CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Jones, Monika Marie |
|---|---|
| Title | Visions of Professional: Traveling Ideas, Gendered Globalization and the Corporate Workplace in Hungary |
| Summary | ABSTRACT This thesis situates women’s experiences with professional presentation in the corporate workplace into the on-going debate about heterogeneity, globalization, and in the ways in which imported ideas are localized. Building on Appadurai’s notion of disjuncture in the global economy (1996), I argue using comparative ethnographic research at two corporations in post-state socialist Budapest, Hungary that corporate brands and values are localized at the level of the imagination. I use a feminist Foucaldian lens to illustrate how pleasure in the internalization of corporate culture and brands as manifested in attire serves to compensate for institutional inequalities by promoting engagement with fantasies of Western individualism, beauty, and equality. However, the imagination encourages corporeal self-disciplining. I argue that the imagination provides an important point-of-entry into understanding heterogeneity with respect to internalized negotiations of complex, oscillating class and gender power relationships. My research on the use of the imagination by Hungarian professional women in corporations brings a new, nuanced dimension to the debate on whether women are passive recipients or active resisters of top-down patriarchal policy within institutional settings. |
| Supervisor | Cerwonka, Allaine |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/jones_monika.pdf |
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