By Author:
Vanessa Conzon – Boston College
Interviewers:
Lakshita Boora – Michigan State University
Lydia Liu – Michigan State University
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392231174235
1a. Starting with the creative journey of this paper, could you please share how the idea for this paper was conceived, and what were some of the pivotal moments while developing it?
Like many students, I had a general but not specific idea of what I wanted to study for my dissertation. Since my undergraduate years, I have been interested in questions regarding autonomy and control tensions with respect to work. The control of time is a hugely important aspect of this tension, and that helped lead me to examining flexible work policy, which from my view is all about renegotiating who controls workers’ time. But because I engage in inductive methods, it was unclear to me a priori what interesting findings would emerge.
At a pivotal moment, I noticed that the patterning of managers’ responses to the flexible work policy seemed to reflect managers’ gender. This was unexpected, but it ended up being the heart of the paper. Another big moment for me, which occurred through the revision process at ASQ, was deciding to foreground the gender part of the paper. My initial submission focused explicitly on flexible work policies. For various reasons, in the end it concentrated more squarely on gender.
1b. Additionally, how did this journey intersect with your life, and if and how did the insights from your paper influence your research or its path?
Writing this paper helped crystalize what I now consider my general central research interest: how workers’ experiences of autonomy and control are shaped by their social identities (including but not exclusively gender). The paper also shaped my research path by introducing me to a multitude of new literatures, which then sparked other research ideas. For instance, my reading of interactional role theory while developing this paper was extremely influential in how I now think about much of my other research.
Regarding how this paper intersected with other aspects of my life—I want to acknowledge, in line with interactional role theory, which highlights role constraints and resources—that I was very fortunate to benefit from the advice and insights from my advisors at MIT, Erin Kelly and Susan Silbey, particularly from the beginning of data collection through submission of the first version to ASQ.
I also joke to everyone that this paper is my fourth child. I welcomed my first child a few weeks before I began data collection. My second child was born during data collection, and my third child was born during the revision process. During that time, I also finished my PhD and began my job as an assistant professor, all while the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded (I was on the job market in fall 2020!). Writing this paper was a time of great personal and professional growth. I bring up my personal life because graduate school is often a time of many life changes, and I hope my story can serve as one example of how a person can muddle through everything. And again, interactional role theory—acknowledging both constraints and resources from a multitude of roles—shaped my experiences writing this paper.
2a. This study brings in an interesting research setting and a rich dataset. It has multilevel longitudinal data over 26 months of 47 organizational units of a STEM organization, which went through the implementation of a flexible work policy during the time of your study. We are, and are sure that readers are as well, very curious about how you managed data collection as a solo author, especially as you used ethnographic methods in your study.
Ethnography takes a massive amount of time, so I tried to be very organized and intentional with how I spent my time. After it became clear to me something interesting was going on around manager gender and employees’ use of the flexible work policy, I began to keep a detailed sheet tracking my data across various roles, units, and so on, to make sure I was collecting data with sufficient variation. A version of this table is in the paper’s online appendix. This relates a bit to how I approach time management—something I’ll talk more about later.
2b. Did you experience any particular advantages and challenges in using ethnographic methods to explore the implementation of gender equality policies in an organization?
The main contribution of the paper is, I think, only possible because of the method I used. My qualitative work enabled me to identify another mechanism through which gender differences in managers’ responses to policies was generated. This mechanism was fundamentally grounded in people’s day-to-day interactions, which could be observed directly through ethnography. In other words, ethnography provided the advantage of understanding how things unfolded on the ground, which allowed me to advance theory. This is, of course, a commonly recognized methodological advantage of ethnography.
3. One of the paper’s critical findings is the “Equality Policy Paradox.” This paradox reveals that even though women managers are generally supportive of gender equality in the workplace, they end up restricting the application of flexible work policies more than men. You describe a step-by-step process of how the data led you to this finding. Could you please share with readers what that process of emerging themes looked like, and how you arrived at this finding that we now know as equality policy paradox?
In terms of the technical process, I think my data analysis section provides a comprehensive overview, so I won’t bore you by repeating myself here. Instead, I’ll take a slightly different tact and describe, with a focus on the paradox, how it came to be central to the paper through the review process. My hope here is to illustrate how the writing of this paper was in many ways a collaborative effort with the reviewers and editor Forrest Briscoe. The paradox was always in the paper, beginning with my initial submission to ASQ; as I mentioned earlier, it was a big aha moment when I noticed managers’ gender-varied support for the flexible work policy.
The revision process highlighted how central the paradox was to the paper. The review team, particularly after reading my first revision, came to the consensus that the paradox was my core finding. Given this input, I radically restructured the front end of the paper to highlight the paradox during my second round of revisions. I will just add, on a lighter note, that I spent a lot of time with a thesaurus thinking through what to name the paradox—it was difficult to land on something that captured its essence but was also concise!
4. Another form of role-based constraint that you discuss is the perception of formal authority. It is intriguing to see the evidence of deference of employees to their supervisors influenced by the gender of the manager. Was there any other role-based theme or an interesting insight that emerged, but did not make the cut in the final version of this paper?
I think with regards to gender and its relation to roles, the main important themes were captured in the published paper. I will say that my finding is consistent with the experiences of many women I have talked with in many other organizations, and is corroborated by a lot of other research, even though those studies may not focus on role theory explicitly. For example, Carador, Hill, and Salles (2022) found that women managers’ authority is often disrespected, and scholars such as Alice Eagly, Cecilia Ridgeway, and Laurie Rudman have shown that women face backlash from their mere occupation of managerial roles.
5a. Talking about the different versions of this paper, what were some of the most challenging and rewarding aspects for you during the revise and resubmit stages?
One of the reviewers was a big proponent of practice theory, which I was previously unfamiliar with beyond a very high-level understanding. Many of this reviewer’s comments focused on how my data and framing related to practice theory. This was a challenge for me because I had to learn a lot about practice theory to determine if it was the main contributory literature for my study—I determined it was not—and then needed to articulate my reasons for not changing the paper to the reviewer. While this was challenging, it was also unexpectedly rewarding, because I was able to learn a lot more about practice theory’s critiques of more mainstream theories and to become better acquainted with the important work of practice theorists who study gender, such as Silvia Gherardi.
At a higher level, I greatly appreciated the opportunity to think deeply about how various literatures regarding managers’ gender fit together, particularly by comparing the findings from the more administrative data-based studies on managers’ policy implementation and the more experimental work on perceptions of women managers. Additionally, bringing these literatures into conversation with research that adopted the interactional role theory perspective was intellectually satisfying.
5b. As a solo author, do you have any advice you would like to offer to readers, especially young scholars, for navigating the various stages of publishing and becoming an independent researcher?
My best pragmatic advice is to be organized with your time. When I work I am very focused and intentional with what projects I allocate my time to. I adopted this approach after observing many highly productive individuals in my ethnographic research; in fact, I have a paper coming out in Organization Science with Dr. Ruthanne Huising entitled “Devoted but Disconnected: Managing Role Conflict through Interactional Control” where we discuss these individuals—they are what we label “occupied workers.” Relatedly, the book “How to Write A Lot” by Paul J. Silvia was recommended to me by members of the Women of Organizational Behavior writing group. This book provides great advice on intentionally choosing what projects you spend your time on. Specifically, it made salient to me that I had often been spending my time on the easiest item on my to-do list rather than on what was the most necessary (working on that ASQ R&R!).
For earlier-career scholars especially, I think it was important to remind myself constantly throughout this process that I was still learning not only about the relevant literatures but also how exactly the publication process worked. My advice is to embrace a growth mindset (to reference Dweck).
6. With your paper’s significant implications for managers and organizational change, what would you say is the lesson for organizations that are looking to effectively implement some impactful gender equality policies?
An important part of research for me is the translation of academic findings to practical takeaways for managers. As I wrote the paper, I had a running list of such implications; two eventually made it into the paper. The first, which I published in a recent Harvard Business Review article, is the importance of thinking about how actors are interconnected when implementing DEI policies. The second takeaway is roughly the same as the first at an abstract level, but it empirically focuses more on the practicalities of implementing flexible work policies following the COVID-19 pandemic: one needs to think through the interactional implications of such policies. The third practical lesson is sort of implied throughout the paper, but I have not written a more practitioner-oriented piece about it (yet). It is the importance of realizing that women managers’ day-to-day acts are not some sort of crystallized, preconceived set of actions reflecting something “inherent” about women, but rather an upshot of the structural constraints they face. I also want to note that all these practical implications are in line with what previous research has found; in my HBR piece, for instance, I draw connections between my work and that of other DEI scholars.between explanatory depth and clarity. My MIT external supervisor emphasized the art of finding the right granularity level in both diagram creation and data analysis to avoid being overly complex or overly simplistic.
Interviewer bios:
Lakshita Boora (booralak@msu.edu) is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at Michigan State University, studying leadership, teams, and diversity. She utilizes a variety of data (primary and archival) and research methods (such as field studies, experimental research, multilevel modeling, and applied econometrics) to investigate research questions across individual, group, and organizational levels.
Lydia Liu (liuya4@broad.msu.edu) is a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. Her research interests include mood and emotion, motivation and self-regulation, and employee well-being.
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