title: Career experiences in Australian sport organisations: formal and informal effects of gender
Creators: name: O'Shea, Michelle
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2017
Subjects: subject: Sports career
subject: Gender in sport
subject: Australian sport organisations

description: Through an analysis of formal and informal sport organisation recruitment and selection, promotion and retention practices, this study investigated women’s and men’s gendered sport management career experiences by answering the primary research question: How do women and men in sport organisations interpret the effects of gendered practices on their career trajectories? I used a Foucauldian poststructural feminist lens to frame my research. With an emphasis on critiquing the gendered construction of power relations, this theoretical framework enabled me to unearth, problematise and understand the fluid and complex power relations shaping women’s lived experiences of sport management. Using this theoretical framework allowed my research to reveal the hidden dimensions of gendered power. This approach contributes to moving debates in the field of sport management away from understandings which have strengthened the idea that ‘gender is … “natural,” biological, and essential’ (Martin 2004, p. 1261) by considering how gender is the ‘historico-material product’ of practices (Bruni, Gherardi &amp; Poggio 2005, p. 5) enacted within and across diverse structural, cultural and interactional contexts. The research used a multiple case study approach with four Australian national and state sport organisations. My analysis of the study organisations’ human resource management (HRM) policies and practices revealed how formally documented and managerially endorsed recruitment and selection, promotion and retention policies were not always enacted in sport workplaces. Instead, there were ambiguities, tensions and gaps between formally espoused hiring and promotions policies, managers’ interpretations of those policies, and women’s and men’s experiences of the practices routinely enacted to recruit, promote and retain sport personnel. How sport organisation employees interpreted and experienced these disparities provided me with a unique window into the complexities of how, in the case organisations, gender was understood and enacted, and how gender power relations differentially and inequitably shaped women’s and men’s sport management careers. The case organisations’ managers typically interpreted that gender inequities were no longer an organisational concern. Managers suggested that recent organisational growth and the ongoing professionalisation of HRM processes ensured that objective and gender neutral practices guided the appointment and promotion of sport personnel so that the best person for the job was appointed, and that employee career development and promotional prospects were based on merit. Where inequitable practices were acknowledged, managers justified their occurrence through their claims that gendered hiring and promotion decisions were unintentional and natural. By constructing organisational practices in these ways, managers’ interpretations reinforced the belief that gender inequities had been addressed and as a result, gendered recruitment and selection, promotion and retention practices remained unacknowledged and unopposed, and their legitimacy was normalised. This dissertation calls into question the naturalness and inevitability of these inequities, and of the gender relations that construct and reproduce them. It does so by finding out how power is exercised, and how women’s and men’s sport management careers are negotiated and regulated through sport organisation recruitment and selection, promotion and retention practices. As a result of these understandings, I establish a unique material and conceptual space where gendered practices and their differential effects on women’s and men’s sport management careers can be revealed, challenged and revised so that more equitable sport workplaces might be imagined and realised.