Masculinity and the Making of Trans-Canada Air Lines, 1937-1940: A Feminist Poststructuralist Account

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Mar 2006 by Mills, Albert J, Mills, Jean Helms

Abstract

This paper presents a feminist poststructuralist account of the role of men and masculinity in the development of Air Canada, specifically in its early years and the development of the organization's culture. It is argued that an understanding of the development of gendered practices (i.e., the development of male associated or dominated work) over time can help us to understand and identify how such practices develop, are maintained, and also change.

JEL classifications: J71, M14, N72, N82

Keywords: Masculinity, Organizational culture. Identity, Gender, Business history

R�sum�

Le pr�sent article est un compte-rendu f�ministe et poststructuraliste du r�le que les hommes et la masculinit� ont jou� dans le d�veloppement d'Air Canada et, particuli�rement, dans l'institution de sa culture sexiste. L'auteur soutient que la connaissance de la fa�on dont cette culture s'est institu�e (celle qui fait croire que les postes d'Air Canada sont r�serv�s aux hommes) peut nous permettre de mieux comprendre et de mieux d�terminer les m�canismes de son �tablissement, de son maintien et de son �volution.

Mots cl�s : Masculinit�, Culture d'organisation, Identit�, Genre, Histoire d'affaires

Within the literature on gender and organizational analysis, organizational culture has been identified as an important arena for the development and generation of discriminatory practices (Aaltio & Mills, 2002; Gherardi, 1995; Wilson, 2001). While a number of studies, including the Canadian Royal Commission on Equity in Employment (Abella, 1984), have explored contemporary aspects of the relationship between gender and the culture of an organization (Wilson, 1997), few have analysed that relationship over time (Morgan, 1988). The importance of the latter approach, we contend, is that it allows researchers to track not only the manifestations of discriminatory practices, but also to track how they develop and change over time (Helms Mills & Mills, 2000). In this way, we can gain an understanding of the processes of change that are central to the problem of redressing discrimination at work, with the overall aim of developing policy suggestions and anti-discrimination change strategies. Within that framework, we have embarked on a feminist poststructuralist study of selected companies, including Air Canada; drawing on extensive archival materials, existing published histories, and interviews with former employees. In this paper, we focus on the foundation and early years of Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA), the predecessor of Air Canada, and the role of men and masculinity in the shaping of the airline's culture and the restricted hiring of female employees.

Studying Organizational Culture over Time: From Theory to Method

The study outlined in this paper was undertaken, or "crafted," within the framework of postpositivist qualitative methods (Prasad, 2005) and in particular, the feminist poststructuralist approach. From this perspective, we have not set out to document historical facts so much as "interrogate" historical documents to see what they tell us about the conditions under which gendered processes and practices develop (Weedon, 1993). This means that we do not simply accept historical statements (whether corporate documents, or interviews) as representations of simple or underlying truths, but rather as clues to dominant discourses that create the conditions under which certain understandings (e.g., discrimination) are possible. To take an example from a positivist historiographie approach, Philip Smith's (1986) history of Air Canada can be read as an account of the key events in the life of the airline. A feminist poststructuralist reading, on the other hand, will analyze the work as a selected marshalling of detail (e.g., stories of key managers and their handling of certain events) to understand how the process serves to favour certain types of masculinity (e.g., the heroic pilot) over other types of masculinity (e.g., the deft steward) and most types of femininity (e.g., the matronly secretary). This reading will also analyze the ways that this process contributes to our understandings of the present (i.e., reading history to understand the present).

In developing a feminist poststructuralist approach we have developed and utilized a number of key concepts for studying the development of organizational culture over time. Centrally, we draw on Smircich's (1983) notion of organizational culture as a root metaphor for making sense of the configuration of practices and processes that influence behaviour in organizations. This means that we do not view the culture of an organization as a concrete entity, as some thing that the organization has (Schein, 1992), but rather as set of experiences that influence how people feel about the organization and who they feel is an appropriate or privileged part of it. We view gender as socially constructed (Mackie, 1987) rather than fixed or essential. Here we view historical materials as contributing to our understanding of the notion of men and women, rather than a descriptive record of men and women. In terms of developing a history, we suggest that a potentially fruitful way of studying time is not as a continuous process but as a series of discrete periods of time. Drawing on Mills' (2006) notion of junctures, we argue that "the history of a given organization should not be seen as a series of progressively changing events but as a series of key time frames, which shape how things were viewed at a given period of time" (Mills, 2006, p. 12). In other words,