Narrating histories of women at work: Archives, stories, and the promise of feminism

Abstract

This article explores narrative in business history and business histories as a means of understanding the absence and presence of women. We develop the argument that narrative is constructed in the historical research process, and note the implications of this for our understanding of business history as product and practice. We suggest that business historians work with a distinction between stories in description, generated by participants as found in traces of the past, and narration through analysis, created by historians writing in the present. We suggest that business historians can work productively with this differentiation, and that histories will be better able to consider the position of women in both forms of narrative. We conclude with reflections on the nature of the archive and feminist perspectives on history to outline a research agenda that would develop our argument empirically and conceptually.

Keywords:

• Narrative
• organisations
• gender
• feminism
• women

Notes

1. Boulding, Underside of History.

2. See respectively: Thompson, The Making; Burrell, Pandemonium; Jacques, Manufacturing; Jahoda, Employment; Cooke, “The Denial of Slavery”; Decker, “The Silence,” 161–163; Cummings and Bridgman, “Limits,” 253–255; Walby, Patriarchy.

3. Boulding, Underside of History, xiii.

4. Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 188.

5. Gamber, Boulding and Woolf, “A Feminine Past?,” 679.

6. Walby, Future, chapter 3.

7. Decker, “Silence,” 169–170.

8. Schwarzkopf, “What is an Archive,” 1.

9. See respectively: Decker, “Silence”; Rowlinson, Booth, Clark, Delahaye and Procter, “Social Remembering,” 466; Taylor, Bell and Cooke, “Business History,” 162.

10. Woolf, “Feminine Past,” 678.

11. Steedman, Dust.

12. Berkhofer, Great Story, 72.

13. Featherstone, “Archive,” 592.

14. Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise”; Downs, Writing, 84.

15. Kwolek-Folland, “Gender,” 2, 4.

16. Smith, Gender, 131.

17. Czarniawska, “The Styles,” 253–254.

18. Peiss, “Vital Industry,” 219–220.

19. Corn, “Making Flying ‘Thinkable’”; Merryman, Clipped Wings; Jarros, Heroes Without Legacy; Millward, Women in British Imperial Airspace; Barry, Femininity in Flight.

20. Wohl, Republic.

21. Wohl, Republic, 112.

22. Yeager, “Feminist Business History,” 13.

23. Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 190.

24. Scott, Gender.

25. Butler and Weed, “Introduction,” 1–2.

26. Scott, Fantasy, 4–5.

27. Scott, Gender; 113, 123; Poovey, Social Body, 131.

28. Cabrera, “Language,” 35.

29. Stoler, Archival Grain, 185.

30. Acker, “Theory of Gendered Organization.”

31. Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 199.

32. Ezzamel, and Willmott, “Registering the ‘Ethical’,” 1021.

33. Walby, Future.

34. Gabriel, Storytelling.

35. Coffey and Atkinson, Making Sense, chapter 3.

36. Czarniawska-Joerges, “Narration or science?,” 26–28; Coffey and Atkinson, Making Sense, chapter 5.

37. Boje, “Storytelling Organization,” 107.

38. Gubrium, and Holstein “Narrative Practice,” 166; Whittle and Wilson, “Ethnomethodology,” 55–56.

39. White, Tropics, Metahistory.

40. White, Tropics, 121.

41. Collingwood, The Idea.

42. White, Metahistory.

43. Jenkins, History.

44. Vann, “The Reception,” 148.

45. Kellner, “Monsters,” 151–152.

46. Hansen, “Business History,” 2012.

47. Mills, Organization.

48. Calás and Smircich, Woman's Point of View.

49. Prasad, Gender.

50. Blackburn, Union Character, 71.

51. Kwolek-Folland, Engendering, 43, 49.

52. Cockburn, Machinery.

53. Lloyds Bank Archives (LBA) HO/D/Org6, ‘’Report of Sub-Committee on Mechanisation’ to Organisation and Economy Committee, 1931’.

54. Seltzer, “Impact,” 466.

55. LBA HO/St/Wil/7.0, ‘Bonus,’ October 1938; Barclay Bank Archive ( B352/pBB6, “Staff Handbook,” 1935.

56. McKinlay, “Dead Selves,” and “Banking, Bureaucracy.”

57. LBA HO/St/off/5,575, “Staff Transfer,” 5 February 1932.

58. LBA A664, “Male Staff Training,” 25 August 1934.

59. Halifax Bank of Scotland Archive HBOS ACC 2012/012/SH19/02, Tuke, Staff Manager, Barclays, to Dempster, British Linen, “Women Staff,” July 1937; see also Seltzer, “Impact,” 1056.

60. Stovel et al., “Ascription,” 369.

61. Fisher, “Herstories,” 306.

62. Boydston, “Gender,” 570.

63. Ackrill and Hannah, Barclays.

64. Corn, “Making Flying ‘Thinkable’,”; Douglas, American Women; Kolm, “Who Says it’s a Man’s World?”; Barry, Femininity in Flight.

65. Mills, Sex.

66. Acker, Hierarchies; Dye and Mills, Dueling Discourses.

67. Dye and Mills, “Discourses,” 431.

68. See Heller, “Late Victorian,” Heller and Kamleitner, “Salaries.”

69. Denzin, and Lincoln, Qualitative Research, “Introduction.” In the current fourth edition, the editors pursue an increasingly separatist agenda for assessing qualitative research. This stands in contrast to recent calls for the use of mixed methods.

70. Gubrium and Holstein, “Narrative Practice,” 173.

71. Czarniawska-Joerges, “Narration or Science?,” 27; and for the necessary paradoxes of feminist politics of considered by in Scott, Paradoxes.

72. Gubrium and Holstein, “Narrative Practice,” 165.

73. Coffey and Atkinson, Making Sense, 57.

74. Silverman, Interpreting Qualitative Data, 46.

75. Gubrium and Holstein, “Narrative Practice,” 166; see also Coffey and Atkinson, Making Sense, chapter 3.

76. Van Maanen, Tales, chapter 6.

77. Foucault, Order of Things, 352; see also Derrida, Fever, 68, where he similarly understands the archive as a particular space and, more importantly, as an open, infinite promise of all that is known and knowable. For a cautionary note on Foucault’s most abstract definition of the archive, see Osborne, “Ordinariness,” 53; to locate Foucault’s genealogy as a research strategy and methodology, see Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker, “Research Strategies.”

78. Czarniawska, “Four Times Told,” 8.

79. Rhodes and Pullen, “Narratives and Stories,” 584–585.

80. Kondo, Crafting, 303.

81. Jenkins, History?, 7.

82. E.g. Anon. “Archival Census.”

83. Eichhorn, Archival Turn.

84. Rose, Women.

85. Yeager, “Women.”

86. Simpson and Lewis, “Silence,” 1268.

87. Walby, Patriarchy.

88. Woolf, “Feminine Past,” 647.

89. See e.g. Honeyman, “Engendering”; McLeod, “Quality Control.”

90. Walby, Patriarchy.

91. Scranton, “Introduction,” 187.

92. E.g. Woolf, “Feminine Past”; Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 190.

93. Woolf, “Feminine Past”; Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 190.

94. Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise,” 216.

95. Peiss, “Vital Industry,” 241.