Description

With the analysis of power effects which are related to the fabrication of docile bodies and the use of individuals as human resources the study touches the key question of (human resource) management, namely how to transform human potential in actual labor which can be calculated and controlled. This question addresses the fundamental tension between individual and organization. The study closes the research gap on how women who are supposed to be a committed and devoted part of the workforce are fabricated as female human resources while being confronted with contradictory and changing demands in view of workforce participation and family work. The historic case of National Socialism is particularly fruitful as the Nazi era is an extreme example for organizational research. Based on sources from that time, I analyze the discursive fabrication of the deutsche Frau in Nazi Germany, a shifting fabrication through different phases of the Nazi regime. I show that the state acts as top manager of all human resources and elaborate how the state proceeds in organizing them. Yet the tensions and ambivalences of female identity construction, the contradictory processes in which female employees are shaped and shape themselves as well as the finish of deutsche Frau as a human resource are key part of the analysis. By analyzing discursive practices as gendered practices the ambiguities of female identity construction and the (re-)production of the organizational and societal gender order are accentuated. Moreover, I show which subjective and objective power effects are linked to the discursively formed ideal of deutsche Frau. In the study the analysis of sources from the Nazi era is combined with the one of the political, economic and institutional context. The institutional context is highly relevant as women in Nazi Germany were being organized in the total organizations of the Third Reich, where they were confronted with a lifelong education according to the ideal of the deutsche Frau. The context forms a territory with a specific topography in which the discourses on deutsche Frau are embedded.

Project Details

Project Type

Dissertation

Subject Group

Law, Economics and Social Sciences

End

2019

Organization

Faculty/Central Institute

Business and Economics

Project Team

Director

Dr. Heike Pantelmann

Publications

https://www.opend.org/dissertation/die-fabrikation-der-deutschen-frau-als-humanressource-im-nationalsozialismus

Researchers

• Dr. Heike Pantelmann

  Current