Gender and the Public Sector: Professionals and Managerial Change

Citation

Linstead, A. (2005), "Gender and the Public Sector: Professionals and Managerial Change", International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 383-384. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513550510599283

Gender and the Public Sector: Professionals and Managerial Change is a welcomed companion for anyone studying, teaching or conducting research on gender, managing the professions and managing change in the public sector. This multidisciplinary book draws from social policy, sociology, philosophy and critical management. As the first book on gender in the Routledge Advances in Management and Business Studies, this edited collection bridges established thinking in the public sector and critical thinking across the areas of gendered change, management and the professions and draws on the editors' independent expertise in these areas. Although managerial and institutional changes have been widely debated in mainstream literature, the gendered nature of these changes has remained a specialist area, and this book brings the importance of gender into mainstream consideration.

Barry, Dent and O'Neill's beautifully produced collection of works will make significant inroads into the study of gender in public sector organizations. Moreover, practitioners and managers will not be disappointed: many of the chapters draw on extensive empirical evidence to present the perceptions and lived experiences of public sector professionals. Are they talking about you? Maybe not, but they might as well be. The dramatic changes in the public sector in recent years have changed the face of management, and these have had lasting implications for the nature and role of management, the individual career and our lives as men and women in public sector organizations. Gender and the Public Sector examines such changes, for example New Public Management, and how these changes influences public sectors across the UK, France, Greece, India, South Africa and Sweden. The specific contributions focus around three key themes:

1. 1.

   In Part One, “Contexts and networks”, Janet Newman kicks off the book with her analysis of a central debate on governance and New Labour and the influence on the politics of diversity; Trudy Honour, Jim Barry and Sneha Palnitkar explore gendered states, highlighting specifically issues if political mobilisation and policy and process; Jenny Owen discusses health and welfare management, and in particular management development, in South Africa; and Mike Dent concludes Part One by exploring gender, welfare regimes and the medical profession in France and Greece.

2. 2.

   Part Two, “Managing professional work”, Stephen Whitehead discusses the notion of the “professional manager” in relation to the ontology of masculinity raising issues of identity work of the professional manager; Elizabeth Berg's research on women combining employment and mothering in bureaucratic organizations is presented; Hans Hasselbladh and Martin Selander explore plural frames of work in public sector organizations; Joanna Brewis critically investigates women's experiences of managing the new public services; Ann Young examines middle managers in the health care and how they use competing metaphors of business and care; and to end this section of the book Heather Höpfl considers nurses as “ministering angels” in relation to their “virtuous profession”.

3. 3.

   Part Three of the book explores specific issues of “Identity and biography”: John Chandler presents his analysis of the gendered narratives of the management of residential care homes, which has been under‐explored in business and management reflects the diversity of empirical contexts presented in the book; and Deborah Kerfoot ends the book with a rich and insightful chapter that explores gender in relation to the transgression of professional identities.

This wide‐ranging collection reflects the broad research interests in the public sector in business and management and its diversity is a key strength. Unlike many texts I have seen on change in the public sector, the critical edge of many of the chapters creatively bring together literature from across the social sciences in new ways. The book reminds me as an academic woman how far we have come in our research and theorising on gender in organizations but how far we, as scholars, managers, professionals, workers, political campaigners, have to go to make real differences for our organizational lives. Gender and the Public Sector contributes to the advancement of writing gender into mainstream arenas and it is the work of the contributors that reassures me that gender not only still matters but is as pertinent today as it as always been.