Suchergebnisse

Chapter 1: Introduction- Gendering the Everyday in the UK House of Commons: Beneath the Spectacle -- Part I: Conceptualising and Researching Gendered Parliaments -- Chapter 2: 'Fleshing out' Feminist Discursive Institutionalism -- Chapter 3: The Eyes Have it -- Part II: Gendering the UK House of Commons -- Chapter 4: The Discursive institutions of the UK House of Commons: An Introduction to the Empirical Chapters -- Chapter 5: MPs: 'Players' and 'Problems' -- Chapter 6: The House Service: 'Servants' and 'Stewards' -- Chapter 7: Parliamentary Researchers 'Second Brains' and 'Tea Getters' -- Chapter 8: Discussion: Beneath Mainstream Approaches.

AbstractGender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic methodology to bring important contributions to understand the reproduction of gender, gender hierarchies, gendered relations, and their redress in parliamentary settings. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the U.K. House of Commons and the European Parliament and finds distinctive gendered cultures and norms in debating and working parliaments. Focusing on one dimension of this distinction—the parliamentary debating chamber—the article argues that parliamentary ethnography provides novel empirical insights into this conceptual distinction and into empirical understandings of gendered debating and working parliaments. While parliamentary ethnography is a fruitful innovation, the article discusses the drawbacks of this methodology and provides feminist reflection on ways to make it more accessible.

Gender and politics scholars are conceptualising parliaments as workplaces, drawing on feminist institutionalist frameworks. Ethnography is a promising methodology that can be used to capture how gender is repeated over time. Ethnography offers scholars opportunities to explore heterogeneity by analysing actors as multiply positioned – with and through institutional rules – and affords attention to ambiguity and contradictions by examining everyday ambivalences. Furthermore, it can nuance conceptions of agency, treating agency as in process rather than as static. Despite these potentials, this article finds that the pairing between ethnography and institutionalism has been problematised and considers these concerns in depth. The diversity of feminist institutionalism across epistemological leanings makes for an important reflexive exercise about what ethnography can offer and how it can be practised. More specifically, the article argues that feminist institutionalism can be thickened with ethnography and by drawing on Butler's concepts of interpellations, undoing and iterability.

Recruitment to key positions in institutions can be viewed as one way to introduce strategic reforms; however, little research has been conducted as to the effectiveness of the practice within parliaments. Even less has been written about the recruitment practices for non-elected parliamentary actors. Applying a feminist discursive institutionalist analysis, this article highlights the main discourses prominent in discussions around the recruitment to the Clerk of the House of Commons in 2014. It is argued that there are three discourses that rhetorically de-gendered career structures in the UK House of Commons, while two discourses explicitly gendered the applicant to the position of Clerk. The article discusses the broader significance of these insights for analysing parliaments as gendered workplaces, and for member engagement with parliamentary administrations.

Abstract
The objective of feminist institutionalist (FI) political science is to expose institutions that perpetuate gender inequalities. The nature of these entities and the best strategies for studying them remain hotly debated topics. Some scholars identify ethnography as a valuable methodology for FI research. However, novices to this methodology might need help navigating it. In this theory-generating article, we aim to bridge the gap between different approaches to FI and ethnographic methodologies. We propose ethnographic approaches suitable for scholars who see gendered institutions as real entities that constrain and enable human practices, as well as those who perceive them as sedimented clusters of meanings. We illustrate our arguments using a partially fictional empirical example, inspired by findings from our own ethnographic research. We hope that this article will promote increased engagement, both theoretical and empirical, with ethnography among FI scholars.