mountain for the pre-colonial period. It provides vivid, day-to-day, eye-witness evidence on how colonialism was negotiated. New details of trading practices at the end of the nineteenth century emerge and, especially, new material on early land transactions which have current consequences and topical interest.

Ongoing Project: Collaborative Historical Research with Dr Kubica in Poland

Ongoing Project: Collaboration with Colleagues in Cameroon

Ongoing Project: Body Piercing and Tattooing

Seminar: In Michaelmas Term 2001 Shirley Ardener was co-convenor of a seminar series on "Transgendered Identities" at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Relevant Publications

Plantation and Village in the Cameroons, with E. Ardener and W.A. Warmington, 1960, OUP; Eye-witness to the Annexation of Cameroon, 1884-1887, Government Printer, S. Ardener, 1968, Government Press, Buea; Kingdom on Mount Cameroon, 1996, Edwin Ardener, edited by S. Ardener, Berghahn Books); "The Funding of Social Anthropology: A Preliminary Note to a Fragment of History written by E.M. Chilver in 1955" JASO 29/3, pp. 243-250

Email: shirley.ardener@qeh.ox.ac.uk

 Malawi/Tanzania

Deborah Bryceson has been involved in fieldwork researching the impact of HIV/AIDS on rural Malawian communities. Her study entitled: Social Pathways from the HIV/AIDS Deadlock of Disease, Denial and Desperation in Rural Malawi’ documents the processes of social change and the aggregate effects of growing rural poverty and vulnerability accelerated by HIV/AIDS.  Local coping mechanisms are identified as well as new social forms that have evolved at household or community level in response to HIV/AIDS. Various policy implications are discussed.

She has also recently completed working on a DANIDA-sponsored study of settlement and migration in northwestern Tanzania. Her focus has been the fast-growing small urban settlements connected with artisanal mining and trading activities. Women have been an integral part of the gold mining boom in the region. They tend to be relegated to the most menial tasks in the gold mining process as well as providing services to the itinerant miners as food sellers, barmaids and prostitutes.

There is also a 'women left behind' experience for women who form relationships with the miners, have their children and then are left in the settlement if and when the miner moves on to choicer alluvial and surface mining sites.

In collaboration with the Nordic African Institute in Sweden Deborah published a critique of the World Development Report 2008 on agriculture entitled: 'African Agriculture and the World Bank: Development or Impoverishment?' She is now concerned with the study of creolization in East Africa's coastal cities and is publishing a paper entitled 'Dar es Salaam as a 'Harbour of Peace' in East Africa: Tracing the Role of Creolized Urban Ethnicity in Nation-State Formastion'. Further she organized a panel at the International Gender Studies, Queen Elizabeth House workshop entitled 'Compassion and Moral Righteousness: Faith-based Donor Assistance for AIDS-affected Communities'.

Recent publications

‘Ganyu Labour, Famine and HIV/AIDS in Rural Malawi: Causality and Casualty’.2006 forthcoming.  Journal of Modern African Studies, 44 (2).

‘A Dying Peasantry? Interactive Impact of Famine and HIV/AIDS in Rural Malawi’. 2006 forthcoming. in Gillespie, S. (editor), HIV/AIDS and Food and Nutrition Security. Vol 1: Interactions and Impacts, Washington DC, International Food Policy Research Institute.

‘Alcohol in Africa’. 2006 forthcoming. Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450. Michigan, Macmillan.

‘Fragile Cities: Fundamentals of Urban Life in East and Southern Africa’, ‘African Urban Economies: Searching for the Sources of Sustenance’, ‘Vulnerability and Viability of East and Southern Africa’s Apex Cities’ in Bryceson, D.F. and D. Potts (eds). 2006 forthcoming. African Urban Economies: Viability, Vitality or Vitiation?, Palgrave Macmillan

‘Agrarian Transformation’. 2005. in Forsyth, T. (ed), Encyclopedia of International Development, London and New York, Routledge

‘Rural Livelihoods and Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa: Processes and Policies’. 2005. in Ellis, F. and A. Freeman (eds), Rural Livelihoods and Poverty Reduction Policies, London, Routledge, 48-61

‘Agrarian Vista or Vortex? African Rural Livelihoods Policy’. 2004.  Review of African Political Economy 102, 617-29

‘Petrol Pumps and Economic Slumps: Rural-Urban Linkages in Sub-Saharan Africa’s Globalization Process’. 2003.  Journal of Economic and Social Geography 94(3), 335-49 (with T.C. Mbara)

‘Livelihoods, Daily Mobility and Poverty in Sub Saharan Africa’. 2003. Transport Review 23 (2), 177-96 (with T.C. Mbara and D.A.C. Maunder)

‘Transnational Families in the Twenty-first Century’, 3-30 (with U. Vuorela); ‘Europe’s Transnational Families and Migration: Past and Present, 31-59 ‘Epilogue’, 265-67 in Bryceson, D.F. and U. Vuorela (eds). 2002. The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks, Oxford, Berg Publishers

‘Alcohol in Africa: Substance, Stimulus and Society’. 3-21 ‘Changing Modalities of Alcohol Usage’, 22-52 ‘Pleasure and Pain: The Ambiguity of Alcohol in Africa’, 267-291 in Bryceson, D.F. (ed.). 2002. Alcohol in Africa: Mixing Business, Pleasure and Politics, Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann

‘The Scramble in Africa: Reorienting Rural Livelihoods’. 2002. World Development 30 (5), 725-39

‘Multiplex Livelihoods in Rural Africa: Recasting the Terms and Conditions of Gainful Employment’. 2002. Journal of Modern African Studies 40 (1), 1-28

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India/UK

Dr Josephine Reynell

Core Project: Gender, Religion, Studies of Prestige and Kinship Dr Reynell’s research builds on her D.Phil material in exploring the relationship between gender, religion, community identity and hierarchies of prestige amongst the Jain communities in Jaipur, northern India. One of the key themes investigated is the way in which religious activities are gendered and how the public enactment of these religious activities by both men and women is crucial in maintaining the identity of the socio-economic and religious community of the Jains. The research aims to build upon recent theoretical writing in anthropology which has questioned the cross-cultural usefulness of the analytical distinction in sociology and anthropology between the public and domestic domains. The research explores the ways in which these two spheres are mutually interdependent, and specifically how women’s religious activities play a key role in the social reproduction of the Jain community by contributing to family prestige and the creation of strategic marriage alliances.

Dr Reynell is also engaged in a new joint project with Dr Jaschok, Investigating the significance of religious belief and practice in the configuration of diaspora identities in the UK with particular focus on the role of gender, religious sites and rituals of death.

E-mail: josephine.reynell@lmh.ox.ac.uk

International

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Gender, Culture and Empire

Prof. Dorothy O. Helly (professor emerita of history and women’s studies, Hunter College and graduate school CUNY) will be completing this research on which she and the late Dr Helen Callaway have worked for so many years.

This interdisciplinary research explores the social history of the metropole and the colonies during the era of British imperial expansion. The programme draws its theory from postcolonial study, colonial discourse analysis, and recent scholarship which charts the complex relations of gender with other categories of dominance/subordination such as ‘race’, ethnicity, and class.

Core Project (ongoing): A Biography of Flora Shaw (1852-1890)

The current project involves a biography, written together with Professor Helly, on Flora Shaw/Lady Lugard, who was the first woman on the professional staff of The Times and its Colonial Editor during the height of imperial expansion in the 1890s. She was actively involved in colonial politics not only in her prolific journalism in the leading newspaper of the period, but also behind the scenes.

Relevant publications

Besides the continuing work on the biography, this research has resulted in various academic papers presented at conferences and subsequently published (or in preparation). These include:

‘Journalism as active politics: Flora Shaw, The Times and South Africa’ in Donald Lowry (ed.) The South African War reappraised (Manchester University Press); ‘Constructing South Africa in the British Press, 1890-1892: The Pall Mall Gazette, the Daily Graphic, and The Times’ in Divided Selves: The British Empire and the Press (in preparation); ‘Configuring Colonial Identities: Flora Shaw’s writings for The Times from South Africa and Australia (to be presented at conference on ‘Locating the Victorians’ in London, July 2001).