Marlina Davidson - Organizational Tensions & Conflict

In Ashcraft and Trethewey’s (2004) article titled Developing Tension: An Agenda for Applied Research on the Organization of Irrationality, identify four recommendations for understanding organizational settings and tensions including that “pivotal axes of social identity—such as gender, race, class, age, and sexuality—are crucial to the negotiation of organizational tension” (p. 177).

Thinking about this fourth recommendation from Ashcraft and Trethewey while reading Morril’s (1991) article on conflict management among corporate executives, I thought of the following questions:

1)How might one’s social identity serve to better articulate the experiences of conflict management as well as the paradoxes, contradictions, and irony of being a corporate executive?

2)Could the organizational tensions that occurred between corporate executives be gendered in ways that helped explain or understand the customs of conflict management among corporate executives differently?