Faculty of Humanities (ETDs)
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Item An Exploration of Life and Career Narratives of Black Senior Managers: The Storied Habitus of Career Navigation(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Ramodibe, Refiloe; Canham, HugoThis research located black senior managers within a temporal frame that links them with their families, communities, childhoods, socio-political and economic histories. This location shed new light since it illuminated their lives and careers in new ways that are grounded in history and context. It enabled an understanding of black senior managers as bearing histories that they bring along with them into the workplace. To explore the stories of these senior managers, I conducted in-depth narrative interviews with twenty black men and black women who occupy senior positions within the financial services sector. Accessing these histories through the genre of narrative assisted in showcasing what is enabled by storying one’s life, therefore creating circuits of meaning-making that connect seemingly disparate sites of the personal, historical, social and workplace. At its core then, this project was about storying the early lives of black senior managers by locating them as mostly working class, caught up in the struggles against apartheid for democratisation, as benefiting from the opportunities enabled by the transition to democracy, as entering the white and masculine corporate workplace of the financial services sector, and as reaching and navigating seniority in their organisations. The participant’s narratives were read through the lenses of narrative theory, habitus, the black feminist theory of intersectionality, and critical race theory. The basic assumption of habitus is that the way one acts and behaves is influenced by where one comes from and one’s dispositions, including contextually salient identity categories, such as race, class, and gender. The basis of these theories is the assumption that there might be a difference in how people of varying class backgrounds and black men and women narrate their stories of mobility. The stories told by participants highlighted the role of the senior managers’ habitus in shaping their identities and trajectories. Childhood experiences and parental influences were found to have shaped their later behaviours in navigating their career journeys. Access to mentors and sponsors early on in their careers was found to have provided the senior managers with the capital that allowed them to progress to more senior roles. Refuting the existing narrative that black people move between organisations excessively, senior managers’ tenure illustrated that they stayed in their organisations for longer periods than industry norms. Notwithstanding their tenure, their stories suggest that unaccommodating cultures and unconscious bias remain prevalent in the financial services sector. Organisations that had more black people in senior roles were found to drive the transformation agenda iv more intentionally. The black senior managers understood their role as that of influencing the cultures of their organisations while also paying it forward by driving the transformation agenda. In the process of sharing their life and career stories, the black senior managers articulated their experiences and understanding of themselves, others, and the world. Therefore, not only did the personal narratives enlighten us about the participants’ personal and working lives, but they illuminated how their identities as black senior managers working within the financial services sector were shaped over time. A prominent finding from the study was that while the black senior managers shared similar experiences related to race, their experiences differed in terms of their family backgrounds and schooling experiences in their childhood. Black people’s experiences may be common in certain aspects and different in others. This necessitates the importance of exploring heterogeneity in organisational studies. This study contributes to organisational studies, gender and critical race studies, history and social theory.Item The role of Mzansi Magic’s ‘Makoti, Are You the One’ in facilitating gender discourses(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Vabaza, Ncumisa; Muparamoto, Nelson; Vanyoro, KudzaiisheThe South African Bill of rights prohibits all forms of discrimination based on gender and sex. The government through the National Development Plan encourages stakeholder involvement in the promotion of gender equality. Yet, the experiences of women in various spheres reveal that normative patriarchal socialization persists. This research evaluates the role of local media in facilitating gender discourses that permeate modern-day South African society. This research employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) and critical diversity literacy (CDL) to interpret the dominant gender discourses on the locally produced reality television show Makoti Are You the One? CDA and CDL are used to interpret the representation techniques used to empower and disempower men and women respectively. The research adopts a qualitative research approach, specifically non-participatory observation to comprehend the dynamics in the relationships between the show’s male-female participants as well as the inter-group relationships between female participants on the show. Using discourse, framing and gender theories the study provides an understanding of the techniques used by the media in representing gender, and how these contribute to the co-construction of social meanings assigned to gender. The findings show a persistent imbalance in the representation of gender through local programming, by hegemonically positioning men in superior standing to women who are represented as subjects in their homes and the broader society. These imbalances are contrary to the ideals of gender equality.