Content area
Abstract
A plethora of popular self-help books giving advice to women on achieving success in managerial careers are currently available. The authors of these popular culture books describe their purpose as the depiction of the reality of organizational life for women. The books' persuasive messages can influence the reader's expectations and interpretations of events in the organizational setting. Two rhetorical traditions have the potential of influencing the content and style of these books: the contemporary women's movement and the genre of self-help.
This study analyzed twenty-eight of these popular books published between 1970 and 1979 using the fantasy theme analysis and rhetorical vision method developed by Ernest Bormann.('1)
One dominant construction of social reality, the Female Manager Vision, was discovered in twenty-three books. The authors of books representing the Female Manager Vision make gender the ultimate factor in giving meaning and coherence to events. Within this vision the locus of control for success or failure as a manager is placed in the individual woman. The organizational setting is characterized as replete with managerial opportunities for women. All any woman needs to do to become successful is overcome the deficiencies of her socialization, learn to play the business game, and apply the rules the authors offer for the handling of difficult situations. All of the stock scenarios of the vision center around the successful handling of the gender of the manger. The overriding rule of this vision is that a woman must never forget that she is a woman, but she should never be too much of a woman lest she fit the negative female stereotypes.
The writers made similar rhetorical choices in their presentations adding a unique interpretation to the vision. The writers employ the strategies of personal testimony as the source of the dramas, casting the reader as the protagonist in the dramas, the use of the analogies of business as a game and as a man's world, promulgation of rules with accompanying dramatizations of right and wrong, and the depiction of a real vs. a mythical world of female characteristics.
As a touchstone for comparison the dominant vision was compared to a minor vision, the Manager Vision, which emphasizes the competent performance of the defined functions of a manager as the key to success, and the research on women and management reported in a scholarly style. The research perspective describes a less optimistic view of female manager success and argues that major structural changes in the organization and society are required for significant numbers of women to achieve managerial success. The comparison to the alternative social realities also suggests that for women who participate in the Female Manager Vision, the social reality is filled with contradictions and self-defeat.
The analysis of these popular self-help books reveals that although the women's movement may have created the books' audience, the ideas of the women's movement have made no impact on the content and style of the books. Instead the books conform to the conventions of the self-help genre.
('1)Ernest G. Bormann, "Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 58 (December, 1972), pp. 396-407.
