Organisational contestation over the discursive construction of equal employment opportunities for women in three Victorian public authorities

The central arguments in this thesis rest on two premises. Firstly language and context are intimately bound up in the social construction of workplace gender inequalities. Secondly, organisational understandings and management of women's access to employment opportunities and rewards in modern bureaucratic organisations are constituted through discourses or systems of organisational knowledges, practices and rules of organising. This study uses the concept of discourse to account for the productive and powerful role of knowledge and language practices in constituting the organisational contexts and meanings through which people make sense of and experience complex organisations.