Admiration, Authenticity and Ambivalence: Gendered Processes of Identification in MBA

Student

Dr Elisabeth Kelan

Picking a Role Model as Enacting Gender MBA as an opportunity to

play with potential selves Building ‘provisional

selves’ based on various role models (Ibarra 1999)

Men tend to chose men as role models, while women chose men and women as role models (Eriksson-Zetterquist 2008, Sealy & Singh 2006)

Gender, Leadership and Queen Bees Leadership as post-heroic and

feminine (Fletcher 2004) The double bind of women in

leadership (Gherardi 1995) Ideal worker (Acker 1990) and

the gender subtext (Bendl 2008, Benschop & Doorewaard 1998)

Women evaluate other women negatively (Ellemers et al 2004)

Multifaceted relationship that women have with other women (Mavin 2006, 2008)

Methodology & Methods

Discourse analysis (Potter & Wetherell 1987) Identification of interpretative repertoires as units

of sense-making Resources which individuals use to talk about role

models Based on 20 in-depth interviews with MBA

students Students were asked to bring a picture of a

person they admire and would aspire to be

The Self Made Authentic CEO/FounderLuke:

But he's, he got a football scholarship to school (...) and started up a load of car dealerships. And made kind of five or six hundred million dollars by the time he was fifty, and then decided to start a [racing] team (...) it's that sort of completely self-made, incredibly sharp, but rather, you don't know, you don't realise it when you first meet him, but actually when you start interacting with him, it's just that ferocious, he's got very high levels of integrity, you know, what you see is what you get.

Being self-made

Starting from no-where

The Self Made Authentic CEO/FounderPeggy: I have a tremendous respect

actually for Oprah Winfrey. Um, who is someone who came from, um, a very unusual background to become, to come into the position she's in. And that's the kind of thing that in my mind can only happen in America. Um, it would be almost impossible to do in Canada or in Europe. Um, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for someone who came from a very poor background where education was not necessarily valued and who as able to basically make herself into something quite different and be quite successful at it.

Unusual background

Success and celebrity status

The Self Made Authentic CEO/Founder

8 interviewees picked CEOs and 6 a founder of a business (some overlap between the two)

Alpha male model of success seems to continue to exist but women seem also able to perform it

Ambivalent Role Models

Caroline:Because she's, she's the type, she's very female in a sense, she's very much a woman. But she knows what she wants and she gets it. (...) She really knows what she's talking about. And she's got that whole sort of poise about her, that I really, I really admire her.

‘But’ used to combine contradicting elements

Ambivalent Role ModelsHelen:

I like the fact the she’s, um, she’s got quite a reputation for anarchy in the industry in that she, um, (.) she founded The Chocolate Society and then left under a cloud and for various reasons and I quite like that. But she also has a family and children and so she seems to have a good balance, but, um, I’m not sure if that’s true, she might paint a very different picture in person.

Being successful and having children

Ambivalent Role ModelsEmma: And I think her career is an

interesting one (name of company), the luxury good areas, is particularly fascinating, because it just seems so irrational and rational at the same time. (...) Just, the fact that, you know, why girls want to spend two thousand or five thousand pounds on a Hermes bag or something, you know, it doesn’t make sense but yet it, it speaks to something inside all of us, you know, we all want to live in this dream world or something. And people who can make you feel that way, I think there’s something special about those people.’

Combining the rational and the irrational

Ambivalent Role Models All male students selected male role models Women’s choices much more diverse

Five women selected female role models Three women selected female and male role models Two women selected male role models

Women’s descriptions of role models more ambivalent Few men used similarly ambivalent and contradicting

constructions of their role models Women who identified with men showed a similar

ambivalence Women as role models have to fulfill a variety of

contradicting parameters

Discussion & Conclusion Men seems to draw their role models from a

more limited pool (men only) than women (men and women)

The ideal of the self-made authentic CEO/founder was dominant

Role models that departed from the hegemonic masculine norm was at risk of being constructed as more ambivalent

Contact Details

Dr. Elisabeth KelanDepartment of Management

King’s College LondonElisabeth.kelan@kcl.ac.uk