Directors of Conscience: Feminism, Foucault and Equal Employment Opportunities in the Public Service

Deborah Jones

Equal Employment Opportunities (EEO) policies and programmes can be seen as  a struggle for the hearts and minds of public servants. They mean a move from organised inequality to organised equality. This re-organisation requires a new kind of public servant ? “equitable” bureaucrats who are required to demonstrate a commitment to EEO principles in their work. Or are they required at least to produce the appropriate rhetoric?

This paper looks at feminism as discourse, as a set of assumptions about what can be said and thought, who can say it, and who has authority as a feminist. How do the micro-politics of feminism work in an organisational context? What are some of the intended and unintended effects of the discourse practices of feminism in bureaucracy? The aim is to present a reading of various practices in EEO policy implementation, drawing especially on the work of Michel Foucault to question the power relationships involved in using bureaucratic processes to introduce equality.