Translating Equal Opportunities: Discourse Analytical Findings from Swiss Universities

How does change happen and how can we impact it? (Not only) feminist movements have asked this crucial question for decades. How can we conceptualize and experience gender relations differently, while moving beyond traditional models of work division between men and women? The idea of gender equality forms the horizon in which those questions of social and organizational transformations are deliberated. Depending on the theoretical frames of the chosen scholarly disciplines, processes of change are categorized as matters of politics, management or also social movements. Accordingly, the explanations and understandings of the nature of change vary, and so do the measures regarded as suitable for organizing change processes.

In this paper, we use the ‘translation model of organizational change’ in order to investigate gender equality reforms at Swiss universities. This model has been developed by scholars within so-called ‘Scandinavian institutionalism’. In order to empirically investigate these sense-making processes, we suggest to combine this model with the concept of ‘interpretative repertoires’ borrowed from discursive psychology. Hence, we conceive organizational change as taking place in different loops of translation in which different interpretative repertoires become dominant which make up the range of possible changes. Simultaneously, this range is heavily influenced by gendered institutions that constitute modern work organizations, such as heterosexuality, the public-private divide, or the ‘ideal worker’. Gender equality work is needed to identify those openings within organizations where these constructs can be eroded, and to facilitate to their erosion.
In the following article we will first shed light on gender relations and the status quo of gender equality in Switzerland and at Swiss universities (1.) before we present current research on translating organizational change (2.). Then we develop our conceptual model for analyzing gender equality reforms at universities (3.), give an empirical example of a Swiss university (4.), and conclude by reflecting on the value of our perspective (5.)