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Managing Gender: Affirmative Action and Organizational Power in Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Sport. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 1998 by Patricia A. Adler, Peter Adler

For those familiar with the work of Jim McKay, an anthropologist at the University of Queensland, Australia, there is not much news here. Much of this book has been published in varying formats in other locations. Even for those unfamiliar with this scholar's writings, the message here, while important and pertinent to organizational researchers and policymakers, has been told many times before. Thus, we are left with a book that had the potential for making an impact, but by now its mission has been rendered practically obsolete. It is a book, then, whose time has come and passed.

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Professor McKay initially set out to assess how the managers of affirmative action programs for women in sport organizations under the aegis of Australian state and federal governments were faring. Given that the findings of the original study were controversial in Australia, McKay compared the experiences in his country with two other nations, Canada and New Zealand, where there were also affirmative action programs for women in sport. The book begins with a review of the literature on profeminist research generally and on profeminist research and sport specifically. McKay echoes the now oft-heard refrain that at almost every level of the sport world, gender imbalances exist. True, but hardly earth-shattering. In a chapter outlining his theoretical framework, McKay, relying on Connell's perspective, shows how the social constructionist approach can be applied to gender relations in sport organizations. Good, but not exactly innovative. McKay next presents a rather long, highly jargonized treatment of the history of affirmative action in the corporate-managerial state, with particular emphasis on how this has shaped the policies for sport in the three countries under scrutiny. For those unfamiliar with the corporate politics of amateur sport in these countries, this represents a welcomed reference, but it is arcane at best.

Finally, in chapter 4, McKay gets to his own empirical research. He describes the methods he used, consisting mainly of approximately 100 interviews with managers in federal and regional departments for affirmative action in Australian sport, buttressed by a couple of dozen interviews with similarly placed people in Canada and New Zealand. Though McKay calls his technique "in-depth interviews," they only consisted of one-hour tape-recorded conversations. Compared with other qualitative interviews, conducted using a much greater amount of time, rapport, and trust, these can hardly be called in-depth. The resulting data mirror the superficiality of the research relationship. In the remainder of this chapter, which covers one third of the book, McKay presents verbatim quotes that reiterate heretofore known ideas about women in management positions, including time management, childcare, discrimination, harassment, power, and status. In sport, as elsewhere in organizations, women are getting the short end of the stick. The women's anecdotes are telling, the reality abhorrent, and the news passe.

Chapter 5 is a rather straightforward presentation of men and women managers' opinions about affirmative action. Not surprisingly, most men did not come out strongly in favor of affirmative action, some were downright hostile, and many perceived it as a fairly benign "women's issue." Chapter 6 tackles how the mass media represented affirmative action issues. We learn that male journalists in Australia exhibit an antifeminist stance, feeling that women's liberation has gone too far in trying to crash through that last of male bastions, sport. Chapter 7 gets a little personal, as McKay seems to be on a vendetta against those who have tried to censure him. In 1992, he submitted a report about women executives in Australian sport to the Applied Sports Research Program, which was waylaid by the executive director of the commission due to "factual errors" in the report. McKay responded with a detailed rebuttal, outlining why these accusations were incorrect and defending the academic integrity of his study. The purpose of including that account in this book is obscure, however, other than to allow McKay to tell his side and to illustrate the extent to which the sport establishment still considers profeminist attitudes questionable. In the concluding chapter, McKay is not optimistic about affirmative action policies. As many have argued before, affirmative action programs are doomed as long as the structures of inequality remain in place.

Aside from revealing little that has not been said before, the book has several typographical, grammatical, and stylistic errors. McKay is a respected scholar who has shed light on social inequalities in Australian sport. The corpus of his work remains important, and to the extent that this book brings his message to a largely American audience, then it is worthwhile. As a contribution to the discourse on organizational change and affirmative action policies we have far too many other places to turn to make this book a valuable investment for one's library.

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Managing Gender: Affirmative Action and Organizational Power in Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Sport. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 1998 by Patricia A. Adler, Peter Adler

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