”Enbart några meter från personer med djupa kunskaper” : En studie av makt, kön och status inom universitets kärn- och stödorganisation.

• Main Author: Harinen, Henna
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Umeå universitet, Umeå centrum för genusstudier (UCGS) 2020
• Subjects: Higher education; general staff; gendered organisations; respectability; class; gender; inequality regimes; Gender Studies; Genusstudier
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-173006

Surprisingly few studies have been performed regarding gender and general staff in higher education, a workforce that in Sweden is called stödpersonal, meaning supportive staff (my translation). Academic staff is called kärnpersonal, meaning core staff (my translation). The academy is a hierarchical organisation where core staff holds the decisive power of the means and the goals of the organisation. These terms can be seen as symbols for gendering processes, constructed by what Acker (1990) calls a gendered organisation. There is a gender imbalance between the categories, for example at Umeå University, 77 percent of those who work with administrative tasks are women (i.e. supportive staff), and 68 percent of the professors are men (i.e. core staff). In order to study the experiences of the supportive staff, qualitative interviews were made with members of the supportive staff at Umeå University. The study shows that supportive staff experiences a lack of participation in meetings and working teams, and it also experiences that the core staff doesn’t recognise its competence. The supportive staff also sees that there are few possibilities to career development. Supportive staff in this study might not know how to improve its situation, but it knows that in order to reach respectability and valuation (Skeggs, 1997, 2014) it should create a distance to an image of a secretary, a subject position that is created for the supportive staff by the university. A secretary represents a woman without a decisive power of her own; she is also a generalist, which is not meritorious in an organisation where the highest power is held by people with high level of specialist knowledge.