infonet-economy

Men in early childhood education (ECE) are subjected to different discourses: while they are facing serious mistrust on the one hand, their otherness to the field is also interpreted as new and potentially innovative on the other hand. This article explores how male childcare workers create and take up different subject positions by drawing on these competing discourses in order to acquire a legitimate position as men in the female-dominated context of Swiss day-care centers. In constructing themselves as professionals they create a subject position that seems to move beyond the gender binary. Analysing the position of the professional in depth, the article first shows how this position is accomplished and then explores how gender unfolds between the lines by infusing professionalism with masculinity.

This book focuses on the concept and role of relational practices as a way to understand, conceive, and study processes of organization, and subscribes to a processual view of organization that, since Weick's seminal book The Social Psychology of Organizing, has turned the study of organizations into one of organizing. More than 30 years later, the field of organizing has increasingly expanded Weick's interpretive framework of sense making, resulting in a rich palette of conceptual frameworks that vary between such diverse processual approaches as complexity theory, phenomenology, narration, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, discourse (analysis), practice, actor-network theory, and radical process theory (Steyaert, 2007). These various theoretical approaches draw upon and give expression to a relational turn that has transformed conceptual thinking in philosophy, literature, and social sciences, and that increasingly inscribes the study of organization within an ontology of becoming.

Forschungsbericht an den Schweizerischen Nationalfonds