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CENTER IN THE MARGINS:
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CENTER IN THE HARGINS:
TEE DEVELOPNENT OE WO_'S STUDIES IN A THAI UNIVERSITY

IRON THREE ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

BY

Shirley Jean Miske

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Teacher Education

1995

ABSTRACT

CENTER IN THE NARGINS:
THE DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN'S STUDIES IN A THAI UNIVERSITY
FROM THREE ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

BY

Shirley J. Miske

This study explores the processes of organizing Center for Women’s
Studies (CWS) in the margins of a regional Thai university from three
perspectives: the structural, the political, and the cultural. These
perspectives view organizations as bureaucracies bent on maintenance and
survival (structural), arenas of competing ideas where conflict pervades
daily life (political), and cultural entities, microcosms of the broader
culture in which they are embedded (cultural).

The researcher utilized an interpretive methodological approach;
The data consist of 50 individual interviews, focus group interviews
with undergraduate students, Thai and English documents from the CWS and
the university and observations of seminars, university classes, and
daily life in the Center. This portrait of Thai women’s studies reveals
professors engaged in training programs with women village leaders,
conducting and encouraging research on women and development, and

occasionally integrating of women's issues into existing courses.

From the structural perspective, CWS professors negotiate the
bureaucracy of the central ministry and the university to carry out
women's studies programs. Loose coupling of the Center to other units
illuminates questions of the impact of women’s studies on the
university. From a political perspective, two cases of organizational
conflict illustrate the ordinary nature of conflict through competition
for limited resources, productive uses of power, and marginalized
discourses competing with the dominant discourse. The cultural
perspective explores women’s studies as a cultural practice in the
university and implications of choices about activism, classroom
teaching, and theory generation for other cultural members, particularly
university students.

Considering the margins and centers of the CWS from three
organizational perspectives reveals enduring dilemmas of women's studies
within the university which cannot be resolved and therefore must be
managed. Key dilemmas include gaining access to resources, negotiating
the bureaucracy, and enacting goals and priorities of women’s studies,
such as training, curriculum development, and theory generation, in the

context of higher education.

Copyright by
SHIRLEY J. MISKE

1995

DEDICATION

In memory of
my mother, Hilda,
and
my sister, Sharon,
whose courage, support and
joie de vivre inspire me still.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Aacaans, professors and administrators, students, staff and
countless other Thai friends and acquaintances made this study possible;
to them I owe a deep debt of gratitude. I am grateful for their
kindness, their candor, for teaching me which questions to ask and for
broadening my understanding of women’s studies and feminisms. Women’s
studies scholars in a number of Asian colleges and universities enabled
me to place this work in a broader international context; working with
them also was a distinct privilege and I wish to express my thanks to
them.

Lynn Paine, chair of my committee, and committee members Doug
Campbell, Rita Gallin, Anna Neumann and Jack Schwille provided
extraordinary support throughout the entire dissertation process. I
count myself among the most fortunate of dissertation writers to have
been able to interact with each of them.

I cannot imagine a finer advisor than Lynn Paine. As a scholar of
education and women’s studies who sees all of life from a comparative
cross-national perspective, she carefully read each draft and then
encouraged me to grapple with complex questions. Her personal care and
concern along with her intellectually engaging questions prompt me to
say that this process was, in many ways, incredibly enjoyable.

Rita Gallin wisely urged me to do this study. She carefully read

my work and offered incisive, always-useful comments about feminisms.

fi

women and development and women’s studies in Asia. Doug Campbell always
was ready to reflect with me on new ways of thinking about the data from
his own sensitive, cross-national understanding of Southeast Asia.
Anna's probing questions pushed me to think more deeply about
organizing, about women's studies, and about whose knowledge is valued
in higher education. Jack's scholarly insights helped me understand the
complexity of international contexts and raised important questions
about national contexts. I was delighted that he and his family visited
me on-site in Thailand and offered their encouragement to me in person.
My special thanks to University of Iowa professor and long-time student
of Thailand, Scott McNabb, for his generous comments on the dissertation
draft and to MSU professor, Chris Wheeler, for his helpful insights.

Sarah McCarthey’s generous gift of the Sarah McCarthey
Dissertation Writing Fellowship to the College of Education enabled me
to write full-time and to complete the dissertation. I am grateful to
Sarah for this kindness, her friendship, and her path—breaking
scholarship that grew out of her own graduate study at Michigan State
University in the College of Education.

To the trustees, staff and members of the Women's Concerns
Committee of the United Board of Christian Higher Education in Asia who
enthusiastically supported my research and under whose auspices I was
able to live in Thailand and conduct this study, I wish to express my
thanks. I am especially grateful to trustees Elisabeth Luce Moore and
Mary Rockefeller for their generous support and affirmation of my work.
Their many kindnesses have been overwhelming and have inspired me and

lifted my spirits on countless occasions.

ifi

A host of friends around the globe supported me throughout the
writing process and kept me focused on the finish line: Lauran Bethell,
sent creative, daily electronic mail messages from Thailand; Martha and
John Butt provided technical and moral support; Saisuree and Kavi
Chutikul befriended me and generously shared cultural and academic
insights; Jan Westrick, Nancy Kroonenberg, Dave Bickel, Jim Handrich and
the Hong Kong cheering section provided words of encouragement and
inspiration at important times; and Michigan State University
colleagues, Naihua Zhang, Benjalug Sookpokakit, Harold Morgan and
countless others offered critical support at different points of the
process. Special thanks to Jeremy Price, who was one step ahead of me
and who mentored, befriended and faithfully cheered me on over the last
eighteen months.

My dear father, Gerald, lovingly supported my adventuresome spirit
through the years, and, more recently, encouraged me through the trying
moments and the triumphs of graduate school. For the sparkle in his
eyes and the affection in his voice as he reports on my work to others,
I will always be grateful. I also appreciate the ways in which my
stepmother, Lorena, and the members of my extended family also
faithfully supported me through this mystifying process of writing “the
book.” To each of you--to family, friends, colleagues, professors--I

extend my heartfelt gratitude.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES.
CHAPTER ONE: THE QUESTION, THE METHODOLOGY AND THE RESEARCHER

Introduction
The Organization of Women’ 5 studies in
International Perspective
Thailand: Women's Experience . . . . . . . . . . .
The Thai Women's Movement, Feminism, and Women's Studies
Genesis and Evolution of the Questions
Methodology .
Research Assumptions
Location
My Choice of Methods
Data Collection Methods
Interviews
Observations
Documentation
Focus Group Interviews
Data Analysis .
Interpreting Data
Organizational Perspectives.
Feminist Critiques of Organizational Theory.
Writing Dilemmas
Overview of Chapters

CHAPTER TWO: TEE SETTING AND THE CENTER: A DESCRIPTION OF
REGIONAL UNIVERSITY’S CENTER FOR WOMEN’S STUDIES

Thai Higher Education.
Regional University.
The Center for Women’ 3 Studies
Emerging Interests in Women’ 5 studies.
The Advent of the Program for Women' 5 Studies.
Organizational Structure and Governance of the CWS
Construction of the CWS Building
Plans to Upgrade the Program to a Department
Content. The Goals and Activities of
the Center for Women’ 5 Studies
Information Gathering and Dissemination
Research . .
Information Center
Training Courses

Lectures, Seminars and Workshops
Publications .

Collaboration and Networking
The University Network
The Community Network.
National Networks
International Networks

Other Social Concerns

Beyond the CWS’s Purview

Conclusions. . . . . . .

CHAPTER THREE: THE STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE:
A TOP-DOWN CENTER AT THE MARGINS . . . . . . . . .

The Thai Bureaucracy

The University within the Thai Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy, Authority and the CWS
Tight and Loose Coupling . . . . .

Loosely Coupled Units: Innovation

without Disturbance—-or Impact . .

Autonomously Setting the Center’ 5 Agenda

Independence and Coordination. . . .

Loose to Tight Coupling: Points of Conflict
Resources in the Environment . . . . . . .
Strategies for Survival at the Margins
Conclusions.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE:
NANEUVERING AT THE MARGINS

Understandings of Power

Case No.1: The Upgrade to a Department:
The Way is not like the Rose.

Discussion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Structures, Functions, Rules and Resources.
The Director.

Case No. Two: The Development Agency
International (DAI) Project.

Discussion. . .
Conceptualizing Gendered Relations.
Conflict and Harmony. .

Symbol of Resistance or Domination?

Conclusions

CHAPTER FIVE: CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS AT THE MARGINS

Cultural Perspectives on Organizations.
Organizational Culture of the CWS
Men in Women’ 3 Studies. .
Doing Women’s Studies “the Thai Way”
Shared and Diverse Conceptions of Women’ 5 Studies
Feminism . .
Definitions of Women’ 5 Studies.
Enacting Women’ 3 Studies.

The Integration of Women’ s ISsues into RU’ 5 Curriculum

Women’ 5 Studies Courses

vi

71
72
73
73
77
78
79
8O
82
82

84

87
94
95
98

99
101
102
104
106
110
114

115
116

119
122
123
131

134
138 .
139
142
145
147

148

148
150
151
152
154
154
156
158
160

.165

Women’s Studies Embedded in Cultural Practices
of Teaching and Learning.
Academic Culture. .
Knowledge Dissemination
Gatekeepers of Knowledge.
Students as Cultural Members.

Challenges to Cultural Assumptions of Sexuality and

Prostitution.

Diffusion or Fragmentation in the Women’s Studies Subculture
or The Center for Women’s Studies is not the Center

of Women’s Studies.
Conclusions

CHAPTER SIX: DILENNAS OE ORGANIZING WOMEN'S STUDIES
AT THE NARGINS.

Three Perspectives on Organizations
Dilemmas of Centers and Margins
APPENDIX A

LIST OF ACRONYMS.

APPENDIX B
LIST OF KEY ACTORS IN THE STUDY

APPENDIX C
LIST OF SAMPLE QUESTIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL INTERVIEWS.

APPENDIX D

DISTRIBUTION OF PROFESSORS INTERVIEWED

ACCORDING TO FACULTY AND CWS AFFILIATION.

APPENDIX E

ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS IN THE FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
AND THE RATIO OF PROFESSORS TO ADMINISTRATORS

APPENDIX F

SAMPLE QUESTIONS FROM FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEWS.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

vfi

.168
.170
.171
.173
.175
.181

.184
.189

.191

.191
.197

.207

.208

.209

.211

.212

.213

.214

FIGURE 1:

LIST OF FIGURES

Structural Arrangement of Regional University.

vfii

47

CHAPTER ONE
THE QUESTION, THE METHODOLOGY AND THE RESEARCHER

Empowering women is a key aim of women's centers
around the world....And though many of these
centers and programs are small, they represent a
voice and provide both hitherto unavailable
laboratories for experimentation and vehicles
for engineering social change. Collectively,
they make a difference.

—-Rao (1991; p. 4)
Introduction

The Center for Women’s Studies of Thailand’s Regional University
(RU) is one center that represents not just one voice but many voices of
Thai women and men.1 The voices call for equality among women and men,
for including women in rural development decisions, and for
incorporating women’s experiences in the academy. At times the voices
are discordant, at times harmonious, and at times they are silenced—-but
collectively, they can make a difference.

In this case study I examine the development of Regional
University’s Center for Women’s Studies (CWS) from three organizational
perspectives. Each perspective--the structural, the political, and the
cultural--illuminates different facets of organizing women’s studies at
the margins of Thai higher education. Examined together, the three
perspectives on organizations highlight dilemmas encountered in

organizing women’s studies. The analysis also offers insight into and

 

1The name “Regional University" and the names of all individuals in this
study are pseudonyms. See Appendix A for a list of acronyms and
Appendix B for a list of key actors in the study.

1

2

raises questions about the organization of women’s studies in a
developing country and internationally.

The CWS is one center of many women’s studies centers around the
world-~centers which, as Rao (1991, p.4) observes, collectively “make a
difference.” This chapter begins with a discussion of women's studies
centers and programs in an international context. I consider
discussions of women's studies from an organizational perspective, and I
note some differences that have been identified between women’s studies
in industrialized and non-industrialized countries. Next, I position
this study within the Thai context, briefly discussing the condition and
position of women in Thailand, the women’s movement and feminism in
Thailand, and the development of women’s studies within Thai higher
education.

Having laid this groundwork, I proceed to discuss both early
assumptions from which I developed my research question and the
evolution of that question. In the discussion of methodology, I
articulate my research assumptions, describe my location in the study
and explain my choice of methods. Then I explain my data collection
methods and the challenges of analyzing the data, including the dilemma
of using western theories of organizations and feminist critiques of
these theories. I close with a discussion of some of the dilemmas I
faced in writing this dissertation and with an overview of the next five

chapters.

The Organization of women's Studios in International Perspective
The enterprise of women’s studies differs in technologically
advanced and developing countries. The differences include the
relationship between women’s studies and women and international

development (WID); whether highest priority should be given to academic

3

research/theory generation or activism; and the use of “gender" or
‘women' as analytical categories (Rao, 1991). Subsequent to the United
Nations (UN) International Decade for Women (1975-85), US and European
scholars devoted greater attention to issues of women and development
(Acosta-Belén and Bose, 1991). Staudt and Jaquette (1983) assert that
in the US WID is grounded in an application of the social sciences,
whereas women’s studies is grounded in the humanities, is more cross-
disciplinary and more theoretical. Women's studies and women and
international development do not necessarily constitute separate areas
of study in European universities; they are differentiated in US higher
education, however (Rao, 1991).

In non-industrialized nations higher education is closely linked
with matters of economic development. The condition of women in non-
industrialized countries not only is linked but cannot be separated from
the colonial experience, from more recent western “modernization”
efforts or from present economic and political incursions into non-
industrialized countries by multinational corporations centered in
technologically advanced wealthy nation—states. Attending to matters of
women and development in countries such as Thailand is synonymous with
women’s studies, not only in research but also in outreach work with
“grass roots” women who suffer the most from inappropriate economic
development activities.

While disagreements about WID and women's studies, activism and
theory generation also are debated within individual countries and
particular institutions, the differences are brought into sharp focus
when viewed in cross-national perspective. This union of or division
between women’s studies and WID constitutes a significant point of
difference between the development of women’s studies in industrialized
and non-industrialized countries. Here I provide a brief overview of

women’s studies primarily in Asia, the US, and Europe.

4

Studies which examine the organization of women’s studies in
higher education in both industrialized and non-industrialized countries
most often focus on the history, structure and design of women’s studies
programs and centers. This literature usually describes the
organizational structure and activities of one center or program within
its national and political context (see, for example, Braidotti, 1993;
Spender, 1978). Other studies describe programs at various universities
in one particular national setting or examine programs within a region,
such as Latin America, Southeast Asia or Europe (see, for example,
Barroso, 1990; Karim, 1993). Descriptions of program design and
structures of women’s studies centers within their political and
national contexts are an important starting point for understanding the
enterprise of women’s studies centers in an international perspective.

Karim (1993) describes gender studies in Southeast Asian
universities within national and intellectual contexts, suggesting that
most gender studies programs began with research centers. The
establishment of university research units on women's issues in 1978 and
1979 marked the beginning of Malaysian women’s studies; by 1991 most
Malaysian universities also had developed undergraduate courses in women
and gender studies. In Indonesia, senior social scientists from
Jakarta's University of Indonesia administer the Yayasan Sri Kandi, a
center for research and publications. Indonesia’s national ministry
also has proposed that each Indonesian university develop its own
women’s studies center to be administered directly by the vice—
chancellor of the university. Karim notes that, under this proposal,
universities are not compelled to develop centers but that this proposal
does offer a “convenient strategy to expand post-graduate research in
Gender Studies” (p. 105). The Philippine Women's Research Collective

and the Institute of Philippine Culture formally established gender

5

studies as a specialized area of research and training.2 Cambodia,

Laos, Singapore, and Burma have not begun gender studies programs in
universities, although Vietnamese social scientists have established the
Centre for Women’s Studies. It is located within the Social Scientists’
Committee and, again, its focus is research.

Just as Karim describes the importance of research in Malaysia and
Indonesia, women’s studies centers in other parts of Asia also focus on
research. Chung and Park (1982) recount that women’s studies were
introduced into Korea through the establishment of the Korean Women’s
Institute at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University in March, 1977. While
research was and is the mission of the Institute, the Institute also
gave birth to women’s studies courses and degree programs at Ewha.3
Chung and her colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, started
the Gender Research Programme, Hong Kong’s first research and resource
center in higher education in the 19805. Through 1994 the university
center continued its emphasis on research, seminars, and conferences.
Under the auspices of the Hong Kong Women's Council, Chung and several
colleagues also began a center for working class women as a “community
approach to feminism in Hong Kong" (Chung, 1991, p. 99).

Women's studies in India grew out of the need to examine the
impact of development processes on women (Mazumdar, 1991). Attention to
research on women and development issues led to the establishment of the
national Centre for Women Development Studies in 1975 and of research
units at institutions of higher education throughout the country
(Chamberlain & Howe, 1995). In Latin America and the Caribbean,

feminist critiques of development paradigms also were key to the

 

2Centers for Women’s Studies in Manila and outlying provinces have
emphasized recovering the stories of Filipina women and also are
actively involved in WID activities.

3 The Korean Women’s Institute also established an Asian Center for
Women’s Studies in May 1995 with a region-wide conference on “Feminism
in Asia.”

6

emergence of women’s studies as a field of academic inquiry in higher
education (Acosta-Belén & Bose, 1991). Women and development issues
became the focus of women’s studies, and activism and outreach went
hand—in—hand.

In contrast, the renascence of feminism and the women’s movement
in the US in the 19603 gave birth to women’s studies as the academic
“arm" of feminism (Gumport, 1987; Stimpson, 1986). Women’s studies
courses grew up quickly in state universities and colleges while most
private, elite institutions established research centers but introduced
curriculum and garnered a commitment to women’s studies more slowly
(Gumport, 1987). From the 1970s North American and European scholars
were engaged in theory construction, developing theories which began
from women’s own experiences, focusing on the inextricable linkage
between the political and the personal.

While most cross—national discussions of women’s studies
centers/programs are not explicitly comparative in nature, Zmrocek and
Duchen (1991) offer an expressly comparative view of women’s studies
initiatives in twelve countries of the European Community. Their
research frame divides the enterprise of women's studies into two parts:
1) degree programs, centers, and publications and 2) feminist research.
They found great diversity among women's studies programs and in state
support for the institutionalization of women’s studies. In countries
such as Spain and Greece, where women had long lived under repressive
governments, women’s movements were small and women’s studies virtually
non-existent. While women’s studies was stronger in countries with more
vigorous women’s movements, women’s studies scholars disagreed about
various aspects of the enterprise of women’s studies. Zmrocek and
Duchen cite point to different understandings of the relationship

between knowledge and politics as at the heart of the debate.

7

The above accounts provide a range of descriptions and analyses of
women’s studies in different national settings. My work challenges the
assumption that we know what it is to engage in women’s studies, for
example, that women’s studies consists of feminist research and
curriculum development. This study provides a textured, “thick
description' (Geertz, 1973) and analysis of the organization of one Thai
university’s women’s studies center. The research illuminates how
women’s studies is defined and enacted in one Southeast Asian country.
It illustrates that women’s studies in a developing country may not
consist of conversations about feminist pedagogy, theories, or
challenges to the epistemological assumptions of male—centric
disciplines. Rather, women’s studies in this context focuses on
research and work with rural and urban lower-class women and these foci
feature prominently in curriculum initiatives as well. Simply put,
women’s studies is WID and they are inseparable. Through analyses of
the Center’s interactions with its environment, the political dynamics
within and surrounding the Center, and RU professors’ shared and diverse
understandings of feminism and enactments of women’s studies, this study
offers insight into the challenges and dilemmas of organizing women’s

studies in a nation engaged in economic development.

Thailand: women's Experience
Thai women account for approximately half of Thailand's 53.4
million people (Thailand Development Research Institute, 1988). Along
with their counterparts throughout Southeast Asia, Thai women have an
“unusually high" public profile (Eberhardt, 1988, p. 3). The
involvement of Thai women in economic activities, traditionally and
currently, together with traditional rights to equal inheritance and

property ownership, contribute to perceptions of this “high profile”

8

position. A juxtaposition of this portrait, however, with women’s
“karmically inferior" position relative to men in Buddhism, the state
religion, and the increased exploitation of Thai women in the sexual
service industry give insight into the complexity of the position and
condition of women and to gendered relations in Thailand (Eberhardt,
1988).

The tradition of matrilocality in Thai society prescribes that
when the eldest daughter marries, she and her husband live with her
parents. This allows a woman more authority and control, at least in
the household, and, therefore, greater autonomy and flexibility than
women enjoy in patrilocal cultures such as India or China (Archavanitkul
& Havanon, 1990; Pongsapich, 1988). This matrilocal pattern does not
always obtain for present-day Thai families, however, nor for Thai
Chinese and other ethnic minority families. For girls4 within the Thai
family, as the students in my study describe, restrictions on and
expectations that they contribute to household activities are much
greater than for boys (Archavanitkul & Havanon, 1990). And for women,
while high esteem is accorded mothers and motherhood, this esteem exists
alongside the polygamous practice of men taking minor wives (mistresses)
and frequenting prostitutes (Muecke, 1992; Supapeung, 1991), thus
placing women in a paradoxical position, one which a professor of
education probes with her students in Chapter Five.

Tantiwiramanond and Pandey (1991) argue that the politico—cultural
factors of Buddhism, matrilocality, and the monarchy contribute to the
position and condition of women in Thailand and relegate women to

varying degrees of power and autonomy. Until the late 19th century the

 

4While I refer to the undergraduate university students I interviewed as
young women, I use the term “girls” when the literature speaks of
“girls” (see, for example, Archavantikul & Havanon, 1990). In focus
groups interviews, women students often spoke of “girls and boys" in the
family and I maintain that distinction in Chapter Five.

9

interplay of these three factors separated women into two categories:
royal and aristocratic women and common peasant women. With
modernization, the introduction of western education at the turn of the
century, and Thailand’s entrance into the international economy, this
stratification became diffused and a small middle class emerged
(Tantiwiramanond & Pandey, 1991).

The state’s commitment to modernization and industrialization has
brought about rapid and sustained economic growth in Thailand. The
development of a Thai middle class and the growth of the national
economy has led to more educational and professional work opportunities—
—and more for some women than for others. The rapid growth of the Gross
National Product has ushered in a widening gap between urban and rural
women. In 1985, 86 percent of the population lived in rural areas;
rural women of the lower class are at a severe disadvantage to other
women and to men in terms of education, health, and employment (see
Tantiwiramanond & Pandey, 1991).

The reasons for a primary focus on women and development issues in
Thai women’s studies become apparent upon scrutinizing these issues.

The rural population is decreasing as residents migrate to urban areas.
For rural young women who migrate, the service industry is almost
certain to become their line of work and, as Pasuk (1982) argues, this
usually leads to prostitution.

Women constitute a large percentage of the work force—~as high as
49% in some rural areas--but there are fewer women than men working as
employers and government employees. The one category in which women do
outnumber men is in the most disadvantaged group of unpaid family
workers (TDRI, 1988). Despite the high regard for motherhood and
women’s high visibility in the work force, women occupy a low position

in the family and society (Tantiwiramanond & Pandey, 1991).

10

In rural areas where water buffalo and elephants were the beasts
of burden, a traditional metaphor for a woman, who was usually
illiterate, was a buffalo. A man, however, was a person (phu ying pen
khwaai, phu chaai pen khan)5 (Tantiwiramanond & Pandey, 1991). A
metaphor still used frequently with regard to the position of men and
women-~which several students mention in my study——is of men as the
front legs of the elephant and women as the hind legs. That is to say,
women are not the front legs which lead but rather they follow and carry
the weight from behind. This position is reinforced in Thailand’s
Theravada Buddhist cosmology, which regards all women as inferior to

men .

The Thai WUnen's Movement, Feminism, and women's Studies

The 1934 Thai political movement that eclipsed absolute
monarchical rule also marked the beginning of the Thai women's movement.
The 19703 saw a fluorescence of the women’s movement in the context of
the broader farmers’ and students’ protests against oppressive Thai
military rule and foreign (US) domination. Thus, the Thai women's
movement always has been a part of larger Thai political movements
(Pongsapich, 1988). Activists who were part of the 19705 radical
movement concur that, although the women's movement has been strong in
different periods of their history, there is no feminist movement in
Thailand; that is, there is no independent movement for women's rights.

Rather than a feminist movement and feminist groups, some women
and men who consider themselves feministsé‘work together with other
activists and women’s rights advocates. These groups cluster into three

categories: conservative (nationalist), liberal (individual rights),

 

SI use the popular transcription of Thai which is influenced by
etymology of Pali and Sanskrit loan words.

6Feminism is defined and discussed in Chapters Four and Five.

11

and progressive-—also called radical, since advocating for “rights" and
“justice” labels one as a radical in Thailand (Tantiwiramanond & Pandey,
1991, p. 10). Thai women’s studies has emerged out of this non—
feminist, socio-cultural, political context.

Women’s studies in Thailand began in 1981 with the establishment
of the Program for Women's Studies in the Social Research Institute of
Chulalongkorn University (Thailand’s oldest university, located in
Bangkok). Under the leadership of A. Amara Pongsapichj and her
colleagues, the program developed into a highly regarded center for
research projects that studied low—income urban women, women street
vendors, rural women in agriculture, and workers in the Thai sex trade
(Karim, 1991). At the initiative of an education professor,
Chulalongkorn also offered one course on women’s situations in Thailand
(Eckachai, 1990).

In 1986, a second Bangkok institution, Thammasat University,
established another women's studies project. That same year, Thammasat
also became the Thai secretariat for an institutional linkage program
between York University in Toronto, Canada, and three Thai universities
known as the Women in Development Consortium in Thailand. Funded by the
Canadian International Development Agency, until 1992 the consortium
aimed to foster and support women and development efforts in Thailand
(van Esterik, 1991). While Thammasat professors successfully organized
consortium activities, their efforts to establish a broader women's
studies program within the university were unsuccessful, due to
students' lack of interest and professors’ concern about the absence of

a Thai body of women’s studies knowledge (Eckachai, 1990).

 

7A. is the abbreviation for the Thai word aacaan, a title accorded those
with bachelor's degrees and those who have special expertise in a
particular area.

12

Public universities and at least one private university located in
outlying provinces also established women’s studies programs and centers
in the 19805. The attempts of some feminist academics to establish
women’s studies programs in their home institutions met with resistance,
leading them eventually to join or establish their own non—governmental
organizations for women through contacts with international donors.

It is in this socio—political context of Thai women, the Thai
women’s movement, and women’s studies in Thailand that a small group of
professors led by a woman law professor created the Center for Women’s
Studies at Regional University. I was privileged to study this program
at close range over a 16-month period. Consistent with the experience
of many fieldwork researchers, although I began the study with one set

of questions, I left with a different set.

Genesis and Evolution of the Questions

The questions that guided this study grew out of the intersection
of my intellectual interests in schooling, diversity,8 and
organizations; a commitment to equity for all people interwoven with an
appreciation of our many differences; and the conviction that cross—
national comparative studies in education provide critical insight into
national, local, international, and even personal questions. My
interests and commitments converged in graduate studies in education and
in administrative work in Asian higher education following my doctoral
course work.

For three years I worked as the “women’s educational concerns"
program director for a US-based organization that funds programs in
Asian higher education. As I lived in Thailand and traveled around Asia

from 1991 to 1994, I met college and university professors (primarily

 

8Diversity is defined here as inclusive of categories such as gender,
race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age, religion.

13

women) and university administrators in nine countries of East,
Southeast, and South Asia. I learned from these scholars and from their
writings about distinctive viewpoints, dilemmas, and problems of women
in Asian higher education and in specific national contexts. This work
nurtured my interest in and pushed my thinking about cross—national
comparative organizational questions in higher education.

Asian colleagues introduced me to an array of organizational
arrangements of women’s studies in Asian higher education. These
include centers for research and information on women, an urban training
center for working—class women, and a women’s museum and women’s college
within a co-educational university. At the world’s largest women’s
university, which is located in Seoul, Korea, a women’s studies
department offers courses to thousands of undergraduate students along
with highly competitive women’s studies master's degree and Ph.D.
programs. In co-educational universities and in all-women’s colleges
and universities throughout Asia, departments such as history and
anthropology offer select women’s studies courses.9 In India the
central ministry of higher education, specifically, the University
Grants Commission, established a Standing Committee on Women’s Studies
in 1985 and soon thereafter prepared a formal set of guidelines for the
establishment of women’s studies programs in higher education throughout
India. Women's universities and colleges in India offer select courses
as well as curriculum in women’s studies and engage in Women and
Development activities. In Southeast Asia, women’s studies scholars and
centers focus primarily on women and development projects and on WID
research. I was particularly interested in the development-oriented

organizational arrangement since it was a predominant organizational

 

9Searching for equality: Resources on women in Asia (forthcoming)
provides detailed descriptions of women’s studies programs throughout
Asia.

14

model of women’s studies in Thailand, where I was living, and it
differed significantly from women’s studies as it was developing in
Japan and Korea in East Asia and in countries of the west.10 I
developed a proposal and a set of questions that would enable me to
explore this arrangement of women’s studies.

Preliminary conversations with two CWS professors alerted me to
resistance within Regional University to the introduction of the Center
for Women's Studies. From my interests in diversity and organization, I
developed questions that would enable me to explore how a Thai
university deals with change and conflict in the organization through
the case of the introduction of a women’s studies program. Attention to
instances of conflict and to the political dynamics of organizing
women’s studies remained constant throughout the study.

Other questions changed, however, in the course of data collection
and even more during data analysis. I naively assumed in my earliest
proposal that, in keeping with the hierarchical patterns and mechanisms
of the Thai bureaucracy within which it is located, the development of
women’s studies would consist of top—down or center-outward infiltration
of women’s studies into the university. At the national level, the
National Commission on Women’s Affairs (NCWA) had initiated a major
research project inviting public and private universities to identify
and integrate women’s issues into existing required courses of the
undergraduate curriculum. I anticipated, therefore, that in keeping
with this initiative from the top, a major goal of CWS professors would
be systematically to integrate women’s studies into departments of the

university, particularly in the formal curriculum, and to engineer

 

10Primarily I use the terms “west" and western since those whom I
interviewed most frequently referred to the countries of North America
and Europe in this way. I also refer to industrialized and non-
industrialized nations, however, since “west" and “developing countries”
are terms which originated in and focus inordinate attention on North
America and Europe.

15

changes to benefit women that would have an impact on the broader
activities of the university.

As the research progressed, and even more as I continued with the
analysis, I began to develop images of the Center for Women's Studies as
it was organized at the margins of the university and moving toward the
center. My questions evolved from “How do individuals organize women’s
studies so that its influence radiates out into an institution of higher
education within the Thai bureaucracy?” and “How does the university
deal with the conflict a women’s studies center generates?" to “How do
Thai academics and staff organize a women's studies center at the
margins of a university in the context of the bureaucracy, other
interest groups, and the culture in which it is embedded?" Although
changing the questions did not alter my methods of data collection, I
did choose to cast my net more widely, interviewing more professors from
different faculties and universities and attending meetings and seminars
sponsored by other units (a research institute and a faculty) of the

university.

Methodology

A discussion of methodology connects my research questions to the
methods I chose to gather information for this study and the ways in
which I analyzed the data. In this section I discuss my research
assumptions, the case study method I selected and my methods of data
collection. Following this I elaborate on the processes of data
analysis: the challenges of interpreting the data; conundrums of
selecting theoretical perspectives on organizations and writing within
and across multiple perspectives; considering western feminist critiques
of organizational theory; and dilemmas of writing the analysis.

Consonant with the (western) feminist practice of acknowledging my self

16

and my location within the research process, I position myself within

the processes of data collection, interpretation and writing.

Research Assumptions

Stating my assumptions about research is important for
understanding how I designed this study and analyzed the data. From my
standpoint, the processes of trying to make sense of our worlds and
systematically learning something through research are situated in
specific historical, socio—cultural, political contexts. Through
internal dialogue and through interactions with others and with our
world, we organize our worlds and make sense of life around us.
Grounded in these assumptions, I engaged in research, data analysis and
writing, not in pursuit of “one objective truth,” but rather
acknowledging my own subjective standpoint and trying to see what other
standpoints people hold.

While I conducted this study to learn about Regional University’s
CWS from Thai instructors, administrators and others, I recognize that
my own assumptions interacted with the ways in which I asked questions,
made sense of the data and offered my interpretations from different
theoretical perspectives. In acknowledgment of this, I describe my
location within the study and the dilemmas I experienced as researcher
below. Throughout the rest of the work, I continue to weave my voice in

and out of the text.

Location

I conducted the research and analysis from my own particular
political, historical, and intellectual location, as a middle—class,
white western feminist educator trained in the US and who has lived and

worked outside the US for eleven years in Asia and Central America. I

17

grew up in the midwestern United States during the civil rights and
women’s liberation movements of the 19603 and 19703; these movements
profoundly influenced my valuing of diversity and commitment to equity.
At age 18 I worked as a volunteer in the highlands of Guatemala; this
ignited a search to come to terms with diversity, inequity and equity
from an international perspective.

Entering into research in Thailand, I was aware that for those I
was interviewing who were resisting the press from the west to “develop"
Thailand, my color, my nationality and my language associated me with
the Colonizer. At the same time, because of my interest in women's
studies and in feminism, I had aligned myself as an advocate with those
who were engaged in women’s studies.

I was continually aware of this tension and I struggled to
minimize the distance between myself and those with whom I interacted.
In conversations with university professors, I acknowledged and did not
defend the negative effects of technologically advanced societies on the
socio-economic development of Thailand. Throughout my stay in Thailand,
I studied the Thai language in order to improve my communication with
Thai people and to understand Thai cultural patterns. Through my
actions I tried to behave in culturally appropriate ways, for example,
by showing deference to elders and to those in high-status positions.

Despite these efforts to lessen the distance between myself and
those whom I interviewed, I remained the “other” and I acknowledge that
my location in the study was interwoven with the ways in which I
collected and interpreted the data. Aware of this location, I paid
close attention to its implications and tried to account for my location
as I collected my data. With particular reference to language use, when
I made the initial contact for an interview, I inquired if the
individual would prefer to speak in Thai or in English. During the

English interviews I encouraged the use of Thai whenever someone was

18

uncertain of a phrase or title or whenever she or he felt more
comfortable speaking in Thai.

An advantage of my outsider position was that I raised questions
that occasionally offered new insights into the activities of CWS
professors. On more than one occasion as I shared observations,
professors responded, “I had never thought of it that way before."
Hearing this statement indicated that I had interpreted something in a
(possibly useful) new way and reminded me once again that my assumptions
were grounded in a different worldview.

In Thailand my work identity was three-fold: 1) foundation program
officer, 2) doctoral student/researcher, and 3) non-teaching faculty
member at another university. Work as a program director enhanced my
access to data and my understanding of Center—donor relationships but
did not seem to influence my interactions with people at the research
site. The foundation I represented did not fund projects at public
universities and no one at Regional ever inquired or approached me about
funding projects. I had no indication that RU professors ever viewed me
as a link to possible foundation resources for their programs.

The foundation work enhanced my research in several ways. I had
observed and experienced the ways in which donors can influence program
development and was aware of the complicated nature of the donor—
recipient relationship. The relationships I developed through the
foundation also significantly enhanced my data collection and
understanding of the development of women’s studies in Thailand.

Because of my professional association with a foundation trustee who was
the Special Minister to the Prime Minister’s cabinet when I arrived in
Thailand, I was invited to national meetings on women’s studies and, in
turn, I invited Thai government representatives to attend two Asian
regional meetings on women's studies which I helped organize. In

addition, the CWS director included me as a luncheon guest with the

19

other CWS professors prior to a seminar in which the Special Minister
participated. As an advocate for women, for the expansion of Regional’s
CWS and for women’s studies centers throughout the country, the Minister
was held in high regard. I was deeply grateful for the opportunity to
develop a broad-based understanding of women’s studies and of the
national government's role in promoting women’s studies as background
for my case study. This relationship may have influenced interactions
with those whom I interviewed and observed in ways that I do not fully
understand and cannot account for in my data collection methods.

My affiliation as a non-teaching social sciences faculty member at
a neighboring private university provided an important contrast for me
in understanding overall public university structure and the development
of women's studies within a larger bureaucratic organizational
structure. This affiliation with another institution may have
discouraged those I interviewed at RU from offering comparisons between
the two universities women's studies programs. Although their insights
in this area would have been interesting, it was not essential to my
question or data collection.

While analyzing and writing up the data, I struggled with writing
“their story,” that is, weaving together Thai colleagues' accounts of
enacting women’s studies, and interpreting their stories as my story
from my location as a US feminist. I wanted to describe and analyze
women’s studies within the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) from the
actors' perspectives in order to convey the “right” story, their story.
They have become my colleagues and friends, I have great respect for
their work and I resist analyzing their work from a Eurocentric point of
View. I am, however, a North American woman and I must position this
work within the English language literature of education and women’s
studies. In the end, I hope that I will have faithfully represented the

work of Regional University professors, administrators and students

20

while acknowledging, at the same time, that this is my interpretation
from within analytical frameworks I have selected, and from a cultural

background and viewpoint that I cannot completely set aside.

My Choice of Methods

My questions are largely exploratory; therefore I utilized
interpretive methodology and the case study approach to examine them
(Bogdan & Biklen, 1982). I chose to look narrowly at a single case in
order to understand 1) the development of one organization from several
different angles over time, 2) the intersections of these angles of
vision (perspectives) at particular historical moments, and 3) the
interactions of one particular center with its environment.

This close-range study afforded me the opportunity to interact
with and observe the individuals engaged in a particular set of women’s
studies activities over an extended period of time; to become acquainted
with those who also were connected although not directly involved in
this work—-administrators, students, donors and representatives of non—
governmental organizations (NGOs); and to observe the context in which
these individuals were developing women's studies, paying particular
attention to the process of how they organized this new enterprise of
women’s studies and to the content of what they were organizing.

The choice of a case study and my methods of data collection
reflects the ways in which I conceptualize organizations: not as
isolated, self-contained units but as collectivities of people engaged
in interdependent relationships with other collectivities and material
resources--the “environment." Weick (1979) argues for analyses of
active “organizing" rather than “organizations," so that theories of

organizations focus on the activities and constructions of people rather

21

a compelling alternative, I have chosen to use both terms: organizing
to refer to the actions of people; and organizations in reference to the
entities with which people identify and in which they work and enact
their ideas and interests.

I selected Regional University as the site of the case study for
several reasons. A regional university located in a province far from
the nation’s center in its capital city brings into sharp focus the
challenges of establishing women's studies in a developing country. As
a regional university charged with participation in national development
activities, RU was an important site for observing where the university
and the Center for Women’s Studies come into conflict over priorities
and approaches to development. The fact that Regional is part of the
government system of public universities and that its employees are part
of the Thai bureaucracy meant that I could research the development of
women’s studies in relation to a central ministry of education, an
arrangement common to higher education throughout Asia and distinctive
from autonomous US institutions. Finally, through colleagues’ kind
introductions, both the CWS director and the FSS dean invited me to
conduct my research at the university in the Center and through the

faculty, giving me official access to the research site.

Data Collection Methods
The period of data collection spanned three semesters of the Thai
academic year which begins in May and ends in February. From March 1993
through July 1994 I collected data through individual interviews,

observations and focus group interviews and by compiling documents from

22

the CWS and from five other centers at Regional University.11

Interviews

Through individual interviews, I set out to learn about the
organization of the CWS, the people who organized and its location
within the Faculty of Social Sciences and in the university. I also
asked questions in order to compare the organization of the CWS with
other centers. In each interview I inquired about the individual’s
autobiography, especially with regard to schooling. In so doing, I also
learned about the individual’s family, interests and relationships with
and connections to other people in the university and beyond. In these
first interviews I inquired about each person’s relationship to and
understanding of the CWS and then probed into different matters,
depending on the information the subject had provided and her or his
elected or appointed position in the university (see Appendix C for a
list of sample questions for individual interviews). These probes led
me in unexpected and sometimes surprising directions, all of which in
some way enhanced my understanding of the setting. I tailored second,
third and fourth interviews to explore specific issues that had come up
in other conversations or through other methods of data collection.

Over the course of 16 months, I conducted interviews with 50
individuals and held numerous informal conversations with professors,
administrators, CWS staff and others who had some relationship to the
CWS. This included interviews with 32 professors from the faculties of
social sciences, education, economics, humanities and nursing (see
Appendix D for the distribution of professors interviewed according to

faculty and CWS affiliation and Appendix E for a list of administrative

 

11Although I lived in Thailand from 1991 to 1994, due to my work
schedule I traveled outside the country for a total of approximately
five months per year in several—week chunks of time. Since I was away
from Thailand even more during 1991 and 1992, I chose 1993-94 as the
time of intensive data collection.

23

positions in the Faculty of Social Sciences and the ratio of professors
to administrators). All but three of the academics I interviewed had
pursued advanced degree study in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK
or the US and spoke English fluently.12 Our shared experiences with US
higher education established a connection early in the interviews. A
minority of professors I interviewed had doctoral degrees in their
fields. That I was pursuing an advanced degree could have influenced
interviews and conversations in this society that accords higher status
to those with Ph.Ds. On the few occasions that I sensed that I was not
being treated as an equal, however, it did not seem that I was being
accorded higher status but lower. This made sense in my position as a
(lower—status and younger) student meeting with (higher-status and
older) professors. Reflecting on this experience also sent me to re—
examine interactions and conversations within the hierarchical context
of Thai relationships and to consider how hierarchy is part of the CWS’s
story, too.

I interviewed each of the seven current members of the CWS, four
former members, the CWS secretary and all five CWS staff members. The
CWS director granted me three lengthy interviews. In addition, my
presence as a participant observer allowed me numerous informal
conversations, especially with CWS faculty and the CWS secretary.

To understand the uniqueness of the CWS and the similarities of
the Center to other institutes and centers in the university, I
interviewed the directors of the other four centers in the Faculty of
Social Sciences, the director of the women's center in the Faculty of
Education, and the director and a staff member of a research institute

affiliated with the FSS. I also wanted to understand how the CWS

 

12Occasionally the direct quotes that I use in the text to support my
assertions include non—standard grammatical constructions of second
language speakers of English.

24

interacts with its environment, that is, with organizations outside the
university such as donors and NGOs. Hence, I interviewed three
foundation program officers and two colleagues in non—governmental
organizations who had collaborated with the CWS director and professors
on specific projects.

To understand the broader context of women's studies as it is
developing in Thai universities, I interviewed the Assistant Permanent
Secretary from the Ministry of University Affairs (who was also the
rector of Regional University at the time the CWS was initiated), the
Advisor to the Prime Minister’s Office for the National Commission on
Women’s Affairs, and the Vice President of Academic Affairs for Regional
University. I am most grateful to friends for making those interviews
possible.

Primarily I conducted interviews on the campus of Regional
University at the offices of the professors and administrators with whom
I was speaking.13 Most interviews lasted one-and—one—half to two hours.
I interviewed staff members at their work sites or over lunch. In
Bangkok I interviewed two distinguished feminist professors from
Thammasat University who were pioneers of Thai women’s studies. I
offered bilingual interviewees the opportunity to be interviewed in Thai
or in English since I worked closely with a very capable Thai research
assistant. All professors and administrators but one selected English
as the language of the interview. My research assistant and I

interviewed all staff members in Thai.

 

13Many of the professors I interviewed also served as the elected or
appointed administrator of a center, a program, a department, a faculty,
or of the university.

25

Observations

Individual interviews provide an opportunity for in—depth, face-
to-face conversation, but the ways in which groups of individuals
interact with one another are better studied through observation.
Observation was a particularly important method given that my question
focuses on layers of the organization and the ways in which people
organize women’s studies. Rituals, routines—-and breaks in routines—-
along with themes and issues are brought to the foreground through
observations. While in interviews individuals described CWS activities
from their personal perspectives, through observation I was able to gain
insight into how they enacted women’s studies. My observations included
spending time “hanging around” the Center for Women’s Studies, attending
meetings and CWS—sponsored seminars at the university as well as
seminars of the National Commission on Women's Affairs Bangkok, and
observing in classrooms.

The director kindly afforded me the opportunity to read the CWS
files containing correspondence, project proposals, reports and
evaluations. This provided the perfect opportunity to hang around the
Information Center (IC) while poring over the center’s files. It also
enabled me to observe routines among the office staff in the CWS office.
In the center I observed the activities of the CWS staff and all who
visited the library.

To capture the sense of who was using the Information Center and
for what purposes, I left questionnaires in Thai and in English at the
IC entrance for one week during the second half of the second semester.
Having observed the rhythms of the first semester, I left the
questionnaires at the time of the semester when the number of users was

fairly typical and when the “regulars” were frequenting the IC. During

26

the week I chose, the Center was not inundated with students studying
for exams, nor was it vacant because they were taking exams.

Over a three-day period, 29 women and seven men responded to the
questionnaire. 15 were from the Faculty of Social Science; the others
were from Humanities, Agriculture, Business, Economics and Fine Arts.
The majority were third- and fourth- year students but professors and
two guests from the community also used the Center.

Since project proposals and reports revealed that conducting
seminars was a major thrust of the CWS, I attended all seminars that
were offered during the period of my data collection in order to observe
the rituals, attend to the content and become acquainted with the range
of the CWS’s activities. This enabled me to observe the organization of
women’s studies at close range. I was able to study the ways in which
CWS staff worked together to organize the details of CWS activities to
which representatives and program directors from foundations and non—
governmental organizations supporting the cws attended and participated
in CWS activities.

Over the 16-month period I observed panel presentations and
discussions in a one—day seminar celebrating International Women’s Day;
a two-day refresher seminar for women from villages and NGOs who had
received paralegal training at previous sessions sponsored by the CWS; a
two-day seminar to organize the regional component of a national network
being established to monitor the responsiveness of politicians and
political parties’ to gender issues; and an afternoon seminar on
economic development for women in the North. All seminars and special
activities were held in the newly constructed Center for Women’s Studies
and were audiotaped.

To develop an understanding of the broader perspective of women’s
studies in Thailand, I attended four seminars in Bangkok sponsored by

the National Commission on Women’s Affairs. At three of these meetings,

27

professors from seven universities described the development of women’s
studies in their own institutions, presented papers on their action
research plans to integrate women’s studies into the curriculum and
discussed their concerns and problems. The fourth seminar was a
national meeting attended by government and NGO representatives from
each province in celebration of 1992 as the ”Year of the Thai Woman" in
honor of HM Queen Sirikit's 60th birthday. Panelists presented papers
on the position and conditions of women in Thai society.

Although I repeatedly requested to attend meetings of the CWS
Committee, this never was possible. On one occasion the director
invited me to a committee meeting but, just before the meeting began,
her colleagues indicated that they deemed the agenda and anticipated
discussion too sensitive for an outsider to hear. Attending a meeting
of the CWS would have strengthened my analysis. This would have
provided additional information on participation and interaction
patterns among CWS members, the ways in which agenda items are discussed
and collaboration occurs among professors, the CWS secretary,14 and
others. Rather, I had to rely on interview data which acquainted me
with the content and frequency of meetings; CWS members willingly
offered general observations about recent CWS meetings they had
attended.

I wanted to become acquainted with the Regional Center for Women
(RCW) in the Faculty of Education to understand how its organization
parallels, meshes with and differs from the CWS; therefore I attended a
sampling of its activities. I observed one organizational meeting of
the RCW committee and two RCW-sponsored seminars. One of these was an
RCW luncheon seminar arranged for Thai NGO leaders working with women

heads of newly-formed NGOs in another Asian country. The RCW’s largest

 

l4The CWS secretary was a university graduate who served as
administrative assistant to the CWS director.

28

project was encouraging and preparing women to run for office on the
village council (sapha tambol), so observing a village training session
would have afforded me an in-depth understanding of the RCW's work. I
was interested primarily in the on-campus organization of the RCW,
however, so the meetings I did attend provided the information directly
related to my research.

Women’s studies, by definition, involves learning (whether through
research, lecture, discussion) and teaching. I observed teaching and
learning take place in CWS-sponsored seminars for professors and for
village leaders, but mention of curriculum development and “integration”
for university students also repeatedly surfaced. Therefore, in order
to understand classroom routines, to get a sense of classroom dynamics
between the instructor and the students, and, secondarily, to observe
the ways in which professors brought women’s concerns into their
teaching, I observed eight different professors from social sciences,
economics and education teach a total of fourteen class sessions. I
selected these professors on the basis of their diversity (they
represented five departments and three different faculties, taught
classes of different levels and size) and their shared interest in
women’s studies.

Attendance in the undergraduate classes varied in size from 8 to
120; 15 attended the master's level class in education (about half were
absent that day due to the airing of the World Cup Soccer Finals the
previous evening). With the exception of the education class, all the
classes were held in the lecture halls and classrooms of the buildings

of the social sciences’ faculty.

Documentation
Documents offer a third source of data to verify information from

interviews and observations. I also used them to spark interview

29

questions. As mentioned above, I took extensive notes from the CWS
files. I was interested in correspondence between CWS professors,
donors, and others; I also paid close attention to project proposals and
reports to donors. In addition, I obtained copies of the Thai and
English newsletters published by the CWS. The secretary of the RCW
provided me with copies of all the proposals and reports from that
center’s files. I also collected materials provided for each seminar in
the CWS, the RCW, and at the national level. Finally, I sought out
materials from the university that would provide a framework for
understanding the university structure and official rhetoric. These
materials included the Seventh Higher Education Development Plan (1992—
1226) for Thailand, the university bulletins for undergraduates and

graduates, and the course selection book for registration.

Focus Group Interviews

I chose to interview undergraduate university students in order to
learn about the university and the gendered nature of activities on the
campus. I also interviewed them in order to test out Thai university
students’ reported lack of interest in women’s studies (Eckachai, 1990)
and to get a sense of how students understood women’s studies at
Regional University. Later, as I learned from professors that students
did not discuss or write much about women or gender issues in their
classes, I expanded the focus group questions in order to hear students
talk more broadly about their understandings of gender—related matters
within the family and society-at—large.

I conducted eight student focus group interviews together with a
Thai colleague; approximately four students attended each session.
Informed by the work of Knodel, Sittitrai and Brown (1990) on conducting

focus groups in Thailand, we interviewed 32 students from the Faculties

30

of Social Sciences, Humanities and Nursing. The interviews were
conducted and transcribed in Thai, then translated into English.

I developed questions for the focus group interviews with
colleagues from another tertiary level institution in the region and
pilot tested the interview questions with a group of women students from
their campus. My colleagues assisted me in formulating questions that
would encourage students to discuss gender-related matters on the
campus, within their families and in the broader society. (See Appendix
F for sample questions from focus group interviews.)

We conducted the pilot interviews at another institution two weeks
ahead of the focus group interviews scheduled at Regional University.
The quality of the pilot group students’ responses taught us how to
alter the questions and the questioning strategy for the interviews at
RU. The content of the students’ responses--particularly their concern
about prostitution among students—-gave me time to reflect on the pilot.
interviews and on conversations with my colleagues and to inquire into
this phenomenon. This experience and reflection prepared me so that I
was better informed and not surprised when similar responses were given
in focus group interviews at Regional University.

Knodel et a1. (1990) recommend that a moderator-—someone other
than the researcher—-be trained to conduct focus group interviews so
that the researcher can attend to other aspects of the interview. For
the RU focus groups, colleagues from another institution and my research
assistant conducted focus group interviews as I listened, observed and
monitored the audiotaping equipment. My research assistant also helped
conduct interviews in Thai among CWS staff members. The interviewers
often probed for information in ways that I probably would not have been
able to, and, in most instances, the probes elicited detailed

explanations.

31

Throughout the process of data collection I proceeded with
preliminary analyses of the data. Having completed observations,
individual and focus group interviews and having collected documentation
related to the work of the CWS, I commenced a comprehensive analysis of

the data. I describe that process in the next section.

Data Analysis
In this section I discuss the importance of triangulation to this
study by providing examples of the availability of documentation (or
lack of same) and particular discourse practices. Next I describe the
dilemmas of selecting theoretical perspectives on organizations for the
analysis and of incorporating western feminist critiques of organization
theory. Finally, I describe conundrums of writing the analysis and the

ways in which I resolved these puzzles.

Interpreting Data

Thorne (1993, p. 7) reminds us that “information gleaned from the
fields of memory should be treated with skepticism since memories are
partial, malleable, and shaped by later experiences as well as by
conventions for remembering.” Piecing together the history of the CWS
and episodes of conflict when I was not present required gleaning
information from the fields of memory of many different people. To
substantiate information I tried to cross-check the data among several
different sources. These attempts at triangulation in order to arrive
at agreement on the “truth” were challenging, especially in interviews,
given certain “conventions for remembering” and discourse patterns I
discuss below.

One pattern is to attribute what may have been one’s own idea and

action to someone else’s initiative. For example, interviewees

32

consistently reported that they did something because “someone asked me”
rather than “I wanted to do it” or “I want people to know about that.”
This pattern of attributing one's own actions to someone else was
particularly problematic in tracking down origins of the Center and
ascertaining who and what were the catalysts for change. While CWS
professors all pointed to the director, the director emphasized
invitations from outside donors through the associate dean. The former
associate dean, in turn, corroborated the director’s story but the
foundation had no archival records of such an invitation. Further
communication with foundation program officers and the CWS director
helped to put the puzzle pieces into place.

A second discourse practice I needed to keep in mind is the way in
which one segues from a previous speaker. The phrase, “I agree with
everything the previous speaker had to say, and...” can be followed by a
statement that, in fact, contradicts what the previous speaker said. It
was necessary, therefore, to listen for disagreement when the speakers
said they agreed as well as to listen for points of agreement when
speakers insisted that their positions were diametrically opposed.

In summary, I utilized the method of triangulation to verify data
from one source with another. Where this was not possible due to non—

existent documentation or differing reports, I note this in the text.

Organizational Perspectives

As I commenced analyzing the data, I grappled with what to call
different ways of thinking about organizations: metaphors, frames,
perspectives, paradigms, images, schemata or maps? Or should I try to
find an entirely new term for the modes of thought that guided the

analysis? This quandary was not simply word play but a deliberation on

33

the premises of using multiple theories of organizations for guiding an
analysis.15

Authors who encourage the utilization of multiple ways of
analyzing an organization do so from a position which argues that
organizations are complex and ambiguous and that multiple ways of
thinking about them expand our opportunities to see them as complex
(Birnbaum, 1988; Bolman & Deal, 1991; Martin, 1990; Morgan, 1987). In
the end, I chose to discuss these not as competing paradigms or as
graphic metaphors but as perspectives, a term that implies different
angles of vision or ways of seeing. Each perspective serves as a lens
that focuses on particular patterns and concepts but it does not
simultaneously obscure others. Certain concepts and images recede into
the background from one perspective while others are brought to the
foreground.

After I had collected all the data, as I proceeded to analyze them
together with the theoretical literature on organizations, I learned
over and over that working with data within multiple theoretical
perspectives (and within a single perspective) is an interactive and an
iterative process. Considering the data from a particular theoretical
perspective impelled me to re-think the data; the data, in turn, forced
me to re-think the perspective. While a range of analytical
perspectives is available, based on my interactions with the data and
with the literature on organizations, I chose the structural, political
and cultural perspectives as those that would have the greatest

explanatory power for this study.

 

1‘IFor a discussion of multiple theoretical viewpoints and comparisons
see Birnbaum (1988) and Bolman and Deal (1991) on frames; Burrell and
Morgan (1980) and Foster (1986) on paradigms; Martin (1991) on
perspectives of cultures in organizations; and Morgan (1987) on
metaphors.

34

Repeatedly I was compelled to decide how I would define a
particular perspective for this study which was grounded in the
organizational literature yet not bound by one particular author or
framework. Historical and conceptual connections served as points of
departure among certain authors and bodies of literature. One example
of this is the view of the organization in relation to its environment
from the structural perspective. Early writings about bureaucracies
focused on the internal workings of the organization and disregarded the
environment in which the bureaucracy existed (Morgan, 1987). Later work
which discussed organizations as open systems emphasized the importance
of the relationship between an organization and its environment (Pfeffer
& Salancik, 1978). Bolman and Deal (1991) merge the two distinct
theoretical traditions into one “structural frame." The divide between
internal workings of an organization and its external environment is
historically important but one which I decided to bridge in one chapter
on a structural perspective. I found the distinction to be useful in
positioning the Center for Women’s Studies both within the bureaucracy
and in relation to its environment beyond the boundaries of the
university.

I also struggled with the artificial lines drawn between
perspectives and how to draw my lines as concepts from one perspective
figured into the other perspectives. For example, a cultural
perspective focuses on patterns and values of the broader culture and of
the organizational culture. Cultural understandings are also important
in understanding how episodes of conflict are played out and resolved
from a political perspective. Cultural influence from the environment
is an important consideration from a structural perspective. A second
example is power and authority-~key concepts in the political
perspective but also important in understanding lines of decision—making

within the structural perspective and the manipulation of symbols within

35

a cultural perspective. In the end I resolved this dilemma of
artificial boundaries by maintaining the emphasis of a particular
perspective but including reference to elements from other perspectives
as seemed appropriate. These struggles are illustrative of the
challenges of utilizing this relatively recent “multiple perspectives”
approach to organizational analysis. While I regard this as a
satisfactory resolution, I also regard it tentatively, one which I will

continue to utilize and to challenge in future studies.

Feminist Critiques of Organizational Theory

Interwoven with data collection and while grappling with
perspectives of organizations I also considered feminist critiques of
organizations and organizational theory (Ferguson, 1984; Smircich, 1985;
Acker, 1991/1993; Calas & Smircich, 1992/1993; Oseen, 1994; Sernak,
1993). From a feminist vantage point I conducted this study at a
fascinating and confusing juncture in the brief history of
organizational theory. Men have written most organizational theory to
date and, feminists would argue (Calas & Smircich, 1989, 1992/1993;
Smircich, 1985), this body of work is based on the assumptions of
western men. Acker (1990/1993) further argues that bureaucracies are
not the ungendered constructions we take them to be, but rather are
predicated on the assumptions of men’s work and men’s jobs. Both the
mainstream literature and the feminist critiques of male-dominated
organizational theory literature, however, are written from a western
point of view, with feminist critiques citing western feminist theories
to critique the male—dominated western theories of organizations.

For example, Smircich (1985) turns to Chodorow’s (1978) work on
men’s and women’s systems of reality and Gilligan’s (1982) work on moral

decision-making among women and girls to push for a woman-centered

36

organization theory. In The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy, Ferguson
(1984) also draws on Gilligan’s work to analyze modern organizational
life, In her concluding chapter, Ferguson (1984, p. 211) declares that
“feminist organizations, even those that routinely encounter and work
with bureaucracies, cannot be themselves bureaucratic or they cease to
be truly feminist.” This statement implies that a feminist organization
cannot be hierarchical or bureaucratic, an assumption I discuss below
and in Chapter Three.

In more recent work, Sernak (1993) constructs a feminist theory of
organizations that brings together notions of power and caring, drawing
largely from the work of Noddings (1984, 1992), a US feminist
philosopher. Calas and Smircich (1992/1993) deconstruct the discourse
of male—centric western organization theory and Oseen (1994) also
reconceptualizes organizational theory from a feminist/postmodernist
point of view. Oseen examines commonly held assumptions about the self,
power, language, knowledge and reality--commonly held western
assumptions. Yet such post—modern critiques are not readily embraced by
Southeast Asian scholars. Indonesian feminist scholar Karim (1993, p.
107) argues that the western bias of such postmodern critiques makes
Southeast Asian feminist scholars reluctant to move into post—structural
language and definitions and to “accept yet another Eurocentric model of
defining women with a new universalism based in a biased male psyche.”

While I found merit in these western feminists’ critiques of
western organizational theories, I continually puzzled over their
appropriateness at this historical moment for understanding the ways in
which women and men were organizing women’s studies in the Kingdom of
Thailand. For example, based on the writings of Ferguson (1984), I
expected to find some intentionally developed, less hierarchical, more

egalitarian and more inclusive ways of organizing the staff of the CWS

37

at Regional University. Although I found evidence of a flatter
structure with regard to the ways in which the CWS worked inclusively
with village women, a top—down authority structure was in place within
the CWS itself. The professors affiliated with the CWS were organizing
the CWS according to the hierarchical patterns of Thai society and of
the Thai bureaucracy, with some variations. A North American professor
and long-time student of Thailand hypothesized that a major goal of the
women academic-activists would be to gain equal status with men within
the Thai hierarchy rather than challenging or dismantling that
hierarchy. My data do not confirm or disconfirm the professor’s
hypothesis but no one I interviewed openly advocated alternative,
lateral organizing as part of the women’s studies professors’ agenda.

On the other hand, although the feminist critiques of
organizational theory represent western critiques, some of their
stances--such as advocating non-hierarchical modes of organizing--are
not uniquely western or feminist. Feminists in Seoul and Manila are
working with colleagues to construct collaborative, non—hierarchical
organizations as they create women’s studies in their own national
contexts. At a Korean university, while professors acknowledged that
the success of women’s studies within the university was due to
initiative and support from the top (the president), simultaneously they
were working with colleagues from other institutions to develop
alternative, non-hierarchical organizations. Thus, the organizational
theory critiques of western feminist authors and conversations with
these Asian feminists prodded me to think more deeply about hierarchies
and feminisms and whether or not they are antithetical, as Ferguson
(1984) claims. This is a puzzle over which I deliberate each time I
return to the data and to my analysis.

I continued to wrestle with these cross—currents of organizing,

organizational theories and women’s/feminist issues for the duration of

38

data collection and throughout data analysis. In the end, I have drawn
from the mainstream or, as Aaron and Walby (1991) label it, the male-
stream base of organizational theories and from feminist contributions

to organizational theories, bearing in mind the western biases of both.

writing Dilemmas

Among the challenges I faced in writing up the data were which
terms to select in writing about the actors and how to discuss the
intersection of gender, age, class, race, ethnicity, and sexual
orientation. Below I discuss how I dealt with these questions.

One dilemma I faced was how to describe the actors in the study.
Professors engaged in women’s studies activities at Regional University
did not call themselves women’s studies professors and they did not
teach women’s studies courses. In most instances I refer to them as
“CWS professors” or professors affiliated with the CWS (or the Regional
Center for Women) so as to not evoke images of full—time or even adjunct
professors of women’s studies courses. This also underscores the fact
that CWS professors at RU see themselves as professors of a particular
discipline who are committed to including women’s issues in their
university work.

I faced a second challenge in writing about administrators.
Department chairs, associate deans and even the Vice President for
Academic Affairs also teach and are called “professor.” Some
administrators are elected (selected through a nomination and voting
process); others, such as assistant and associate deans, are appointed.
Program and center heads take on the role of program administrators when
they start programs and are officially recognized by the faculty dean.
In view of these multiple identities, I have chosen to refer to

department chairs, deans and other appointed and elected officials up to

39

rector as administrators. In Chapter Four I refer to the elected dean,
associate dean, and assistant deans as “the dean” in an attempt to
protect identities and respect confidentiality around sensitive data.

A third naming puzzle was writing about what I meant by students.
When I asked a CWS committee member in the earliest stage of my research
about which women’s studies courses the CWS offered, she answered, “we
have a lot of training courses but we don’t give certificates or
diplomas.” I was asking about university courses offered to
undergraduate and graduate students. Her response startled me and
compelled me to redefine the ”student” in the Regional University
context of women’s studies. I was probing to understand why CWS
professors were not deliberating on how to introduce women’s
contributions and concerns into the university undergraduate and
graduate curricula. The CWS professor appeared puzzled that I seemed to
be unaware that the CWS professors, in fact, were teaching women's
studies at the university. The students, however, did not stay in
dormitories for a semester. The “grass roots women,” as RU professors
respectfully called them, stayed at the YMCA for the duration of their
one- or two-week courses. Those attending seminars on women and
research stayed at a hotel or at home. I usually refer to the students
who attended the shorter seminars as seminar participants or grass roots
women; in one or two instances I call them students to be faithful to
the fuzzy distinction. I call university students just that,
undergraduate and graduate students. As Thorne (1993, p. 8) notes about
such conundrums, “Although I have found no tidy solutions, I have tried
to be thoughtful about such choices.”

A second dilemma I faced was how to include other categories of
diversity in this study while giving primary attention to gender.
Scholars are developing dynamic ways of thinking about relationships

among gender, age, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality (Collins, 1991;

40

Price, 1995). In a cross-national discussion such as this, nationality,
religious affiliation and positioning with the global political economy
are also important. Social location within these categories implies
different access to power for social actors. I discuss the
intersections of these socially constructed categories in a limited way
but not in a manner that reflects my awareness of their inseparability
or of the myriad ways in which they influence the organization of
women’s studies at Regional University. While I focus on gender in this
study, in future research I plan to attend to the intersections of these
socially constructed categories and their implications for organizations

and organizing.

Overview of Chapters

Chapter Two describes the establishment and development of the
Center for Women’s Studies, the structure of the Center within the
university structure and the CWS’s goals and activities from 1986 to
1994.

Chapter Three examines the CWS from a structural perspective on
organizations. I analyze the Center in its environment, that is, the
Thai bureaucracy and other organizations on which it is dependent for
resources. I also discuss the Center's position at the margins of the
university structure and its tighter coupling with the center as it
changed status from a program to an official department within the
Faculty of Social Sciences. The chapter concludes with a brief
discussion of a second women’s center within the university which
questions the notion of the CWS as “the center” and points to a more
complex organization of women’s studies at Regional University.

Chapter Four examines the CWS from a political perspective. I

examine two cases in which the CWS and the FSS administration are pitted

41

against each other over competing ideas about the governance of the CWS
and conceptualizing women’s issues.

In Chapter Five I examine the content and organization of the work
of the CWS from a cultural perspective. First I consider the
organizational culture of the CWS and the ways in which professors
affiliated with the CWS define and organize women's studies. Next I
turn to the university undergraduate students’ conversations about
gender relations and consider what professors' choices about organizing
women’s studies imply for the development of women’s studies in the
university. Finally I expand the discussion to the broader cultural
margins and to the enterprise of women’s studies at RU that extends
beyond the CWS.

In Chapter Six I briefly discuss the strengths and challenges of
examining the data from three perspectives on organizations. I examine
the dilemmas and contradictions of engaging in women’s studies which
emerge from utilizing this multiple—perspective approach and I close by
suggesting some implications of the study for women's studies

internationally.

CHAPTER TWO

THE SETTING AND THE CENTER:
A DESCRIPTION OE REGIONAL UNIVERSITY’S
CENTER EOR.WONEM’S STUDIES

Professor Rita Gallin, Director of the Women and International
Development Center at Michigan State University raised one of the early
questions that led me to do this study. "How does a women's studies
center in Southeast Asia get started?” she asked. "We don't know much
about that. Is it from two women talking under the bathroom stall-—or
what?”

Since, as Professor Gallin observed, we don’t know much about
organizing a women's studies center in Southeast Asia, in this chapter I
provide a rich description of the organization of Regional University’s
Center for Women's Studies. I have chosen which events and details to
recount, therefore this chapter marks the beginning of my interpretation
of the data. By design, however, the chapter is long on description and
short on analysis, in order to set the stage for in-depth analysis from
three different perspectives in Chapters Three, Four and Five.

I begin by locating Regional University within the context of Thai
higher education and the Center within the organizational structure of
the university. A narrative follows of how the Program for Women’s
Studies (PWS) came into being at Regional University in Thailand 1986,
moved into its own new building in 1992 and became an official center
with the status of a university department in 1993. In the second half
of the chapter I describe the goals and activities of professors and

staff affiliated with the Center for Women’s Studies.

42

43
Thai Higher Education

A military academy, a hospital cum medical school, and the Royal
Page School were the first institutions of Thai higher education; all
were located in Bangkok (Bhamarapravati, 1990; Wyatt, 1969;). In 1927
the Royal Page School became Chulalongkorn University and among its
first students were seven women studying both the arts and sciences
(Kabilsingh, 1991). This established an important precedent for women

in Thai higher education.16

Bhamarapravati (1990) asserts that these
institutions were not a I'seat of learning, research, and scholarly
pursuit as in the universities of the west“ (p. 245); rather, their
mission was to prepare leaders for the country and for the labor force,
specifically, the civil service.

Between 1958—1970 the public university system expanded
tremendously, and in 1967 the first regional university in a province
outside of Bangkok was established. Subsequent to 1970 the university
system has expanded further, gradually introducing Ph.D. and master's
degree programs; establishing two open universities with enrollments
exceeding 200,000 students to meet student demands for greater access to
higher education; and, in 1969, adopting legislation which paved the way
for the establishment of private universities. In 1994 Thailand had
nine public regional universities in outlying provinces and twelve in
Bangkok, in addition to twenty-five private institutions.

Undergraduate students are admitted to public “selective”
universities, such as Bangkok's Chulalongkorn and this study’s “Regional
University,” on the basis of qualifying grades on the National Entrance
Examination. This allows students around the country to apply to attend
any faculty in any selective university anywhere in the country. In

addition to the national exam, regional universities offer the Regional

 

16It is important to note that, although Thailand has secondary schools
for young women only, there are no all—women's colleges or universities.

44

Quota Entrance Examination which has different admissions standards.
This enables students from outlying provinces to be admitted to the
university more easily. (Fifty per cent of the admissions quota is
reserved for students from high schools in the region.)

While there is no quota for women and men students, there appears
to be relative parity in numbers of men and women students. Statistics
from 1984 indicate that more women take the entrance examination than
men; almost equal numbers of men and women are admitted and more women
receive BA degrees but more men receive MA degrees and Ph.D’s (Thailand
Development Research Institute, 1988). The numbers of men and women
professors also suggest parity among men and women instructors but men
administrators predominate at various levels of the system.

The Seventh Higher Education Development Plan (1992—1996)
identifies four areas to be developed in Thai higher education: equity,
excellence, efficiency and internationalization. These priorities
acknowledge increased responsibilities for regional universities and
promote greater autonomy in decision-making for public universities
through the decentralization. To “meet the changing demands of society”
and to “guide these changes in the right direction,” the document cites
these four areas as most important to higher education: teaching,
research, academic services and the preservation of Thai art and culture
(Ministry of University Affairs, 1992b, pp. 18-21).

Regional universities have a particular mission in Thailand. The
Assistant Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of University Affairs
(MoUA) elaborated on these objectives in this way:

One thing that stands out very clearly is the
role for regional development...if you take all
the provincial universities, all the aspects of
mission will be tied up with regional
development. For example, with selection of
students, 50% of the seats will be provided for
the high school students in the region....The

research activity will be focused on the
problems of the region....The extension services

45

of each of the universities will be targeted to
the groups in the region.

With the Seventh National Plan, one thing that
we stated quite clearly is the
internationalization of the higher education of
this country—~and we have seen a lot of
activities going on between regional
universities and overseas universities ....This
is the second wave of what I would call the
internationalization and the regionalization of
the regional universities.

The MoUA defines equity as equalizing educational opportunities
between the Bangkok center and the outlying regions of the country.
Gender equity and categories of race, language and religion are not
included in the definition of equity. Regional University is one
institution in an outlying province responsible for bringing about this
equity.

Regional university

A uniformed guard seated in a small open-air guardhouse watches
those who pass the imposing brass bas—relief university emblem to enter
the grounds of Regional University. Following the straight, paved road
onto Regional’s campus, one passes a long stretch of green grass and
blooming flowers, then comes face—to-face with a miniature white house
on a post--a spirit house——trimmed with dozens of flower necklace—length
garlands placed there to invoke blessings or to give thanks for such
things as passing a course examination. The regal Thai—style building
behind the spirit house is the sala where the King waits once a year
prior to personally handing diplomas to each Regional University
graduate. Following intersecting roads onto the central campus, one
winds past a grassy soccer field, tall palm trees and bougainvillea
bushes, hundreds of motorcycles, the single story campus post office,

and buildings of various shapes and sizes. These include six-story

women’s and men’s dormitories, faculty buildings, the computer center,

46

the five-story library and, across from the library, the Center for
Women’s Studies.

Regional University was among the first of the regional selective
universities established under national decree with the express purpose
and distinctive mission of contributing to “development” of regions of
the country outside of the capital. Currently one of nine regional
universities, its budget is among the largest of the nine.
Proportionately, however, RU and all other regional universities are
allocated a small share of resources from the national higher education
budget.17

Faculties of Social Sciences are found in all the selective
universities in Thailand, but the departments may vary. The social
sciences at Regional University consist of: Political Science, which
includes Law, International Relations and Government; Geography; and
Sociology/Anthropology, which includes Social Work (see Figure A).
Historically, studying political science in Thailand was preparation for
civil service. Still today, its chief mission is not to prepare budding
political analysts but rather aspiring bureaucrats who hope to find a
career in the Ministry of Interior. Social Sciences at Regional do not
include Economics or Business Administration; in 1992-93 the Ministry of
University Affairs approved the request of both departments to be

upgraded to faculties.

 

”The Seventh Plan for Higher Education indicates that the four

selective universities in metropolitan Bangkok receive 43.63% of the
total higher education budget. The remaining 17 universities—-selective,
open and technical universities--receive 53.71%. The remaining 2.66% is
allocated for administrative costs of the MoUA.

47

Figure 1: Structural Organization of Regional University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Scienc Faculty of Faculty of Faculty of
Research Social Science Education Humanities
Institute

Dept. Of Dept. of Dept. of IDept. Of:
Political Sociology Geograph E CWS '

Science /Anthro.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Programs

   

  

Women’s
Studies

Human Asian
studies Resource~ Studies

    

As described above, a faculty consists of several departments; it
is the equivalent of a college within the US university. In addition to
its three departments, Regional's Faculty of Social Sciences has five
autonomous programs, also called centers, which individuals or small
groups of professors have established to address specific concerns.
These include programs or centers for “Election Studies," “Asian
Studies” and “Women's Studies.” Each of these receives nearly all
funding from sources outside the university, most commonly from North
American, European or Japanese foundations or from ministries of the
Thai government other than the MoUA. If funding ends or the issue for
which the center has opened is considered solved, the program closes.
If the program continues to receive funding, the appointed program

director stays on indefinitely as head of the program and takes primary

48

responsibility for writing proposals, attracting funding and charting
the direction of the center.

Centers have no full-time appointed professors but rely on the
volunteer efforts of interested professors to carry out programs and
serve on center policy-making committees. The CWS, then, has no
professors of women’s studies with full-time or joint appointments.
Rather it has professors of specific disciplines who accept the
invitation to affiliate with the Center for Women's Studies on a
volunteer basis. Although center directors also lack full-time
appointments, a committee and advisory board meet periodically with
center directors to offer advice on programmatic activity. In most of
these autonomous programs, the dean of the faculty or one of his or her
associates sits on the advisory board and/or working committee. This
practice builds in a formal connection between the faculty
administration and any given program.

Professors are expected to teach two courses per semester although
elected department heads and faculty administrators may have reduced
workloads. In reality, a professor’s load varies from one to five
courses per semester, depending on student demand and other factors.
Research, writing and academic service are all considered volunteer work
and, together with committee work, may constitute the balance of an
academic’s work load. While non-teaching activities count toward merit
pay raises and promotions, they are neither required nor are they

weighted with specific percentages as part of one’s workload.

The Center for women’s Studies
The 19703 in Thailand was a period of increased popular political
activity in Thailand, a decade in which the Thai Communist party rose

and fell and students and farmers worked and demonstrated together

49

against repressive military rule and foreign (US) influence. During
this period a number of foreign donor agencies left or were asked to
leave the country. A coup d'etat in 1976 returned a repressive military
government to power and the 19803 ushered in a period of decreased
popular political activity. The decade of the 19803 was also a period
when a ”critical mass” of Thai academics returned to Thailand having
completed master's degrees and Ph.Ds in Australian, European and North
American universities. These new or early career professors returned to
Thailand having developed competencies in conducting research, writing
proposals, and communicating fluently in English and other European
languages. Concurrently, international donor agencies such as the Ford
Foundation, Asia Foundation, and IDRC of Canada funded Thai development
projects. CWS professors described these conditions as ripe for

beginning a women’s studies center in Thailand.

Emerging Interests in women's Studies

Chamberlain and Howe (1995) link the development of women’s
studies in Asia to the development of Women’s Studies in the US and
Europe. Given that most CWS professors obtained advanced degrees from
North American and European universities, it would be naive to ignore
influences of western scholarship on higher education in Thailand.
Indeed, two professors affiliated with the Center for Women’s Studies
indicated that attention to women’s issues in their graduate studies,
one in the US and one in Europe, was important in developing their
understanding of gender issues. Still another cited an interplay
between early activist work on behalf of Thai women along with US
graduate-level comparative studies in women’s rights as forces that
influenced her commitment to equity for women. This notion of

interplay, or of a dynamic construction between Thai understandings and

50

western ideas of women’s rights, is a useful way of characterizing what
went on in those early years for the professors and what is still going
on in 1995; I expand on this in Chapters Five and Six.

Despite this interplay, most Thai professors engaged in women’s
studies in Thailand cited their experiences within the Thai political,
cultural and historical contexts as critical to the development of their
commitment to women’s studies. In particular, the anti-military and
anti-foreign pro-democracy movement of the early 19703 sparked the
interest of many in matters of gender equity and the contributions of
women to Thai society. I discuss the impact of this period on CWS
professors again in Chapter Five.

Early work related to women's issues in Regional University’s
Faculty of Social Sciences was carried out by individual professors who
explored the concerns related to women on their own or with one other
person and shared this information informally with colleagues. For
example, a researcher in agricultural economics stumbled onto the
pivotal position of a rural woman’s labor in the family work unit when
doing her research among farming families. It became apparent to her,
she noted, that the “male head of the household,” the one whom the
researcher had been trained to interview, “didn’t know all about
agriculture.” A. Kanchanaa said,

We wanted to know what kind of fertilizer they
used for those particular crops. [The husband]
was not sure [how] to answer. He had to shout
for his wife and ask her, “What kind of
fertilizer do we use? When do we apply the
fertilizer? How much...?” That caught my
attention first. I was doing something wrong
seeking information; I was overlooking woman’s
role. From then on I was aware of the woman’s
role.

Professor of anthropology, A. Prasit told how, in doing research

on rural Thai people’s belief systems, he sought to document animist

beliefs to challenge the dominant voices in mainstream academic writing

51
of the 19703 which say that Thailand is a “pure Buddhist society.”

Through this research, A. Prasit “came across the idea of matrilineal
social structure in Northern Thai society” and “the reality that women
in the rural area work as hard as men and they speak their opinion." In
later research on decision-making in the rural area at the household
level, he noted that the prevailing paradigm at that time pointed to men
as the household decision-makers. A. Prasit and law professor A. Radida
found in their collaborative research that, whether considering
household finances, the health of family members, or decisions about
children’s education, men and women shared decision—making
responsibilities.

Law professor A. Kamol spoke of reading a book on women and
society written by A. Radida, and he noted that he had learned much from
her about women’s issues through their informal discussions as members
of the same small faculty. These early learnings, conversations,
collegial relationships and friendships catalyzed the foundation of the

core working group of the Center for Women’s Studies.

The Advent of the Program for women's Studies

Those involved with establishing the Program for Women’s Studies
spoke of its origins in different ways. Within the Thai cultural
context many professors with whom I spoke who were involved in a
university program spoke of “being asked by someone to do something,”
rather than initiating or seeking out opportunities on their own. Since
conversations about the earliest beginnings of the CWS also proceeded in
this way, I discuss the different versions of the Center’s origins.

Most professors credited A. Radida, the Center's director, with
starting the program. Colleagues who worked closely with A. Radida in

the earliest days of the Center acknowledged her central role:

52

We got together-—five or six of us at the
beginning-- and we pushed this. Radida-~she’s a
very strong person, you know, she has a very
strong personality. She went to talk to the
dean and gave him the idea that we should have
this project.

There were a few faculty members who were
interested in women’s studies, but the real
initiative was from A. Radida, actually. I
don’t think anyone else can claim that they had
a part in establishing the Program for Women’s
Studies.

A. Radida herself and the associate dean for academics at that
time gave the credit for the idea to the foundations that funded the
earliest projects and to the associate dean. A. Radida recalled that
since she had been involved in women’s issues for some time, FSS
administrators “saw the prospect of bringing in funding for research,"
so they approached her and offered her the opportunity to set up a
program. The professor who served as associate dean in 1986 noted:

I just gave her the idea, that's all, and then
she ran with it. She's a very tough woman as
you know. She wanted to be by herself and run
things by herself. My part was to give her an
idea-~and she got it.

Her colleagues in the Department of Political Science were well
aware of A. Radida’s activism on behalf of the legal rights of low—
income people and her views on equality between men and women. The
associate dean, with whom she had worked closely when she was Political
Science Department Chair and on a research project, also knew A.
Radida’s commitment well. She had worked actively to promote the status
of women in Thailand since the 19603, when, as an undergraduate law
student, she had found disparities in the ways in which Thai law treats
men and women. In 1974, A. Radida completed a master's thesis. In her
thesis she compared Thai and US inheritance and property laws and their
implications for women at an Ivy League university in the US. Prior to

the completion of this degree Radida returned to Regional University to

teach undergraduate law classes in the Department of Political Science.

53

In the mid—19803, A. Radida's interest in equity issues meshed
with the newly-articulated mission of donor agencies. Following the
1985 Nairobi UN World Conference on Women, the Ford Foundation expressed
its commitment to funding initiatives focused on women in a monograph

entitled Created Equal; a document that Foundation staff shared with

 

Thai colleagues (M. Zurbuchen, personal communication, September 25,
1995). The foundation also announced a grant to the Social Science
Association of Thailand to encourage the development of institutional
capacities in women's studies (G. Suwannarat, personal communication,
August 2, 1995).

A. Radida and her colleagues submitted a proposal to the Ford
Foundation for funding to begin the Program for Women’s Studies. (They
sent a second proposal to the Asia Foundation, which, together with
Ford, was the earliest funder of the PWS.) A. Radida had become
acquainted with the Representative of the Ford Foundation’s regional
office in Jakarta who expressed an interest on behalf of the foundation
in supporting on-going program development as well as special projects
of the proposed PWS. With the promise of funding from these foundations
and with the PWS proposal’s authors’ consent to RU officials request not
to pursue women’s studies curriculum development, the university and the
Faculty of Social Sciences approved the establishment of the PWS and
provided office space and basic office furniture. In 1986 the Program
for Women’s Studies of Regional University was launched.

Not every professor who had an important idea and wanted to
establish a program could simply start a center. Another CWS professor
noted that he had proposed an idea for a different kind of center but
was not able to find financial support for the idea. Whether the idea
to develop the PWS came from the associate dean, from an announcement of
Ford Foundation funding, from A. Radida herself or from all of these

factors combined, each was an important ingredient that led to the

54

development of the Program for Women's Studies. The interest and
objectives of the donors, combined with willing personnel who will write
proposals requesting financial support from outside and in-kind support
from within, are critical factors in starting a program or a center in
the university. A. Radida was able to secure that kind of support from
the dean, her colleagues, the university, and outside donors so that
within the first two years the center had sponsored two training
programs; collected hundreds of articles, books and magazines for the
Information Center; and published several newsletters in English and in

Thai. The Program for Women’s Studies of Regional University was off

and running.

Organizational Structure and Governance of the CWS

As a requisite of setting up the program, Professor Radida

insisted that she be allowed to choose the committee members with whom

she would work.

So I had my condition, you know, of setting up
the program... that I have my own committee
members of my choice. [The associate dean] said
that was fine, he didn’t want to bother with
that. As long as I would be able to deal with
all other regulations and financial problems, I
would be free, independent...it means [I am] on
[my] own actually. There are good, the positive
and the negative sides of that. If you are able
to bring in enough funding you are very
independent and no one will interfere. But once
you are in trouble, there is no one to offer to
be at your assistance.

Prominent members of the community and university administrators
serve on the advisory boards and committees of other autonomous programs
but A. Radida wanted to select only those with an understanding of and a
commitment to women’s issues. She did not select the dean, an associate
dean or a department chair to serve as her co-workers and advisors at

the Center for Women’s Studies. Rather, in consultation with

55

similarly-minded professors, she identified other professors in the
Faculty who were willing to serve on the working committee and advisory
board of the proposed Program for Women’s Studies. Four professors who
were invited to become part of this group have continued working with
the center throughout its eight-year history. Four others worked with
the committee for different periods of time and then resigned. (While
the terms “program” and “center” are used interchangeably for all
autonomous programs in the Faculty of Social Sciences, hereafter I refer
to the PWS as the Center for Women’s Studies, unless I am specifically
referring to the work of the center in 1986-87 when it was introduced as
a program.)

When the Center first opened with minimal staff support,
colleagues served in these roles, providing services such as secretarial
work for the center and A. Radida, translating proposals and assisting
with administrative work for conferences. The eventual funding of
proposals allowed for the hiring of a secretary (administrative
assistant) for the Center and, later, for an accountant, a librarian,
and a research assistant. The Faculty of Social Sciences provided a

custodian to perform janitorial work in the Center.

construction of the CWS Building

In 1990 women’s organizations in Norway had come together to raise
funds for women in the Third World. Members of the Norwegian
Association of Women Jurists came to Thailand to collect information,
evaluate projects that their government had supported, and select
programs that they could support and that would be coordinated in the
Third World. The association representatives also served as board
members for a huge television fund-raising campaign, “TV Campaign ’89:

Women in the Third World,” which consolidated more than forty Norwegian

56

women’s organizations. In 1989, this same group, together with children
all over Norway, campaigned for funds to help women in the Third World.
They brought Radida and her husband to Norway and urged her to submit a
proposal that would include a request for office space because the
office space they occupied in the Faculty of Social Sciences was not
large. With her colleagues, Radida prepared a proposal for the
building, the information center, research-—and, as she notes, they “got
it all.”

Government architects who were friends of A. Radida (and had
designed her home) designed the CWS building according to the needs of
the program and A. Radida’s tastes. The spacious, two-story building,
patterned after Thai-style architecture, is painted white and trimmed in
teak. Door-sized windows allow a maximum amount of light and tropical
breezes to flood the building. The building is located directly across
from the main library of the university, not far from the Faculty of
Social Sciences classroom and office buildings on the campus. The
distinctive style of the building—-the teak trim, balcony and tall
window openings-—sets the Center for Women’s Studies apart from the
concrete block, box—style classroom and office buildings on the campus.

By February 1992, the building was completed, and it was dedicated
in a ceremony on February 29, 1992, that was presided over by the
ambassador of Norway to Thailand and attended by an array of officials
and guests. One professor of the Women’s Studies Committee observed
that with the erection of the building, faculty administrators seemed to
begin to take notice of the kind of work the program was doing, work in
which international agencies were heavily investing. She identified the
construction of the Center for Women’s Studies building as a turning
point in raising awareness among faculty and department administrators
about women’s issues.

We’re educating them, we’re pushing them from
the bottom up, not the top down, sort of pushing

57

our way up. If you ask them [about women’s
studies], it will make them more interested in
our work. They don’t understand the kind of
work we are doing now. They see we get a lot of
money from international agencies and put up
this building—-I think they began to take notice
then...not before that.

The Women’s Studies Newsletter described the new building in symbolic
terms as standing for the equality of women. It is indeed unique; no
other academic Center for Women’s Studies in Thailand has its own
building. A. Radida recognizes its uniqueness and, given her account
that she never solicited funds for the building but that the donors came
to her, she maintains that “luck” played an important part in its
construction on Regional University’s campus.

The building enhances the capability of the WS program to host
seminars for and about women and also provides space for lectures on
other topics. It is a visible symbol of women’s studies on the Regional
campus, however women’s studies is defined. The Information Center is a
comfortable, quiet place to work where resources on women’s issues are
available for students, faculty and international scholars' use and
loan. CWS committee member A. Prasit meets with his two general
anthropology classes either in the upstairs seminar room or the small
downstairs meeting room. On occasion A. Radida holds her law class
here. Training courses, seminars and workshops are convened in the
large upstairs seminar room. During all-day seminars, lunch is served
either out-of—doors under a canvas pavilion tent or inside, upstairs in
the large hall/entrance way outside the seminar room.

Community activists also meet here in the seminar room, and,
occasionally, local artisans and farmers are invited to sell their
wares, such as painted fans and umbrellas, textiles, fruit and honey, on

woven mats they spread out in front of CWS building.

58

Plans to Upgrade the Program to a Deparhment

In the early 19903, A. Radida began to prepare for the process
that would lead to the upgrading of the Program for Women’s Studies from
an autonomous and completely externally-funded program to an entity with
the status of a department, eligible for government funding alongside
other departments in the faculty. It appears that this commitment to
upgrade the program set a precedent in the university and in the
country. No other autonomous programs at the university had ever
requested this nor had any other women’s studies programs at other
universities attempted such a move. Consequently, no written guidelines
existed to indicate how to proceed with the process. A. Radida
contacted different officials to discover what documentation was needed
and how to proceed. After she had prepared the 37-page proposal in
December 1992 A. Radida submitted the request to the MoUA for final
action. The Advisory Commission of the MoUA which approves new
curricula and new organizational units within the university structure
asked A. Radida to appear before them to answer questions about the
proposal. Although she flew to Bangkok for the meeting, the committee
approved the proposal without requiring A. Radida even to enter the
meeting room. A high-ranking government official on the MoUA commission
strongly advocated the upgrade and explained the necessary information
to the other committee members. They agreed to it with little
discussion. The Assistant Permanent Secretary recalls,

When we talked about gender studies, [MoUA
commission members] looked at it as some
academic activities that we should
support....everyone agreed that we should set up
a center at RU. There was discussion in terms
of what [the CWS] has done in the past. Radida
and her colleagues prepared documents of what
they have done. They have done many, many
activities in the past and I think that

convinced the committee that they are strong
enough to carry on the project of the Center. I

59

don’t remember anyone opposed to it; that was
very good.

In July 1993 HM King Bhumibol Adulyadej signed the action into the Royal
Gazette, officially recognizing the Center for Women’s Studies as a unit
with departmental status in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Regional
University.

Just prior to notification of the officially upgraded status of
the Center within the university bureaucracy, the dean and an associate
dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences initiated a proposal to alter the
working arrangements and decision-making structure of the Center. The
final written arrangement was issued by the office of the Vice Rector
for Academic Affairs during the final weeks of my data collection in
July 1994. According to this document, although the working
organizational arrangement of the Center had not been changed for the
short-term, the process for selecting the director would be changed,
thereby sowing seeds of change for the future administration and
direction of the Center for Women’s Studies. I discuss this in greater
detail in Chapter Four.

Of the other centers in the Faculty of Social Sciences at
Regional, at least one had applied unsuccessfully to elevate its status
to that of a department; the other centers had chosen not to apply for
this. The CWS was unique in its ability to capitalize on its work and

relationships to continue to develop the work of the Center.

Content: The Goals and Activities of the Center for WOmen’s Studies

In the case of developing countries
particularly, intervention for women's equality
and development....always has to contain a
central core of educational information
gathering, communication and training
activities....Educational institutions possess
some of the necessary skills, infrastructural
support and above all the human resources to
play this role. (Mazumdar, 1991, p. 45).

60
The goals set by CWS professors in 1986 illustrate what Mazumdar

calls the “central core” of intervention for women’s equality and
development: information gathering, communication and training
activities. In the first project proposal A. Radida and her colleagues
prepared to initiate a Program for Women’s Studies, they wrote that
“women have a significant role in the development process” and they
underscored the need to promote “an understanding of women’s hidden
contribution to society in all countries and in a historical
perspective.” CWS professors established women’s needs and
participation in economic and social development as priorities of the
center. They also cited the need for a theoretical framework that would
both “analyze the root causes” of the exploitation of women and critique
development strategies from the point of view of their effects on women.
The proposal’s authors believed that disseminating information on
women’s issues was the university’s responsibility. With their proposal
to establish the PWS within the university, information gathering and
communication or, in their words, information dissemination, figured
prominently in their vision for the program. They chose to emphasize
the “documentation and analysis of women's organizations and struggles
against their subordination, particularly in developing countries.”

To operationalize these plans, the PWS organizers listed the

following objectives in their program brochure:

0 To encourage studies, research and collection of
information relating to women's issues.

0 To set up a source of data and information about
women.

0 To disseminate and create an academic exchange
on women's problems.

0 To create a liaison with other governmental and
non—governmental organizations in working
towards the development of women.
Implicit in the objectives, according to the authors, was the need for a

“critical approach towards existing social science theories with a view

61

to identifying and overcoming their inherent androcentric and
Eurocentric biases.” They also were interested in searching for “a
methodology with which practice and theory, teaching and research could
be integrated.” CWS professors developed the following five strategies

to meet these objectives:

0 A curriculum for women's studies will be
arranged.

0 Studies and research into women's problems will
be pursued.

0 A center of information and documentary work
relating to women, especially those in (this
region), will be set up.

0 Information and research findings will be
disseminated by various means, such as provision
of training, dissemination of documents and
articles, publicity through the mass media,
exhibitions and other media.

0 A forum for academic exchanges of View between
academicians and other organizations will be
created in the forms of a symposium, discussion
and lecture.

In accord with the center’s objectives and strategies stated
above, the work of the Center for Women’s Studies encompasses two broad
activities: 1) information gathering and dissemination and 2)
collaboration and networking.18 Although the first strategy was to
“arrange a curriculum for women’s studies,” A. Radida indicated that
this strategy was relegated to last place when university officials
considering the proposal objected to the expense of providing
instructors to teach courses for a new curriculum. CWS professors had
not yet developed a women’s curriculum by the end of my data collection

in July 1994; rather, professors integrated topics about women into

class lectures on an ad hoc basis.

 

18Over the course of the data collection period, the center reported the
following products of its work: symposia (2) workshops (5); training
courses (7); research projects (5); lectures/seminars (12); panel/group
discussions (6); video presentations/ discussions (5); exhibitions (3);
publications (13); newsletters; action projects (1).

62

In addition to enacting formally stated goals, the Center devotes
time and energy to other activities that are not formally stated in the
goals. These include securing funding for the work and projects of the
center (primarily the work of the director) and encouraging attention to
and providing a venue for meetings that promote other progressive

causes .

Information Gathering and Dissemination

The centerpiece of the CWS’s activities is gathering and
disseminating information. This consists of research, seminars,
lectures, training sessions, panel discussions, publishing monographs
and newsletters and collecting materials for loan through the

Information Center.

Research

CWS professors have studied the impact of deforestation and
reforestation programs on household survival strategies and the work of
ethnic minority women; statutory laws, customary laws and village
practices; gender and access to justice; and the impact of social,
cultural, economic and political changes upon children and youth in
rural schools of the region.

A. Malee describes the latter project:

[I am conducting the research] with the help of
a research assistant and...[one] teacher. The
first activities were real research; the second
was launching a campaign on inculcating the
value of gender equality among primary school
pupils and the prevention of child prostitution
by giving them education. My research assistant
was assessing the impact of the extension of
compulsory education to nine years [to see]
whether it could help prevent or stop child
prostitution.

63
To reach the village where they conducted the study, A. Malee and the

research assistants traveled by bus to a province three hours away,
walked around in the hot sun for hours and then returned by bus to the
university. A. Malee admitted that this was a physically demanding
study but that she was pleased with the outcome. A Scandinavian NGO
funded the research but it was unclear whether or not the results would
be published and to what extent they would be shared. The principal
investigator of some research projects prepare reports that are marketed
through the CWS, but A. Malee worried that preparing such a publication

would announce that she was trying to promote herself or her own career.

Information Center

The Information Center was part of the original PWS proposal and,
in its first years (1986—1991), was housed in the one—room office
allotted by the Faculty of Social Science to the Program for Women's
Studies. The library moved to the first (ground) floor of the Center
for Women’s Studies when the CWS building opened in 1992. As one enters
the building, staff offices are on the left and the Information Center
is on the right. Outside the large L—shaped room of the IC, a bulletin
board to the right of the entrance displays a variety of information:
posters denouncing the trafficking and trickery of Thai women into
prostitution, announcements of upcoming exhibitions or concerts of Thai
art and music, flyers advertising the latest publications of the Center
for Women’s Studies, even a notice that the Center director is selling
her car.

Inside the entrance on the right, Information Center staff are
available behind the counter to sign out materials and answer questions.
To the left is an office with three desks that CWS committee members use

as Office space. (These professors also maintain the office space

64

assigned by their respective departments but choose to use this as their
main office space. Aside from.A. Radida and her husband, who each have
ample office space on the second floor of the building, three of the
other four professors affiliated with the Center work in their
departmental offices and come to the CWS occasionally.)

Cabinets, bookshelves, book racks and filing cabinets flank the
perimeter of the large room. In the center of the room, free—standing
book shelves display books in Thai and in English. Five ceiling—to—
floor glassless windows around the room trimmed with Thai teak allow
sunlight or the sounds of pounding tropical rains to flood the room as
well as the roar of motorcycles at the end of a class period and
occasional yelps of local dogs. Four tables with six chairs each
provide spaces for library users to sit and work. The Information
Center is officially open from 8:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.; on more than
one occasion, however, I observed that one or more of the center staff
arrived and opened the center early (8:00 a.m.) and stayed after closing
hours.

The Information Center staff collects and catalogues printed
information. Books, journals, magazines, newsletters, newspaper
articles in Thai and in English, videocasettes, slides and conference
papers are available for public use. Through these materials and
publications, the CWS hopes to reach NGO leaders, village and rural
women leaders, academicians and students of Regional University and “the
public”--including international visitors and visiting scholars.
Materials are loaned out for one week to undergraduate students and for
longer periods to graduate students and professors. CWS documents
indicate that, as of 1994, more than 6,000 entries line the shelves and
filing cabinets of the Information Center. Books are categorized by
language (primarily Thai and English); clippings and articles are filed

according to twenty—nine subject areas.

65

A. Radida considers the Information Center to be critical to the
future development of a Women's Studies curriculum on the university
campus:

The collection of the textbooks and the
materials in the area of Women's Studies has
been successful. And that is, I think, the most
significant stage of preparing for the long—term
curriculum....People can make use of the
Information Center. Already they integrate
their feminist approach or the concepts of
feminist thought or women’s experiences into
their individual courses.

To capture the sense of who was using the Information Center and
for what purposes, I asked IC users to fill out a questionnaire about‘
their use of the center. Over a three-day period, 36 women and men from
six faculties filled out the questionnaire. As I discussed in Chapter
One, the majority of those who visited the IC were third and fourth year
students but professors and guests from the community also joined them.
Most came to find books and materials on specific topics: abortion,
rape, child prostitution, women’s rights and women and AIDS. One
student said she came to the IC to do her homework and, from my extended
period of observation in the Center, I discovered that indeed it was a
place where students came to work on homework assignments or study for
exams. An occasional student also placed his or her head on a table to
take a noontime or early afternoon nap. Students who participated in
focus group interviews admitted that prior to their association with the
Center for Women’s Studies they had misunderstood its work and raison
d’étre. One student assumed the CWS was a center for research only,
another student thought the Center served women with problems, a third
thought that the entire building was a library.

One avenue of information dissemination for the CWS is making

materials available to professors, students and the general public

66

through the Information Center. Training courses constitute a second

avenue, one in which a major share of Center resources are invested.

Training Courses

Prior to the construction of the Center building, sessions were
held in the seminar room of the Faculty of Social Science. The current
venue for training sessions is the CWS’s second—floor seminar room. The
second floor seminar room is large, with long tables arranged in a
square three rows deep; microphones are available at each set of tables.
In the training sessions university personnel and, on occasion, outside
resource personnel identified by the Women’s Studies Committee give
lectures and conduct discussions. When the budget has allocated a
stipend for professors, a sum of money is offered to those who conduct
the lectures. The project budget also includes a daily stipend for the
women who attend the training courses. If the training lasts more than
one day, participants stay at the nearby YMCA, or, for the research
seminars, at a moderately-priced hotel.

Women wearing silk skirts or cotton sarongs arrive at the center
for the seminar on a comfortable tour—style bus from the YMCA. The
training sessions they attend usually are held from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 or
5:00 p.m. and last from one to two weeks (although one lasted only two
days). A typical morning session begins between 9:00 and 9:30, and,
shortly thereafter, the CWS secretary, Napaporn, or another CWS staff
member serves cold water to the seated participants. The morning
session consists of two lectures followed by a question-and-answer
period. In between the two lectures, CWS staff members serve Thai
sweets (khanom) and tea or coffee during the 15- to 30—minute snack
break. The afternoon session follows a similar pattern and the bus

returns at the end of the day to take participants back to the YMCA.

67

A CWS professor who has lectured in these training courses

described her lecture in this way:

[The lecture] is a kind of “make them alert”
[session]; give them facts first. For example,
give them figures of the proportion of the
females in the labor force. Normally there are
a lot, depending on jobs....Then I tell them
what kind of pay they would get. “That’s less
than the men, right?” And I tell them about
working conditions, the rights that they should
get and don’t get, this kind of thing. So we
make them more aware--and make them feel more
aware that they are more important as well.
“Why [do] they get less pay for equal work?” we
ask--things like that. And we make them aware
of all the social benefits that they should get
sometimes they don’t get——because most of them,
most women, work in the informal sector of the
labor force that the fair labor law doesn’t
cover. For example, when they want to have
maternity leave, they don’t get paid.

Since the CWS committee consists of only eight professors
including A. Radida, the professors work together closely on major
tasks. Not only do they plan the training programs, they also give the
training session lectures. CWS professor A. Kanchanaa described the
necessity of working together:

Everybody has to get involved in every activity
—-at least in the meetings, to give ideas. In
practice, in training in law (we have three
committee members)....And if it happens to be
training in something else, the one who has
direct knowledge and experience will take direct
responsibility; the rest help. So we have to
get together for every activity.

The Ford Foundation and the Asia Foundation funded the first two
training courses of the PWS in 1986. The first course was a “Leadership
Training Project for Rural Women”; the second a training course for
conducting research in women’s studies. The CWS sponsored four
additional workshops from 1991-93. Three of these focused on legal (or
“paralegal” as it was called) training for rural women; the other was an

‘improved’ version of the Leadership Training for Rural Women. Prior to

the elections of March 22, 1992 CWS professors traveled to villages in

68

outlying provinces to hold seminars on “Women’s Issues in Thailand and
Politics” and “Platforms of Political Parties and Women's Issues in
Thailand.” Funded by the Asia Foundation, the seminar’s purpose was to
encourage women to run for political office and to prepare women and men
to question political candidates about political parties’ positions on
women’s issues. Rao (1991, p. 4) asserts that ”empowering women is a
key aim of women's studies center around the world.” Sharing this view,
CWS members have offered training courses in doing research on women,
training paralegals, and other training programs. I elaborate on the
details of one such project below.

In 1990 the Ford Foundation funded the second "Leadership Training
Project for Rural Women.” Several non—governmental organizations that
work extensively in villages in the region, such as the YMCA, assisted
with the selection of candidates for the training. CWS professors
invited some of the candidates together with NGO representatives to the
Center for assistance with planning the training classes. The
professors asked the future trainees about their needs and interests and
what they thought should be included in the training course. The CWS
professors and the donor agreed that this was a novel and important part
of the project; such preliminary work is not customary practice of
projects sponsored by the Thai government.

As they talked about developing training courses, such as the
training of paralegals and of rural women leaders, CWS professors were
quick to note that the rural women who attend a course also participate
in its design. CWS professor, A. Prasit, noted:

We [kept] suggesting to the Center committee:

if we have paralegal training, it has to be
specially designed. We spread the word around
to NGOs, asked them to come in and provide us
with real—life situations. “Are there any women
leaders in your [vicinity] who we can work with?
Can you identify someone who is active and has
potential to develop their leadership, to

strengthen it?” we asked. “If so, contact us,
give us their names. Ask if they're interested.

4:3.

69

Identify key leaders.” [NGO leaders and women]

came in and we designed the project together.

“What are the serious problems in your village?”

we asked....0bviously, most said, “[We need]

more jobs, funds to support women in raising

pigs, small scale business, for example,

cooperatives in the village.”
Committee members take pride in the fact that the CWS includes the women
who will participate in a training course in its design, observing that
this is a radical departure from the top-down approach of government
agencies. For the training for paralegals, the entire group of
seventeen participants attended the meeting to discuss potential topics.
An elected group of representatives working together with the professors
and NGO leaders finalized the seminar topics and schedules of both of
the proposed week-long seminars.

Regional University professors taught most of the seminar
sessions. Although most lectures were given by CWS professors, on
topics such as women’s health, professors from different faculties of
the university were invited to present guest lectures. Lecturers from
outside the university, for example, from the local association for
women lawyers, also gave occasional lectures to the seminar
participants. Although lectures followed by question-and-answer
sessions were the primary mode of knowledge dissemination, seminar
organizers also included field trips, practice sessions in proposal-
writing, and skits through which participants applied and demonstrated
what they had learned.

On occasion class sessions move from the meeting room to the
field. Leadership Training Project (LTP) participants visited the
animal experimental unit in RU’s Department of Animal Husbandry;
paralegal trainees visited the provincial court, an attorney’s office
and the juvenile rehabilitation center.

Seminar leaders and participants selected seminar topics together.

CWS professors, leaders from several regional NGOs that work with women,

70

and seminar participants collaborated on the choices. LTP organizers
and participants arrived at the following topics: group organization
and management; information on income-yielding activities; women and
health; the role and status of women (including wage inequalities
between men and women); daily life and the law; environmental issues;
herbs and medicine; culture and education; and field trips to learn
about paper flower making, weaving, animal raising, the use of herbs and
mushroom culture.

An evaluation component of the Leadership Training Project sent
professors to the villages to meet with their trainees to see what
impact the training had on the leadership capabilities of the women and,
ultimately, on their villages. Evaluations of the program were mixed;
some participants had implemented the plans participants had designed in
the seminar while others had not.

One seminar participant, who, on returning home, immediately
utilized what she had learned, was Nah Eh, an ethnic minority woman from
Baan Pa Kaew Village. The villagers’ farm land had been badly damaged
by waste water from nearby mines. This necessitated that the men and
women of Baan Pa Kaew walk a long distance to cultivate crops. To earn
supplementary income, especially when farm lands lay fallow, villagers
worked in the mines that had damaged their land. Men received 50 baht
per day; women 30 baht.19

At the time of the CWS secretary’s visit to Baan Pa Kaew, the
village housewives’ group, formed with assistance from a Scandinavian -
sponsored development project, had been in existence for about a year.
After returning from the training at the CWS, Nah Eh proposed to the
group of thirty women that they try weaving for commercial purposes as

another source of employment and income, and they agreed. Nah Eh

 

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expected that they would begin this project within two months. In

addition to the weaving project, Nah Eh initiated a second activity,
encouraging members of the housewives’ group to grow and market garden
vegetables.

In attending the two—week seminar of the Leadership Training
Project for Rural Women at the Center for Women's Studies, Nah Eh, along
with about 20 other women had learned about the opportunity to market
woven goods and garden vegetables. She also learned how to prepare a
project proposal that the NGO staff could submit for funding. The
village of Baan Pa Kaew faced grave problems: their farm land was
damaged, the village had no school (school—age children walked two
kilometers to attend school in another village) and the dirt roads to
Baan Pa Kaew were rutted and in poor condition. By attending the
training project and working with the local NGO, Nah Eh had learned how
to gain access to resources that enabled her and members of the
laousewives’ group to increase their meager incomes, an initiative that

luad,the potential to provide them with a means of dealing with other

issues in the village.

Lectures, Seminars and workshops
In addition to training sessions, the CWS sponsors lectures and

SearDinars on specific topics. From 1986-88, the first two years of its

exjAstence, the Center offered six lecture-seminars. In the early days,
prc>fessors from the Regional Teacher’s College, a private university,
different Regional University faculties, and area NGOs gathered to
diS“EUss women’s issues. They examined the status and roles of Thai
won“3n, laws about which women should know, and mother and child health
caINE from a developmental psychology perspective. They also explored

18$“les for women in Papua New Guinea and talked about women's studies

(j

cry

72

and matters of women and development. One participant in these
discussions said repeatedly that she considered herself “lucky” to be
part of those early discussions. When she wrote her thesis on Thai
literature she had come face-to-face with glaring inequalities between
women and men, and she had been puzzling over these patterns on her own.
Meeting with the group gave her a forum to share her findings with
others and to discover patterns of inequality in other disciplines and

in society.

Publications

The goal of CWS publications is to disseminate information on the
status and condition of women, especially women in this region of
Thailand, to readers throughout the country and the world. A 20— to 40—
page newsletter, “Women’s Studies News,” is published biannually in
English and quarterly in Thai. One woman and one man professor,
members of the CWS Committee, each edit one language version of the
newsletter. CWS professors and individuals affiliated with the center
write some of the articles; others are reprints from non—CWS
publications. Topics of articles range from the humiliation of women
Ministers of Parliament (MP3) by men MP3 to the prostitution of Thai and
Burmese women, from environmental issues to democratization in Thailand,
from the education of girls in the region to the position of minority
religion women in the country. The newsletters also include listings of
CWS publications and of Center events. The last few pages of each Thai
issue chronicle the travels of and meetings attended by the CWS
director, CWS professors and the secretary as well as the visits of
other groups and individuals to the CWS and meetings held at the Center.

Under the same goal of information dissemination, the Center

publishes reports of Center work. These include reports of research

73

findings and reports or follow—up manuals from training courses, such as
the two guides, entitled “The Law for Women,” published after the
paralegal training course. FSS law professors, including two not
officially affiliated with the CWS, prepared the guides to make the law
accessible to women with limited formal education. One author noted
that they intentionally wrote the guides in very simple language.

Topics included women’s status, family, inheritance and administrative
law, constitutional law, social problems, contracts, law and
environment, law and forestry, land law, prostitution and law, rape,
child and juvenile security, labor law, and the roles of community

leaders in the arbitration of local disputes.

Collaboration and Networking

A. Radida and CWS professors are committed to building a network
among women and men who are working to addresses women’s issues. CWS
goals define this as creating an “academic exchange on women’s problems”
and a “liaison with other governmental and non—governmental
organizations in working toward the development of women.” They engage
in this networking at the university, local, national, regional and
international levels with academic, government and non-government
agencies and individuals working on matters pertaining to women’s rights

and women and development.

The university Network
CWS professor A. Kanchanaa explained the CWS’s approach to

creating a network among professors at Regional University:

Whenever we have a seminar and whatever we would
invite the public to, that‘s what we do not just
with the Institute [for Research on Social
Concerns)] but with the Teachers College as well
and [private universities], too. So what we do
is we try to create a network and work with this

74

work with this group. So even though we have a
committee--like when we have a group training on
Women and Democracy, most of us are the ones
that talk and we give a lecture, [but the
teachers’ college professor] also helps us, so
it's not just that we do it by ourselves. ..

A. Radida adds:
We have all kinds of support from our colleagues
from other faculties. We invited them in to be
on certain projects, to be our resource persons
and to participate in our discussion activities
or seminar or trainings.

While the CWS reaches out to invite and include other professors
and leaders in its activities, neither the CWS or any other unit assumes
responsibility for coordinating women’s studies activities in the
Faculty or the university. The CWS is on the electronic mail network
but the majority of Regional University professors are not; therefore,
it is not a means of communicating with RU professors interested in
women’s studies. Rather, professors and staff from different units
communicate by telephone, written memoranda and face—to-face. RU
professors report that although they know what each other and what other
centers involved with women’s concerns are doing, they find it
impossible to stay abreast of all the projects and activities.

No formal connection exists among the five centers in the Faculty
of Social Sciences. While center directors may be friends and work
together on certain issues, organizational ties among the centers are
not strong. According to A. Kanchanaa, while the FSS’s Human Resource
Management Development Center and the CWS may, in fact, be working
toward similar goals, the two centers do not collaborate on plans or
activities.

The director of another FSS center candidly states that he does
not collaborate with the CWS on women’s studies projects nor does his

center promote a women's agenda. He argues that women’s studies has

“come up from the fantasy of feminists in the west who would like to see

75

women playing a more active role in developing countries” and he
believes this is wrong. He argues that since political consciousness in
Thailand is new, the women’s project, which demands more concessions
from men and “makes them uneasy,” instigates a “rivalry among sexes” and
does not water the seeds of democracy. For various reasons, then, FSS
centers rarely, if ever, work collaboratively.

Other RU professors in the Faculties of Humanities, Education,
Communication, Nursing, Agriculture and others, consider themselves part
of the women’s—issues network in the university based at the CWS. These
professors attend CWS seminars, give lectures for CWS training courses
and integrate women’s issues into their teaching.

The CWS is not the only organized entity engaged in the study of
women in the university. A second autonomous women’s studies program,
the Regional Center for Women, exists in the Faculty of Education. Since
I refer to the RCW at different points throughout the study, I provide a
brief description of it here and the discuss some of the implications of
two centers within one university in Chapter Five.

A group of men professors from the Faculty of Education
established the RCW in 1990. They invited A. Pornthip, a newly-hired
woman professor of education from a progressive Bangkok university to
become the director of the center and she agreed. A. Pornthip shapes
the RCW’s activities according to her political interests, a direction
her colleagues support.

The primary project of the center focuses on encouraging and
equipping women to run for election and serve on village councils in
select areas of nine northern provinces. other work of the Regional

Center for Women includes research, workshops and community-based

76

training projects, and international exchange.20

Two RCW research
projects focus on issues for Thai women laborers. In the category of
exchange, a US-based foundation brought four women leaders of Mongolian
fledgling NGOs to meet with Thai women NGO leaders and the RCW
facilitated the visit. The dean of education supported this work of the
RCW with funds and in-kind support from the faculty.

The working space of the Regional Center for Women is located in a
non-air—conditioned office in one of three Faculty of Education
buildings; formerly the space was the office of one of the professors
who was a founder of the center. RCW committee members discussed a
proposed move to a second floor office in another building at the
committee meeting I attended. The new office space was a renovated rest
room and had no windows; committee members expressed concern that it
would not be comfortable and discussed how to deal with the expense of
air conditioning if the office space were to be made more comfortable.

A faculty administrator noted that early funding for RCW projects
came from the Faculty of Education and from the Research Institute for
Social Concerns with which the RCW’s founding professors were
affiliated. Funding for the projects in 1992-94 come from several
foundations in Europe and the US. Two of the donors of RCW projects also
fund projects at the Center for Women’s Studies. Although the RCW
projects are similar to the programs of the CWS, the directors do not
consider their programs in competition, rather, they see themselves as

part of the same university and national network.

 

N Concern was raised in the Regional Center for Women’s planning

meeting about connotations of the word “training” and the expert—trainee
(higher-lower) meanings implied. A brief discussion ensued and there
was indication that the word might be changed to diminish the implied
status differential.

77

The network within the university is not the only one important to
the CWS. Given its definition of mission, the CWS sees links to the

community as vital.

The Ccmunity Network
Work with community non—governmental organizations is the main
focus of networking within the community. A. Kanchanaa clarified the
role of the center with regard to non—governmental organizations:
We have said clearly that “we don’t work in the
field; we don’t work directly [in] the village.”
We give sort of advisory work to the NGOs, such
as the way we work with the YMCA....So our role
is serving them, serving the NGOs as an advisory
agent. Since we have knowledge, maybe we don’t
have experience, we share, they have experience
and we have knowledge, so we work a lot with the
NGOs. We learn from their experience and they
want the knowledge from us...for advice on how
to do the research work, how to do a campaign or
how to set up a development program....We don’t
have enough personnel, enough money, since we
are all full-time lecturers, we cannot go

straight to the village, to the people, like the
NGOs.

The CWS has worked with NGOs in the region on planning training
programs and has relied on the NGOs to identify women leaders to
participate in training programs. For example, the Village Leaders
Association, women leaders of the Young Men’s Christian Association
(YMCA), and the Regional Lawyers Association met to plan the paralegal
training course. The YMCA routinely houses CWS training program
participants in the building in which its offices are located. NGO
leaders have also been invited to participate in seminars about doing
research on women. Professors from a private university in the area
initiated the development of an umbrella NGO organization in 1986. The
CWS participated in this volunteer activity which brought together
approximately 20 regional NGOs working on women’s issues. The network

had not disbanded but neither was it active in 1993 and 1994. These

78

community networks extend beyond provincial borders and are intertwined

with national networks as well.

National Networks

The CWS is involved in both NGO and university networks. The CWS
second floor seminar room housed the two—day organizing meeting of a
regional chapter of a newly—formed national NGO, the Gender Watch Group.
The national network aims to monitor politicians’ promises and hold
political parties accountable to women’s needs and concerns. Several
CWS professors participated in this organizing meeting or “action
project,” as CWS documents labeled it. CWS members have attended or
spoken at national conferences of, for example, the Rural Development
Organizations Committee, the Population Institute, and Chulalongkorn
University in Bangkok. Participation in these meetings nurtures
informal networks among those interested in women’s issues.

Gumport (1991) argues that the development of cross-institutional
national networks were crucial to the development of feminist
scholarship and women’s studies in the US. Although the development of
such scholarship was not a focus of my study, my data suggest that the
NCWA’s initiative to integrate women’s issues into the curriculum is the
principal avenue within the Thai academy for promoting academic
scholarship on women’s studies. NCWA leaders invited academics and
government officials chiefly responsible for giving shape to women’s
studies in the university to NCWA conferences. Over time the NCWA
meetings expanded to include university academic administrators under
its ever-widening umbrella in an attempt to expose administrators to the
importance of including women’s issues within the curriculum. While
NCWA-funded meetings promote dialogue, the absence of national scholarly

associations and societies which have special interest groups that

79

attend to issues of women and gender constrains dialogue among Thai
women’s studies professors and fosters cultural fragmentation rather
than cross-university collaboration. Nevertheless, Thai professors
interested in women’s issues and CWS professors in particular work
diligently to build international networks to support Thai national

initiatives to improve the condition and position of Thai women.

International Networks

A. Radida is convinced that international networking is key to the
Center’s mission. While she asserts that working toward equality for
women and men is the primary mission of the CWS, A. Radida adds:

...but, added to this, now my perspective has
broadened. Working with regional or
international organizations is quite critical,
too. One cannot work alone in one's own local
level or at the domestic level. There are so
many times that campaigning and pressure from
the outside world. Letters of support or
whatever from a network appear to be quite
efficient because the government now is aware of
globalization. The world situation now has
changed and Thailand can’t ignore the world.

Internationally-supported, high profile campaigns which address
the trafficking of women and child prostitution in Thailand (and
throughout Southeast Asia) are among the projects that have had an
impact on Thailand. A. Radida believes that connecting with
international and regional networks that bring pressure to bear on the
Thai government to deal with issues such as prostitution increases the
likelihood that the government will address women’s issues.

To develop this network, over a two-and-a-half year period A.
Radida attended over thirty meetings, including fourteen trips to
Bangkok and nine trips out of the country for NCO—related meetings. A.
Radida is a member of the steering committee of a Southeast Asian non-

governmental organization for women lawyers. There have been exchanges

among members in the region: the CWS secretary traveled to India and a

s-.

:1-

I)

80

Malaysian member visited projects in Thailand. She has attended
meetings for NGOs throughout Asia and participated in the NGO Forum
prior to the Fourth UN International Conference on Women held in Beijing
in August 1995. The list of Center visits and meetings included in the
Thai language newsletters gives insight into the variety of NGOs with
whom members interact: the Laotian Women’s Federation, NGO Committees
Against AIDS, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development, among
others. Given that only eight professors are part of the working
committee and that A. Radida takes primary responsibility for
networking, building this international network requires the few CWS

professors involved with the CWS to expend a great deal of energy.

Other Social Concerns

A. Radida and the majority of the committee members of the CWS
believe their work on women’s rights and in women’s studies is
integrally related to other societal and university—related concerns in
which they are involved. When I asked one member how she came to be
involved in women's studies activities, she answered:

I’m regarded as an activist here. I don't like
to see changes happening in the wrong way in

[this area]. For example, I was one of a few
people who participated in protesting against
high rises....We are interested in similar

things like that: injustice...you could say
“improper things.” Things that should be this
way but it’s not that way. So I’m interested in
justice and improper things.

Another professor from the faculty who was involved with the CWS
committee for several years notes:

In our country we have so many, many problems..
..We do not have a separate group to deal just
only with the women’s issue. This means that if
you are considered a feminist group or women’s
group you need to deal with other problems, too
——like poverty, the environment, and other
issues also.

81

One of the newer members of the CWS committee explained that the
CWS professors asked him to serve on the committee because he repeatedly
met one or more of the members at meetings about prostitution, child
labor, the environment, and similar conflictual issues. His
participation in these meetings signaled that he shared their interests
and concerns and therefore that he was a logical and appropriate choice
to work with the Center for Women’s Studies. CWS committee member A.
Prasit is involved in a social forestry project with RU's Research
Institute for Social Concerns and works on that project from his office
space in the CWS building. His research assistant is based at the
Center and assists CWS staff members, as her work load permits, with
their work.

Individual and collective commitments toward justice and “proper
things” thus extend into the work of the Center and involve activities
that take place in the CWS building. Human rights, environmental
concerns, activities to promote a more democratic Thai society--all
have been the subject of meetings held in the Center for Women’s
Studies. In early January 1994 the board hanging in the CWS office
listed activities scheduled for the weeks ahead:

--a seminar on community forestry;

——biodiversity;

-—“The Red Indians?” A lecture by a Native American on March 4th;

-—lecture by a retired community professional and local activist.

The work of the Center also reflects a commitment to challenging
the social costs of economic development and modernization within the
region and the country, as is evident from the topics of research
PrOjects, workshops, training courses and seminars. Two of the
(“filter’s four research projects underway in 1993—94 focused on
deV'elopment issues (the impact of de— and re—forestation and the impact

0f (development-related changes on rural children and youth).

82

Participants in seminars examined approaches to community development,
the impacts of socio-economic change on men and women and relationships
between women, consumerism and the environment. Training course

lectures covered similar topics.

Beyond the CWS's Purview

Given the wide range of activities of centers for women
internationally, it is also important to describe what the Center does
not do. It does not as yet offer women’s studies courses, despite its
earliest plans to do so, nor does it offer seminars for professors of
their own or other faculties to integrate women’s issues into the
curriculum, Despite this lacunae, CWS professors and those in other
faculties do integrate women's issues into their teaching, a subject I
discuss in Chapter Five. As with many women’s studies centers described
in the literature (for example, see Rao, 1991), activities related to
student services also are beyond the CWS’s purview, for example,
advocacy on behalf of women students and counseling services. The
Center also does not engage in advocacy on behalf of women professors or

staff.21

Conclusions
The CWS at Regional University did not begin with two women
talking under the bathroom stall but from a convergence of factors.
These included a) the efforts of one professor committed to establishing
a center to promote equality among Thai women and men, b) similarly-
minded colleagues who invested time and energy to develop proposals and

execute activities, c) the interest and willingness of outside donors to

21Student services personnel indicated that they provide no special
Counseling services for women student’s to deal with issues such as
rape, pregnancy, or sexual harassment.

83

fund this initiative, and d) faculty administrators who supported the
people and the ideas.

While this is one description of the Center’s origin, organizing
the CWS was and is much more complex than the above description conveys.
In the next chapter I begin to explore this complexity from a structural

theoretical perspective of organizations.

CHAPTER THREE
THE STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE: A TOP-DOWN CENTER AT THE NARGINS

[Women’s studies] doesn’t happen from the top

down. It happens from the underneath going up

as opposed to many, many other studies where

it's a top—down thing....[For example,] if you
want science or technology, you tell the [MoUA]
and they respond. But with women’s studies

being a subject that is very controversial, it ;
is interesting that it has to be brought from

the bottom up.

——Advisor, National Commission on Women’s Affairs

Bureaucracies operate from the top-down according to hierarchical
principles which establish a “firmly ordered system of super- and
subordination” (Weber, 1922/1958, p. 197). From her position at the top
of the bureaucracy, the NCWA Advisor observes that an office at the top-
-the Ministry of University Affairs--supports certain initiatives from
its position at the top and not others——in particular, not women’s
studies. Regional University's Center for Women’s Studies is one unit
which is working from the bottom up to develop Thai women’s studies. To
carry out this work it must work within the national and university
bureaucracy and it has developed its own top—down hierarchy to carry out
its mission.

To explore these arrangements in greater depth, in this chapter I
analyze the Center for Women’s Studies from a structural theoretical
perspective, drawing from the literature on organizations as
bureaucracies and as open systems. First I describe the Thai
bureaucracy, showing ways in which it influences the work of the Center.
Next I examine hierarchical assumptions of line authority in relation to

the CWS and within the literature on the Thai bureaucracy. Following

84

85

this I explore conceptual notions of loose and tight coupling in the
context of Regional University. Descriptions of loose coupling
illuminate innovative and autonomous aspects of the CWS; the transition
from loose to tighter coupling points to areas of conflict between CWS
organizers and administrators. Finally I discuss the relationship of
the Center to its environment, exploring ways in which the CWS
organizes, selects its priorities and expands within the organizational
structure of the university.

Interviews with administrators, professors and staff members at
each level of the university as well as CWS, faculty and university
documents were laden with references to functions, structures, goals,
national development plans, control, coordination and conflict as an
interruption of task accomplishment. These words point to assumptions
of working within rational, bureaucratic structures. Conversations
about such things is not surprising since public universities such as
Regional do not exist apart from the national Thai bureaucracy. All
professors and staff are civil servants in the national government’s
civil service bureaucracy and advance according to the national step-
system pay scale. The university’s funding comes from the MoUA's
national budget for higher education. University administrators are
accountable to the Ministry of University Affairs for program,
curriculum and staff increases. In addition, the CWS and all units of
the university must consider all future planning in the context of
national development plans, such as the Seventh Higher Education
Development Plan, which are predicated on rationalist assumptions that
setting appropriate goals and achieving those goals leads to progress
and overall national development.

A discussion of the CWS within the structure of the bureaucracy
was a useful and compelling point of beginning. In view of the

autonomous nature of the Center, however, both the notion of the CWS’s

86

“loose coupling” within the professional bureaucracy of the university
and the significance of the relationship between the CWS and its
environment became fertile ground for analysis.

Finally, a cross—national comparative perspective highlights the
reality that the location of women’s studies within the university
bureaucracy is related to the ways in which women’s studies develops in
academe. Gumport (1987, p. 118), addressing the situation of US higher
education, notes that “the most obvious location for the emergence of
women’s studies within the organizational structure is in the academic
program.” This is also true in some countries of East Asia, for
example, Japan and the southern provinces of Korea and in Indian
colleges and universities (Committee for Women’s Studies in Asia,
forthcoming; Chamberlain & Howe, 1995). In Thailand and at Regional
University in particular, however, women’s studies is grounded not in
the academic program but in the Center for Women’s Studies which focuses
on issues of women and development and on research. Thai academics are
experimenting in various ways to include women’s concerns in the
academic program, but the Center continues to be the focal point of
work. This structural positioning of women’s studies and its focus on
development is not unique to Thailand. This arrangement does stand in
marked contrast, however, to those countries and institutions where
women’s studies is located within an academic program and is synonymous
with coursework and classes. To better understand the Thai arrangement,
I proceed to examine the CWS from a structural perspective.

The structural perspective on organizations gave birth to the
entire field of organizational theory. Weber's (1922/1958) nineteenth
century theory of the development of bureaucracies paved the way for
this field of study. Taylor’s (1911) construction of a management
science provoked debate and won disciples for his theory about the ways

in which organizational parts are arranged for the efficient and

87

efficacious workings of twentieth century organizations. Discussions
since the 19503 challenged debates about structures to consider
organizations as systems, appealing to the metaphor of the organization
as a biological system rather than a machine (Morgan, 1987; Scott,
1981). The open systems perspective highlights the salience of an
organizational system’s relationship to its environment (Scott, 1981).
In this chapter I combine the view of organizations as machine-like
bureaucracies which focus on the internal workings, structures and
functions of an organization with the open system perspective that
continues to guide much of the contemporary popular debate about
organizations today. While I do not utilize the biological metaphor
which examines exchanges between an organism or an organization and its
environment, I do attend to the relationship of an organization to its
environment along with the intraorganizational machine-like structure of

the bureaucracy.

The Thai Bureaucracy
Bureaucratic structures in Thailand have a long history. In the

fifteenth century the monarch of the Kingdom of Ayudhya (located in what
is now central Thailand) introduced an elaborate system of bureaucratic
administration, codified law, and a state—organized economy. The system
was effective in expanding Ayudhya’s control, despite resistance, since
it contrasted sharply with the more personal system of patron-client
relations that had preceded it (Wyatt, 1982/1984). The bureaucratic
pattern of Ayudhya endured until the late nineteenth century when King
Chulalongkorn set out to restructure the bureaucracy in a strategic move

to push Thailand out of isolation and to strengthen ties with colonial

88

powers but keep them at a distance.22 This system continues—-and
continues to expand--to the present.

Thailand’s government bureaucracy is massive. In addition to
university professors and staff throughout the country, the national
bureaucracy includes primary and secondary school teachers, the police
force, postal service, armed forces, and hospital and health care
workers. Thirty—seven per cent of the national budget is allocated for
the maintenance of the bureaucracy and this amount is increasing.
Benefits of being employed by the government bureaucracy include the
guarantee of a life-time position, opportunities for advancement and a
pension upon retirement.

The center of decision—making and power of this government
bureaucracy is located in the capital city of Bangkok. With a
population of over six million people (about 1/10 of the country’s
population), Bangkok is the center of government, finance, business and
trade for Thailand. As Thailand’s GNP grew dramatically in the 19803,
the majority of resources were expended in the center of Bangkok and in
other urban areas around the country (Muecke, 1992).

As with other government ministries, the Ministry of University
Affairs (MoUA) is centered in Bangkok. It has a coordinating function
that involves responsibility for approving university development plans
and the establishment of new universities. Standardization and quality-
monitoring also fall within its purview and the ministry approves
individual course syllabi and new degree programs and courses of study.
Professors at private universities must also regularly defend their
proposed examinations and have them approved by the Ministry. Together

with the Budget Bureau, the MoUA decides the numbers of new professor

 

22Thailand was never officially colonized. An agreement between the
British to the west of Siam, as it was known, and the French to the east
designated Siam as a buffer state between the two colonial powers
(Keyes, 1989).

89
and staff appointments to be allotted to each faculty of any public

university. In 1993 the FSS applied for a number of new professors to
expand disciplinary offerings but they were allocated only one new
professor.

Bureaucratic procedures shape the organization of the university
and of units within the university in countless ways. The “Laws of
Regional University,” which exist under royal decree, dictate the
organizational structure of the university and any change must comply
with these laws. Permission to hire new professors, to construct new
buildings and to introduce new programs must all be approved by the
appropriate units of the bureaucracy, usually the MoUA and the Budget
Bureau.

When the CWS conducts a seminar which is funded by the national
government, the Center must follow government guidelines. For example,
national government guidelines specify the exact stipend to be given to
seminar consultants conducting training workshops. The guidelines are
based not on who the consultants are, but on who the trainees are.
During one CWS seminar, the director registered her dissatisfaction
about the level of stipend paid to CWS professors and community
professionals conducting the seminar. Since their students were rural
women each consultant was to receive 300 baht. Had the students been
business people, the stipend would have been substantially higher. In
this case, A. Radida argued strongly against the government’s guidelines
and assumptions and the consultants were paid the higher fee.

To receive permission from the MoUA’s Advisory Commission to be
upgraded from an autonomous program to an FSS department, the CWS had to
demonstrate through documentation required by the MoUA that it had, and,
in the future, would continue to fulfill the objectives of Thai higher
education as set forth by the MoUA. The director and CWS staff prepared

a document which demonstrated that the activities of the CWS were indeed

90

in line with the Ministry’s objectives. In keeping with the mission of
regional universities, CWS work was devoted to work in the region.

Their “academic service” work matched one of four MoUA focal areas. The
networks the CWS professors are developing in Southeast Asia and
internationally carry out the MoUA’s goals for the internationalization
of Thai universities.

CWS employees were paid by project monies and funds continually
had to be sought from donors to pay them. With that arrangement there
was less job security for employees and lurking uncertainty for the
Center. That is, if project funding did not continue the Center would
have to reduce staff and scale down its work. As mentioned above,
benefits of being an employee of the bureaucracy include the guarantee
of having a position for life, a pension, and opportunities for
advancement, among others. Receiving permission from the MoUA to
upgrade to a department and Budget Bureau approval to gradually allow
staff members to become civil service employees implied greater security
for the individual employees and the work of the Center than existed
when the Center was an autonomous program.

Organizational studies of Thailand characterize the Thai
bureaucracy an inflexible hierarchical structure in which rewards,
sanctions and decisions on important matters are centralized at the top
of the hierarchy (see, for example, Riggs, 1966; and Siffin, 1966).
These features are attributed to the hierarchical nature of Thai culture
and society and to the intentionally designed Weberian bureaucratic

23
system.

 

23Eberhardt (1988) describes this hierarchy within Buddhist cosmology:
“Buddhist cosmology orders all creatures—-human and nonhuman--along a
continuum...with the Buddha representing one end of this continuum. Not
only are classes of beings hierarchically ordered, but individuals are
classes of beings hierarchically ordered, but individuals within each
class are also believed to be fundamentally unequal....This belief in
the essential inequality of all beings has consequences for people’s
behavior. At any given point in time, cultural norms prescribe the

91

A Weberian bureaucracy posits that roles, rules, classifications
and assignments obviate attention to favoritism and personal
relationships. Weber (1922/1958) described these characteristics of a
bureaucracy: 1) it is divided into fixed areas of jurisdiction which
are ordered by rules and regulations, 2) bureaucratic activities are
designated as official duties, 3) the authority to give commands to
carry out these duties is rule—bound and stable, 4) official duties are
fulfilled methodically only by qualified employees, and 5) hierarchical
principles hierarchy ensure that higher offices supervise lower ones.

In Thailand, however, the line authority of the bureaucracy is
both reinforced by hierarchical relations in Thai society and
complicated through the importance of affiliative relationships.
Organizational structures coincide with and are reinforced by cultural
norms which give weight to hierarchy and its distinctions. The co—
existence between personal, patron-client relations and the Thai
bureaucracy, rooted in practices of the fifteenth century, continue on
in 1995.

Haas (1979) suggests that criteria such as graduating from the
same faculty of a university allows Thai officials to enter easily into
the patron-client system and to maximize their rewards and
satisfactions. He further argues that this particular criterion is more
frequently observed in highly bureaucratic environments than in
professional institutions such as a government hospital. In contrast,
Prabudhanitisarn (1988) asserts that using such particularistic criteria
to build trust in personal relations in fact may be used even in a less

bureaucratic environment of a university when resources are scarce or

 

proper manner of interpersonal interaction in such as way as to
highlight this inequality....[through] posture, speech, and overall
demeanor” (pp. 78-79).

In

Hr

 

 

92

interests are in conflict and cannot be reconciled by formal rules and
procedures.

The most widely—discussed example of this personal bonding which
provides lifelong professional (and personal) gain discussed by FSS
professors was that of the ”Black Lions” (singh dam). The Black Lions
are graduates of Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science
who expect to enter into the service of the Ministry of Interior upon
graduation. Black Lions aspire to become district officials and
provincial governors--bureaucratic positions to which one is nominated
and appointed by officials of the Ministry of Interior. Not all become
government officials, however; some move into other professions, such as
university professors. In the FSS at Regional University, the dean, an
associate dean and the department chair of political sciences were all
Black Lions; in addition, three out of five of the autonomous programs
in the Faculty of Social Sciences were headed by Black Lions.

Drawing on relationships with Black Lions or members of other
groups are primary ways in which trust is built and tasks are
accomplished within an organization. Relationships with other Black
Lions or Red Lions (graduates of Political Science from Thammasat
University) or with members of the same class from a military academy
reinforce patron-client relations and clique-based favoritism within an
organization. In the process, bureaucratic assumptions of replacing the
personal with the impersonal recede to the background.

The CWS professors who are Black Lions reject this group
membership; this rejection clusters them and like—minded professors into
an opposing category. This group refuses to participate in Black Lion
activities and speaks out against activities and practices that bond
Lions more closely. However, one becomes a Black Lion by virtue of

graduating from a particular university faculty and therefore shares an

93
unbreakable bond for life with other Black Lions. This means that these

alumni--including those who oppose the activities of the Black Lions——
will address each other using nicknames (a practice not exclusive to
this affiliation but an expected part of it) or in familial terms such
as “big sister.”

While CWS professors may resist some of these affiliative ties,
personal relationships also have been important to the development of
the CWS. A. Radida and her colleagues acknowledged that her
relationship with one or more influential members of the subcommittee of
the Ministry of University Affairs was crucial to obtaining approval to
be upgraded to a department. At least one other center also had applied
to be upgraded to a department but it did not have a similar long list
of accomplishments nor did the directors have connections with members
of the MoUA advisory commission. In a public meeting the director
announced to her colleagues that, in fact, the Center would not have
been upgraded if the Special Advisor to the Prime Minister’s Office had
not championed their cause.

A member of the national Budget Bureau also sits on the Ministry
of University Affairs committee that approved the upgrade of the CWS.
If the Budget Bureau does not set aside funds for a new program being
considered by the Ministry of University Affairs, the progression to
program is unlikely to succeed. The Budget Bureau did concur with the
upgrade of the CWS to a department, meaning that the Center could have
access to funds as does any department of the university. The official
Budget Bureau memo that endorsed the upgrade of the Center also
indicated that the bureau would financially support only one center of
women’s studies at the university. Since there are two women’s centers
at Regional University, this decision limits the ways in which women's

studies will develop at the university in the future.

94
The Dnivorsity‘within the Thai Bureaucracy

As mentioned above, studies of professional agencies within the
Thai bureaucracy suggest that not all segments of the bureaucracy are
resolutely hierarchical. Case studies on management information and
budgeting systems in a Thai university and of physicians in a Thai
government hospital indicate that these institutions are less
bureaucratic, less hierarchical, and more collegial than are those
within the regular Thai bureaucracy (Prabudhanitisarn, 1988; Haas,
1979). In universities, the authority to make many decisions is
delegated to academic departments and faculties. Faculties and
departments have autonomy in managing academic affairs as long as they
conform to the official rules of the university. Committees make
recommendations on curriculum development, the allocation of research
grants and budgeting before decisions are made at department, faculty,
or university administrative levels (Prabudhanitisarn, 1988, p. 53).

Professors elect colleagues to administrative positions such as
department chairs, deans and the rector for limited terms (a maximum of
eight years). Administrators who wish to continue in office have to be

4 At the end of their term,

reelected at the end of four years.2
administrators return to their work as professors, a strategy that “has
an effect of making them careful not to make enemies unnecessarily and
careful to respect the dignity and the needs of the professors under
their charge” (Prabudhanitisarn, 1988, p. 53).

Directors of autonomous programs, such as the Asian Studies Center
and the Center for Women’s Studies, are not elected and are not subject

to the same election guidelines as department chairs and deans. When a

new dean was elected to the Faculty of Social Sciences, the director of

 

“ There is even autonomy and variation here, however. Within the
Faculty of Social Science at Regional University one department selects
a chair every two years for a maximum of four; another may rotate the
chair every two years; the third follows the 4—year/8—year pattern.

95

the Center for Women’s Studies offered to resign, as is customary, so
that the dean would be free to appoint a new director in her place. The
dean reappointed A. Radida and the members of her committee; he also
reappointed the directors of other centers in the faculty. When another
center’s director was elected department chair, he asked a colleague to
be his successor and the dean issued the formal appointment. The
university is less formally hierarchical than other organizations within
the bureaucracy and units such as the CWS are more flexibly structured
than other units within the university.

There are other differences between the “regular” Thai bureaucracy
and a university. The Civil Service Commission is the responsible
agency for recruitment to all bureaucratic positions. Advancement
within the bureaucracy is determined solely by a ranking administrator.
In the university, however, recruitment of new professors is considered
by academic departments autonomously and career advancement from
instructor to full professor depends in part on the deliberations of
departmental evaluation committees. Although professors are government
officials and receive approximately the same salary as other civil
service officials, they have separate rules of recruitment and reward

(Prabudhanitisarn, 1987).

Bureaucracy, Authority and the CWS
Even if a university is not as bureaucratic as other
organizations, the structural arrangement of the CWS reflects the
bureaucratic arrangement of hierarchy and authority. The director of
the Center is at the top of the hierarchy. In a national seminar she
described that she and the CWS professors worked together as a team but

that she was “a little higher” than the others. In terms of pay,

96

authority and status, under the director is the secretary, then the
librarian, then the accountant, and the custodian is at the bottom.

I found some evidence of a flatter, less vertical structure in the
CWS and in the ways in which it is organized. For example, the staff
assisted each other with tasks outside their domain and, except for the
secretary, they regularly ate lunch together. On one occasion I also
observed a professor from the working committee eating with the staff.
Rather than carefully separating tasks between advisory board and
working committee members, members of the advisory board worked
alongside the members of the working committee. In the area of program,
village and rural women leaders were brought in to give their ideas of
what should take place in training sessions and their ideas were
incorporated into the design of the program. These may be said to be
dramatic challenges to the hierarchical structuring of Thai relations.

The two-tiered distinction between professors and staff and the
top-down line authority among center staff also reinforced the
hierarchy, however. Except for the secretary, staff members were not
included in planning meetings with the working committee and advisory
board. There was a clear delegation of tasks and authority that
descended from the director to the secretary to other staff members.
Appointments with the director were made only through the secretary.
The two large second floor offices were occupied by the director and an
advisory board member (the director’s husband) while a third smaller
office remained empty; one large first floor office was shared by three
other professors. At the bottom of the hierarchy was the custodian, the
only one sent to buy lunch for the Center staff at noontime, the lowest
paid and the one whose duties included staying at the center day and
night. As a subsystem of the university, the CWS appears not to offer
an intentionally designed, non-hierarchical structural alternative to

the university system or to other agencies with which it works.

97

My interviews suggest that for some of the CWS Committee members
past and present, the hierarchical structure of the Center, even with
its inclusion of NGO and village women leaders and fluid work
responsibilities of staff members, is unsatisfactory. Although they
agreed that the director had invested an inordinate amount of time in
the Center, some would prefer that the director invest less time,
personally fulfill fewer invitations and lower her own visibility,
giving more leadership responsibilities and opportunities for
participation to other professors. Professors serving on the CWS
Committee in 1993 and 1994 expressed appreciation that A. Radida took
charge of Center, however, and they gave credit for the development of
the Center, from its earliest beginnings to the 1993 upgrade, to A.
Radida.

Ferguson’s (1984) critique of bureaucracies champions egalitarian,
horizontal structures as viable feminist alternatives to vertical,
hierarchical structures. Chinese feminist scholar, Zhang, (personal
communication, June 15, 1995) argues, however, that “definitely not all
feminists share the American feminist idea that a feminist organization
should be bottom—up, consensus based, and non—hierarchical.” She
asserts that this may not be part of professors’ consciousness at this
stage or it may not be part of their concern.

Even if the CWS were to challenge the pattern of line authority,
it would be naive to expect a structural alternative from an
organization in the margins to have an impact on the broader university.
Ferguson (1984, p. 210) observes that “women’s studies programs cannot
restructure the university, any more than unions can restructure
corporations.” While the CWS structure does not offer an alternative
organizing pattern within the university, its practice of collaborating
with rural village women way may serve as important testimony to

alternative ways of organizing in the broader society.

98

Tight and Loose Coupling

A metaphor for smooth functioning of a bureaucracy is the machine
(Morgan, 1987). A machine must run smoothly for maximum efficiency; the
gears must fit tightly and be well greased. A change in linkage or a
tightening of the gears may result in the grinding of metal against
metal and they must be adjusted to obtain a proper fit.

The mechanistic logic of the structural perspective presumes that
organizations are “rational, consistent and orderly” (Scott, 1981, p.
256). For example, the rational system expects tight linkage or
coupling: 1) of directive to outcome (what the manager says the worker
does); 2) of information to action, that is, that adequate information
effects appropriate action; and 3) of basic work of the organization to
its output (Bolman & Deal, 1991). Weick (1976) proposed, however, that
loose coupling describes organizational activities more accurately so
that, for example, a worker’s actions may precede receiving information
and organizational intentions are ascribed to actions after the actions
have occurred

Although all social organizations are made up of combinations of
loose and tight coupling, forms of tight coupling exist more obviously
in organizations with sufficient resources and low complexity. Bolman
and Deal (1991) give the example of McDonald’s, a fast food industry
restaurant with low complexity as a tightly coupled organization. In a
professional bureaucracy such as the university, however, goals are
diffuse, resources are limited and the mission and work are complex; the
organization thus operates as a loosely coupled system. There are
examples of tight coupling within the university but, as I describe

below with regard to the CWS, one primarily finds loose coupling.

99
Loosely Coupled units: Innovation'without Disturbance-~or Impact

One advantage of loosely coupled units within the university is
that the university can respond quickly and innovatively to a concern
(Weick, 1976). The origins of the Program for Women's Studies
illustrates this well. In 1986 funding was being made available through
US foundations to support programs related to women’s issues in
Thailand. The associate dean recalled that to obtain outside funds A.
Radida needed to set up a program, that is, to write up a proposal with
goals, objectives and strategies that could be approved by necessary
university committees. The structure of the autonomous program within
the university allowed A. Radida to prepare a proposal and to design a
“Program for Women’s Studies” within the Faculty of Social Science to
which the funds from the foundation could be directly channeled. The
program was quickly approved without having to go through the longer,
slower decision-making paths of the national bureaucracy.

A “program” within a faculty is a moveable piece in the structural
organization of a university faculty that can be added or deleted with a
modicum of official approval and paperwork. A proposal is written by
members of a faculty, outside funding is secured, office space is
allocated within a building of the faculty, members of a committee and
an advisory board are selected and the program becomes official. This
internal structural dimension tells part of the story but another
important part is to be found in the context.

The CWS was thus introduced to Regional University’s Faculty of
Social Science with little disturbance to the building blocks of the
organization of the university——a faculty, research institute, the
central administration or any other part of the university. In this
case, it meant not having to seek permission from the Ministry of

University Affairs or going through the even more time-consuming legal

100

process of getting approval from the Ministry and the signature of the
King, the procedure the Center later had to follow when upgrading to a
department. There was little disturbance to the university and the
university was able to begin officially addressing concerns about the
position and condition of women in Thai society through the Center for
Women’s Studies without forging an institutional response or making a
serious and permanent commitment to these matters through a university—
wide policy or initiative.

With the introduction of a women’s center to pay attention to
women’s concerns, the university was not compelled to attend to women's
concerns in a comprehensive way. I have no evidence of a university-
wide or administrative level commitment from the rector, vice presidents
and deans to dealing with women’s/gender issues within or across
faculties or beyond the university nor is there evidence that they
attempted to coordinate such an initiative. The Ministry of University
Affairs had not mandated that universities consider gender issues nor
did any ministry require that the goals of the 20—Year National
Development Plan for Women be incorporated into the university’s Five-
Year Development Plan. Hence, attending to women's issues was optional
for Regional and all other universities in the country. The university
was not compelled to formulate a university-wide policy to address
women’s issues or women’s studies. Under these circumstances, a Center
for Women’s Studies has no major impact on the university with regard to
policy or program.

A disadvantage of a loosely coupled unit such as the CWS is that
its presence does not compel or even urge RU to comprehensively deal
with women’s concerns; in fact, it may appear to relieve others in the
university of addressing such issues. Birnbaum (1988) suggests that
when a university creates a loosely—coupled unit to deal with specific

concerns, administrators and others may regard that unit as taking care

AD

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101

of the issue so that a university—wide response is not required. My
data indicate that the presence of the Center for Women’s Studies also
allows professors and administrators to pass off women’s concerns to the
CWS as the place where the university deals with women’s issues. For
example, in an interview with an FSS center director, I asked:

S: Do any of your [center] projects focus on

women’s issues——say, getting women mobilized in

government?

D: No--why? You know why? Women’s Studies is

taking care of that. That’s one thing. Another

thing is that there’s another project at the

Faculty of Education led by Prof. Pornthip...

So why should we do that?
Loose coupling between centers and other units of the university
bureaucracy allows autonomous programs within the same faculty as well
as administrators who oversee the university’s academic core not to pay

attention to women’s issues in curriculum and in other academic service

and research activities.

Autonomously Setting the Center's Agenda

A potential advantage of loose coupling is that it fosters
innovation and attention to issues by smaller sub—systems (Weick, 1976).
In this case, the subsystem of the Center for Women’s Studies is allowed
to develop its own agenda, requiring approval from university committees
for only its most general goals and strategies. The director, CWS
committee and advisory board, through their activities, discussions and
written documents have defined this broad work agenda: information
gathering and dissemination on women’s issues in relation to other
social concerns, networking within the university and with community and
international organizations, and developing courses in women’s studies.

All FSS centers focus primarily on issues, training seminars and

meetings beyond the university and expect to have an impact on audiences

102

other than university undergraduate and graduate students. While the
CWS’s audience includes university colleagues and GO and NGO leaders,
its primary interest is in “grass roots level” women, that is, rural
village women who are respected leaders and can bring about changes in
their village communities. A. Radida identifies outreach to grass roots
women as the CWS’s highest priority. She says:

The most urgent and needed strategy to work on

women's concerns...is to...reach out to the

rural women' s group....Because in the past

[university people and government organizations]

have been focusing on [things other] than the

outreach programs with the grass roots women. So

we would rather develop projects where we can

work with grass roots women above anything else.

In choosing to build networks and work with grass roots women,
defined as extension work or academic service, the Center for Women’s
Studies becomes more tightly coupled with NGOs in the environment
outside the university and less tightly coupled to the Faculty of Social
Sciences. Through this they also avoid dealing with the MoUA over the
adoption of new courses of study development and syllabus development, a
goal that has not as yet received support in the faculty or the
university.

Loose coupling of the CWS with the faculty, university and with
financial resources has allowed the CWS, under the strong leadership of
its director, to innovatively and independently address women’s concerns

as they choose to define them as long as they are able to match with

donors’ guidelines.

Independence and Coordination
Within the professional bureaucracy of Regional University,

attention to women's studies and women’s issues is appearing in many

103
different places and forms around the campus. I noted this in a
conversation with A. Radida:
S: It seems to me that women’s studies is
growing up like little plants in many different
places in the university.
R: It’s the same as happens in government work
or even NGOs--because it’s connected more with
the interests of each particular group and the
potential of the group to develop activities or
programs to suit their interests....
We have never had a master plan or main plan for
anything. If someone is interested in the
indigenous people’s rights, then they develop
their own project and carry out the work from
their side. Another part of the university
might also have the same interest but we don’t
have the dialogue for people to avoid the
unnecessary waste of resources or human
resources or financial resources....But I don’t
mind having many, many groups working toward the
same issues.

Although there are many activities around and resources available
through the Center for Women's Studies, it is not a center that
coordinates and primarily initiates all work about women on campus.
Many things are going on; individuals report that they casually inform
each other and that they know what other centers and individuals are
doing but in a university of 12,000 students with over 1,500 full—time
instructors, coordination of this information is very difficult. One of
the results of an absence of coordination, however, is that there can be
overlap in programs. Indeed, I saw some of the same village women
leaders at activities sponsored by the CWS in the Faculty of Social
Sciences and at those sponsored by the Faculty of Education’s Regional
Center for Women. One professor reported that some of these women had
BXpressed concern that being invited and feeling obligated to attend
aCtivities by different units placed heavy demands on their time.

Other examples point to the potential difficulty of coordinating

this work at Regional University’s campus. The Research Institute for

Social Concerns received a contract to write a report on ethnic minority

104

Women’s Studies. That institute also sponsored a conference on
“Leadership, Socioeconomic Change and Gender” with a US university and
forgot to inform the CWS that the conference would take place. One CWS
professor received a notice about the conference, and she informed me.
Institute staff members apologized profusely for this oversight.
Nevertheless it was emblematic of the lack of coordination and
communication among centers with related interests. In fact, a several
million baht project of the Faculty of Social Sciences, “Improving
Conditions for Thai Women,” was developed by the dean and his associates
and the Center for Women’s Studies was not consulted about it. Faculty
administration defended the absence of collaboration by arguing that the
proposal was not about women but about HIV and AIDS. Birnbaum (1988)
argues that examples of this lack of coordination within a loosely
coupled system are not unusual; in fact, they are quite typical. In
Chapter Five I explore this further in a discussion of the fragmented
women’s studies subculture emerging at Regional University.

Notions of loose and tight coupling within the loosely coupled
university have offered insight into the following: the possibility of
introducing an innovation such as the CWS into Regional University
without impact on or disturbance to the university structure, the
opportunity for a new unit to set its agenda independently, and the
possibility of operating autonomously without coordinating women’s
studies across the university (and the likelihood of overlap). It also
points to the possibility of conflict wherever loose coupling is

tightened.

Loose to Tight Coupling: Points of Conflict

Following the approved upgrade for the CWS from a center to a

department, the dean proposed a new set of guidelines for governing the

105
CWS and selecting its director. In this proposed plan, the FSS deans

would have a say in choosing committee members and in recommending the
new director, which would result in a tighter coupling between the
faculty administration and the CWS.

Comparing the earliest form of governance of the CWS with that of

other centers in the faculty and the university provides insight into
the broader context. One of the earliest conditions set by the director
in establishing the Program for Women’s Studies in 1986 was that she
would be able to select the people with whom she worked. The dean
agreed and the director chose a group of six professors for the working
committee and three for the advisory committee, with no faculty
administrators included, i.e., no dean, associate or assistant deans.
This composition stands in contrast to other centers, for example, the
women’s center in the Faculty of Education that has seventeen committee
members and includes the faculty’s dean and an associate dean. This
latter approach often includes administrators, members of the community,
and prominent Thai citizens in addition to the organizing professors.
A. Radida reasoned, however, that more names on a committee list did not
equate with more workers for a center’s mission, and she was interested
in working with committee members who were truly committed to doing the
work.

Some professors, including past CWS committee members, judged that
this approach is too exclusive and that committee membership should be
expanded. Others criticized the CWS committee’s practice of inviting
only one or two new professors to join the CWS committee every couple of
years. One professor notes:

I think that [the CWS] should have been able to
attract more people because as far as we know
there are more people who are interested in
[Women’s Studies]. That leads to another
question: How come after so many years of
working we just have so few people who are

interested in women’s studies?....There may be
something wrong there in trying to recruit more

106

people into coming in...and I don’t know whether
enough efforts [are] being made.

From its beginning, the CWS had been autonomous and loosely
coupled to funding and decision—making mechanisms of the university. A.
Radida had been told that the CWS more closely resembled an NGO than a
university program-—an observation that makes sense given the CWS’s
autonomy and flexibility within the bureaucracy. The dean’s proposed
new set of guidelines would couple the CWS more tightly to the faculty
and to the university.

The CWS had proposed a tighter coupling with the university
bureaucracy in order to gain job security for its employees and a
permanent position in the university for itself. This tighter coupling
with the bureaucracy also meant that in order to have access to this
stability the CWS would now be responsible for following rules and
regulations of the bureaucracy.

In the mechanistic terms described above, this upgrade adjusted
the loose-fitting gears or coupling of the Center for Women’s Studies to
the Faculty of Social Sciences. This adjustment in the linkage resulted
in a loss of autonomy for the CWS, required that it follow new rules
and, in View of the dean’s proposal, implied that in the future the CWS
would work more closely with faculty university administrators. The I
CWS’s resistance to this loss of autonomy could be described as a
grinding of the gears to which the CWS as a new part of the machine

bureaucracy would have to adjust.

Resources in the Environment

The above understandings come from looking inside the university.

What goes on beyond the borders of the campus in the broader environment

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of the university is also important in understanding the functioning of
the CWS. The earliest structural perspectives on organizations viewed
the organization as its own entity, as an autonomous independent unit.
It is impossible not to take into account the environment of the
organization, however, since an organization depends on exchanges with
other systems for its survival (Scott, 1981). The salient dimensions of
the environment for this analysis include the structure and culture and
of the Thai bureaucracy in which the university is positioned, the Thai
academic structure and culture, and resources essential for the survival
of the Center for Women’s Studies. These resources are accessed through
relationships to donors, to the national Ministry of University Affairs
and the Budget Bureau, and to different levels of university
administration. Since an essential component of the core technology of
the CWS is training of village and rural women, the Center depends on
NGOs that operate in the community and in provinces within the region to
supply the “input” for their system (Katz and Kahn, 1978). The topics
and content of the training are derived from perceived needs of the
sociopolitical, economic and cultural context.

To acquire resources and to operate within bureaucratic policies
and regulations, Thai universities have to deal with several
organizations in the bureaucratic system. Resources essential for the
survival of the Center for Women’s Studies include relationships to
organizations within the Thai bureaucracy--the national Ministry of
University Affairs and the Budget Bureau-—to donors, and to different
levels of university administration. They also include material
resources.

In the earliest days of the Program for Women's Studies the
Faculty of Social Science provided office space and basic furniture for
the Center. Now that the Center has its own building, electricity and a

telephone line have been allocated to the Center from the faculty budget

108

along with annual purchases of items such as filing cabinets or a desk.
Funds for curriculum and research projects and for special celebrations
such as the 30th anniversary celebration of the university ostensibly
are available to the Center now that it has the status of a department
but it must compete with three other departments within the faculty for
these monies.

Funding also is available for the work of the CWS through specific
government channels. Special project monies have been made available to
the CWS from the National Commission on Women’s Affairs, which is part
of the Office of the Prime Minister. A two-day seminar in legal
training for rural women at the CWS was funded by the NCWA. The NCWA
has also funded conferences or meetings in Bangkok on Women’s Studies
and the CWS director has been invited and funded to attend those
meetings.

The majority of project funding for the Center, however, comes
from donors in North America and Europe, such as the Ford Foundation and
the Asia Foundation, the International Development Research Centre and
the Canadian International Development Agency, the Norwegian Association
of Women Jurists and the Freidrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation of Germany.
At least one Asian NGO also has contributed to the work of the Center.
Each donor organization has its own mission, guidelines and modus
operandi that the CWS must understand and match in its proposals in
order to receive funding. Work with foundations is facilitated by the
fact that the director or her husband have had long—standing
relationships with program officers at several of the major foundations.
Nevertheless, changes within donor organizations-—staff turnover,
Organizational re-structuring or down—sizing and budget reductions—-
usually have an impact on the work of the CWS.

For their part, donors are partners with Center for Women’s

Studies professors in their attempts to challenge the dominant

109

patriarchal structure of relations through their funding of CWS
programs--although these funds can also be construed as evidence of
colonial patrimony. One program officer, who called funds for women
“fashionable,” noted that many resources are available to women’s
programs these days but that donors have their own ideas about how
recipients should relate to a foundation about the use of the financial
resources:

We have so many difficulties in getting money to
Thailand now. We [donors] each have our own
projects....What I don’t like is to compete with
other donors. I like to get together with
others so we’re not funding the same thing. We
want the recipients to understand our
philosophy. I don’t want them to just use our
money. They want to be independent-—they don’t
even want to acknowledge we have given the
money. I want to give an opening address, tell
them our goals.

I always go to the seminars to get an idea of
who’s coming, at least for half a day; otherwise
it’s just money business. I want to know what
has been done with it, to see what’s developing.

Many foundations have women’s programs. They
need it. It’s fashionable--if not a woman
[program officer] for women’s concerns, some
money for it....

I have been supporting some of the same seminars
as [another foundation]. If I’m not sure of the
budget....Sometimes they (those requesting
funds) say they’ve asked [another] foundation
for [a certain amount of money] but they
haven’t. I like to be sure we don’t fund the
same thing--at least to get to know each other.

The Center for Women’s Studies has been the recipient of
successive grants from several different foundations, an indication that
they are trusted, that their work is respected by the donors, and that
the Center for Women’s Studies is able to successfully negotiate for
resources, matching the interests of foundations that are looking to
fund the kind of projects that the Center is able to propose and

facilitate. Since the foundations’ resources come from North America

and Europe, the funds can be interpreted both as a resource for the

52¢

110

Center to develop women’s studies in the Thai context and a “press from
the west” to increase attention to women and gender concerns in

Thailand.

Strategies for Survival at the Margins

From the structural perspective, the organization is viewed as a
technological system. The focus of this system is the technical core or
core technology, the mechanism for transforming inputs into outputs
(Katz and Kahn, 1978). Applying this language to the arena of higher
education, students enter the university as inputs and are transformed
in the system through teaching so that transformed, learned students
become the system outputs. Teaching is the core technology, just as
laboratory work and data collection constitute the core technology of
research organizations. Teaching, labeled “information dissemination,”
is also a core technology of the Center for Women’s Studies. The taught
are primarily village and rural women leaders and NGO leaders along with
university professors interested in women’s issues. The teaching takes
place through training projects, seminars and workshops. Conducting
research is a second dimension of the core technology in which the
majority of the CWS affiliated professors participate. Publishing
research findings and collecting printed materials are auxiliary aspects
of the core technology.

The core technology of an organization is subject to environmental
perturbations, that is, changes and uncertainties within the environment
Can affect the technological core in substantive ways. For example,
budget reductions within donor agencies can eliminate or significantly
delay entire programs of the Center for Women’s Studies. Organizations
Such as the CWS initiate strategies, such as expansion and growth, to

buffer the technological core from these disturbances (Pfeffer &

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Salancik, 1978). Another strategy to secure the survival and enhance
the bargaining position of an organization in relation to its
environment is the utilization of bridging techniques (Scott, 1981).
These techniques include the co-optation of personnel from the
environment, developing associations and mergers with similar
organizations and forging institutional linkages and governmental
connections. The absence of such bridging techniques within the CWS
contributes to its autonomy and also to uncertainty for it as a
subsystem within the university system, as I discuss below.

Reliance on donors for all major program funding results in great
uncertainty for the Center for Women’s Studies. The director commented
on the program’s vulnerability from the outset when she stated:

If you are able to bring in enough funding you

are very independent and no one will interfere.

But once you are in trouble, there is nothing to

offer to be at your assistance.
A European funding agency that had expressed great interest in funding a
training program to assist women in establishing small businesses
changed personnel and the training program was canceled. Upon receiving
a government budget cut, a North American governmental organization
withdrew its funding from the Center (at least temporarily) and a grant
and training program for researchers in women’s studies that the CWS
professors envisioned to be ongoing was terminated. The board of the
Norwegian TV Campaign that had funded research and the construction of
the two—story CWS building changed membership. Reportedly the new
members set different priorities and their funding was no longer
available to the CWS. In structural terms, these are perturbations in
the environment that affect the Center’s technical core of training and

research. Buffering techniques shield the technical core from these

disturbances.

112

The strategy initiated by the director and working committee to
buffer the technical core of the CWS was upgrading from an autonomous
program to the status of a department, an option available within the
laws of the university and the national bureaucracy. A department has
access to funds from the national budget for higher education,
especially for personnel. Whereas a program must pay all staff members
through project funds, a department can employ personnel who are part of
the government bureaucracy, thereby giving greater job security to the
employee and providing greater stability for a center.

A second strategy under discussion in 1994 was the expansion of
the Center for Women’s Studies from a department to an institute that
has the status and available resources of a faculty. Scott (1981) notes
that organizations that are large have more leverage over their
environments and a cushion against organizational failure. With the
encouragement of at least one major donor, CWS professors began to
explore the merger of the CWS and the RCW and the expansion of the CWS
to serve countries in the region. There is resistance to this plan; one
high-ranking administrator sees the Center as attending to a “single
issue” (women) and not sufficiently diverse to warrant upgrading yet
again to become an institute. Other concerns expressed focus on the
allocation of scarce resources and the acquisition of power; I discuss
these issues in greater detail in Chapter Four.

To secure its survival and enhance its bargaining position, an
organization uses bridging techniques such as the co-optation of
representatives of external groups into an organization’s advisory
structure, the development of associations and forging governmental
connections (Scott, 1981). Maintaining connections with government is
one solid bridge that the CWS has built to its environment. Although
the process of preparing documents for upgrading the Center to the

status of a department was a long and complicated one, when it came time

113

for the Ministry of University Affairs commission to meet and make their
decision, A. Radida did not even have to appear,before them to defend
the proposal. She traveled to Bangkok for the meeting as requested but
she did not have to defend the proposal; a high—ranking government
official did that for her. While ties with some government leaders is
one strategy the CWS utilizes, it appears not to have actively developed
any other bridging strategies. In fact, it has avoided bridging to some
other parts of its environment, as the example of co—optation below
illustrates.

Other autonomous programs in the university, including the Faculty
of Social Science, utilize the strategy of co—optation. Distinguished
members of the community are invited or co—opted to serve on program or
center advisory boards and committees. Their presence and participation
give distinction and potentially greater visibility to a program. The
participation of faculty and university administrators on advisory
committees both garners the administrative support necessary when
requesting outside funding and potentially fosters communication of
plans and activities between faculty and program administrators. The
CWS director has chosen not to utilize this strategy. Instead she chose
to select only those professors who possessed an understanding of and a
commitment to women’s issues to serve as her co—workers and advisors at
the Center for Women’s Studies. She did not choose the dean or any of
the associate deans or department chairs in 1986 and this pattern has
been followed to the present. This action provided a buffer from
potential interference from administrators and allowed her to work with
like-minded colleagues and develop the program in the ways in which she,
her colleagues and funders agreed upon. Not utilizing this strategy of
co-optation also may be cited as one reason for poor communication

between the program and the faculty. It also may result in a potential

f‘i

(“I

DI

'7'?

114

1033 of bargaining power with regard to scarce resources in the

environment, as I discuss in Chapter Four.

Conclusions

The structural perspective provides a useful way of understanding
the development and functioning of the Center for Women’s Studies at
Regional University. Existing studies of the Thai bureaucracy offer
insight into how the national and university bureaucracy within the Thai
cultural setting influences the structural arrangement of the Center for
Women’s Studies. Since the university does not function in a strictly
top-down hierarchical mode, however, the concept of loose coupling helps
us to understand the ways in which the CWS has developed. Moving beyond
the university to examine the environment extends the structural
perspective of this analysis, highlighting how the CWS is able to
maintain itself as an organization. These strategies focus on the ways
in which the CWS protects or buffers its work as well as builds bridges
to its environment and resources in order to survive.

As the CWS makes the transition from an autonomous program to a
department, an examination of tightened coupling of the Center to the
national bureaucracy, to the university, and to the Faculty of Social
Sciences in particular points to a grinding of the gears at the margins
of the university. This grinding signals a possible point of conflict—-
a nuisance from a structural perspective but the focus of a political

perspective, the approach to which I now turn.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE: HANEUVERING AT THE NARGINS

I would look at the gender issue differently
from the western way....I would use the word
“harmony” between genders in this society;
harmony more than conflict. It has never caused
any social conflict at all....In higher
education I don’t see any particular issues that
would concern gender. [We] have women rectors——
women presidents-—in the past and in the
present.

-—Male Official, Ministry of University Affairs

Utilizing the political perspective as a second approach for data
analysis in this study challenges the official’s position that harmony
prevails over conflict among women and men in Thai society and within
higher education. This exposes interests, conflict and power in the
arena of higher education, dynamics that are hidden in the structural
approach to organizations. This perspective also analyzes the discourse
that ignores or hides conflict, thereby reproducing the status quo of
male domination, and alternative discourses which challenge the status
quo. The structural perspective offers one view of the CWS's
organization, that is, its form of governance, lines of authority,
structures and functions. The structural perspective highlights the
complicated nature of coordinating activities and engineering change
within a loosely coupled system.

What the structural perspective misses, however, are the posturing
and battles in the arena of the university as actors compete for control
of resources and fight to maintain or struggle to resist dominant
patriarchal ideologies. From a structural perspective actors would be
expected to view conflict as an aggravation since the rationalist

assumptions of that perspective posit that an organization exists to

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116

accomplish its goals and conflict obstructs its mission. Those whom I
interviewed spoke disparagingly about politicking within the FSS and
Regional University. The political perspective, however, exposes the
dynamics of intense conflict as inevitable and as life-as-usual within
the organization.25 And as much as rationalist assumptions may underlie
the criticism of politicking that I heard, my observations and
interviews suggest that the organizing of women’s studies at RU is very
much a political activity.

In this chapter I discuss the CWS within the FSS as an arena of
competing ideas and interests where conflict is common and sometimes
intense. I present and analyze two case studies which illustrate the

political dynamics of organizing women’s studies at Regional University.

understandings of Power

One tradition within the political perspective posits that
organizations consist of collectivities of people which depend on
limited resources in the environment for the maintenance and survival of
the organization (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Membership in these groups
shifts as individuals coalesce around different interests and compete
for scarce material and human resources and for the resource of power.
I draw on this perspective in the analysis of the first case where
competition for resources surfaced repeatedly in discussions. While the
theme of access to resources was muted in the second case, I also
consider the implications of this perspective in the analysis.

From a critical theoretical perspective, people live within and
construct societies and, thus, organizations, which are characterized by
dominant and alternative ideologies and resistances (Apple 1992).

Dominant ideologies, such as the assumption of personal advancement

 

25I use “faculty administration” and “the dean” as interchangeable terms
within this chapter. When referring specifically to the dean himself I
call him Dean Suwit.

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within a society based on merit, reinforce and reproduce prevailing
power relations. The dominant discourse, that is the dominant ideology,
although it oppresses, can also be resisted. This way of thinking is
grounded in Foucault’s (1980) view of power as the politics of everyday
life, and views power processes as complex (Fraser, 1989; Gallin, 1995;
Villareal, 1992). In this way of thinking, power is “instantiated in
mundane social practices and relations” (Fraser, 1989, p. 26) which
implies that efforts to dismantle or transform current power relations
must attend to the complex processes and address practices and relations
of dominance in everyday life. Resistances allow actors both to
individually “maneuver within the spaces/margins” of dominant power
relations and to challenge dominant ideologies collectively and
individually. In this way of thinking power is not only used to oppress
but it is productive as well. As I examine the attempts to dismantle
existing power bases of both alternative and dominant ideologies in
these two cases, particularly the second, I consider the discourse among
the actors and the productive use of power to resist the dominant
ideology.

Although CWS professors' work is not in the mainstream and their
ideas challenge mainstream practices which pay scant attention to women
and to gendered relations, CWS professors do not see their work as
marginal or themselves as powerless. The following excerpt from the
CWS’s project evaluation report of the Second Training Seminar for
Paralegal Workers project report graphically illustrates how CWS
professors used their access to power to defend a village headwoman. In
this instance CWS professors utilized their power, that is, their access
to information and to a successful attorney, to support one woman with
whom they see themselves in partnership at the grass roots level.

The CWS invited women whom regional NGO personnel had identified

as community leaders to two weeks of seminars for training as

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paralegals.26 Following the seminar an instructor was assigned to stay
in touch with each paralegal in her home village in case she needed
additional information or advice. As part of the project grant, the
advisors traveled to visit the paralegals in their home villages. There
the advisors gave lectures and answered legal questions of particular
interest to the local citizens-~or non-citizens, in the case of ethnic
minority people who are not granted citizenship under Thai law. While
visiting a paralegal in another province, one advisor confronted the
following controversy:

One of the paralegals was prosecuted for the

charge of defamation by an owner of a

construction company. This was due to the

performance of her duties as village head by

voicing complaints of villagers affected by the

construction company’s activities. As a result,

the CWS arranged for Mr. Chatchai Chunitawan [a

famous human rights lawyer working on the

project] to represent her in this case. The

litigation was successful and she was found not

guilty by the court of first instance in

Anantana province.
In this vignette, a representative of the CWS working together with a
rural woman, a paralegal trained by the CWS, challenged the construction
company, a player in the game of national economic development. The CWS
used its access to power (an influential attorney and material
resources) to support the headwoman of a rural village in her challenge
to the construction company’s defamation charge. It is this kind of
partnership with villagers over domination by others to which the CWS
members are committed and which they plan to continue through their
Center work. Thus, at the heart of CWS work is a challenge to power.
Perhaps because of that, politics are an important dynamic both within

the Center itself and in its relationship with the rest of the

university.

 

26The CWS defines paralegals as community leaders who are knowledgeable
in the law and can apply this knowledge to resolve conflicts at the
local level.

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The two cases below illustrate the political dynamics in the CWS
and within the university. The first case examines the attempts of two
interest groups struggling for control of resources through an attempt
to change the CWS’s mode of governance following its upgrade to a
department. The second case examines the discourses of domination and
resistance, of maneuvering at the margins in the case of the CWS’s
eleventh-hour decision not to participate in the FSS's academic service
project “Improving Conditions for Thai Women.” Each case is followed by
a discussion of the conflict and each suggests enduring themes found in
the case from the political perspective.

Throughout the analysis I assert that academic and fiscal resource
agendas are impossible to disentangle, as are personal and
organizational interests and motives. Since interests and agendas are
impossible to completely untangle, through the cases and analysis that

follow I will attempt to show how they are intertwined.27

Case Mo. 1: The Upgrade to a Department: The May is not like the Rose
On February 13, 1990 the Center for Women’s Studies received
approval to apply for department status within the Faculty of Social
Sciences. In December 1992, the Center applied to the Ministry of
University Affairs to receive official status as a fourth department
within the Faculty of Social Science. The change in status was approved

in July 1993.

 

27Personal vendettas and how they are played out in Thai social action
are also very much a part of academic politics. Allusions to personal
animosities surfaced in interviews and I acknowledge that they are a
part of private motivation for action within an organization. I do not
elaborate on these animosities or vendettas in my analysis but I do
acknowledge that they exist and are inseparable from actors’ articulated
motivation for action. I posit that women also play out these vendettas
but with less practice and at greater odds in a male-dominated Thai
society, a theme that I address in the discussion of Center leadership.

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During the course of 1993, faculty administrators began to discuss
how the director of the upgraded center should be chosen. Just before
the King authorized the CWS’s change in status in the Royal Gazette, the
FSS dean sent a memorandum to the three department heads about a new
selection for choosing the CWS director. Members of the Center for
Women’s Studies were not aware that this memo was going to be

m both

circulated. At the next meeting of the FSS Standing Committee,
the memorandum and a proposal for a new governance structure for the
upgraded CWS were on the agenda. The dean proposed that the CWS be
governed according to the model of faculty—level research institutes on
the university campus. The rationale for this new structure was that
the function of the Center-—its research and extension work——was more
similar to the work of an institute than to a department where courses
are taught. This new model would expand the membership of the policy—
making committee of the Center and change the process of selecting the
Center director.

After the Center for Women’s Studies officially was upgraded in
July, the FSS Committee met again. The Center for Women’s Studies was
represented at this meeting, but not by A. Radida. Convinced that the
committee would not respond favorably to her, A. Radida asked a CWS
colleague, Professor Linchee, to represent her. In addition to being a
department colleague of four Standing Committee members, A. Linchee was
arguably the most academically illustrious and by rank the most senior
professor in attendance at the committee meeting.

At the meeting Professor Linchee proposed a second model of
governance on behalf of the Center for Women’s Studies. Since the

Center had been granted the status of a department, the Center’s

 

28The FSS Standing Committee consisted of the dean, [four] associate
deans, three department chairs and several elected professors, including
the former dean who had lost a second-term election to the current dean.

121

rationale was that the governance structure should parallel that of a
department, even though the Center was not yet offering any courses.
This meant that the professors affiliated with the Center would remain
the members of the working committee and that they would choose the
director.

Neither side left with its original proposal intact. Although no
one mentioned compromise, they had indeed compromised. A. Linchee
agreed that the CWS working committee and advisory board merge into one
standing committee, to parallel the governance model of a faculty
institute as the dean had proposed. A. Linchee also volunteered that
the standing committee would welcome additional professors to join the
new CWS standing committee, thereby meeting the dean’s interest in
expanding committee membership. For its part, the FSS Committee agreed
that the dean should re-appoint professors currently serving on the CWS
working committee and advisory board. They also agreed to consider the
CWS’s counter-proposal to govern according to department structure. The
FSS sent both the deans’ and the CWS’s governance proposals to the
university-wide deans’ committee for that body to make the final
decision. While everyone awaited this decision, the dean of the Faculty
of Social Science notified A. Radida that until a decision had been made
she would be considered not Director but “Acting Director” of the Center
for Women's Studies. Several weeks later the Vice President for
Academic Affairs sent out a memorandum stating that the selection of the
CWS’s “department head” or director would parallel the departmental
selection process this time. In four years, department heads and deans
would be involved in selecting the next CWS director.

In describing this process of pressing for the Center’s upgrade to
department status at a national seminar, A. Radida lamented, “The way is
not like the rose, the way has many thorns.” The process of the

development and upgrading of the Center resembled not the delicate

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fragrant rose petals at the top of the stem, but rather the thorns that

emanate from the stem, thorns that must be avoided lest they pierce the

flesh and wound the one who touches them.

Discussion

The king’s signature elevated the CWS to a department and
procedures for governing a department already existed within the
university. Why, then, did faculty administration raise the issue of
the governance of the CWS and propose a significant change in the
organizational structure of the CWS? I argue that the discourse of the
dean’s proposal was about structures and rules but at stake were issues
of control and power.

From a structural perspective, rules, regulations and procedures
in organizations are often viewed as rational instruments to be
manipulated in order to enhance task performance and outcomes. A
political view suggests that these are better understood as “products
and reflections of a struggle for political control” (Morgan, 1987, p.
162). What appears to be disagreement over structural change--the
adoption of new university rules and regulations for governing the
Center for Women’s Studies-—actually was a fierce power struggle.

The dean saw the CWS as competing for and taking scarce material
resources from the Faculty. Other FSS administrators viewed CWS
professors’ work for the Center as a drain on department resources:
more work for the CWS meant less time available for teaching in the
department. The dean also viewed the CWS director and her colleagues as
controlling the Center and its entire agenda. CWS professors, on the
other hand, viewed the multi-faceted work of the Center as a valuable,
expanding resource within the FSS which enhanced the work of the

Faculty, carried out the university’s commitment to academic service and

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contributed to the work of national development——albeit from an ideology
which challenged the dominant discourse. Discourse about structures,
functions and position descriptions actually constituted a struggle for
power, for control over the Center and its resources. The dean used the
power of his position to set the terms of the debate and to stage the
challenge; the CWS used its power to oppose the dean and maintain

control over the resources and direction of the Center.

Structures, Functions, Rules and Resources

The dean proposed a new structure with different election
procedures for the CWS based on the functions of the Center rather than
on its new status as a department within the university structure,
explaining that the functions of a center should determine how a center
is governed. Research institutes at Regional University are engaged
primarily in research and academic service activities; the chief
function of a department, however, is teaching. According to the dean,
the CWS’s chief function is not teaching but rather is research and
academic service; therefore the CWS should be governed as a research
institute. Ironically, one reason that CWS professors did not engage in
teaching women’s studies courses was that in 1986 administrators
rejected the Program for Women’s Studies’ first objective which was to
establish a women’s studies curriculum. In 1993 faculty and university
administrators pointed to the fact that offering courses and teaching
were not part of the CWS’s function as one reason why the Center should
change its modus operandi.

To parallel the structure of a research institute, the dean
proposed that the CWS’s structural arrangement of two separate but
related entities-~the CWS committee and a CWS advisory board—-should be

replaced with one standing committee. Standing committee members would

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come from each FSS department, different faculties in the university,
and, he suggested, even from other universities. To choose a director
according to this model, each FSS department would nominate a candidate
for CWS director and FSS administrators would select the person who, in
their opinion, was the “best nominee” to head the Center for four years.
Additional reasons the dean cited for his proposed structural change
were to bring new faces to the CWS Committee and to change the procedure
for how the Center director would be selected, casting the net more
widely for potential candidates.

The director and committee of the CWS countered that the
governance system of the newly upgraded center should be based on
structure. Since the CWS had acquired the status of a department, they
argued, the Center should be governed in the same way as a department.
The CWS secretary explained the rationale this way:

If you want to appoint a chair of a [French]

department you ask for nominations from the

professors in the department--you don't go

across the department to ask the teachers in an

English Department, right? The dean has to go

and ask the professors in the [French]

department, ”Who do you want to nominate as a

chair?” And that's what we want...[for] the

professors in the CWS who are associated with

the Center for Women's Studies to be able to

nominate their own chair.
Given the existing governance structure of the CWS, this strategy of
“department members,” i.e. CWS professors, nominating the director
implied that current CWS professors would nominate the director. In
light of current CWS members’ support for A. Radida, they would
certainly elect her to a four—year term as director. Since she had been
responsible for attracting donor support and developing the scope of CWS

activities into an exemplary Thai women’s studies program, her

colleagues supported A. Radida staying on as director. One CWS staff

member stated:

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There's no other qualified candidate [to be the]

director....There are limited funds, and [the

director] is not working just as an

administrator, but also has to be a “funding

hunter” and needs a lot of connections and

credibility with funding agencies. I don't see

anybody else that can replace her at the moment.
CWS members were not simply concerned about structure, they believed it
was imperative that A. Radida continue on as the Center director.

By virtue of the dean’s position as the elected authority of the
Faculty of Social Sciences, he not only initiated the debate about
functions, structures, and position descriptions but he also controlled
the timing of the circulation of the memo and agenda of the Standing
Committee meeting where his proposal was to be discussed.

Dean Suwit, by virtue of his position, set the agenda for FSS
Standing Committee meetings. In proposing an alternative form of
governance for the Center for Women’s Studies without consulting the CWS
professors, the dean exercised control over the FSS Standing Committee’s
agenda in an to attempt to institute a new form of governance in the
CWS. If successful, the dean would have sought out nominations from
many sectors and thus would have appointed as director the person he and
the selection committee considered “most qualified.” This move could
have wrested power from A. Radida and those with whom she had worked for
eight years, thereby giving the dean greater control over the Center’s
direction and agenda than he originally had.

CWS professors did not have access to the FSS Standing Committee
agenda nor control over the distribution of the agenda. The CWS
professors did interpret the proposed structural change as more than
simple tinkering with director/committee selection procedures, however.
They viewed the proposed structural changes as vital to their power. A.
Radida chose not to attend the FSS Standing Committee meeting herself

but asked a non-controversial, highly respected professor to attend in

her place. A. Linchee did not see herself as a CWS negotiator, but, in

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fact, she was a figure with whom to be reckoned. She offered a sensible
counter-proposal on behalf of the CWS: if the CWS had the status of a
department then it should be governed as a department. When one FSS
administrator tried to reject the CWS’s counter—proposal, A. Linchee
asserted that since they were all “part of the faculty” they should be
able “to reason together;” which they did. Several FSS Standing
Committee members agreed that A. Linchee’s counter-proposal should be
considered, and the meeting ended with the current CWS structure intact.
FSS administrators and CWS professors did not only debate rules
and structures but they also were competing for resources, particularly
for control of the Center for Women’s Studies. The CWS sees the
presence and work of the center as a resource to the Faculty and to the
university; the dean sees it in competition for FSS resources. CWS
activities constitute a resource for the university, through its
Information Center, occasional seminars, academic service which reaches
beyond the borders of the campus, and through the expertise of
professors with knowledge of and experience in women’s issues. The CWS
brings outside resources for the Center to the university; specifically,
money for research, materials, training, office staff and a building.
The dean, however, spoke of the CWS as competing for the limited
resources of the Faculty. While the autonomous programs required
minimal funds from the Faculty since their funding is all external,
departments are entitled to FSS resources. The dean stated clearly that
the CWS’s upgrade to a department required additional resources from the
faculty budget. From his perspective the expertise of CWS was not an
asset to the faculty but rather a drain on the budget. Given the
elevation in status of two FSS departments--Economics and Business
.Administration--which took resources from the FSS and increased the need

for additional funding for these two departments, the dean was

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particularly unhappy that the former CWS program had worked to become a

department and would now also require dwindling FSS resources.

A CWS professor indicated that on two occasions the dean
apportioned funds to the three FSS departments for research and special
activities but he gave various reasons why the CWS, the newest
department, should not receive a share of Faculty funds. Through these
actions the dean reinforced and reproduced the status quo and its
ideological underpinnings. When one unit is deserving of more funds
than another, the entity which is judged “more deserving” occupies a
more elevated position in the hierarchy than the unit that is less
deserving. The dean’s actions not only prevented the CWS from having
access to Faculty funds, but also relegated the CWS to a less deserving,
marginalized position.

The dean is on the advisory board of another FSS center which
gives a small share of its outside funding to the Faculty in payment for
its electricity. While this is not common for other centers, the dean
suggested to A. Radida that the CWS should consider this practice in
partial payment for custodial personnel and electricity. The dean saw
the Center as rich in material resources and in a position to help fund
the FSS rather than vice versa. A. Radida countered that the CWS
carried out the work of the Faculty and was entitled to financial
support from it.

From the point of view of some other administrators in the
Faculty, professors are the essential resource for the main work of the
university, that is, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses. While
professors also engage in research and academic service, these may be
considered volunteer activities and in competition with professors' time
for teaching. As CWS secretary Napaporn reported:

Sometimes the department has an uneasiness to
let their professors have responsibilities here

[at the CWS] because they're afraid that they
won't be able to work for the department most of

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the time. When you take a job it means that you
have to spend your time on it...and there's a
problem with personnel in the departments--that
they don't have enough faculty.

I asked one professor if department colleagues would see work with
the CWS as enhancing the work of the department. She responded:

Oh no, no, no. Not an advantage....My work at

the CWS is of advantage to me. I gain knowledge

in order to teach students-— it's a benefit for

me and it's an advantage for the department

also, because I'm not using the teaching time to

work there. I said that I guarantee that I will

help with the duties of the department as well

as the Center for Women’s Studies....I realize

very well that, being a university lecturer, my

first priority is to teach; but I never ignore

the people-—it is my lifetime commitment.
Although several CWS professors noted that one of the primary benefits
to them of working in the CWS was that the research and related work
enhanced their teaching, those who disagreed with the way the Center was
being run viewed these activities not as complementary but in
competition.

Commitment to center or program activities also may take
professors away from teaching unstaffed courses. In 1993 the Department
of Political Science introduced a new (undergraduate) Law program.

Since a number of law professors engaged in special program and research
activities, the program coordinator found it difficult to enlist staff
to teach the courses necessary to make Law a viable new program.29

Discussions about human and material resources-—and the instances

in which the CWS was excluded from Faculty funds-—underscore the reality

 

29This is directly related to how courses are staffed. Low course
enrollment for a particular course may result in a professor teaching
only one course. He or she then could choose whether to devote more
time to other activities or to teach an unstaffed course. While
professors have a sense of duty to students and colleagues and while
there are incentives (additional pay, counts toward merit promotion) to
teach additional courses, a professor is not required to take on
additional teaching responsibilities if too few students have enrolled
in the course that she or he has offered.

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that competition for limited resources can indeed be a source of
conflict. It also suggests that control of the Center, which represents
substantial resources, may be of primary interest to the dean. As the
battle continues, the governance style of the CWS raises another
concern.

The dean asserted that the CWS’s small, self—perpetuating
committee excluded the contributions of others. CWS professors
described their committee as a working group—-a hard-working group of
people——who shared similar ideas-—ideas considered marginal to
mainstream thinking in the Faculty of Social Sciences-~and worked
together to execute those ideas. They maintained that the committee was
an inclusive group which regularly invited others in to participate in
particular CWS activities. The dean, however, believed that a larger
working group was necessary to carry out the work of the Center in its
“initial stage of development” as a department. He argued:

We need a director who can be very open for the
initial stage of the development of the Center.
It's impossible to pick someone to do [the work]
with a small group of people and try to produce
good quality research regarding women’s issues
with a small group of people.

The CWS’s on-going decision to maintain a pattern of work and
governance that differed from other autonomous programs elicited the
observation that the director and the committee were “closed” and that
the director was “very selective in choosing her colleagues.” Two
professors from different faculties, the first a man, the second a
woman, observed:

Everybody--the [professors] in the Center for
Women’s Studies--they are not open; they are
closed. We are very interested in that Center
for Women’s Studies, we want to study something
about [women] too, but the professors at the
Center were closed, they do not have open minds
and don’t want anybody to be involved with

them...

Many of the faculty members would see [the CWS]
as a monopoly...no one [goes] there to interfere

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or to step into the Center for Women’s Studies;

it’s a kind of kingdom....I haven't seen many

professors except those who are part of the

Center for Women’s Studies there at the Center

going after information or looking up resources

or anything.
Since the CWS committee is a self-perpetuating committee and would
remain so under their proposed department-style system of governance,
the dean’s proposal raised the question of how new members can be
brought on to the CWS standing committee and how other professors can
rotate into the directorship. Although in the FSS committee meeting A.
Linchee volunteered that any interested professors would be welcome to
join, no additional professors had stepped forward to request membership
in the CWS committee group. Perhaps other professors were reluctant to
join the perceived “monopoly” or “kingdom;” perhaps they preferred to
work with another center. For whatever reasons, the only names
submitted to the dean for the new CWS standing committee were those of
professors who had been serving on the committee for at least two years

With an eye toward resources, one FSS administrator further argued

that the current exclusive organizational arrangement would be “suicide”
for the Center:

To have only six people doing administration and

research is suicide for the Center. It will be

unable to attract necessary resources...I'm not

in favor of having the director who [is voted in

by] only six people who sit on the standing

committee of the Center for Women’s Studies.

That's going to narrow down many opportunities

for cooperation.
The administrator reasoned that attracting material resources and doing
the necessary administrative work as an official department in the
bureaucracy would be impossible with a small committee and that
opportunities for cooperation with other professors would also be

eliminated.

While the dean spoke of structures, rules, and resources, the

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attempt to change the rules was a maneuver for control to dismantle A.
Radida and the CWS Committee’s existing power base and to gain control
over that power base. It is important, then, to explore who the

director is in somewhat more detail.

The Director

With the unwritten understanding that a center director is, as a
professor from another center noted, a center’s “owner,” the director is
the center in the minds of many. According to the structural
arrangement of a center at RU, and the hierarchical Thai cultural
pattern of organizing, most frequently center directors establish a
center, chart its course, and go after funding to ensure its survival.
This pattern prevailed among all five FSS centers.

Given the intense debate over rules for choosing the CWS director
and committee, it is important to know more about A. Radida and
perceptions of her role and her work. She emerges as a highly
controversial figure, one who is always ready to challenge those who
would thwart the course she has charted for the Center. It also is
essential to remember that organizational conflicts do not hinge on the
actions of one person alone nor is this particular conflict solely an
artifact of RU personalities. Conflicts precede and outlast any
individual. This case provides the opportunity to see at close range
“how and why the organizational actor is a political actor” (Morgan,
1987, p. 196) and to see the salience of organizational actors enacting
competing political interests within the organization.

Both friends and opponents describe A. Radida as “strong,"
“tough,” “aggressive on women’s studies,” and one who gets angry “very
easily when someone makes male chauvinistic remarks.” The director

acknowledges that she is known to be a “non-compromising figure when

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[she] deals with the administrators.” A. Radida, together with a cadre
of like-minded professors, has opposed the university in its efforts to
build the city’s largest auditorium at the front gate of the university
and to lease part of the campus to businesses as a profit-making venture
for the university. In the case of the former, she entered unannounced
into a meeting where the rector and the deans were discussing the
project behind closed doors. She interrupted the meeting and presented
them with a petition from a group of university professors, some of whom
were with her, to challenge the site of the proposed new building.

A. Radida believes the Center has to work in opposition to
administrators at every level of the Thai bureaucracy. In a national
seminar she described this perceived lack of support for the Center for
Women’s Studies, speaking of officials as “they” and “them.” When asked
to clarify who “they” are, she replied:

“They” means starting from the faculty up to the
university and the Ministry of University
Affairs and also the Budget Bureau. The Office
of Royal Decrees is no problem. So I can't say
which one—-it’s each one, every one.

In a society that values “social smoothing” tactics over
argumentation, even in academia (Komin, 1990), and especially among
women, how the Center director tries to straddle two worlds, trying to
be a director of a Center for Women’s Studies in the context of a male-
dominated society is part of the complexity of A. Radida. She plays by
their rules, confronting men and women alike, posturing according to
male-defined rules while working to advance women’s rights. Yet
constructed social norms indicate that women are to be followers, not
leaders. When women do lead, they are to be gently assertive, certainly
not leaders at the forefront of conflict. As studies of other Asian
feminists and women's studies scholars suggests, challenging the
Gendered status quo of patriarchal ideology and structures requires

leaders who are assertive and undaunted (see Committee on Women’s

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Studies in Asia, 1994; Jaywardena, 1986). The Advisor from the Prime
Minister's Office to the National Commission on Women’s Affairs
highlighted this:

Within the university’s administrative web, the

personal leadership of [women’s studies] has to

be very dynamic. You actually rely on the

leadership of those people who are involved to

make things happen. [A program's success

depends on] the seriousness of the person-—

usually the individual professor who is

personally involved.
A leading academic feminist in Bangkok noted specifically of A. Radida:

Radida is very strong in [the regional women's]

movement, but more or less single-handedly. I

don't know how many of her colleagues understand

what she is doing or appreciate what she is

doing.

With respect to social location and power, A. Radida is part of a
wealthy, upper class, landholding family. One RU professor volunteered
admiration for A. Radida in that she gives her heart and soul for this
work when she wouldn’t have to work at all:

She could just only teach but she works very

hard...it's not necessary for her to work as

hard as this. So I think that she has

sacrificed to a certain extent.
Others observed that because of these personal resources she was neither
beholden to others nor did she have to make concessions throughout the
organizing process in the ways that others of lesser means did. For her
part, A. Radida refers to the CWS and to her work in the women’s
movement as her infant, her child. While she is disappointed that this
child has not matured more quickly and requires her to invest increasing
amounts of time and energy for its development, she maintains a hopeful
vision for its future. Donors have encouraged A. Radida to develop a
plan for the future of the CWS; her dream is that it will serve the
region more broadly, bringing in women from throughout Southeast Asia.

A key premise of the political perspective is that conflict is a

daily occurrence in organizing and organizations. Following this

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analysis of the dynamics of power negotiation and conflict in the
upgrade of the CWS, it would be conceivable to interpret this discrete
event as a major turning point for the organization of the Center for
Women’s Studies rather than as one of many episodes of conflict that
constitute life-as-usual in the organization. To illustrate the
everyday nature of conflict within the institution, I present a second
case. The political perspective highlights that conflict is part of the
fabric of an organization. This episode of conflict underscores that
reality and extends the discussion of the dynamics of power within and

around an organization.

Case No. Two: The Development Agency International (DAI) Project

“[In] the Thai culture, you know that this happens all the time.”
So said a Regional University professor in discussing one occasion of
conflict between the CWS and the dean about which I was questioning her.
She was intimating that conflict is routine and not worth paying much
attention to. Her indication that it is routine compelled me to pay
close attention to her remarks.

The conflict under discussion focused on a project called the
“Improving Conditions for Thai Women (ICTW)” that was a public—private
partnership among Regional University's Faculty of Social Sciences and a
number of major corporations facilitated by a North American government
aid agency I call the Development Agency International (DAI).

One responsibility of the FSS Associate Dean for Academic and
Foreign Affairs is to attract grant money to the FSS for research and
academic service. The ICTW proposal grew out of an earlier grant the
dean had prepared to underwrite a counseling initiative for students at
Regional University. The proposal was not funded, however, a key

government official, suggested that the dean submit an alternative

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project proposal that the DAI might fund—-a campaign to address child

prostitution. Although this is not what the dean and his associates
originally had wanted to work on, they decided to “give it [their] best
shot.” Unfamiliar with work in this area—~“We just had ideas but we
didn’t know how to do it at that time”—-they worked “gradually” and were
pleased with the results.

This large project was related to an earlier smaller project that
was intended to address attitudinal issues among parents, children and
teachers about the dangers of young girls going into prostitution.30
They weren’t certain how to proceed but took every step “moving very
carefully” and were pleased with the influence that the teacher-
counselors and the videotapes they produced had on the villagers.

With the possibility of significant funding from the DAI, the
proposal was expanded. The “attitude-changing” component was extended.
Scholarships were added that would enable girls to finish middle school.
Occupational training and job placement constituted the final
partnership between private companies and the university/government
partnership. The associate dean explained the rationale of the project:

We have to find the jobs first—-we have to find
the market demand first and then work backward
into the training. And now we are very
successful. We have sent several girls to
Bangkok to work and to be trained at Kanoke
Academy to become assistant health workers.
The project began with a quickly-planned seminar for governors and

other high ranking government officials, the first officially DAI—funded

part of the project. “So everything was in a hurry and everything was

 

” In this particular area, parents' reasons for sending their daughters

to become prostitutes include not only economic desperation but also
parents’ desires for additional family income. With the deeply held
cultural value of the importance of expressing gratitude (bunkhun) to
one’s parents, young girls enter the sex trade. In other areas parents
are tricked and girls are abducted and forced into prostitution.

136
done rapidly——as you can imagine,” concluded the administrator. CWS
professors did not participate in the seminar.

CWS professors learned about the grant and followed its progress
in the same manner as an average literate citizen—~through the
newspaper. From the newspaper they learned that members of the ICTW
project committee included a former CWS member and a professor from
another university.

The deans did not include the CWS in discussions of the ICTW
proposal until just before the dean's office and the donors officially
announced the project. The dean circulated a memorandum that listed the
positions of ICTW advisory committee members and included on the list
was the position “CWS Acting Director.” A. Radida attended a meeting of
the project committee; it was there that she first received a copy of
the project proposal. Later she discussed the project with the
professors of the CWS and together they reached the conclusion that the
CWS would not participate in the project and A. Radida would not be part
of the project committee.

FSS Dean Suwit indicated that he preferred that the committees
work together on the project

This is not a factor of women but about HIV as
well as AIDS....One of the Academic Committee’s
major tasks is to give service to the
community...and this problem is huge. I
personally feel that we need to help; not just
one single agency can solve it.

Before signing the agreement I asked the
director of the Center for Women's Studies to
serve on a [project] committee that’s part of
the Faculty of Social Sciences but she wrote a
letter to refuse--because that's the way it is.
I can understand why because they feel anything
dealing with women should be their area of
interest. However, I consider that this is a
very serious issue and A. Wimol’s [academic]
committee has a responsibility to give service

to the community....

It would be more effective if the Center for
Women’s Studies and A. Wimol’s committee could

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work together and use the expertise of each
other to tackle each problem.

S: Do you think that will happen?

D: No. [The director] said they have a
different way of doing things. But they need
more people to work on this because the
committee of Center for Women’s Studies is very
limited....

I’m glad to see [the Advisor to the Prime
Minister’s Office] is going to do the same
thing. She talked on Channel 9 [TV] and
mentioned my name—-our faculty--that we’re doing
this and they’re going to do the same thing.
They have more money. I feel sorry that the
Center for Women’s Studies doesn't see the
problem is so huge....

The CWS professors critiqued the project for being overly
ambitious, for including the training of “beauty advisors”-—a dubious
occupation for keeping young women out of prostitution since it is a
notorious channel for bringing them in. (This occupation was later
deleted from the final proposal.) CWS professors also expressed the
opinion that the proposals’ rationale was not clearly delineated and it
appeared to “blame the victim.” But primarily the CWS professors were
concerned that the project committee consisted of professors without
expertise in this area and that project organizers had disregarded both
printed and human resources available through the CWS. The FSS
administration had not utilized Information Center materials which
document and analyze different facets of the dynamics of prostitution in
the region. Neither had Faculty administrators drawn on the collective
insight of the CWS affiliated professors, at least two of whom have
conducted research and action research projects related to women in
prostitution. (In fact, the dean individually approached at least one
professor of the CWS with knowledge and research experience in this area
to request her participation in the project. She indicated that she was

already engaged in another time-demanding research project which

precluded her involvement in this one.) “It shows how they think about

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us,” said one professor. “I think it’s very [indicative] of how they
view the center in general,” said another. A third elaborated:

The people who are involved [with the project]

don’t have enough experience or enough knowledge

to work in this area; prostitution is very

sensitive and it's a hard issue to do well in. I

think they should possess certain expertise and

I think that they’re inadequate, they don't have

enough expertise to do this work. It's a hard

issue; you have to do it very cautiously. It is

a very complex, very complicated issue. You

should do it little by little, not a huge

project that you cannot manage in terms of

people involved and in terms of money, in terms

of administrative management. And it is too

ambitious I think, the project itself.
The CWS professors unanimously agreed that it would be imprudent for A.
Radida to participate in this project.

These disagreements may appear to the government official who
facilitated ICTW project funding as a series of puzzling internecine
squabbles. Since the goal of the CWS and the National Commission on
Women’s Affairs is to advance the position and improve conditions for

Thai women, cannot these professionals simply work together and do their

part to effect these changes?

Discussion

The DAI case involved typical university activities of
conceptualizing research, writing proposals and engaging in academic
service activities. The DAI grant was among the largest grants the FSS
had ever received and received more media publicity than other grants,
but the steps of design and execution were common, not unusual. As A.
Linchee had noted, the conflict between the FSS and the CWS over the
proposal is the sort of conflict that “happens all the time.” An
analysis of the conflict reveals similar patterns to those of the first
conflict and underscores the fact that political posturing and battles

are really quite ordinary.

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In this second case, as in the first, the dean31 once again
utilizes the power of his elected position to advance his--and what he
would label FSS, RU and national—~interests. From his position of
control the dean decides the timing of sending out information to the
newspaper and an invitation to the CWS Acting Director to attend the
ICTW project committee meeting. He also decides who participates in the
conceptualization and early negotiations of the project proposal and who
is appointed to the project committee.

In contrast to the first case, however, the discourse is less
about rules, structures and resources and more about competing ideas and
who is marginalized. The ideas more obviously in competition in case
two include the ways in which different groups conceptualize gendered
relations. Symbols of resistance within the dominant discourse
reinforce the expressions of this conflict and cultural views of harmony

and conflict give insight into how scenarios of conflict are played out.

Conceptualizing Gendered Relations

CWS professors conceptualize gender relations far differently from
the MoUA official quoted in the introduction to this chapter. He speaks
of harmony, not conflict, in gender relations in Thai society and higher
education. CWS professors, on the other hand, discuss, lecture, plan
training sessions, and publish reports on inequalities among Thai men
and women, and on injustices suffered by women and girls in Thailand and
throughout Southeast Asia. For the CWS professors, the fact that a few
women rectors occasionally head Thai universities does not confirm that
“all is well” for women in Thai higher education; rather, they question
why more women do not occupy administrative positions at all levels of

the university and why the government has limited the number of women

 

31Here again, “the dean” does not specifically refer to Dean Suwit
himself.

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entering certain fields such as veterinary science. CWS professor A.
Kanchanaa assessed the situation in this way:

The women’s studies issue is not really very

popular. Not many people give attention to it

or realize the importance of this issue. They

don’t see women conceptually. They see women

physically, but conceptually--there’s no woman

in their concept.

CWS professors try to help others see women conceptually; in so
doing they resist and challenge dominant societal power structures that
popularly position women as the “hind legs of the elephant.” CWS
activities focus on empowering women and on raising public awareness
about women’s issues. CWS professors and staff align themselves with
grass roots women and include rural women in planning training seminars
on law and leadership, raise women's issues with political party
members, encourage women to run for political office, conduct and
promote research on women, and gather thousands of documents on women
together in one place.

As I discuss in Chapter Five, most CWS professors do not call
themselves feminists. Their discourse and their activities, however,
support anti-patriarchal (feminist) discourse which actively critiques
and resists patriarchy. Their work is consonant with Farganis' (1994)
definition of feminism which “assumes the injustice of treating men and
women inequitably and views women as oppressed by men through long-
standing historical structural arrangements” (p. 102).

Dominant patriarchal ideology is reproduced through inaction and
action. In case one, the Center was elevated in status by the MoUA
Advisory Commission and the director was demoted in status by the dean.
Although she had served as CWS Director for eight years, following the
announcement of the official upgrading of the Center for Women’s Studies

into the Royal Gazette, A. Radida was notified that her title had been

changed to “acting director.” She was to retain this title until other

141

decisions had been made with regard to the Center. A. Radida voiced her
understanding of this decision to her colleagues at a national seminar,
indicating that the decision was grounded in FSS administration’s
interest in both wresting control from her and, once again, in
withholding material resources:

I am now the ‘Acting Director’ because the

university doesn’t know how to manage/control me

under this new official status....

The university wants me to be the leader, not

the director. Why do they mind? In my

understanding my title does not mean “to control

everybody” because we work together like in

teamwork. [It doesn't mean that I’m on the top,

the leader, I’m a bit higher but I can talk to

everybody. . .]

We got the salary for the janitor from the

department but now there’s no money for the

title of director...they are afraid to spend

money for my title.
“Director” was not just a title; new legislation had, for the first
time, just allotted a small monthly stipend for department heads. A
head of a center with the status of a department should receive this
stipend along with other department heads. In this case, the monetary
remuneration would be of little consequence to a person of independent
means such as A. Radida. But changing her title and according her a
title of lower status--”acting director” for whatever reasons
(insufficient funds, waiting to make a decision, need for more
information) was a very offensive demotion to A. Radida and to her CWS
colleagues. The dean’s actions attested to the position power he held
and underscored his position of dominance in the faculty hierarchy.
Just as A. Radida had metaphorically described the road from program
status to department at a national seminar as “full of many thorns,”
this manipulation of her title was one more thorn.

By ignoring or downplaying the power alliances which reproduce

patriarchal structures, administrators at various levels reproduce the

142

dominant patriarchal ideology. For example, the MoUA official’s
declaration that there is harmony and “no social conflict at all” among
Thai women and men, appeals to the cultural value of harmony and low
conflict but ignores the problems and paradoxes of Thai women. At the
faculty level, male administrators speak of women as “a factor” in the
spread of AIDS and, in so doing, ignore the unequal power dynamics of
gendered relations and sexuality. CWS professors insist that experience
and knowledge are needed to work in the area of prostitution. They
argue that prostitution is a very complex and sensitive issue and that
it is a difficult area in which to work successfully. In so arguing,
they advocate a different ideological position and are resisting the
reproduction of patriarchal ideology that is expressed in this project.
They do not, however, act out of resistance as they did with the
proposed upgrade structural change. They did not propose an alternative
way of doing and jump in to do it. Rather than maneuver from their
marginal position, CWS professors agree that A. Radida should leave the
project and not work with the committee. To understand this response,
it is necessary to consider Thai cultural views of conflict and how to

deal with it.

Conflict and Harmony

To place conflict in a Thai context, it is useful to begin the
discussion recognizing that Thailand is often called the “Land of
Smiles” by Thai people and foreigners alike. Komin (1990) argues that
Thais place a high value on “other directed” social interactions which
project a picture of smooth, kind, pleasant, no-conflict interpersonal
interactions, in short, the “surface harmony” observed by many non—
Thais. Komin asserts that the non—assertive, polite personality and the

preference for relaxed and pleasant interactions contributes to the

143
reputation of Thai people as smiling and friendly. Mulder (1979)

concurs that a smile is a “means of smooth and polite presentation of
self” (p. ix). He adds that a smile may be a sign of good humor or
agreement but, for a person who has been offended, it may also express
sadness, hurt or opposition.

Smiling when one has been offended is of particular interest here.
Komin (1990) argues that ego-orientation is the foremost value among
Thais, ranked even higher than smooth presentation of self. Despite a
calm presentation of the self, if the ego/self or a person close to
one’s self has been insulted or violated, one can be provoked to a
strong emotional reaction. To illustrate this, Komin cites the high-
profile case of Deputy Prime Minister who promptly resigned from the
cabinet when another cabinet minister publicly called the Deputy PM’s
wife a “walking jewelry case.” The Deputy PM’s response was a not—
surprising reaction to the insult.

In less public conflicts, the foremost way of dealing with
conflict between people is to consider saving “face” or the ego of the
persons involved, to find “indirect ways to soften the message" (Komin,
1990, p. 134). In case one, two professors who attended the FSS
standing committee meeting where the alternative governance proposal was
presented reported that they remained silent in the face of conflict
because they “didn’t want to argue.” One professor chose not to voice
opposition to the CWS’s counter-proposal; another chose not to
contradict the dean on an obvious and significant error. Saving face
for the other person was of primary importance for both professors.

Komin (1990) labels saving face as one of the “social smoothing”
values. Attention to social smoothing does not only mean that one is
silent in the face of conflict, but that one is careful to not hurt
another’s feelings, nor to reject another's good intention or

Contribution. Intellectual contributions and ideas cannot be separated

144

from one’s self and therefore a rejection—-or failure to include——
another person’s ideas constitutes a rejection of the person. As Komin
(1990) asserts:

It is difficult for the Thai to dissociate one’s

idea and opinion from the “ego” self. This is

why strong criticism to the ideas is often

automatically taken as criticism to the person

holding those ideas. The Thai would avoid

criticising not just superiors, but their

equals, and to some extent, their inferiors as

well. Such characteristics are deeply

internalized (p. 136).
The inextricable connection between the person and the idea, and the
anticipatory aspect of social smoothing which requires one person to
work diligently in advance to not offend another person, give insight
into the CWS’s recommendation that A. Radida not participate in the ICTW
project. By not involving the CWS in the conceptualization of the
project, not inviting the Acting Director to join the project committee
until just before the project was announced officially, the dean ignored
the CWS’s expertise and contributions. This not only signaled low
regard for the CWS, but, more specifically for the professors and for
the director. As two of the professors noted: “It shows how they think
about us” and “It’s very [indicative] of how they view the center in
general.” In light of the dean’s insult to the individuals, an
appropriate CWS response was to send a letter-—as A. Radida did—-
indicating that she would not be able to participate in the project. In
another context a professor might join the project committee, challenge
project assumptions and propose an alternative. In this context, the
dean’s total--and what appeared to be intentional--disregard for the CWS
and most of its professors for a project dealing with young women was an
egregious offense, not to be ignored or taken lightly.

The dean had similarly ignored and offended CWS professors in the

upgrade debate in case one. CWS professors understood that the upgrade

145

necessitated that they would work under some new set of rules but they
also were frustrated that that proposal was developed without consulting
them. One professor noted:

This is the first time that the Center for

Women’s Studies is officially part of the

university so [the administration] had to come

up with how we were going to choose the

director. But, instead of the normal thing you

do with other departments where you have members

of the department staff select the [department

chair], they said, “No, we're going to have

each department in the faculty nominate a

person.” So without [regard for] all the people

that have worked at the center or the

committee...they disregarded completely.

Since the CWS committee had been disregarded in the formulation of
the dean’s governance proposal, they countered with their own proposal.
Contrary to CWS professors’ decision in case one to maneuver from their
marginal position by offering a counter—proposal to the FSS standing
committee in order to keep control of the CWS, in this second case the
CWS’s survival is not at stake. Although the dean’s actions and
inaction over the ICTW may have been a serious affront to CWS
professors, his deeds did not threaten the on-going work of the CWS as
they had earlier. The lack of threat to the Center for Women’s Studies’
work meant that professors reacted to the affront in a more or less
normal way, that is, by withdrawing from a difficult situation as a way
of dealing with conflict. It takes something like a major threat to a
group’s core interests for it to risk violating cultural proscriptions

against conflict by more actively resisting and countering threats of

that sort.

Symbol of Resistance or Domination?
While I continue to describe the CWS as the alternative or
resistant ideology, the CWS building raises important questions about

the nature of this alternative discourse. Editors of the Center for

146
Women’s Studies Newsletter identified the Center as a symbol of equality

for men and women on RU’s campus. One CWS professor observed that its
construction and the access to material resources that the building
represents was a sign to university administrators that women’s studies
was not simply another program at the margins but that it was strongly
supported by similarly-minded donors in the west. Although its
activities may not be well-known or understood, by its very presence
the CWS building, located directly across from the main library, is a
symbol of resistance to dominant patriarchal ideology in Thailand. Or
is it?

One western foundation program officer suggested that the
construction of the Center for Women’s Studies building represents a
“press from the west,” an act of colonial patrimony or nobless oblige on
behalf of another western donor to promote its own agenda for women in
Southeast Asia. On the other hand, A. Radida considered herself and the
CWS “lucky” that a Norwegian NGO offered funds to construct building
which freed her from actively seeking donor support for such a project.
This lovely, distinctive building advances the work and announces the
CWS’s mission; the edifice also stands out from other buildings on
campus. It has access to materials from western donors which positions
the Center in a rather prominent position at the margins-—comfortable
office space for professors and air conditioned classroom space for the
one or two professors who choose to teach there. The CWS building
appears to be both a concrete example of western hegemony and an
expression of solidarity between western and Thai feminists. It is an
example of the complexity of resistance that individuals and
organizations-—even those committed to alternative ideologies

organizations-—both resist and reproduce ideologies of domination.

147

Conclusions

The political perspective highlights enactments of resistance to
and the reproduction of power in the daily life of organizations. In
this chapter I explored the ways in which organizations, or, more
specifically, organizers, compete for limited resources and I argued
that differential awarding of resources reinforces the dominant
ideology. I examined ideologies and gendered relations and the
complexity of both reproducing and resisting dominant ideas. A
discussion of cultural enactments of conflict in Thai culture
foreshadowed attention to the cultural perspective of organizations,

which I discuss in Chapter Five.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS AT THE MARGINS

I think this field [of women’s studies] is very
new and there’s no consensus. At this point I
think that it is in the process of searching for
an identity.

--A. Malee, CWS Professor

Professors at Regional University are creating Thai women’s
studies. A. Malee speaks of the enterprise as new and “searching for an
identity.” As CWS professors enact women’s studies they are
constructing its identity. While a political perspective highlights
conflict, interests and power, the cultural perspective focuses on
enactments and meanings of women’s studies. Their enactments are
diverse, shared, fragmented.

Cultural studies of organizations examine organizational actors’
interpretations of events and things rather than assuming that a priori
meanings exist in the events and things themselves (Louis, 1983/1992).
The structural perspective focuses on structures, functions, rules and
roles in organizations and the political perspective views these as
contested sources of power. From a cultural perspective, however,
”organizations are socially constructed realities that rest as much in
the heads and minds of their members as they do in concrete sets of
rules and relations” (Morgan, 1987, p. 131).

Although the phenomenon of culture has been studied in the academy
for over a century, the introduction of culture into studies of
organizations gained currency only in the 19703 (Burrell & Morgan,
1979). Organizational theorists most frequently have studied cultures

by looking at shared interpretations and meanings among organizational

actors (see Martin, 1992; Morgan, 1987). While early cultural studies

148

149

by looking at shared interpretations and meanings among organizational
actors (see Martin, 1992; Morgan, 1987). While early cultural studies
in anthropology also sought out shared, agreed—upon meanings among
cultural group members, from the late 19403 scholars also have
researched diverse and oppositional interpretations within and among
cultures as well as subcultures. Contemporary studies of cultures in
organizations explore not only homogeneous cultural views but
oppositional subcultures within larger organizations and cultural
fragmentation, that is, the constant flux, confusion and unresolvable
complexity of organizations (Martin, 1992). In this chapter I consider
the CWS’s organizational culture as it is embedded in other cultural
contexts and I explore the confusion and complexity of culture in the
CWS in relation to cultural enactments.

Weick (1979) describes enactments as the processes through which
we shape and structure our realities. While I continue to focus on the
ways in which CWS professors shape and structure the enterprise of
women’s studies at Regional, I also include other cultural actors in
this chapter, some of whom do not figure prominently in the analysis in
the analysis in Chapters Three and Four.32 Undergraduate students are
cultural participants in the wider university culture and in the
cultures of specific faculties, departments and classes. Students
clearly construct culture and gendered understandings about their world,
as my data show. But within the Thai context of teaching and learning I
describe, I am compelled also to discuss students as cultural actors who
are the focus of cultural transmission, recipients of disseminated

knowledge (Spindler, 1974).

 

32While this analysis focuses on administrators and professors in
Chapters Three and Four and pays more attention to students and less to
administrators in Chapter Five, this does not imply that perspectives
are audience-specific or more appropriate to one group of actors or
another.

150

Within this framework of cultural transmission and disseminated
knowledge, I argue that teachers are disseminators and gatekeepers of
knowledge. Examining how professors beyond the CWS organize and enact
women’s studies positions the CWS as part of a broader emergent
subculture, that of women’s studies at RU. The ways in which professors
and students shape their realities is embedded in a larger context of
values, discourse and actions.

The position and condition of Thai women and gendered relations
which I discussed in Chapter One are part of the broader cultural
context in which the CWS is embedded. Also included are important Thai
values, some of which I discussed in Chapters Three and Four. In
Chapter Three I examined affiliative relationships, such as the Black
Lions, within the Thai bureaucratic structure and Chapter Four explored
conflict and harmony in Thai culture as related to ego and face and to
conceptions of gratitude in Thai relationships. In this chapter I
allude to those discussions and I proceed to explore some of the
dynamics of Thai academic culture and cultural practices of teaching and
learning as they relate to how professors and students engage in the

cultural practice of women’s studies at Regional University.

Organizational Culture of the CWS

Morgan (1987) asserts that “the formation of a group...ultimately
hinges on an ability to create a shared sense of reality” (p. 133).
Through their words and actions CWS professors articulate a shared sense
of doing women’s studies within the broader contexts described above.
They agree that doing women’s studies means: 1) women and men must work
together 2) for equality among Thai women and men 3) to solve the
problems of Thai women, especially village and rural women in the

region, through training and research. In so doing they are creating a

151

Thai way of doing women’s studies. CWS professors’ opinions also
diverge, however, on conceptions of feminism and ways of organizing and
defining women’s studies, weaving a colorful tapestry of an emergent

women’s studies culture at Regional University.

Men in Mann's Studies

CWS professors appeared to be in complete consensus about whether
or not men professors should engage in women’s studies activities.
Women CWS professors did not say, “We invite the men to work with us,”
rather, they insisted that men and women have to work together to
address gender inequities in Thai society. A. Linchee stated:

Both men and women, we have to solve the problem
together--that's my position.

Law professor A. Kamol underscored the importance of his participation
in the Center for Women’s Studies:

Some of my students always ask me why I joined
the Center for Women’s Studies because they
think that women’s studies is the work of women
or only women ought to join. I tell them that
women’s studies is not only for women, it’s for
everyone--to construct the understanding that
everyone is equal. In Thailand men dominate
society. I think it will take a long time to
upgrade [the position of women]. This is one
reason why A. Radida invited men to become
committee members, to show that women’s studies
is not just for women; everyone has to help.

In addition to the commitment of CWS professors to work together,
the participation of men and women professors at national women's
studies seminars, including one man who headed another regional
university’s women’s studies center, suggested that this value of women
and men working together to do women’s studies was shared by professors

interested in women’s studies throughout Thailand.

 

152
Doing women's Studies the Thai way

For CWS professors, the belief that men and women must work
together to obtain equality for Thai women and men and to improve the
position of Thai (rural) women separates them from the west. That is,
Thai professors appear to share the perception that in the west women’s
studies is constructed by women alone, women who choose to define
women’s studies work apart from men. I posit that this commitment of
Thai women to work together with Thai men constitutes one element of
constructing women’s studies the “Thai way.”

When US professors began creating women’s studies programs in the
19703, they paid little, if any, consideration to constructing women’s
studies “the American way.” They simply created women’s studies within
and alongside the US feminist movement. In Thailand, however, with the
history of powerful and unwelcome US political, economic and
intellectual involvements in the country, US and other western nations’
constructions of women’s studies are considered with caution (Bell,
1991).

CWS professor A. Malee spoke candidly about the western origins of
Women’s Studies and the urgency for Thai scholars to develop a
distinctively Thai women’s studies:

Feminism originated in the west and the body of

knowledge is western-oriented. But in Thailand

we have to indigenize our own body of knowledge

of women’s studies and we have not done this so

far....I really want to indigenize the knowledge

in women’s studies--but before I can indigenize

I have to know exactly what that knowledge is.
A. Malee spoke of “indigenizing” women’s studies knowledge. She and her
colleagues do not want Thai women’s studies to consist of western
feminist writings translated into Thai with Thai introductions. A.

Malee wants to understand and connect with extant scholarship on women's

studies from the west so that she can know “exactly what that knowledge

153

is” in order to adapt it or to commence the development of a body of
uniquely Thai, women’s studies knowledge.

A. Malee and her colleagues conceive of their field research and
training seminars as building this base of knowledge. At the same time
they actively promote equality among rural women and men through
academic service, that is, by offering training seminars for women on
leadership, the law, research and running for political office. '_
Curriculum and theory development take second place to the urgency of
equipping women with skills to participate in rural development. 9

This commitment to constructing women’s studies the Thai way is I

iglluminated through a brief discussion of the disciplinary culture of

 

4:13 sun -

Tiiai social sciences. Bell’s (1991) work on the influence of the Us on
Tfllai social sciences provides an interesting frame for thinking about
triis. By 1974 8,000 Thai students had been trained in the US. Many
stztudied the social sciences and returned to high positions in the Thai
knirweaucracy and to teach in Thai universities. Thus, American
St:runetural-functionalist scholarship and its bias toward political and
eccxruomic social stability qualitatively influenced the development of
SOCEiEal science research priorities, higher education curriculum,
PaJTEiéiigmatic views of society and the translation of these views into
Puri1:ic policy. In the 19703 student alliances with farmers and workers
bl tille uprisings profoundly affected Thai society and social science
scholarship. Students and scholars alike began to reject the
furActionalist paradigm that had little explanatory power to help them
understand and change the conditions in which they lived. The
revolutionary stirrings encouraged a proliferation of Thai Marxist
stnldiixes which changed the face of the social sciences. Although no less
western than a Weberian, positivist analysis, Marxist methodology
emphasized the active relationship between social theory and social

a - , _ ,
ctZignand introduced analytlcal categories of conflict, class struggle

154

and exploitation specific to Thailand into social science discussions.
This deep suspicion of theoretical frames which undergird dominant
ideologies also prevails among a number of Thai social scientists today
and it influences the research and scholarship of social science
professors affiliated with the CWS, reinforcing both resistance to
western feminist theories and the commitment to develop women’s studies

in a distinctively Thai way.

Shared and Diverse Conceptions of women's Studies
While CWS members completely agreed that men and women should

construct Thai women’s studies together, dissenting voices quietly
registered disagreement over the small size of the CWS committee and its
range of activities. One professor suggested that the CWS should expand
in size, another asserted that the CWS should begin to offer legal
consultation services for women. These were individual ideas, however,
and not widely shared. CWS professors demonstrated a greater range of
diversity in their lack of consensus about feminism. And although they
described CWS goals and activities similarly, their definitions of

women's studies differed.

Feminism
In their study of women’s organizations in Thailand,
Tantiwiramanond and Pandey (1991, p. 10) describe feminism in Thailand

thusly:

In western society the word “feminism” sometimes
connotes a strong “anti—male” attitude. It
often gets conflated with lesbianism. Because
of this impression of confrontation (male—
hatred), or individual pursuits (often related
to “bra-burning,” free sex), the word “feminist”
is often disliked (frowned upon) or explained
differently in the Third World, specifically in
Thailand. There is no feminist movement in
Thailand as a unified theory.

155

A. Radida concurs with this explanation of how Thai women,
including those in the women’s movement, reject calling themselves
feminists. She offered this explanation:

Not many women in the movement itself would
consider themselves as feminists because maybe
they don’t see clearly what feminism means or
they are quite reluctant to use the term because
of the image of a feminist. A feminist to many
of the women--not to mention the men-—is seen as
the radical, irrational extremist and not very
sophisticated. F-

A. Radida added that being labeled a feminist is not always one’s
personal choice, but is related to the labels that others create:

[The media] always classify feminist and
intellectual women who work for women's rights
and call them feminists. Personally I'm always
seen as a feminist. Even the press when they i
refer to me wouldn't address me as an

intellectual or as a professor. They refer to

me as a feminist or activist. I'm surprised

myself...[so it’s not only what] one might

choose to call oneself but it's also what people

see you as.

 

While she does not consider the case of Thailand, Jaywardena
(1986) argues that feminism is rooted in the traditions and activist
movements of women throughout countries of Southeast Asia and that it is
necessary to recall those origins lest Asian feminists dismiss feminism
as uniquely western enterprise. CWS professors voiced the perception,
however, that feminism is a western phenomenon, an anti—men, separatist
movement. A. Malee asserts:

Feminism for me is much different from how the
west defines it. A feminist for me is the one
who advocates-—only advocates--for the rights of
women and who advocates for gender equality.
For me that's all...I wouldn't work in this if
[we were] against men.
Two other women CWS professors, A. Kanchanaa and A. Linchee, distance
themselves from the word feminist:
I don't quite understand the word feminist.
What does it mean really? I don't know and I
don't care if I’m called a feminist or not. I

just work in what I think is interesting and
important....So far, when I have come across

156
people who refer to somebody as a feminist, I
think they say it with some kind of an
attitude...not a very good attitude: ”Oh, she's
a feminist.” It's not a good attitude....
I don't say, ”I'm a feminist.” I say, ”No, I'm
not!” If you present yourself as a feminist,
people immediately are against you no matter
what you do.

While CWS professor A. Kamol understands feminism as a
constructive force in Thai society, at the same time he recognizes the
negative connotations of the term. He asserts that not only the broader
populace but also RU students from his department unilaterally dismiss
the concept of feminism:

[When people talk about] a feminist in Thailand,
I think they think that they're [talking about
someone who is] active in fighting for women's
rights. Another opinion is not so good. I
understand what a feminist is but when I talk to
another person--such as the political science
students at Regional University--they don't find
a good meaning any good points about feminism.
While CWS professors disagreed on the meanings of feminists and
feminism, they did share the practice of not openly referring to
themselves as feminists or to their work as a feminist project. They

are creating a culture of women’s studies but not in the context of a

Thai feminist movement or shared understandings of feminism.

Definitions of Women's Studies
In addition to holding mixed understandings of feminism, CWS

professors offer an array of definitions of what constitutes women’s
studies. Several professors speak of the emergent nature of women’s
studies and voice uncertainty about what exactly it is about. CWS
professor A. Orapun, a woman, stated:

[Women’s studies] from my point of View? That’s

very hard. I think it’s anything that’s related

to women’s issues-—research.

CWS professor A. Prasit, a man, added:

157

Women’s Studies is something we don’t know much
about. Any time we don’t know much about
something we call it “studies.”

A. Kamol focused on the essential quality of women’s rights as

related to women’s studies:

From my opinion and only at Regional University,
I think that when someone talks about women’s
studies they mean a group or an organization or
a center that works with or is concerned about
women and about making equality for both sexes-—
but I don’t know; this is only my opinion.

A. Kanchanaa, an economist, asserts that women's studies is about equal
rights but, even more importantly, in her opinion, offers an essential
contribution to national economic development.

[Women’s Studies] consists of activities that
relate to a woman’s role, the ways in which
women will be developed to be a useful resource
for the economic development of the country--
that’s the ultimate goal. It’s not that we want
to have equal rights [for their own sake]....But
if we are equal, if we give more attention to
the development of the woman that means that we
are developing our own economic resources. The
woman is one of the human resources...a valuable
human resource.

A. Radida offers this definition:

I think [women’s studies] is not only a concept,

it's also a movement--[and it’s] not restricted

to only women——for people to participate in for

the equal status of women and men. But it's not

just raising the status of women, especially it

means the equal status, not the improved status.
CWS professors speak of women’s studies as anything that relates to
women’s issues, research, western knowledge that needs to be
indigenized, an organization on the university campus concerned with
women and equality and developing women as a valuable resource for
national economic development. While they define women’s studies in
different ways, there is no evidence of conflict in this diversity. CWS

professors’ participation in and descriptions of CWS activities speak of

shared understandings and priorities in enacting women’s studies.

158
Enacting Warren's Studies

A. Radida spoke of reaching out to the rural women’s groups as the
CWS's “most urgent and needed strategy” to address women’s concerns. A.
Kanchanaa spoke of this as the Center’s contribution to national
economic development. Other CWS professors referred to work with rural
women’s groups as important in the struggle to achieve equality among
women and men in Thailand. Through on—campus seminars CWS professors
offer leadership and paralegal training and teach researchers to focus
on women in their research projects. In village training seminars CWS
professors urge village women to vote and participate in constructing a
democratic society as well as to run for political office.

On the first day of CWS seminars on leadership training for rural
women and for paralegals, CWS professors lectured on “Why we need to
study about women” and “Women and the Law” respectively. The point of
these sessions was to show participants the roots of women’s
subordination to men, set the stage for understanding “strategic gender
interests” and build on this understanding through subsequent lectures
and seminar activities.

Molyneux (1986) proffers that women’s interests in particular
socio-political settings be divided into strategic gender interests and
practical gender interests.33 Strategic gender interests are derived
from the analysis of women’s subordination and an alternative, “more
satisfactory set of arrangements to those that exist” (p. 284). Women
themselves inductively formulate practical gender interests in response

to concrete conditions they experience by virtue of their gender in the

 

33Molyneux (1986) developed this analytical framework to assess
particular government following the Nicaraguan revolution. Wieringa
(1994) critiques the overuse of the framework and the assumption of
strict divisibility between practical and strategic interests. She
argues that strategic interests arise in the context of meeting
practical interests. While I find Wieringa’s critique compelling, I find
the categories of practical and strategic gender interests useful
descriptive categories for this set of data.

159

division of labor. Women come to understand practical gender interests
from their own daily-life experiences whereas an awareness of strategic
gender interests usually are not achieved through going about daily
activities but require a level of conceptual understanding. Developing
this kind of understanding of structural bias against women in society
and long-term solutions to inequalities is the focus of consciousness-
raising sessions where women learn about their strategic gender
interests.

Through their social location in Thai society, CWS professors have
been privileged to have access to formal higher education and to reflect
on strategic gender interests. In CWS seminars they take responsibility
for raising the consciousness of rural women about strategic gender
interests and, at the same time, address the women's practical gender
interests. Through seminar sessions on “why we need to study about
women,” CWS professors present the facts of discrimination against women
in Thai society, underscoring gender strategic interests. Through
sessions on herbal medicine and proposal—writing, the professors attend
to participants’ practical gender interests.

A. Radida and her colleagues invest much time and energy in
training seminars. In so doing, they assign first priority to work with
grass roots women and to training researchers; they give second place to
graduate and undergraduate curriculum development.

CWS professors share a vision of how they will introduce women’s
studies courses over time——by proposing discrete courses on women
through their respective departments. At present, however, their
curriculum efforts involve integrating women’s issues into departmental

courses they currently teach.

160

The Integration of women's Issues into RU's Curriculum

CWS professors integrate or infuse women’s concerns into their
teaching in several different ways. They illustrate points of a lecture
with examples of women’s concerns, tag stories about women at the end of
lessons and assign research reports to their students.

A. Kamol gave examples of ways in which he includes women’s issues
in undergraduate law courses:34

Every time I have a chance to include some
problem about women’s rights, I include it. For
example, when I’m teaching about contracts I
refer to the old contract law which limited
woman’s right to make a contract except with the
consent of her husband—-and now this law is
abolished.

I think that Thai society is a man-dominated
society. Then when we talk about women’s
studies or feminism, many students protest, they
don’t agree. For example, almost all of my
students think that their mothers do not work,
do not earn a salary—-only the father. But, in
fact, doing work in the house is a kind of work.
....Or equal rights. It’s very difficult to
explain equal rights--why a woman can’t do
something but a man can. One profession that we
talk about right now is the nai amphur (district
officer). Women can't go into this profession,
only men. Or like the governor. Now we have
only one woman governor.35 When we have
opportunity to talk about women’s rights, I will
give the example like this.

In a class on planning and development, A. Malee discusses with
t1k1€3 students how development planners must be aware of the needs of both
IVV<31Tleen and men as they set up development projects; otherwise the project
<>IJ3tlczomes may not benefit the women. A. Kanchanaa includes women’s

JIESSE‘T—Jes in applied economics courses which she described as at a higher

._‘~__~“

34
C2C>];-an is an undergraduate program in Thai higher education. Upon
(:Ilrrtzbletion of the undergraduate degree in law, students——if they so
35: <:’<:ise--may study an additional year to become a barrister.
t:11_(3;<overnors in Thailand are appointed officials from the Ministry of
I><>IE§ Interior. Prior to January 1993 women were not allowed to hold the
111% ition of governor. District officers are also Ministry of the.
(laltlserior appointees who head geographically smaller political units
(bfijLiled amphur or districts. Women were not allowed to serve as district
IElicers until late 1993.

161

;1eaxfel than theory courses. Her examples include unequal pay for equal
vvc>1rk and the effects of unbalanced development. She described the
latter as a chain reaction where farmers become low-wage laborers after
being lured or forced into selling their land, who eventually sending
tkaeejxr daughters into prostitution to supplement the family income. In
aritzliropology classes, A. Prasit discusses women and work in different
cu1]_t:11res and culture-specific practices such as cliterodectomy.

Whereas some professors include examples and information about
wcurleeln in their lectures, A. Orapun said she adds stories at the end of a
d15133:s session to fill unused time. “Of course” she includes women’s
issues in her courses, she stated,

...but normally I don’t know when. Sometimes

when I have time and then the [lecture] topic is

finished already but I have five more minutes, I

don't want to let them out [because they disturb

the other classes]...normally I’ll keep them in

class by giving them examples....
At: the end of a lecture to an economics class of mostly men engineering
St3-L:I.dents, A. Orapun told the story of four Burmese girls who had escaped
fITCIm work in a brothel and went into hiding in a Buddhist temple near
the university:

I told them about the girls, how badly they must

suffer...the class was so quiet--so I think it

helped a lot. And I told them--most of the

students are boys from Engineering--“You

shouldn’t go [to a brothel]; you should change

your norms and values of being a man....You

should stop doing that. You should change norms

and values because (I used economics terms) when

they have demand then they have supply. If you
don’t demand [it] then there's no supply.” So

they listened! The whole class was quiet....I
don’t know whether the results were immediate or
not.

H Third and fourth year men students, particularly those in certain

men-dominated disciplines, were known to take first year “freshies” to
brothels as part of their initiation into university life (The New York
Times Magazine, 1991). The students who participated in my focus group
interviews reported that they were not aware of students maintaining
this practice; they cited fear of AIDS as the reason. I did not
interview students from the men-dominated disciplines.

 

 

162
Not only does A. Orapun fill time at the end of the class period by

recounting this story; she also fulfills her obligation as a Thai
teacher to be students’ moral guide by telling them that changing their
practices can contribute to reducing the trafficking of women in the
region.

Several professors assign research projects or written reports to
allow or encourage students to think about women’s issues. Law
professor A. Kamol, asked the students in his criminal law class to
write about the criminal offense of rape. He required students to
examine a sample decision from the higher court on rape and to combine
this with information gleaned from documents from the CWS’s Information
Center.

Each semester geography Professor A. Linchee assigns a research
project to all Cultural Geography students. One year students
interviewed students (all boys and young men) studying in various
Buddhist temples in the community. RU students learned that most of the
boys were from rural areas and had come to the temples to get a free
education. A. Linchee explored with students the inequalities inherent
in this system which offers an educational option to boys from rural
villages which have poor-quality or no schools, but provides no parallel
educational opportunity for girls. Another year geography students were
scheduled to research “sacred spaces.” A. Linchee expected that
students might find gender implications in the study when they examined
rituals in sacred spaces and discovered that only monks may conduct
rituals. Women, even Buddhist nuns (bikkhuni), are not allowed to
participate.

CWS professors do not merely integrate women’s concerns into their
teaching and assignments out of personal concern and commitment, they

are also encouraged to do this through a curriculum project of the

163

National Commission on Women’s Affairs. In 1991 the NCWA of the Office
of the Prime Minister initiated a project funded through Canadian
government aid money to integrate women’s issues into required
undergraduate general education courses. The project director invited
interested professors from universities throughout the country to
participate in an “action research” project. This meant that interested
professors would speak with colleagues on their respective campuses
about ways in which women’s concerns had been and could be included in
undergraduate courses. Professors from seven universities met in
Bangkok on at least four occasions to report on the progress of their
work. At the end of the project, the NCWA commissioned chapters to be
written for a Thai language textbook on women’s studies to facilitate
and encourage the integration of women’s issues into future
undergraduate courses.

Systematic, cross—disciplinary integration aims for a larger
audience where students from many disciplines and faculties hear about
women’s issues (Aiken, Anderson, Dinnerstein, Lensink & MacCorquodale,
1993). Many consider integration an important companion to women’s
studies courses. McIntosh (1983) considers integration an important
phase of women’s studies curriculum development through which CWS
professors identify the womanless nature of the courses they teach and
modify the courses to include women’s experiences.

A. Prapun, a professor of Education and Humanities affiliated with
the Regional Center for Women in the Faculty of Education, prepared RU’s
curriculum integration report for the NCWA. He described ways in which
professors from Social Sciences, Education, and Humanities who teach
RU’s twelve required undergraduate courses currently do or, in the
future, can integrate women’s issues into course syllabuses. For
example, the introductory course “Thai Society and Culture” emphasizes

the changing role and status of women in Thai society. Lectures in

164

“Introduction to Civil and Commercial Law” may include topics of equal
personal rights under the law, the development of family law which
limited the rights of married women, and property relationships between
husbands and wives.

In his project report, A. Prapun concluded

In the BA level there are a lot of students and
a lot of subjects to study. In the past, topics
about women in anthropology, sociology and
education or general science depended on the
[individual] instructor and [her or his]
teaching methods. There is no coordination or
exchange of ideas or problems. Also there is
limited time for each subject and a large number
of students. Incorporating ways of thinking
about women is only one subject [of many] and
there is no discussion [about these matters].

A. Prapun asserts that systematic integration is not easy to
accomplish when students must study many different subjects, or courses,
when professors must teach large classes and when “ways of thinking
about women” in any given course must compete with many other course
topics. The problem is exacerbated, he adds, because no one coordinates
integration efforts and professors do not exchange ideas about
integration. A. Prapun implies that systematic coordination is
preferable to having individual instructors integrate on their own but
that coordinating integration efforts with an array of departments and
faculties throughout the university is a daunting proposition made more
difficult by the fact that there is no integration coordinator.

While integration is one approach to introducing the notion of
women’s studies to students and professors throughout the university, an
alternative or companion strategy is the development of women’s studies
courses. The Advisor to the Prime Minister’s Office, initiator of the
NCWA integration project, described her ideas about the two different
avenues of teaching women’s studies in this way:

My idea is that you always have to do both
[integration] and women’s studies course

development). There is a need for the younger
generation to be exposed to the issues and that

165

is why you concentrate on knowledge and

learning. But also you need in—depth studies

and when you talk about in—depth studies you

want to be more concentrated. Organization is

needed for that sort of thing-—that’s why you

have women’s center or women’s studies as an

academic major or a division within the faculty.
While four Thai universities offered a few women’s studies courses37 and
also participated in the integration project, women’s studies courses

were not yet a part of cultural enactments of CWS professors.

women's Studies Courses

CWS professors described future plans to establish women’s studies
courses but offered a variety of reasons why such courses were not
currently offered. From A. Radida’s point of view, the preparation and
collection of women’s studies materials through the CWS’s Information
Center is the most significant stage of preparing for a “long term
curriculum” in women’s studies. In that regard the CWS is already
preparing for women’s studies courses. Other professors indicate that
the CWS is not ready to offer women’s studies courses. A. Kanchanaa
cites the lack of resource persons, that is, professors with a
background in women’s studies, as the reason why women’s studies courses
cannot soon be introduced:

Due to the constraint on resource persons that
we don’t have, I don’t think we can offer
courses that soon. We have discussed it, but not
courses to give a diploma. We have a lot of
training courses, but we don’t give certificates
or diplomas. I don’t think we can have them;
not very soon——not in 4, 5 years.
A. Orapun concurs with her colleague. In A. Orapun’s presentation

on the work of the CWS for Asian university administrators attending a

conference sponsored by an area private university, two conference

 

37While four institutions offer women’s studies courses, students
interest was low and the courses were not always taught (Eckachai,
1990).

166

participants inquired how women’s studies were taught at Regional
University. After the second professor re-phrased and asked a second
time, A. Orapun declared to the group, “We’re not ready yet!” She
explained that CWS staff member Napaporn would soon pursue MA studies in
the US and at that time she would dig more deeply into women’s studies
which had also been the focus of her US undergraduate studies. CWS
professors anticipate that Napaporn will become a women’s studies
resource person and perhaps teach for the CWS on her return.

One professor suggested that including the development of a course
of women’s studies in the 1992 document was important primarily to have
the necessary objectives that would fit it into the national plan so
that the Center could be upgraded. The implication of her statement was
that the discussion of women’s studies courses was strategic and that
developing them was not a priority.

Scholars have explored the ways in which the emergence of new
fields of study in higher education are linked to societal and
organizational factors. Some argue that, among these factors, are
individual academics who strongly advocate for a new field and new
initiatives buttressed by outside financial support (Gumport, 1987).
Regional University’s Center for Women’s Studies clearly is led by an
advocate but donors encourage one kind of development rather than
another. Donors appear to have little interest in funding the
development of an undergraduate or graduate course of Thai women’s
studies. One program officer who advocated funding Thai WID initiatives
wondered what would be the purpose of such a curriculum. Other donors
eagerly funded the CWS’s training projects and the NCWA’s national
curriculum integration project, but I found no evidence of interest in
funding women’s studies course development. A representative from the
Fulbright Commission, the agency that had agreed to fund Napaporn’s

advanced degree study in the US, urged her to focus on other areas

167

besides women’s studies in her master's degree program. The implication
was that Napaporn’s BA in women’s studies was sufficient and that she
should explore other areas.

North American and Australian donors have funded individual CWS
professors to attend WID courses in Canada and Australia; in 1994 and
1995 the Thai government funded Thai women and men students to go to the
US or Canada to study women’s studies. Unfortunately, some CWS
professors’ attempts to participate in these classes were foiled. An
inaccurate blood report for a hepatitis test prevented one professor
from studying in Australia; Thai government guidelines judged the
professor who was very eager to understand and indigenize women’s
studies as too old to participate in the government-sponsored master’s
degree program.

An alternative to integration and to teaching a curriculum of
women’s studies courses is to offer select courses within a discipline.
FSS Dean Suwit indicated that the FSS standing committee had agreed that
courses about women could be introduced on a department—by-department
basis. At least one other university in the country had already
established this pattern. Further, at least three CWS professors
indicated a shared understanding of how the CWS would proceed to develop
courses on women in law, economics, political science in “four or five
years.”

In the meantime, while CWS professors were dealing with questions
of what these courses would consist of and when the courses should be
introduced, a sociology professor not affiliated with either women’s
center in the university was preparing to teach a course on
“Sociological Perspectives of Women.” A. Lawan had proposed and
obtained approval for the course and planned to teach it in 1995, based
on her research studies on issues of women and labor conducted together

with the sociology department chair. A. Lawan’s course proposal, the

168

first in the FSS but quite separate from the CWS, raises questions of a
fragmented subculture of WS at RU. I discuss this at the end of this

chapter.

women's Studies Embedded in Cultural Practices of Teaching and Learning
CWS professors enacted women’s studies as they conceived of it in
“the Thai way” as embedded in Thai cultural practices of teaching and
learning and conceptions of knowledge. Expressions of high esteem for
teachers, students’ obligations toward teachers, and views of knowledge
as that which is disseminated are cultural values which shape the ways

in which RU professors develop women’s studies.

 

Within Thai society the teacher is a respected repository of PM
knowledge (Bhamarapravati, 1990).38 Mulder (1979) observes that to be
called teacher (khru), professor (aacaan) or doctor (mo) confers high
social visibility and means that “one will be consulted as a repository
of the knowledge to which people pay respect” (p. 142). A teacher is a
moral guide, a beacon for students who strives to disseminate accurately
the knowledge she or he has acquired to students. The student—teacher
bond endures for a lifetime and, with careful deliberation, one may draw
on this relationship for support or assistance throughout one’s life.

Students, in turn, accord their esteemed teachers deep respect. A
wai, placing the hands together in a prayer-like position in front of
one’s face, is a symbol of that respect in Thai culture. When students
enter class (especially when late) or leave (especially if early), they
wai their professors. Students also wai professors when meeting them on
campus; professors nod or, especially with graduate students, may wai in

return. Once a year, from primary school through university, students

‘

3alt/lost often the teacher also is older than the student——an important
‘Tvnamic in a socio—cultural context where elders are accorded respect in
Imany different forms.

169

pay special respect to their teachers in a wai khru (“paying respect to
the teacher”) ceremony.

This deference to professors carries into the classroom where
professors lecture and students take notes. With two exceptions,
professors and students did not engage in conversation during classes I
observed. In the two large undergraduate law classes, neither
professors nor students raised questions. In economics and law classes fin
of approximately 50 students, professors asked questions which elicited
a one- or two-word choral response from the entire class, as is the
pattern in primary and secondary schooling. In smaller classes,

professors and students engaged in short exchanges. In only one of

 

these small classes did I observe a student, a man, offer a lengthy ""5
opinion on factors contributing to the migration of ethnic minority

people. A teacher’s duty is to teach; a student’s duty is to listen and

learn and, when questioned, to respond. Three professors remarked that

it was difficult to know if students understood examples about women

integrated into their courses since Thai students are quiet and not very

expressive.

The view of teacher as knowledge repository is reinforced through
patterns of teaching and learning. Students may have a course textbook
but they are not asked to read in advance of class sessions. Instead,
the instructor distributes hand—outs and lecture notes s/he has prepared
during or at the end of the class or refers to the text. While the
contemporary nature of some professors' lectures conveyed fresh
preparation, several professors from the CWS and beyond referred to
their own texts and lecture notes or those of colleagues as out-of—date
or in need of revision. Formal knowledge acquired through advanced
degrees is often passed on to students in the form in which it was

received (Mulder, 1979).

170

A professor from a Bangkok university, recently returned from
advanced degree study in Australia, lamented that his experiment to
require students to read assigned materials in the library prior to
class was thwarted—~by students who didn’t comply and by professors who
urged him to return to the Thai approach to teaching. Two CWS
professors said they provide students with optional course-related
readings by putting books on reserve in the library but students are not
required to look at them. The view of knowledge that emerges from these
data is that the teacher possesses the important knowledge. For
students to articulate and apply that knowledge is paramount; outside

texts are extraneous to important learning.

Academic Culture

The influence of colleagues on pedagogical decisions, such as not
requiring students to use the library, reminds us that the Thai academic
culture is also important when considering how professors approach
matters of teaching, learning and curriculum development. Komin (1990)
observes:

Even in academic seminars where intellectual
criticism has a legitimate place, the Thai still
try to avoid direct strong criticism, if
possible. Foreign observers would rarely find
heated debates or arguments or strong criticisms
in Thai meetings of any nature.

I observed this in a CWS seminar where the scholar, who was to
critique research findings just presented, stated, “I agree with
everything the guest speaker has to say,” and then proceeded to
construct her own very different analysis of the research study, a
veiled critique of the researcher’s presentation. Academic culture as
professors described it and as I experienced it does not promote

conversation about pedagogy, theory and curriculum or a vigorous

exchange of opinions and ideas.

 

17]
Knowledge dissemination

In the past, students “waied” their books because “books are our
teachers” (S. Maneenop, personal communication, August 18, 1992).
Mulder (1979) posits that traditional ideas of knowledge are exemplified
in the curriculum for formal Buddhist learning (naktham), courses which
emphasize memorization and rote learning and which give complete details
of proverbs but leave one on one’s own to infer and understand the FE
larger system of Buddhism. Students' understandings of knowledge as
contained in teacher—prepared texts or lecture notes resonates with this
conception of naktham as teacher. One image this conveys is of

knowledge flowing out of founts of wisdom with students receiving

 

I '1

knowledge from its source.
“Dissemination” of information and of knowledge similarly connotes

a one-way flow of knowledge from the teacher to the student, from one
who knows to one who does not know. The MoUA’s goals for higher
education include “the need to expand higher education opportunity and
disseminate knowledge at the university level to every region.”
Information dissemination also figures prominently in CWS professors
vision for their program. In the initial proposal to establish a
program for Women’s Studies, A. Radida and her colleagues cited
information dissemination as a high priority:

Information and research findings will be

disseminated by various means, such as provision

of training, dissemination of documents and

articles, publicity through the mass media,

exhibitions and other media.
The more recent 1992 upgrade proposal listed similar priorities and

9

objectives.3 The national integration project began with an action

 

” The “Request for Operation of the Women’s Studies Center According to
[the Seventh] Higher Education Development Plan (1992-1996)” lists the
following areas of focus for the center: Information gathering and
dissemination, training programs, collaboration with NGOs, research,
national/international networking, women’s studies courses and academic
work, collaboration with Southeast Asian universities.

172

research project and with professors speaking with colleagues in their
home institutions about their current experiences or interest in
including women’s issues in their courses. They identified professors
who were interested or neutral as potential targets for the integration
project. The project finale also followed the dissemination model: the
NCWA commissioned Bangkok writers to prepare a textbook on women’s
issues which the Commission would disseminate to all universities
throughout country for any professor to use in her/his disciplinary
area. It could be considered one text of many but it is more likely
that, with no other Thai language university texts about women, it will
be used as the authoritative work.

Aiken et al. (1993) describe a different approach to integration
at one US university which highlights cultural aspects of university
integration projects. In the US project, 45 professors met in small
groups on a regular basis throughout a semester to discuss feminist
works. They argued about the relevance of these works for a particular
course they planned to teach which they had agreed to re-design. This
staff development approach to integrating gender issues into the
university curriculum is carried on within an academic culture that
promotes argumentation among academics, the challenging of ideas and a
collaborative approach to course syllabus development. It reflects
assumptions about teaching, learners, and knowledge which are different
from Thai cultural understandings. Integration, as carried out by CWS
professors and undergirded by the NCWA project, is consistent with Thai
professors’ commitment to disseminating information on women to students
and colleagues.

CWS professors were interested no only in disseminating
information to others, however, they also were interested in learning
from rural women about their problems and their lives-—and in

disseminating this information to others. With encouragement from the

 

173

foundation program officer responsible for the project, CWS professors
developed this dissemination plan:

Documents used in the training project will be
disseminated to various organizations as well as
the public. Training materials as well as cases
to be dealt with by trainees will contribute to
the preparation of women’s studies and law
curriculum planned at the Faculty of Social
Sciences, Regional University.

The Program for Women’s Studies will provide 5””
academics and non-governmental organizations
with at least twenty case studies which are
valuable first-hand information concerning women
and the struggle for their rights. The PWS can
encourage Regional to work in coordination with
NGOs in solving problems for northern women when
the Seventh National Education Plan of the
university is implemented in the fiscal years of
1992 through 1996. __3

 

Twenty case studies for the university and NGOs were to be drawn from
rural women’s “struggle for their rights.” From the rural women's
stories the CWS planned to develop a women’s studies and law curriculum.
Anthropology professor A. Prasit spoke of the rural women as bearers of
local knowledge, a kind of knowledge which CWS professors recognize they
do not possess and which they value highly. For CWS professors to
codify this knowledge, then, suggests a kind of turnstile role for the
CWS as information gatherer and disseminator, the ones who take in
knowledge and send it out. The turnstile is also a kind of gate and the
gatekeepers—-the professors--are those who decide whose knowledge is

important and which knowledge comes in and goes out.

Gatekeepers of Knowledge

The enduring cultural view of teacher as respected knower and
disseminator of knowledge places professors in the position of knowledge
gatekeepers. They have access to knowledge about women and possess the
means of disseminating this information—-through training, publishing

and sending out documents and through the mass media and exhibitions.

174

CWS professors’ intention is to open the gate widely so that many will
know about women’s concerns and take action to solve women’s problems.
CWS professors’ primary concern is knowledge dissemination which will
empower and facilitate improved quality of life for rural women.

When rural women teach professors about their lived experience,
professors codify and disseminate this knowledge back to the women
themselves, to organizations and other women in similar positions, and
to others within the academic community. The conception of knowledge as
something precious which is acquired and disseminated places CWS
professors in the powerful position of utilizing this knowledge to equip
researchers with tools for conducting research about women. They also
can utilize their knowledge to empower rural women through paralegal and
leadership training. In addition, they also become the filter to decide
which knowledge is shared with whom, which places them in a powerful
position. The most important questions for gatekeepers in this context,
however, are who keeps the knowledge and how wide open the gate is.

In their search to understand what a disciplinary field of women’s
studies in the Thai context consists of, however, CWS professors wait
for resource personnel to be trained and for sufficient research and
printed materials on Thai women to accumulate in the Information Center.
They are able to focus on the dissemination of what they do know to
others who do not. Professors open the gate and disseminate extant
knowledge of the condition and position of Thai women to seminar
participants. In their research and in their university teaching,
however, they maintain a strong commitment to their respective
disciplines and do not challenge the disciplinary epistemological
assumptions interrogated by feminists in other countries.

Cultural expectations of teacher-as—knower coupled with the lack
of resource people who are acquainted with the breadth and depth of

women’s studies literature, resistance to western conceptions of

175

feminism and feminist theory, the absence of a Thai feminism and many

other different factors constrain CWS professors from developing of a

Thai feminist theory or theories. As I interpret the data I assert that

the construction of a Thai feminist theory or theories could provide

multidisciplinary frameworks for researchers and students to analyze

women’s issues, advance women’s studies in the Thai academy, and foster

the exploration of women’s studies as an interdisciplinary field of "A
study in the university. I acknowledge that my location within the US
academy together with a western view of the uses of knowledge influence
my conclusions. In addition, however, I cite the development of women’s
studies in, for example, India (Chamberlain & Howe, 1995), as strong
examples of ways in which theory generation, research, teaching and
praxis interweave to create hearty women’s studies/gender and

development programs in a non-western setting.

Students as Cultural Members

For cultural values and concepts to endure, cultural members must
transmit cultural expectations to the newest members, be they infants or
older adults (Spindler, 1974). Within the university, professors
dutifully disseminate disciplinary knowledge to their students; for CWS
professors this includes integrating ideas about women and women’s
issues. Second- and third- year students mentor first—year students
into university student culture. At the same time, all students
construct their own understandings of what it means to be a woman or man
student in the university, connecting gendered relations in the
university with the gendered experience of home life.

Some CWS and RU professors described undergraduate students as not
having sufficient experience to discuss ideas about women's issues in

class. Others stated that it was very difficult to know what students

176

were thinking about information on women they integrated into their
classes since Thai students are quiet and respectful and don’t convey
their emotions. The students I interviewed gave evidence of wide—
ranging personal experiences of gendered relations as well as classroom
learning about women’s experiences. They also expressed strong emotions
about women’s issues. In the pages that follow I discuss women and men
students’ comments about personal and campus-related experiences of what
it is to be a woman or a man in this Thai socio-cultural setting.

The overwhelming theme among women and some men students was the
inequality of freedoms between men and women. Boys at home, young men
on campus and men in society have greater independence and fewer
responsibilities than girls and women. Girls and young women are
restricted from many things their male counterparts are allowed to do
and have more home and family responsibilities. Women students noted:

I would like to be a man because women’s rights
and liberties are more boxed in than men’s.

Men have more rights; they can go out at night
and women can’t.

My brother can stay out late; I can’t.

Neighbors talk if the girls get too much
freedom.

We have early curfew hours and have to climb up

to the dorm room (from outside) if we’re late-—

and girls are judged “good” or not on the basis

of this.

Thai men have more rights; they can travel

anywhere. Thai women have to be body-checked

when they go out of the country because they

(the men) think we’re prostitutes.
Young women students who live on campus in dormitories have a ten
o’clock evening curfew; young men have none. In their study of
opportunities and problems encountered by girls in Thai society,

Archavanitkul and Havanon (1990) note that girls are treated more

strictly and assigned increased duties at home, such as caring for

 

 

1t!

177

siblings and the elderly. Boys, on the other hand, are “allowed to have
fun and spend a lot of time in out-of—the—house activities” (p. 20).
Some young women students indicated that, due to their father’s
influence, daughters’ and sons’ duties at home were not so conventional:

I am the only girl but I am strong because my
father taught me to be.

My father says that we should also teach girls
to be independent. '51

Father likes to cook so girls and boys in the
family both cook——but it’s a daughter’s duty and
a brother’s option.

While girls immediately and consistently raised the issue of

freedoms and duties, boys did not. One man student stated:

"1..

There’s no difference between how girls and boys
are treated in the family. There’s just a
difference between older and younger children;
the older ones need to be responsible for the
younger ones who need to be taken care of.

Men and women students expressed mixed and contradictory
understandings about familial, societal and personal expectations for
them in society. Stereotypes associated with women and girls, in
particular, predominated. Women students stated:

Daughters are closer to the parents than the
sons and should be more tender, softer. Boys

are treated stronger.

Women are neat and sweet; men are strong leaders
and good decision-makers.

Men students added:
Women always think about the details. There's
no opportunity for women to work in high
positions--because women can’t make quick
decisions; they think and think.

Women are smarter than men; they get better
grades.

The theme of men as good leaders and women as followers who attend
to details but don’t make good leaders prevailed among both men and

women students. Young women shared these opinions:

178

Women should be leaders, but in the family
sometimes the women should follow the men. In
decision—making women should be the hind legs
[of the elephant].

Men always are my leader...but sometimes we are
equal.

If a woman doesn't work outside the home she
should do what the man, the breadwinner, says.

A man added:
Men think they’re superior, that they are the
front legs of the elephant. I'd like to think
that things are changing, however.
In fact, men students occupied positions of university student
leadership in campus-wide organizations and in departments. Students
reported that even in FSS departments where the majority of students
were women, men were the leaders of student department organizations.
Not all agreed that leadership arrangements should continue on this way.
A woman student declared:
Thai women think we are inferior to men. We
should change this. (All focus group
participants agreed).
In discussions of challenges or problems for women and men
students, both women and men students cited student pregnancy, women
students who become prostitutes, and verbal harassment. In all cases,
except for verbal harassment and rape, students—-men and women—-blamed
women for these problems:
Women students get pregnant because they can't
control themselves....Women don't handle
independence well.
We are women, we need only one thing: money.
Student prostitutes get money to go out or for
tuition or the family.

Men added to the list:
When girls from far away villages come here and
see civilized things-—especially bad things like
horse racing and alcohol——then they become

prostitutes because they have problems with
money or want a new experience.

. ,l

'L

 

179

Some girls behave badly and live with their
‘boyfriends. They have sex before marriage and
have to drop out of school if they have a baby.

There are HIV+ girls in all eight dorms except
for one.

For themselves, boys listed that men students “can't control themselves,

they play cards and drink and come home late.”

A woman student spoke in contradictory ways about her experience

as a geography student in a department dominated by men:

There are more boys in geography because it’s
terrible for the girls. We can’t do trekking or
carry the cameras——that’s the duty of the boys.
But [when we go on a field trip] boys will say,
“This is hard—-can you do this?” And sometimes
they don’t let all the girls go on an outing.

Students learn of women’s issues through course integration and

expand their understanding of societal issues. They spoke of these

issues separately from their own experiences and concerns, however.
Due to RU professors’ current integration efforts, students speak of
learning in English class about women’s participation in society, past

and present, and about men’s oppression of women. A male English

student noted that when his professor spoke of oppression in the past

she declares, “Now is the time for women to do something!”

Undergraduate law students describe unequal treatment of women in family

and property laws; a woman sociology student remembers a sociology

lecture on prostitution. A geography student, a senior woman, explains

how she came face to face with the unequal treatment of men and women in

rural areas:

[On a field trip] we interviewed men and women
at the Family Development Project. Women get 80
baht and men 120 baht. They say that women
“just grow” the crops but men spread the hay.
When we studied this in class, we didn't believe

it. But when we ourselves saw it, then we
believed it——it’s true!

For sohitions to problems of raising the status of women in

sochaan students’ rely on people's good will to just “do better.”

 

180

Women students asserted that women have to do more, to be better. Two

men and several women students argued that men have to let women do

mores. Students lack a broad framework for discussing gendered relations

and fall back on stereotypes of women and men as the reasons why things
are the way they are, why some things can change and others won’t.

fflmrough course integration students are learning where women aren’t

included and.where they are treated unequally, but they do not yet have

access to seeing the world from Thai women’s standpoint, that is, to

consider all of knowledge, theory, and analysis through women’s eyes.

Students understand practical gender interests from their own

experiences and teachers’ illustrations but they lack an understanding

of strategic gender interests.

While CWS professors strongly value their grass roots work with

rural women and value the rural women student’s local knowledge, a

different view of students emerges from professors’ interactions with

younger undergraduate students. I observed that professors take

seriously their responsibility to transmit a body of academic knowledge

to university students--both that which the professors themselves have

received, and, in some cases, generated from their own research. As

discussed with regard to the culture of teaching and learning, this

dissemination or transmission is demonstrated through lectures, tests,

teacher-prepared texts and lecture notes. This transmission involves

professors telling undergraduate students about women’s issues in their

lectures and providing training in the law, leadership and politics for

rural grass roots women. Exploring local knowledge does not necessarily

extend to “grass roots” university students’ local knowledge.

Professors and graduate students I observed and with whom I spoke

did converse at greater length about issues, including women’s issues.

Challenging and transforming cultural beliefs about gendered relations

is difficult for both professors and students. The formidable nature of

181

this task is illustrated in the next section by A. Pornthip’s discussion

with Education graduate students on norms and roles.

Challenges to Cultural Assumptions of Sexuality and Prostitution
While undergraduate students learn about women’s issues in course
lectures and research and field assignments, professors more frequently
engage graduate students in class discussion. A. Prapun’s report on
RU’s integration project states that graduate students have “maturity
and sufficient experience to be prepared to discuss ideas about women.”
While graduate students may have more experience, challenging widely-
held cultural beliefs about women and men, such as those articulated by
the undergraduate students, is a difficult pedagogical task. Education
professor A. Pornthip undertook this challenge in “Analysis of
Essentials of Foundations in Education,” a master’s degree class at
Regional University.
Approximately equal numbers of men and women students attended

class the day I visited; most appeared to be 30 to 45 years old. A.
Pornthip was the lecturer for this section of the team-taught course.
Although the overhead transparency noted that the class was about
societal norms and changing roles in Thai society, in fact, A. Pornthip
was challenging students’ ideas about sexuality in the context of
prostitution. Following a brief lecture/discussion of the changing
roles of societal institutions—~the wat (Buddhist temple), the schools
and the family, A. Pornthip initiated a discussion of Thai norms related
to prostitution. The discussion evinced students’ attitudes and beliefs
about sexual roles of men and women:

P: (In a discussion of multiple norms.) Or

what about the problem of prostitutes? If a man

goes to a brothel, there are three

interpretations of this: 1) the prostitute is

wrong, 2) both are wrong, 3) neither one is

wrong. Who is wrong?

Man: It’s not wrong--it’s a buyer and a seller.

182

tfloman: It depends on the status of the man.

the man is married and he goes to the

prostitute, he is wrong. If he is a bachelor,
he is not wrong.

If

Man: A man goes to the prostitute because of
his physical needs. (Students laugh.)
P:

If a woman who is married has a sick husband
or the husband is not at home, can the woman do
that [go to a prostitute], too? And how would
society judge this situation?

Man: Women can’t do that because the woman is
the wife and the mother. And the society values
the role of mother very highly.

Woman: That depends on the society.

The students’ responses indicate their attitudes toward

prostitution: visiting a prostitute is a business transaction and

should not be judged; single men can frequent prostitutes since all men

have sexual needs; women dare not visit male prostitutes because women

are wives and mothers and motherhood is highly regarded. At another

point in the class discussion a woman student suggested that since

society is changing, the laws should change and legalize prostitution.

One man stated that if there are no prostitutes, more women will be

raped; another man added that as an occupation prostitution reaps a good

income. Nevertheless, A. Pornthip pressed on,

challenging dominant

roles amdrxuns of Thai society with regard to prostitution. She ended

the class session by asking:

P: How should we solve the prostitution
problem?

Man: We should find some vaccine to inject the

men who are married and then they will stop
going to the prostitutes.

P: A research study shows that women have sex
half as often as men. So the question is, where
do the men go for the other half?

The answer
is, outside the house.

183

It. Pornthip proceeded to discuss research findings that showed

that.vumnen in urban areas had sexual relations with their husbands less

frequently than women in rural areas and the implications of this. A

middle-aged student, a man, responded to this information by telling a
joke about an elderly man who was accused of rape and accepted his

punishment to let everyone think he was virile when he wasn’t.

IMen dominated the classroom conversation; at one point during the

class the professor urged the women to speak out—-even if other students

in the class were their superiors at work, she urged the women to

respond to participate in the discussion. One woman student appeared to

resonate to the direction of A. Pornthip’s questions by giving the
example of female animals that have multiple partners as an alternative

to the indisputable image of faithful wife and mother that her colleague

had insisted on.

By including the topic of roles and norms for men and women in the
syllabus, A. Pornthip and her colleagues are formally bringing gender-

related concerns into a mainstream graduate course. In the class

session discussed above, A. Pornthip introduces a high-profile, rarely-

discussed topic and pushes her students to think about the implications

of prostitution for men and women. The men appear to resist her

challenge with their quips and the women students resist with their
silence. The students don’t engage in discussion with each other about

norms and roles for men and women and they give A. Pornthip pat answers,

but still she is making problematic, in a university course, the idea

that men can go to prostitutes and women cannot. In so doing, she

pushes the marginalized and often taboo topic of prostitution and

sexuaLHarand legitimizes the topic for advanced studies in education.

She does not moralize with these graduate students; rather, she raises

questions and poses more questions to their answers. In the course of

her teaching she openly encourages the women students to participate.

184

A. Pornthip challenges her students to re—examine their ideas about the
cultural norm of men frequenting prostitutes and their fundamental
beliefs about sexuality. She uses the dominant language of her
discipline of sociology--“roles and norms for men and women"--to
introduce controversial, marginalize ideas about sexuality.

As this discussion of a graduate education class indicates, the
enterprise of women’s studies is not limited to the Faculty of Social
Sciences and the Center for Women’s Studies. Activities such as the
classroom conversation discussed above raise questions about the
development of a broader subculture of women’s studies at RU. What are
its characteristics? Do multiple efforts fragment or enhance the
development of a women’s studies subculture within the organizational
culture of Regional University? I explore these questions below,

primarily through a comparative discussion of the RCW and the CWS.

Fragmentation in the Women's Studies Subculture
or
The Center for women's Studies is not the Center of women’s Studies

This discussion explores the emergent subculture of women’s
studies at RU, through a brief comparison of the organizational cultures
of the RCW and the CWS. At the same time, this comparison provides an
opportunity to bring together the three theoretical perspectives--
structural, political and cultural--employed in this study and to see
how together they give useful insights into different aspects of
organizing women’s studies.

Several men professors from the Faculty of Education established
the Regional Center for Women (RCW) in 1990, seemingly in reaction to
the perceived exclusivity of the CWS. One professor flatly stated that
they were compelled to open the RCW since the CWS professors were not

“open-minded.” A second founding professor also mentioned “politics” as

 

185

the reason for two centers and noted that the two centers have distinct

Inissitnu3——the CWS works on curriculum, the RCW works with women in the

regirni. In fact, as noted above, this was not correct since CWS

professors had repeatedly stated they were not ready to initiate a

women’s studies curriculum and, with regard to curriculum integration,

an RCW professor had conducted the NCWA integration study. Ostensibly

tflna interest in “doing work on women” and acquiring resources to do that

tmork prompted RCW men to start the second center.

While the two centers’ modes of organizing differ, there were no

signs of open conflict.

The directors save face for each other; in

fact, the CWS director had not been aware of the RCW’s origins; she

thought A. Pornthip had started the work on her own and was very

supportive of A. Pornthip’s work. Although the current center directors

work together, more than one male Faculty of Education professor

expressed discontent with the CWS. In addition, a disaffected former

CWS member participates in RCW activities but not in those of the CWS.
The RCW was sown from seeds of discontent which have not died.
Paradoxically, yet not surprisingly in the context of “social smoothing”

and maintaining “surface harmony,” the two centers appear to co—exist in

harmony. Yet the male education professors created a separate——and, in

some ways, a competing-—women’s studies center.

Projects of the RCW indicate that its mission closely parallels

that of the CWS. Both are involved in curriculum integration, work

among grass roots women and publishing documents related to women’s

studies. The RCW is the center of curriculum integration at Regional

University; the RU professor in charge of the curriculum.integration
project and the professor who conducted the NCWA integration study for

the university both are members of the RCW Committee. The RCW is also

the center of a leadership project for rural women which encourages and

186

prepares women to run for a seat on the village council (sapha tambol).

These activities for women which are centered in the RCW’s committee and

working group, move the CWS off-center. The CWS still is a center for

women’s studies but no longer is it the center for women's studies. The
RCW remains an autonomous program which operates out of a small office

while the CWS has its own building and the status of a department.

 

Nevertheless, at least two major donors have funded projects at both 7“
:
centers, suggesting that cultural enactments of women’s studies at RU -
are fragmented.
The ways in which the directors and committee members have .
organized the two centers presents a striking contrast. The RCW ; I
if

 

operates inclusively with a large working committee and open meetings;
the CWS makes decisions and conducts activities with a small working

group. The Center for Women’s Studies committee agreed to expand and

invite others to join with them when the importance of doing that became
apparent at a faculty standing committee meeting but prior to that the

director had strongly defended her choice to work with a small

committee. A. Radida established the CWS committee and advisory board

with a group of eight similarly-minded FSS (and former FSS) professors

to work together and alongside her. This organizational arrangement, as

I observed it in 1993-94, resulted in a fairly cohesive group with a

shared sense of mission and willingness to support the directions

 

charted by the director with their advice and suggestions.
CWS planning meetings generally are reserved for CWS committee

inembers and the secretaryu The CWS committee invites professors from

<different disciplines and non-university resource personnel to lecture
eat seminars which they plan and in this way the CWS sees that it casts
.its net wddely by including others in the execution of the Center’s

work. Some RU professors and administrators refer to the CWS’s

187
organizational style, however, as exclusive rather than inclusive. The

strrnx; leadership of the director coupled with the small size of the CWS
attracts the criticism that the CWS is exclusive and goes about its own
\mork without considering the opinions of a broader range of people.

As the one in charge of the Center’s work, A. Radida is linked

lnost closely of all CWS professors to donors and to international

networks. She travels frequently on Center—related work and pushes

aggressively to execute the CWS’s mission and expand its influence. This

organizational pattern of a strong leader working with a small, loyal

group of colleagues draws criticism as well as praise. Critics suggest

that A. Radida is building a kingdom, expanding her personal power base.
The experiences of professors engaged in women’s studies across Asia
suggests that this assertive leadership is critical in the development

of women’s studies initiatives (Asian Women’s Studies Committee, 1994).

The challenge to pervasive patriarchal notions of gender harmony under
A. Radida's leadership has resulted in impressive growth for the CWS;
one national leader observed that Regional’s CWS has grown more

dramatically than any women's studies center in Thailand and that this

was due largely to A. Radida’s efforts.

By contrast, A. Pornthip re—organized the RCW committee in 1993-94

and invited seventeen individuals to advise and/or work with her. These

included Faculty of Education administrators and colleagues, community

and NGO leaders, and professors from other faculties. She cast her net

widely to include the voices of many people at the stage of planning and

executing RCW activities. At the RCW planning meeting of 13 people

which I attended, A. Pornthip stood in front of the group and

facilitated the entire meeting. Men and women participants represented

nmmw'different perspectives of thinking about women’s issues. Men

pmofessors,‘however, dominated the conversation. Rather than women

professors and village leaders taking charge of planning activities for-

 

 

188

women in the region, men professors’ extended commentary and advice
silenced women participants and reproduced dominant cultural patterns of
social interaction among men and women. Although the size of the
committee makes it appear more inclusive, my observation of committee
meeting interactions suggest that, in fact, women RCW committee members
are more likely to be excluded and marginalized.

Tensions between organizing women’s studies in what are perceived
to be inclusive and exclusive ways are not easily resolved. The
assertiveness of women leaders in a university dominated by men
administrators, the size of a committee, and issues of shared ideology,
control and whose voices are included and excluded are enduring dilemmas
which women's studies organizers continually have to negotiate.

The presence of two women's centers with parallel missions along
with initiatives of other professors in women's studies raises questions
about the development of a broader women’s studies subculture at
Regional University. RU is not only the first university in Thailand to
have a women’s studies “department,” it is also the first to have two
women’s centers. Individual professors of English, Communications and
other fields who are not members of either women’s center integrate
women’s issues into their teaching and conduct research on women. At
least one other research institute conducts research on women and has
sponsored a conference with a focus on gender. A sociology professor
who is not affiliated with the CWS, initiated the university's first
course on women outside the faculties of nursing and medicine. Diverse
enactments of women’s studies suggest multi—disciplinary, complementary
efforts. At the same time, they suggest a fragmented subculture of
women’s studies, replete with paradoxes and contradictions (Martin,
1992).

While the two centers operated autonomously and not conflictually

through 1994, the ever—present reality that higher education is part of

 

189

the national bureaucracy may change this peaceful co—existence in the
future. The Budget Bureau's memorandum regarding the CWS’s upgrade
stated that that only one officially recognized and funded center for
women will operate at Regional University. The implications of this
decision were not clear in mid—1994 but were certain to raise questions

of coordination, merger and the control of women’s studies.

 

While bureaucratic decisions will have an impact on future ,
directions of the CWS, so will political maneuverings and cultural

practices.

Conclusions

A cultural perspective of organizations highlights cultural
enactments of organizational members and cultural dynamics in which the
organizational culture is embedded. The cultural perspective challenges
the notion of reified structures and posits that organizational features
reside in peoples’ heads and shared and diverse meanings among cultural
members constitute the organization.

At Regional University, shared and diverse understandings among
CWS professors of women’s issues and organizing to address women’s
concerns are embedded in the cultural contexts of the social sciences,
academic culture, teaching and learning and conceptions of gender
constructions. The interweaving of these constitutes the CWS’s
organizational culture. RU students and administrators cultural
enactments along with those of individual professors and those
affiliated with the RCW, constitute the broader emerging subculture of
women’s studies at Regional University.

The cultural, political and structural perspectives illuminate
different dynamics of organizing and organizations. As the analysis has

unfolded, so has a picture of the complexity and dilemmas of organizing

190

women’s studies within the university. Chapter Six explores this
complexity and these dilemmas through the metaphor of margins and

centers.

CHAPTER SIX

DIM OE ORGANIZING "0' S STUDIES AT THE NARGINS

Organizations are generally complex, ambiguous,
and paradoxical.
-—Morgan (1987, p. 17)

Analyzing the data of Regional University’s Center for Women’s

Studies from three perspectives highlights the complexity of organizing

women's studies in higher education. In this chapter I examine this

complexity along with the ambiguities and paradoxes, or, as I call them,
the dilemmas of organizing women’s studies, by reviewing the analysis of
the CWS from each perspective and from the three perspectives together.

I trace the ways in which my thinking changed as I analyzed the data and

I discuss the ways in which this analysis prodded me to think about this

case study in terms of centers and margins. hooks’ (1984) and

Brimstone’S (1991) work on margins and centers pointed me to the

dilemmas and contradictions of organizing the CWS. I employ the
metaphor of centers and margins to discuss these dilemmas and I close

with a brief discussion of the questions this work raises for organizing

women's studies internationally.

Three Perspectives on Organizations

The analysis of Chapters Three through Five considered Regional
University and the Center for Women’s Studies in three different ways:

as bureaucracies bent on maintenance and survival whose task is to

ensure the smooth, efficient running of the organization; as arenas of

competing ideas where conflict pervades daily life; and as cultural
entities that are microcosms of the broader culture in which they are
embedded. These three perspectives offer three distinctive, albeit

partial, ways of looking at the CWS in the university context.

191

r'

 

192
A structural perspective exposes the CWS’s relationship to

national Thai bureaucracy. The CWS resists certain bureaucratic

guidelines for its own projects, at the same time it becomes more
closely connected to the bureaucracy as it is upgraded to a department.
While the university is less hierarchical than other sectors of the
national bureaucracy, the university is a bureaucratic environment, a
fact which is reflected in the organization of the CWS itself.
.Affiliative relationships are important for negotiating the Thai

bureaucracy, yet CWS “Black Lion” professors who are Black Lions resist

identification with that particular network. Center professors,

nevertheless, do depend on personal relationships to help them negotiate

the bureaucracy, as is illustrated through the process by which the CWS

was upgraded. This less hierarchical structuring of the university

equates not with tight coupling; rather, units within the university are

loosely coupled. This loose coupling of the CWS to the university and

to the Faculty of Social Sciences in which it is located allows the

Center to develop autonomously and to grow by strengthening ties to

organizations outside the university. Loose coupling also allows the

university and different units within the institution to declare that
the CWS deals adequately with women’s issues on behalf of the entire
institution and it allows university administrators to view women’s
issues as an optional concern for the larger organization. The

elevation of the CWS’s status from an autonomous, loosely coupled

program to a more tightly coupled department within the FSS points to
the possibility of conflict for the Center’s organizers and university

administrators to whom CWS most closely relates.

From a political perspective, the conflict at which the structural

perspective hints translates into another example of conflict-as-usual

within the organization. The case studies of the CWS’s upgrade and the

[ml grant to the Faculty of Social Sciences illustrate how resources--

193

Imaterial, lnmmuu and power itself-—are limited and the ways in which

interest groups fight for these resources. While the CWS is

marginalized within the university, it is not powerless. CWS committee

members use their power to maneuver at the margins in the university
arena of competing ideas and discourses. The ways in which CWS
jprofessors and administrators deal with conflicts related to these

Challenges are embedded in cultural practices which value harmony and

face-saving. The ways in which CWS professors conceptualize women’s

issues challenges the dominant discourse as does the very presence of

the Center for Women’s Studies on RU’s campus. A paradox inherent in

this resistance, however, is that those who resist the dominant ideology

also may reproduce it, as the presence of the CWS building suggests.
A cultural perspective on the organization of the Center for

Women’s Studies reveals enactments of women’s studies that are rooted in

other cultures, for example, in Thai academic and social science culture

and in Thai cultural assumptions about teaching, learning and knowledge.

Characteristics of the CWS’s organizational culture include shared

commitments that men and women together should construct women’s studies

“the Thai way.” CWS professors understand feminism and women’s studies

in different ways but they share a commitment to work chiefly with
adults--rural women leaders and academic associates interested in
conducting research on women--and secondarily with university students.
Their enactments of women's studies consist of integrating women’s
issues into the curriculum, where CWS professors are gatekeepers of

knowledge, and “activism” or academic service work among grass roots

women. As members of the university culture, students construct their

own understandings of gendered relations based on their experiences and

perceptions of being a young woman or young man in the family and in the

university. Challenging and questioning prevailing cultural beliefs

about gendered relations and, more specifically, about sexuality and

 

194

prostitution is difficult, as the graduate class discussion with A.

Pornthip illustrates. While A. Pornthip and CWS professors face a

communiciilemma in addressing these issues, the establishment and

actjanities of the RCW and of other RU entities also provide evidence of

a fragmented, emergent subculture of women’s studies at RU.

Perspectives on organizations are “invented social constructs”

iMhich help us to “‘make sense’ of organizational processes” (Birnbaum,

1988, p. 175). A single perspective is useful but partial. While it is

impossible to understand an organization in its entirety, utilizing a

multiple-perspective approach enables us to apprehend some of the

complexity of organizations and offers a rich analysis that can lead us

down unforeseen paths.

When I commenced data collection, the working title of my research

study was “Organizational Change and Conflict in a Thai University

through the Introduction of a Center for Women’s Studies.” I selected

research methods that would allow me to study a women’s studies center

at close range and I anticipated that my case study would illuminate how

a Thai university addresses deals with diversity, through the lens of

gender.

As I wrote Chapter Three and examined the data from a structural

perspective, I began to ponder the meanings of “center.” Regional

University’s Center for Women’s Studies was a center or the center of

what? In relation to what was it a center? These questions prompted me

to think about the connections between centers and margins in women’s

studies and about the CWS’s paradoxical position as a center in the

margins.

As I proceeded to examine my data in light of the political

perspective, two studies on rural women based on Foucault’s (1980)

nothnicm productive power pushed my thinking on organizing in the

marghur Gallin’s (1995) study of rural Taiwanese women and Villareal’s

 

195

C1992) research among tomato—laborers discuss ways in marginalized women
nmuuaiver in the marginal spaces of society where they are located.
anis prompted me to think about CWS professors’ creative, productive use

<of power in the margins of the university. Even though various

jpolitical actors and the dominant ideology marginalize the Center, the
cases in.Chapter Four illustrate that CWS professors do have power and
utilize this power to advance their own marginalized agenda.

Pondering the center-margins metaphor from a cultural perspective,
I considered the ways in which actors transmit cultural knowledge of the
center, for example, how teachers and students are to interact with each
other while, at the same time, professors transmit to students the seeds
of an alternative discourse which includes women. The analysis afforded
me the opportunity to consider margins and centers from three different
frames of reference: the structural, the political, and the cultural.

As I examine what had emerged from data analysis from these
several organizational perspectives, I discovered that this case study
was less a case of how the university deals with diversity issues and
more a case which illuminates what it is to organize women’s studies in
higher education in a Third World country and in the broader context of
women’s studies international. From discussions among women scholars,
Rao (1991) cites tensions between focusing on women and international
development and focusing on women’s studies and between attention to
activism and attention to theory generation as two points of enduring

conflict among scholars from First and Third World countries. This is a

case study of one part of each of those tensions: developing women’s

studies which focuses on WID and on activism. In the English language

literature on women’s studies, this is the marginalized story: the

story of professors in Southeast Asia who care deeply about equity

issues for women and men grappling with how to organize and enact

women’s studies in their setting.

196

But even as this is a story from the margins, representing only
one set of choices in the tensions Rao identifies, it is also a story of
tensions in the margins. For the story of the CWS is a story filled
with tensions and paradoxes. In addition to revealing a complex picture
of organizing women’s studies in a non—industrialized country of
Southeast Asia, as described above this is a study of the ways in which
the Center is positioned and positions itself both at the margins and in
the center. Feminist authors bell hooks (1984) and Lyndie Brimstone
(1991), writing from their different standpoints about margins and
centers, give conceptual insight into these metaphors.

For hooks, who grew up in a southern US town where the railroad
tracks demarcated her Black African American community from the White
European American community, a clear distinction is apparent between
margins and center. She writes:

Our survival depended on an ongoing public
awareness of the separation between margin and
center and an ongoing private acknowledgment
that we were a necessary, vital part of that
whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon
our consciousness by the structure of our daily
lives, provided us an oppositional world view--
a mode of seeing unknown to most of our
oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our
struggle to transcend poverty and despair,
strengthened our sense of self and our
solidarity (1981, p. i).

Brimstone, on the other hand, a lesbian feminist British academic,
emphasizes the fuzziness of the center—margins divide:

Much as we might like there to be at times, the
fact remains that there is no straightforward,
easily identifiable opposition between centre
and margins, oppressor and oppressed, for within
the terms of this binary classification system
the splittings are so infinite and so unstable
that what we inevitably end up arguing about is
the relative degree of participation each of us
has in one or the other position at any given
time (1991, p.125).

Brimstone challenges the idea of a binary opposition between margin and

center, reminding us of the unstable and myriad splittings between the

197

margins and the center. hooks argues that her survival depended on an
awareness of the separation between the two and that an understanding of
the relationship between margins and center imbued her with a sense of
wholeness and a new mode of seeing. Margins and centers: in the
enterprise of women’s studies are they separate or indistinct? I assert
that they are both separate and inseparable. Working at the margins of
the center, sometimes straddling margins and center and sometimes
standing in one or the other is a paradox of organizing women’s studies.
The multiple perspectives analytical frame reveals the dilemmas and
paradoxes organizational members live out and about which they

repeatedly make choices.

Dilemmas of Centers and Margins

As this study unfolds, so does a series of dilemmas. One of these
is about choices of how to organize decision-making and women’s studies
program activities in what are perceived to be exclusive or inclusive
ways, as discussed in Chapter Five. Here I consider the key dilemmas of
obtaining access to material resources and working within the national
and university bureaucracy, and of enacting the Center's goals and
priorities with regard to university classroom teaching, theory
generation, and academic service activities.

The Center for Women’s Studies is positioned and positions itself
at the margins and in the center of resources. On an on-going basis,
CWS professors negotiate the center bureaucracy and ways in which to
organize and enact women’s studies and promote a marginalized discourse
in Thai higher education. The professors are both distinctly in the
margins and in the blurry divide between margins and center.

The CWS is a center rich in human resources, women and men

committed to women’s studies, and in material resources from

198

international donors. It is a center of concentrated material, human
and printed resources, a visible focal point of women’s studies on RU’s
campus. It also exists at the margins of Regional University’s material
resources, however. Until the CWS was upgraded to a department in 1993,
national budget allocations to higher education did not include the work
of women’s studies. National development priorities of the Thai
government and of the MoUA fiscally support science and technology
initiatives but not attention to women’s issues. As of 1993, national
funds for higher education have begun to support CWS staff members and,
thus, the institutionalization of women’s studies at Regional
University.

Regional’s progressive professors engaged in women’s studies still
live with this paradox. They are paid officials of the patriarchal
government bureaucracy who must define their work in the language of the
bureaucratic center and in terms of national goals for development; at
the same time they resist these national goals by constructing an
alternative woman-centered development agenda at the margins and
resisting modernization claims through its activities.

The CWS must negotiate the language and structures of the
bureaucracy in order to have access to the benefits and security of the
center bureaucracy. To win a permanent place in the university the CWS
had to wedge into the bureaucracy through the Seventh Five-Year Higher
Education Plan and gain official approval from the MoUA’s advisory
commission. Center staff prepared the required 34-page document for the
MoUA, demonstrating the ways in which Center activities were aligned
with national goals for higher education and development. At the same
time, in seminars and protest activities, CWS professors challenged and
continue to protest the state’s strategies for social and economic
development.

The state bureaucracy is built on rationalist assumptions with

199

rationalist claims to progress through modernization. Long-range
development plans, such as the Seventh Higher Education Development Plan
(1992-1996), establish goals for modernization and development through
the nation’s universities.

The dominant discourse of those in power at the center and the
marginalized discourse of CWS professors constitute another tension.

The MoUA speaks of equity in terms of regional and urban (Bangkok)
universities and does not mention gender. The MoUA official speaks of
gender harmony, rejects the notion of social conflict among women and
men in Thai society and considers women’s studies a “single issue” to be
dealt with among many social concerns in Thai society. FSS
administrators share the conception that women are one of many factors
to be considered in confronting social problems. CWS members organize
the Center around a commitment to eradicate inequalities among women and
men in Thai society, to include marginalized women in the national
development process and their voices in RU’s curriculum. These
alternative ideas are not widely shared among RU professors, MoUA
officials or the majority of national government officials; the CWS
ideology is a marginal one, which sometimes is accommodated but rarely
heard from the administrative center.

It is important to note here that the bureaucracy is not a
monolithic center. Different units are central and marginal to the
national government. Within the bureaucracy, for example, projects of
the National Commission on Women’s Affairs in the Office of the
Permanent Secretary of the Prime Minister is funded largely by
outside donors, as is the case with the CWS. The NCWA grows and
withers, depending on who is in charge, their access to outside
resources, and their understanding of and commitment to the work.

Positioned in this marginal position of resource allocation,

national bureaucracy and dominant discourse, the CWS carries out its

200

work. Through academic service, research and research training
activities, CWS professors focus on rural women and development and
define women’s studies as activism. These priorities both place them in
the center and ensconce them in the margins. Attention to academic
service and seminar training activities over classroom teaching places
the CWS in the center of economic and social development among rural
women. Through seminars at the Center and in the villages, the CWS
builds networks with NGOs, village women, and government organizations
involved in development. By assigning highest priority to activist—WID
work, however, the CWS accords second place to curriculum development
and teaching, thereby marginalizing the Center’s position in a
university setting where teaching is considered the highest priority.

As a non—teaching department in a university which requires all
professors and most administrators to teach, the CWS’s focus on academic
service positions the department outside of the university’s central
mission--in the margins.

The MoUA highly values academic service to society, listing it as
one of four priorities—-along with teaching, research and the
preservation of art and culture--for all Thai public and private
universities. The university and the Faculty of Social Sciences also
take seriously their responsibility to participate in academic service,
as the struggle over the DAI grant illustrates. The MoUA, however, in
the Seventh Higher Education Development Plan (1992-1996) together with
university resources and budget allocation, give highest priority to
teaching. While 2.46 percent of the national higher education budget is
set aside for academic service, nearly 47 percent is allocated for
teaching (MoUAa, p. 244). The CWS’s priorities to work with rural women
reinforce its position at the margins of the university.

In the ways in which they have chosen to address women’s issues in

the classroom, CWS professors are pushing marginalized women’s issues

201

into the curriculum. They do this by integrating women’s issues into
their teaching and coursework. This choice to infuse women’s issues
into existing courses receives support from the center, that is, active
support from the NCWA’s national integration project, approval from the
FSS administration, and tacit support from RU administrators since
integration requires no funding from the university.

Integration does not constitute women’s studies as a legitimate
field of study parallel to all other university departments, however.
Through integration alone women’s studies remains invisible in the
Regional University Bulletin of course listings and stands apart as an
area from the disciplinary areas of knowledge in other departments which
consist of defined bodies of knowledge, for example, sociology and law.
In addition, professors are not publicly identified as connected to a
body of knowledge called “women’s studies” or “women’s issues.” Rather,
colleagues and students view CWS professors as instructors of
anthropology, economics or law. This “public invisibility” of women’s
studies within higher education relegates it to a marginal position in
academic knowledge.

The choice to integrate women’s issues into existing courses
within particular disciplines allows CWS professors to maintain
legitimacy with the center while working at the margins. CWS professors
identify the womanless nature of the courses they teach and modify them
to include women’s experiences which McIntosh (1983) proffers is an
important phase of women’s studies curriculum development. But this
modification through integration-—sometimes labeled the “add women and
stir” approach (Harding, 199l)-—also reproduces the male-centered
assumptions undergirding the disciplines and contributes to the marginal
position of women's studies in the university.

From their research, reflection and work with women on women’s

issues grounded in their respective disciplines, CWS professors are in a

202

strong position to critique gender inequalities inherent in Thai
political, socio-cultural, economic systems. Their publications,
presentations, seminars and classroom teaching all give evidence to
solid critiques of gender inequalities in Thai society; for example,
the dearth of women university administrators and women politicians;
juridical inequalities; economic development decisions which exclude
women’s; voices lack of participation in women from economic development
decisions; sexual practices, women’s migration and the transmittal of
the HIV+ virus. The lack of tradition within Thai academic culture to
generate new theories, however, leaves the university community without
a framework to test a comprehensive framework to test out and examine
connections among gender inequalities in the village, in the university
classroom, and in the bureaucracy.

The absence of courses which re-vision the Thai experience through
the eyes of women and of theories of women’s experiences and gendered
relations in Thai society has an impact on students, too. Lacking a
conceptual framework of strategic gender interests, students articulate
problems of women in terms of practical gender interests and fall back
on their personal understandings and unchallenged stereotypes to make
sense of issues for women and men in Thai society, concluding that if
everyone tries harder things will get better.

The enactment of priorities which take precedence over theory
construction or which delimit theory construction to a disciplinary
framework appear to focus discussions on critique rather than on re—
visioning society from Thai women’s standpoint at the micro- and macro-
levels. Given the strong impact of an alternative Marxist ideology on
these social scientists in the 19703, the construction of a theoretical
framework of strategic gender interests for Thai women, and of theories
grounded in Thai women’s standpoint worked out with rural village women

and university students alike could offer a powerful analytical tool to

203
both professors and students, including “grass roots” RU women and rural

40
women students.

A dilemma, of course, is what greater attention to
theory development would mean for the activism to which CWS professors
are deeply committed.

In the context of women’s studies internationally, the margins-and
centers dilemmas which CWS professors must manage on a daily basis have
implications for women’s studies professors in other countries, for
example, the challenge of negotiating organizational bureaucracy where
there is a central ministry of education--and even in universities with
greater autonomy. Women’s studies partnerships with donors and
acceptance of funds from the west can be construed as evidence of
colonial patrimony in women’s studies, welcome assistance for women’s
studies development, or both. Third World academics shun western
feminist works, viewing them as another potentially western hegemonic
discourse or, at the very least, inappropriate for the Third World
context. Professors of all disciplines borrow and share ideas to create
new understandings and while staying mindful of past and contemporary
lessons of hegemonic knowledge. These thorny dilemmas, when seen from
the Thai perspective, raise further questions about enactments of
women's studies in specific settings.

The limits of women’s studies approaches in other settings are
revealed by this Thai case. With regard to negotiating the centers and
margins of academic knowledge, the CWS’s attention to academic knowledge
raises questions about what it means for western university students not
to focus on WID and activism, not to study notions of development and
not to routinely conduct studies and research of Third World settings in
their own cities and countries as part of women’s studies. While women’s

studies and women and development may be more closely linked in European

 

‘oPeggy McIntosh (1994) suggested the importance of viewing university
students as women’s studies professors’ “grass roots” constituency.

204

higher education than in the US (Rao, 1991), a commitment to activism

among and research with lower-class women in rural or urban areas is a
strength of women’s studies in Third World countries raises important

questions for women’s studies in First World settings.

The dilemmas of margins and centers I have discussed are
intertwined, not separate; they are big themes that are interwoven, must
be managed on a daily basis, and have implications for the organization,
and the individual. I discuss enduring dilemmas in this study in the
context of actors who, in their proposals, project evaluation reports,
and in their mission statement talk about solving problems—-identifying
women’s problems in order to solve them. Dilemmas, however, cannot be
resolved. They must be managed. To consider these as dilemmas requires
thinking about problems in a different way, a way that has personal,
professional and organizational implications. Lampert (1985) writes of
managing dilemmas in the organization of her primary school classroom.
While she reaches temporary, satisfactory conclusions about dealing with
such conundrums as attention to both gender equity and promoting
critical thinking in the classroom, she proffers that these dilemmas
cannot be resolved but can only be managed.

Whether in a primary school classroom or a university women’s
studies center, dilemmas within an organization are fascinating to
ponder yet confusing to live out. It is intellectually engaging to
contemplate dilemmas; it is personally and professionally challenging
(and often exhausting) to continually negotiate them in daily
organizational life. While theories of organizing may direct our
attention to collectivities and, thus, beyond the individual, individual
ramifications cannot be ignored.

Throughout the course of data collection I worked within three
different organizations, two different universities and a foundation.

As I reflect on the organizational dynamics and my membership in each

205

organization, I am reminded of the personal costs and public trade—offs
for women activists/feminists negotiating enduring tensions and
contradictions within an organization. These tensions are not
“management issues” about which simple decisions can be made; rather,
they are dilemmas that require thoughtful consideration and daily, on—
going negotiation. As an organizational member, sometimes I welcomed
these tensions, sometimes I ignored them, sometimes I was completely
baffled. On occasion, I had to fight hard to remember that I was a
person of agency with power when my work was marginalized or undermined
by the more powerful. The women and men whom I interviewed and observed
at Regional University spoke of similar reactions to negotiating
organizational tensions in their work lives. The benefits and costs of
living within the complex worlds of organizations—-particularly
organizations which problematize gendered relations-—are many.
Perspectives offer no recipe for how to successfully create a
women’s studies program within a university in an economically
developing country. The multiple perspectives do, however, paint a
picture of the manifold, complicated and on-going challenges of
organizing a program of women’s studies at the margins of the
university. Considering these challenges as dilemmas of working within
organizations rather than as impersonal and bureaucratic or personal and
idiosyncratic decisions directs our attention to the complexity of
organizing women’s studies in a particular context and points us to the
critical task of engaging in international dialogue on women’s studies.
Viewing organizations and ways of organizing from different perspectives
and managing the dilemmas of engaging in women’s studies within
organizations enables us to understand another dimension of the marginal
and the central work of women’s studies and to envision ourselves and

our work in the way that hooks (1984) describes: aware of

206

the separation between margin and center yet acknowledging that we are a

necessary, vital part of the whole.

207
APPENDIX A

LIST OF ACRONYMS
(Listed according to order of appearance in the text.)
RU — Regional University
CWS — Center for Women’s Studies
WID - Women and International Development
UN - United Nations
TDRI - Thailand Development Research Institute
NCWA - National Commission on Women’s Affairs
FSS - Faculty of Social Sciences
NGO(s) - Non—governmental Organization(s)
IC - Information Center
RCW - Regional Center for Women
PWS - Program for Women’s Studies
MoUA - Ministry of University Affairs
LTP — Leadership Training Project (for Rural Women)
MP3 - Ministers of Parliament
YMCA - Young Men’s Christian Association
ICTW — Improving Conditions for Thai Women

DAI - Development Agency International

208
APPENDIX B

LIST OF KEY ACTORS IN THE STUDY

Center for Women’s Studies

 

Director: A. Radida
Secretary: Napaporn
CWS Committee Members (women): A. Kanchanaa

A. Linchee
A. Malee
A. Orapun
(men): A. Kamol
A. Prasit

A. Somsak

Regional Center for Women
Director: A. Pornthip

A committee member (man): A. Prapun

Administrators, Faculty of Social Science
A. Suwit, Dean

A. Wimol, Head, FSS Academic Committee

Other

A. Lawan (woman) FSS professor

209
APPENDIX C

LIST or 3mm guss'rrous son INDIVIDUAL INTERVIEWS“

1. Please tell me about your educational background. Where did you
attend secondary school and university for undergraduate and graduate
study? What was the topic of your MA/Ph.D. thesis?

2. When and how did you become interested in women's issues? How and
when did you come to be involved in the CWS? In which Center activities
have you been involved (seminars, publications, etc.)? In which
activities are you presently involved?

3. As you recall, how did this idea for a women's center get started?
Who was involved in the early years?

4. How has the membership of the group changed? How are new CWS
members chosen? What is the selection process? How do people
join/leave the CWS committee and advisory board?

How often do you meet together as a CWS committee/advisory group?
When was the last meeting? What did you discuss? In which ways, if any,
do tasks for men/women on the CWS committee differ?

5. What are your responsibilities as a CWS committee member? Is being a
committee member different from being an advisory board member? If so,
how? Have you had any role in writing proposals or working with
foundations to obtain funding for CWS projects?

6. How is the CWS director chosen/reappointed? What are the director's
responsibilities?

7. What are the special benefits of being involved in the center? (e.g.
pay, promotion, status, opportunities for out—of—country travel,
consulting). How do colleagues regard your involvement with the CWS?

8. What do other professors in Social Sciences say about the center?
Do they ask about your activities? Do they attend Center activities?
Are professors from outside the faculty involved in CWS activities? If
so, who? In what ways?

9. Are you involved with other centers in the Faculty of Social
Science? Please describe official or informal relationships between
other centers and the CWS.

 

41I prepared these questions for CWS professors and altered other
interview questions according to the responsibilities of the interviewee
and her/his relationship with the CWS.

210

10. How do the activities of the center fit with your work as a
professor? How do they affect your ”work load?” How many courses do
you teach? (Give course titles, describe content. Do topics about women
or gender issues surface in the course of your teaching? Do students
show an interest in issues of women/gender? Give examples.

11. How is the FSS administration involved with the Center? How does
the dean show his support for the CWS and for other centers in the
Faculty of Social Science? Do you talk to the Department Chair about
the CWS? Regarding what kinds of things?

12. Has this building made a difference in the programs of the WS
Center? Has it made a difference in what others (faculty, students,
community) think of the WS program?

13. What are the issues in which colleagues in your department are most
interested? Do faculty groups tend to form around issues? Which
interest groups have formed or are forming around those issues? With
whom do they work most closely on these concerns?

14. What is ”women's studies” and “feminism” a) for you; and b) as you
think other Thai people (RU professors and students, the public)
perceive it. There has been some discussion about offering a course or
courses in Women's Studies. Could you tell me more about that?

15. What plans or vision do CWS committee and advisory board members
and the director have for the future of the Center?

211
APPENDIX E

DISTRIBUTION OF PROFESSORS INTERVIEWED
ACCORDING TO FACULTY AND CWS AFFILIATION

Professors Interviewed CWS Committee Member

Faculty of Economics 3 2
Faculty of Education 4 0
Faculty of Nursing 1 0
A. Wichit (Ac Dean)
Faculty of Humanities 1 0
Faculty of Social Sciences 23 6

Dept. of Political Science 14 3

Dept. of Geography 3 1

Department of Sociology/
Anthropology

lm
IN

TOTAL 32 8

212
APPENDIX F

ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS IN THE EACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
AND THE RATIO OE PROFESSORS TO ADMINISTRATORS

Faculty of Social Sciences

Number of Administrative Positions:

Dean 1
Associate Dean 1
Assistant Deans 2
Department Chairs 3
Center Directors 5
TOTAL 12
Number of Professors by Department:
Department of Geography 17
Department of Political Science 35
Department of Sociology/

Anthropology 22
TOTAL 72

Ratio of FSS Professors to Administrators: 12:72

Approximately 17% of FSS professors serve in an administrative capacity.

213
APPENDIX E

SAMPLE QUESTIONS ERON FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEWS

1. Please give your name, your class (year you entered Regional
University), the faculty in which you are enrolled and where in Thailand
you are from. After you graduate what will you do? Why did you come to
study at Regional University? After you graduate how will you find a
job?

2. Do you think the status of women and men in Thai society is unequal?
If so, hOW? Please give examples.

3. Do you have brothers and sisters? Are girls and boys treated the
same in your family?

4. If you could choose, would you prefer to be born (or reborn) as a boy
or a girl? Why? What problems do young women/men at Regional
University face?

5. Describe “Freshie” initiation in your faculty. Did the senior male
students persuade the freshie male students to go to a brothel?

6. What is the ratio of boys to girls in your faculty? Who are the
student leaders (women or men?).

7. Do any of your professors talk about or assign projects on women’s
issues? Give some examples.

8. What’s your definition/understanding of Women’s Studies?

9. If the university or your faculty offered a course in women’s studies
would you enroll?

10. What do you think about the saying that a woman should be taken care
of by three men in her lifetime, the father, the older brother, and the
husband?

214
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