Bridging Types and Frames in the Organizational (Inter)Act : Type Casting of Female Researchers in Academia

• In this paper we bridge the concepts type (Schutz) and frame (Goffman) to conceptualize misfits in the social intercourse of the academic everyday experiences. We see the combination of type and frame as a way to further elaborate the role concept. This was done by developing an interactional model that illustrates a combination of type and frame in relation to an organizational setting where the (inter)act takes place. The concept (inter)act is used to stress that although people may participate in the same act; this is not necessarily the same thing as role agreement during interaction. Rather, the lack of agreement is the starting point for this paper; we work with the empirical question “Why were we, and our fellow colleagues, treated as women when we were acting as researchers?” The problem we address is how some people in an academic organization confused the idea of woman as a type with the female body, and what consequences this had for everyday social practices. This paper is based on an at-home ethnography (Alvesson, forthcoming), which in our version include both introspection and dialogue around emerging ideas and involves a strong component of re-interpretation.  We suggest that individuals may embrace or reject role-types, connected to a role-frame of expected behavior, in the organizational socialization process. Research as an activity is characterized by both masculine and feminine attributes, but in line with previous writings we see the research organization as gendered; the researcher-type is a man. We have called this type-role the wizard-man, a type that engage in intellectual activity. An alternative type-role is the mother-woman, whose role-frame is in line with key words such as body and caring. In the academic organization studied, there was a blurring between people as abstract (ideal) types and as individuals. In the organizational context, gendering by type casting seemed to be an important aspect of the socialization process. A negative consequence came when doctoral students were equaled to the mother-woman role, since these doctoral students were assumed to take on a role that was not in line with their professional development.

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