Men on board: Actor-network theory,feminism and gendering the past

Introduction

In this paper, we consider the usefulness of a historically reflective ANT for analysing discriminatory practices. Despite substantial progress by the feminist movement over the years, areas of male dominance endure, including the higher echelons of the corporate world. Numerous studies have used a variety of methods of research and analysis to document the persistence of gender inequities over time (Konrad, Prasad and Pringle 2005). Recently, some feminist approaches have explored the value of actor-network theory (ANT) for tracing discriminatory practices through networks of people and non-material actants (Haraway 2004; Hunter and Swan 2007). Nonetheless, it can be argued that Latour’s (2005) notion of following the actors (to see how networks are formed) lacks a critical exploration of the role of the past in gendered practices. Using Air Canada as an exemplar, this paper explores the contribution and limitations of ANT in explaining the remarkable resilience of masculine dominance of organizations.

John Law (1992: 379), one of the originators of ANT, notes that observers of the social are every so often astonished as they witness an ‘order crashing down’. He wonders why they thought the order would always be secure, especially since its long-standing existence was artificial all along. It is a telling point that sets up the past as the scene of transition.

Getting on board: The problem of long-term change

Boards of directors more often than not continue to be male dominated. This is true in Canada where women’s representation on corporate boards remains conspicuously low and is growing at a disturbingly slow rate. Studying this issue is problematic. The presence of researchers in the boardrooms of corporations is generally unwelcome, contributing to the ‘black box of the boardroom’ (Terjesen, Sealy and Singh 2009: 333) in which women are seen in gender role stereotypes and whose substantive views are then marginalized. Terjesen et al. (2009: 324) have also identified a trend in the USA promoting ‘branded women’ – i.e. female directors with Ivy League degrees. Companies in the USA market these women as if they were parade marshals of progress, even though the proportion of women executive directors is little changed over the past 10 years (Terjesen et al. 2009).

On Canada’s largest (FP500) corporations, women constitute only 14 per cent of positions on boards of directors (Fitzsimmons 2010) even though Statistics Canada reports that women comprise 50.4 per cent of the Canadian population. Fitzsimmons calculates that if the rate of change does not accelerate from its current pace, it will take until 2082 before women hold half the board seats in Canadian FP500 companies. By comparison, Norway (40 per cent), Sweden (22 per cent), the USA (15 per cent) and South Africa (15 per cent) all have more female board representation than similar types of corporations in Canada. Britain, however, has even lower representation in its largest (FTSE100) companies. In fact, UK companies have nearly shut out female chief executive officers (CEOs), board chairs and chief financial officers (CFOs), reported in fiscal 2009 at 4 per cent, 3 per cent and 5 per cent, respectively. From 1999 to 2008, in what has been described as a ‘decade of delay’, the ratio of women on boards has risen to only 12 per cent (Sealy and Vinnicombe 2010: 38) and of these, just 5 per cent are executive directorships. The situation has over time become uncritically accepted as satisfactory governance. As we shall see below, Air Canada exemplifies the problem of gendered practices and, as such, provides a useful case study.

Feminism and ANT

Recently, feminists have explored the value of ANT for tracing neglected politics and gender practices through the activities of networks of people and non-material actors (e.g. engineering tools) (see Berg and Lie 1995; Haraway 1985; Hunter and Swan 2007). While the outcomes are promising, feminist accounts of ANT are still either neglecting or reifying history (Durepos and Mills 2012). Haraway (2004: 199–200), for example, argues that:

Knowledge is always an engaged material practice and never a disembodied set of ideas. Knowledge is embedded in projects; knowledge is always for… some things and not others, and knowers are always formed by their projects, just as they shape what they can know. (original emphasis)

In attempting to reveal the performance of knowledge (and of gender as knowledge) Haraway focuses on current engagement but ignores the significance of the argument that ‘knowledge is embedded’ – i.e. has links to past performance. We contend that a more fruitful fusion of ANT and feminist theory lies in a critical exploration of the role of the past in gendered practices (Hartt et al. 2010). This will help to reveal how the past can be considered an actant; an actant that is engaged through performance of (gendered) knowledge.

Air Canada: A case in point

Established in 1937 as Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA), Air Canada’s initial board consisted of male civil servants and officers of the Canadian National Railroad (Mills and Helms Mills 2006). From a 100 per cent male proposition at the start, the company’s gender composition rarely improved over the years, despite a background of royal commissions (i.e. the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 1970; and the Royal Commission on Equity in Employment, 1984) that specifically explored the practices in its own Crown corporations, which included Air Canada (Myrden, Mills and Helms Mills 2011). Nor did the situation improve when the airline was privatized in the late 1980s. The company presidents, and the networks of power, have always been distinctly masculine. In 1937 the TCA tag line ‘Fly with His Majesty’s mail’ could have as easily read ‘His Majesty’s male’. In the long history of Air Canada there have been women in management, but none at the level of executive vice-president or president, and only token representatives on the board of directors. Perhaps the management glass ceiling was broken through by women, only for them to find another glass ceiling nested above. Remarkably, even in 2011 men constitute all the members of the board of directors, the CEO, CFO and the entire executive management of Air Canada. To the extent that ANT can describe why executive ranks at Air Canada have sustained maleness, an important set of methodological insights will be added to feminist organizational analysis.

Primer on ANT

We use the term ‘primer’ here not so much to signify basic or elementary coverage (although it will be that) but as in priming a surface for painting. While there are various references to ANT in the literature, they are underwritten by a variety of philosophical approaches. There are variants of ANT that have developed over the years – some are more social constructionist, others are more amodern, and others are more realist in tone (Durepos 2010; Hunter and Swan 2007). In this paper, we focus on the work of Bruno Latour (e.g. Latour 1996, 2005), John Law (e.g. 1999) and Michel Callon (e.g. Callon and Law 1982), although we will decline to get too bound up in trying to locate ‘the’ definitive version, for if we stick too closely to Latour’s script, ANT may lose its appeal as a lens to view gender discrimination. So the first tenet is that the endgame is transitory. Chess players will not like ANT – there is no such thing as a checkmate, and a draw is just as unlikely – only tense and tentative strategic positions. Nothing is exempt from rearrangement – even the pieces of the theory label (actor, hyphen, network, theory) have to be enrolled and re-enrolled. Latour (2005: 9) confesses: ‘Alas, the historical name is “actor-network-theory”, a name that is so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept… I have to apologize for taking the exact opposite position here as… the time I criticized all the elements of his horrendous expression, including the hyphen, I will now defend all of them, including the hyphen!’

If the boundaries of ANT are confused, it will have this in common with feminism. Haraway (1985: 192) takes ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries’ and considers this a part of imagining a world without gender. Haraway (1985: 196) claims that ‘it has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective – or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun.’ More than other traditions, feminism is varied in its ontological and epistemological assumptions (Prasad 2005). These include a wide range of traditions such as Women’s Voice, liberal, radical, socialist, post-colonial and post-structural feminism (Calas and Smircich 1992, 2005), as well as postmodern feminism, which embraces the laboratory research of science and technology studies (STS) that helped to spawn ANT. The intersection of ANT and feminism would be eclectic indeed. But the variety may help trace gender bias that has occurred in, and engaged with ‘the past’, since the narrative scripts influence sensemaking (Weick 2001) and help to shape different types of masculinity after strategic shifts over time (Helms Mills 2005). In turn, these masculinities shape organizational rites and rules that punctuate discriminatory action. As indicated above, feminism is not an integrated concept, but covers a range of paradigmatic positions and approaches (Calas and Smircich 2005).

A hallmark of ANT is that research has to ‘follow the actors’, learning from them how an order has been assembled. An actor is something or somebody that is made to act by others. Agency assigned to non-humans is also part of the action. For example, actants (i.e. things that act on people and things) in a network of gender discrimination at Air Canada may include the staid railwaymen that founded the company, stewardesses with tight-fitting uniforms, advertising copy showing only men as pilots, the phallic fleet of airplanes, company newsletters celebrating heroic managers, the Second World War and human rights laws. It would also include ‘the office pin-up girl said to be a [TCA] counter clerk in Vancouver’ (Smith 1986: 124). Feminism is an actant in the Air Canada masculinity story. Basically, ANT follows things that may not be bound to each other yet become allies – systems in a meta-stable state. Network is a specialized term within ANT: a coordinated set of heterogeneous actors interacting towards success (or failure), although as indicated above, organizational success must be ‘perceived as continuous and unfinished, precarious and partial’ (Alcadipani and Hassard 2010: 425). ANT research methodology often consists of qualitative ethnographic studies focusing on daily living and working contexts, such as performing fieldwork with medical practitioners in a cervical screening programme (Singleton and Michael 1993), or observing performances in laboratories even though the physical site is only part of the interest. Nonetheless, it needs to be considered that viewpoints have historical context, are socially constructed and, as such, influence how we view events in time and over time (Jenkins and Munslow 2003).

The dominant focus within ANT on ethnographic methods may be a problem for researchers attempting to ‘do history’. The past may not be recoverable since it is somewhat problematic to follow actors that have been dead for 75 years. But traces or their ghosts (embedded within such things as written and oral histories, memoirs, archives and artifacts) may provide evidence of how they enrolled others or came to be enrolled themselves in networks. To that end we have drawn on existing histories and accounts of Air Canada to ‘follow the actors’. Here we are following on from Law’s (2002) use of textual analysis, and the subsequent work of Durepos and her colleagues (Durepos, Helms Mills and Mills 2008b; Durepos and Mills 2012).

Researchers should be aware of abusing the licence to commit or omit items from the past. ‘It is the historian who selects the disparate traces of the past, orders or emplots them into a coherent story “to then infuse it with meaning”’ (Weatherbee and Durepos 2010: 7). Accordingly, the authors of this paper have to declare our own subjectivity: the first author, a long-time manager and number cruncher, is steeped in a lifetime of ‘maleness’ – one of a family of eight brothers and no sisters, segregated early into private school for boys, all male teachers (from the priesthood – itself an exclusionary profession), growing up in a rough mining-company town where woman equals mother, female sport was unheard of (except cheerleading) and gay men were at personal risk of physical harm. The second author – also experiencing a life of maleness – has a lengthy academic curriculum vitae focusing on gender issues, airline culture and the corporation, often in the context of problematizing the past. So we will both have to be wary of the potential for falling into our own foxhole. Perhaps our situated perspectives may provide a transparent, if not keener, understanding of the past(s).

History and organizational culture at Air Canada

In exploring ‘the past’ it is tempting to rely on the recordings of history, even though it has been well argued that the two concepts are not the same (Munslow 2010), and that the social construction of corporate history (as in the Air Canada exemplar) has lent itself to gendered business practices (Green 2007; Mills 2002). Published histories of Air Canada have, to date, been written by men and, not unrelated, have tended to give a privileged status to a specific selection of corporate memories of powerful actors. The voices of women such as Judy Cameron, the first female Air Canada pilot, or more recently in 2009, Patricia Jacobsen, the only female member of the board of directors in the past five years (but who lasted not quite 12 months on the board and was not replaced), are nearly silent. Instead, females are represented in their stereotypical ‘sex’ roles, as in the Pigott (2001: 85) text, which refers to Chatelaine magazine to ‘describe exactly what stewardesses did in those days’. The on-board female staff member is seen as a ‘little housekeeper in the clouds’ (Pigott 2001: 88). On those rare occasions when women are displayed in masculine work settings (e.g. aircraft engine repair), their contributions are presented in a patronized way: ‘… to see a pretty head bending over an ignition harness would have caused a commotion… training girls to do productive machine work was a radical development… women were reassured that in some departments, such as upholstery, we have no intention of replacing them [after the men return from the war]’ (Pigott 2001: 143).

In some ways, following the actors is easier to perform on the past, since gender discrimination was so overt. As Calas and Smircich (1992: 228) note, the silent woman’s voice can be rewritten as we notice that certain historiographies are patriarchal and the ‘discourse is already male gendered’. The ‘authoritative’ histories of Air Canada are positivist, linear and gendered. Realism and realist historical practices are processes that support managerialist notions in the present based upon managerialist notions of the past (Rowlinson 2004). Such histories are positivist as in seeking to explain knowledge development as a cumulative activity. Position A leads over time to an ‘improved’ position B, which leads to the ‘modern’ position C. ANT can increase the richness of the discussion by uncovering multiple interpretations of the past from the points of view of various actants, thereby revealing multiple sources of knowledge of how the past was created. ANT may also recover voices of actors that have been marginalized.

Evidence of corporate culture is often sought in historical records, but what does it mean to say published history books are ‘about’ Air Canada? We talk of this thing – Air Canada – as if it were real, and as if it remains the same thing over time (Mills 2006). The corporate entity seems to be a sometimes growing and sometimes contracting collection of buildings, people, aircraft, oxygen systems, regulations, instrumentation, financing, radios and politics (Mills 2002). How does one make sense of all the bits and pieces of Air Canada when these are reconstituted continuously? The company is much different after the terror of 9/11 where a sewing kit in carry-on luggage is now seen as an airline security threat – and after Air Canada’s acquisition of Canadian Airlines (Mills 2006; Milton 2004). The merger caused employees, according to Milton (2004: 109), ‘to behave in such a tribal-like fashion, with our native colours evoking emotion and hostility toward each other.’ Even the colour of employee uniforms was contested – the blue uniforms of Canadian Airlines battled with the Air Canada green. The Canadian Airlines uniforms were not prepared to be easily enrolled into a new actor-network. Mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcy raise another question. Is Air Canada the same company in fiscal periods of profitability as it is in the down periods where thousands of employees get laid off? Also, what sense can be made of the term president of this company/collection of actants? A. J. Hungerford was the first president in 1937 and was simultaneously president of the Canadian National Railroad (CNR). It must have come as a surprise to him when it was announced four years later that Herbert Symington, a lawyer for the Grand Trunk Railway, was appointed as the first president of TCA – a second first president? – but this time of only the airline (Pigott 2001). So it seems that the fledgling airline was pushed out of the CNR nest; small TCA had morphed to big TCA.

We argue that organizational culture involves the intersection of actors in a punctuated network that creates (gendered) knowledge. This involves language, attitudes, behaviour, symbolism, dress, stories, rites and physical artifacts – in other words, a wide range of actants. Histories not only describe men and women of the past, the published words and pictures arguably contribute to our sense of what it means to be a man or woman. A sense of masculinity at Air Canada is punctuated as a required trait of managers (Mills and Helms Mills 2006). Kanter (1977) describes these elevated traits as assumed to be present in men alone, and deemed necessary for effective management, including: mental toughness in problem-solving; abstract strategic planning abilities; a preference for task success over personal or emotional engagement; and cognitive superiority. Dichotomies from the past seem to persist in the airline culture: male/female, white/black, strong/weak, heterosexual/homosexual – with the first of each dichotomous pair given privileged status in the past and present.

Organizational work as it was historically constituted ‘presupposed and at the same time helped to produce (an often ignored) gendered and hierarchical division of labour’ between men and women (Law and Moser 1999: 9). The writers of history privilege certain actors and silence or demote others. In an airline, throughout the pages of its corporate communications we have intrepid (male) pilots and submissive (female) stewardesses; in the office setting, we are shown head-and-shoulder photos of guiding geniuses (men) making serious decisions while their work wives (female secretaries) are shown full-body with legs crossed and wide smiles (Mills and Helms Mills 2006; Myrden et al. 2011).

The recent presidents of Air Canada continue to contribute to the gendered and aggressively gendered nature of these artifacts, giving form to the gendered organization. Former CEO Robert Milton writes his own history in a book that is essentially a catalogue of what he perceives as (his) gifted accomplishments, and a description of awards that Air Canada received while he was there. Milton (2004: x) begins by acknowledging the old boy network: ‘I’d like to thank a group of true troopers, the Air Canada Board of Directors… in particular… the two chairmen I’ve worked with: Jack Fraser and Bob Brown. Jack was the chairman who gave me the CEO job.’ This is an example of how CEOs construct their own version of events and attempt to enroll others into networks. Milton (2004: 166) complains that the news media did not write stories of accolades given by Air Canada customers (in a survey of frequent fliers), so he paid for a full-page advertisement in all the newspapers across Canada the following day. He constructed the news, then used communication tools and financial clout for its reproduction. The language of the transportation industry is used by its leaders in the process of bringing together and stabilizing networks, a process ANT calls ‘translation’. In his book, Milton (2004: 76) says: ‘If someone pokes me in the eye, my response is to poke him back with two fingers in both eyes.’ The current Air Canada CEO, Calvin Rovinescu (2010: 13), remarked to Les Rendez-vous Financiers on 17 November 2010 that to be a ‘global champion’ Canada needs to be more strategic: ‘we cannot be boy scouts running around in short pants.’ Transportation imagery would seem to privilege men, and certainly not women and boys – especially not those in short pants. Management cloning reproduces existing actor-networks as boards of directors make ‘safer’ choices for the position of CEO – i.e. picking the known over the unknown (Kanter 1987). Both Milton and Rovinescu were selected as returnees to the executive ranks of Air Canada.

The production of discrimination, including masculinity, is arguably an outcome of organizational processes that are rooted in past notions (Acker 1990). Acker (1990) raises the idea of the past by arguing that feminist theorizing is disadvantaged by the historical discourses that tend to present organization as gender-neutral. In contrast, feminist researchers take as a starting point that organizational culture is already gendered (Maddock 1999).

The storytelling capacity of ANT can contribute to our understanding of organization, and the many ways that exist for recalling the past will provide a ‘more fragile tone for “doing history”… and the need for (re)writing histories’ (Durepos et al. 2008a: 116). To better understand the persistence of discriminatory practices requires a critical examination of both the processes of actor-networks and the past(s) in which they occur. ANT used in this way has been criticized for ignoring gender (Berg and Lie 1995). The simple tracing of actors in ANT would lack a critical exploration not only concerning gendered practices, but of the role of ‘past’ representations of gendered practices. In the next section we explore the usefulness of a historically reflective ANT (Durepos and Mills 2012) to examine which contributing actants maintain the gendered practices in Air Canada’s circumstances.

ANT and its intersection with feminism

This section discusses some of the tensions that create an anxious relationship between ANT and feminism. Notwithstanding these, many scholars have recognized that these traditions are not mutually exclusive (see Whelan 2001: 552–3). Versions of ANT have also been extended to a literature generally labelled ‘ANT and After’, where feminist writers are drawing upon ANT tools but see no need to be faithful to any particular school of ANT thought. A theory-coalition provides a way to simultaneously study the gender relations of organizations and their past, although this is not just a matter of ‘add gender and stir’ (Lohan 2000: 900). Although ANT usually neglects gender (Berg and Lie 1995), feminism looks to radically change gender relationships, such as the persistence of masculinity at Air Canada. However, even those who appropriate elements of ANT have a fairly long list of regrets. Chief among these is the attribution of agency to non-human actants. To some it may seem an eccentric idea that actants, for example airline baggage-handling rules or job application forms, are acting to enroll others into their network of gender discrimination. However, females may indeed be at a disadvantage if hiring rules require them to be unmarried, have a specific ratio of body measurements, not wear eye glasses and have their parents’ written permission to qualify for a stewardess job – as at Air Canada in the past (Mills and Helms Mills 2006).

ANT holds that power is an effect of networks rather than of individual actors. However, the centre of discussion in many ANT studies is an explicit human agent who seems to have a specific, held in advance, motive to build durable networks that continually shore up the agent’s power (Whittle and Spicer 2008). Key figures may include successful and brave scientists (as in Pasteur’s taming of France – see Latour 1983) or unsuccessful engineering marvels (as in the TSR2 fighter jet – see Law 2002). Often, though, there seems to be a hero figure. It would be in ANT style to spin a story around Air Canada CEO Gordon McGregor – ‘the oldest fighter pilot and the top-scoring RCAF ace to serve in the Battle of Britain’ (http://www.aerovision.org). This propensity to venerate heroes – the most powerful actor situated at the top of the hierarchy (Hunter and Swan 2007) – is at odds with the ANT foundation that networks result from heterogeneous sources. Feminist studies distrust such singular positioning that fails to make sense of diverse views. However, this does not have to be the case. ANT aims to break down boundaries to help us understand how both material and human agents enroll one another. These assembled alliances are necessarily complex and leave room to consider feminist concerns.

Feminist and ANT researchers can end up constructing different versions of the past and this has implications for the usefulness of ANT to express feminist views. ANT does not seek attention for those who have been rendered invisible by selective accounts of the past, opting instead to follow the actors and see where that leads. Feminists would prefer to focus on the invisible other, such as women who are sidelined from participation on the Air Canada board of directors where women currently hold none of the 10 board positions (Air Canada 2012). They may see the enrolment activities of the all-male nominations committee in a way that gets ignored by ANT researchers. Feminist critique aims to draw attention to situations that prevent ‘others’ from participating. No one is invited to leave their brain parked at the door to unquestioningly follow actors. With ANT’s focus on agency, feminist positions that point out discriminatory practices occurring over time would perhaps make for less interesting storytelling. So ANT may privilege heroes even if they fail (Sismondo 2010) and may reproduce masculine hegemony rather than provide a critique of the gendered effects of the actor-networks.

Further limitations arise from ANT seeming to lack political critique. This includes the hierarchical networks, and following how ‘inclusions and exclusions [are performed] in “heterogeneous” ways’ (Alcadipani and Hassard 2010: 423). As indicated above, centring on ‘translation’ brings a bias towards centre stage. As emphasized by Latour (2005), when you perform, you quickly learn that you are acting with a script and props that have not been brought there by you and that scenes may be improvised by the other participants without your permission. In the case of Air Canada, this bias towards centre stage further marginalizes the voices of women whose achievements have been excluded from recorded histories. Part of the reason for this exclusion is a disproportionate hierarchical power system – the old boy network that has the power, for example, to systemically restrict highly paid commercial piloting to male war veterans and over a long period of time, while allocating the lower-paid roles of secretary and stewardess almost exclusively to females.

The selection of research sites – i.e. selecting what becomes the subject of focus – is another criticism that feminists have made of ANT in its science and technology research. Latour (1983: 141) likes to study ‘what scientists do inside the walls of these strange places called laboratories.’ Indeed, much technology research has been located in design laboratories. According to Berg and Lie (1995), research and development laboratories are spaces primarily occupied by men where gender is not seen until women are present. A tour of any university science building puts on view the masculinity of the faculty, as would a listing of the incumbents of engineering jobs at Air Canada. Of course, gender bias is not restricted to science and technology. Air Canada has never hired a female as a chief officer in charge of airport operations, comptroller or solicitor, although women have held positions that may be constituted as feminine – such as officer in charge of customer service and vice-president of communications.

ANT would deem relevant the physical space where activity takes place or fails to take place. However, gender would not be considered relevant a priori. In ANT empirical research women have to show up as important actors in order to be counted. Feminists are not content with taking their chances that actor-networks will be revealed as gendered. They argue that gender should be ‘operationalized as an analytic category in order to be seen’ (Lohan 2000: 901). Gill and Grint (1995) agree; they worry that ANT theorists may not have the theoretical sensitivity to see issues of gender, and that just because the researcher followed some actants in a different direction, does not mean gender effects are not operating in the networks: ‘silence, like absence from networks, is itself gendered’ (Gill and Grint 1995: 19). Air Canada may actually be a good example of where ANT can be applied to voices that are largely silent on the board of directors. Other actants cry out on their behalf – history textbooks, government legislation, archives of heavily gendered company newsletters and other documents proclaiming (slowly) shifting attitudes over time. We can imagine feminism as an element of a heterogeneous actor-network or perhaps as a network where numerous researchers, books, computers, conference organizers and other actants are enrolled.

ANT prescribes that a researcher should not begin by assuming what the project seeks to explain. Reflexivity on the part of a scholar who invokes history requires the author to be present in the text and whatever lack of innocence exists as a potential influence of the researcher’s version of history should be disclosed (Weatherbee and Durepos 2010). Feminists such as Lohan (2000: 907) believe that ANT is ‘lacking responsible reflexivity because… the narrator is allowed the only innocent position. Feminist science, by contrast, has generally eschewed detachment in favour of participation.’ We agree that ANT in the hands of feminists should be more politically engaged. In qualitative research we should look at actors with more suspicion so that those excluded from networks have a chance to become visible. Extending the idea of ‘translation’ to include feminist critique of the maintenance of marginalized or silenced actors enriches the analysis, even if it offends some ANT theorists. Haraway (1994: 60) suggests that we move beyond mainstream STS ‘interlocking agonistic fields, where practice is modeled as military combat, sexual domination, security maintenance, and market strategy.’ Her metaphor of the game of cat’s cradle, with its handmade patterns, can also be taken as a call for shifting the responsibilities of ANT to produce a new playing partner – one that returns the string network with gender issues artistically exposed.

Nonetheless, ANT has some intrinsic advantages in helping researchers follow gendered practices over time. A fundamental goal is to understand how technologies or organizations come to be as they are. ANT does this, while accepting that the social is complex and heterogeneous. It also shows how relations get amended over time, and morph into another form, or how the bits and pieces of an actor-network might just ‘make off on their own’ (Law 1992: 381). Constructivism shows how artifacts bind society together. Berg and Lie (1995: 346) argue that artifacts may have gender and ‘constitute part of the glue that sometimes keeps gender relations stable, sometimes on the move.’ Therefore, the tools of ANT add to our understanding of how artifacts are gendered and contribute to gendered inequality. Artifacts such as Air Canada’s annual reports, for example, could be studied using temporal approaches – one would find traces of actors pushing back. The annual report for 1945 states that the return from war of former male staff was reflected in a further decline in the proportion of female employees – dropping from 35 per cent in 1943 to 23 per cent, with the company having no female senior executives (Pigott 2001: 220). The more recent annual report of 2009 shows a marked improvement in the location of women in the company, with women holding five (of 20) senior management positions (Air Canada 2009: 144). But we do not wish to reify the positivist notion of inevitable progress. Evidence points to masculine persistence and we should also recognize that feminist theorizing is hindered by available discourses that already conceptualize the history of organizations as gender-neutral. This is described by Acker (1990: 142): ‘both traditional and critical approaches to organizations originate in the male, abstract intellectual domain and take as reality the world as seen from that standpoint.’ ANT can help here. For example, the Air Canada website, an ‘actant’ in ANT analysis, ironically has photographs on a web page called ‘Culture Change’ that reinforce decades-old stereotyping – men as pilot and baggage handler, with women as ticket agent and flight attendant. ANT as an analytical lens can help to illuminate such discrimination by examining the linkages that perpetuate the corporate culture. This is especially effective when non-human actants intersect with masculine technological industries such as airlines. Lohan (2000) admires the unique concept of the actant, especially its non-discriminatory approach to technical and social organization. Relationships are not assumed in advance but translated by empirical investigation. Feminists find this useful in ‘studies of technology where the borderline between what is “technical” and what is “social” is frequently also a gendered border between the masculine and the feminine’ (Lohan 2000: 904).

Since ANT explores how non-humans and humans attempt to enroll one another, it opens up a view as to how material actants commonly present in organizations help or hinder gender discrimination – items such as heavy engine repair tools, pay equity policies, financial rationalization strategies, or the size of an aeroplane galley may all contribute to punctualized actor-networks. This means that heterogeneous humans, objects, documents, skills and technology can ‘align together to produce a relatively stable but dynamic network in spite of contradictions and oscillations’ (Hunter and Swan 2007: 405). Thus, ANT focuses on how human actors and non-human actants associate to produce a durable (but ultimately temporary) alliance. Knowing how the actor-network has been constructed may expose how it may be deconstructed.

ANT searches through less-formalized processes where discrimination may be hidden – what ANT literature labels a black-boxed process (Hunter and Swan 2007). A feminist-adjusted ANT could be useful in explaining how particular management strategies become punctuated over a long period of time – for example, how networks convince female directors to reproduce the nested glass ceiling by apparently contributing to their own discrimination, prompting Fitzsimmons (2010: iii) to declare that ‘skirts in seats aren’t enough’. ANT researchers focus on micro-materials that can reveal macro-strategies, such as the use of images to give the appearance of a self-evident fact (e.g. displaying the logo of ‘Canada’s Best Diversity Employers’); the use of inscription devices (e.g. stock charts in an earnings report showing a colourful line spiking up towards ‘shareholder value’); or repeated stories (e.g. ‘off-colour’ jokes at speeches given to mostly male business dinner audiences); in short, ‘the drawing together of discursive and material elements to enrol a large and diverse group of allies essential to the acceptance of a claim’ (Whelan 2001: 566). According to Whelan (2001: 548), ANT has the ‘seeds of a useful theory of power’ describing the way in which actors are defined and associated with one another. And in a world where CEOs claim to represent the views of all the bits and pieces of an organization, ANT also permits ‘an explanation of how a few obtain the right to express and to represent the many silent actors of the social and natural worlds they have mobilized’ (Callon and Law 1982: 224).

As indicated earlier in this paper, the rendering of organizational culture and historiography suffers from the positivist penchant to claim steady advances – an unfolding of events leading to a superior end state (Booth and Rowlinson 2006; Burrell and Morgan 1979). A preference to follow actors challenges the less helpful assumptions of sociological positivism, assuming instead that organization (and gender) is socially constructed knowledge where actants seek to enroll others in satisfying their interests. These actants have been good enough to leave breadcrumbs for us to follow, in the case of Air Canada over a period of 75 years.

Conclusion

ANT has emerged as an influential approach to studying the social. ANT is useful in providing the ability to apply insights to storytelling and to empirical studies of technologies, power and actor-networks. The theory can be useful not only in STS, but also in feminist and organization studies generally, and we attempt in this paper to find common ground between the views of feminists and the views of ANT theorists. It would be good to get beyond ‘words battling words’ in the paradigm wars (Aldrich 1988: 24). As Latour (2005: 89) poetically describes, when you enter a construction site you experience an ‘exhilarating feeling that things could be different, or at least that they could still fail.’ So it is that the heterogeneous manager cannot be certain that masculinity in the company will continue to work as predicted. Punctualization is always precarious and there is some evidence that the ‘other’ has begun to push back.

Common themes in feminist and ANT literature dispute claims that science is a purely rational activity based on objectivist themes of realism, positivism, determinism and quantitatively based ‘scientific methods’. After-ANT scholar Susan Leigh Star (cited in Whelan 2001) outlines further commonality between feminism and mainstream STS: both emphasize the role of social context; both are interested in critically examining black boxes; and both value multiple viewpoints in knowledge-making. Common ground for feminism and ANT is also influenced by a desire to ‘deconstruct dualisms’ (Whelan 2001: 552) such as human/non-human and masculine/feminine. As Haraway (1994: 61) puts it, critical approach is about ‘a certain kind of negativity’, a commitment to show an alternative for reified masculinity. Let’s return to the cat’s cradle (Haraway 1994: 69):

I seek a knotted analytical practice, one that gets tangled up among these three internally nonhomogeneous, nonexclusive, often mutually constitutive… webs of discourse… It is a game that requires heterogeneous players, who cannot all be members of any one category… Cat’s cradle is about patterns and knots; the game takes great skill and can result in some serious surprises. One person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands; but the cat’s cradle figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players, who add new moves in the building of complex patterns.

ANT theorists will recognize the principle of re-enrolment, even as it applies to their own theory (if one can own a theory). An expanding ‘ANT and After’ literature can be adapted to be used as an additional lens for feminist critique. If we are to understand past events it will be useful to reassemble all the actants and their associations that have contributed to a gendered and punctuated actor-network. ANT demystifies the organization. It simplifies and renders transparent the power of the powerful. Ultimately, the concept of translation is a potent feature of ANT for the study of gender discrimination, and in explaining the remarkable resiliency of masculine dominance at Air Canada in the CEO position and on the board of directors.

This paper has explored some of the advantages of a critically historical ANT as a way to achieve a level of fusion between ANT and feminist thought. In doing so, we recognize that our research problems will always be historically situated. We believe that it is a limiting and dangerous issue that ‘management scholars are socialized… early in their careers and they come to view knowledge of the past as neutral and universal; as opposed to situated and contextual’ (Weatherbee and Durepos 2010: 6, original emphasis). A critically historical ANT can expose hidden gender bias at Air Canada, and can be used in other research projects to overturn myths and false accounts, and expose the marginalization of non-managerial actors.

We are promoting a hopeful alliance between feminism and ANT – a way to make sense of the past without the burden of realist and linear thinking. The natural scientists who see ANT as ignorant and subversive have rather overstated their case. The glass ceiling is a boundary that can be breached if we understand how human and material agencies create durable alliances by enrolling one another into their networks. Just as Haraway (1985: 192) takes ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries’, we can imagine networks with a different ordering of the past, and use this information to create a different future.