This paper introduces the concept of ‘organizational readiness’: socio-cultural expectations about working selves that prepare young people (albeit indirectly and in complex and multi-faceted ways) for their future life in organizations. This concept emerges from an analysis of Disney animations and how they constitute expectations about working life that may influence children through their representations of work and gendered workplace roles. The paper’s exploration of Disney’s earlier animations suggests they circulated norms of gender that girls should be weak and avoid work. In contrast, its contemporary productions circulate gender norms that suggest girls should be strong and engage in paid work. In this reading, the continued circulation of earlier alongside contemporary animations may convey to young viewers a paradox: girls must and must not work; they must be both weak and strong. We thus offer new insights into the puzzle of the continued relegation of women to the sidelines in organizations; more optimistically, we also point to ways in which future generations of employees may forge ways of constituting forms of gendered selves as yet hardly imaginable.

‘Just whistle while you work, and cheerfully together we can tidy up the place….It won’t take long when there’s a song, to help you set the pace. And as you sweep the room, imagine that the broom is someone that you love. And you’ll find you’re dancing to the tune. When hearts are high, the time will fly so whistle while you work’ (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, ‘Whistle while you work’, 1937) ‘No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free!’ (Frozen, ‘Let it go’, 2013)

Disney Constructing Work and Gender Separation from parent(s) In this first stage, individuals – usually children – are subjected to work due to their vulnerability, invariably through the death of (or separation from) one or both parents. Separation from parents is a common story device in fairy tales (Propp, 1968), and Disney drew deliberately on European fairy tales, sanitizing them through replacing tales of common experiences, erotic encounters and violent struggles with nostalgic longing for well-ordered patriarchal realms (Borland, 1991; Zipes, 1995). Separation from parents is an overriding theme in Disney animations, with main characters suffering this fate in 35 of these 54 ‘classic’ feature animations. In such well-known animations as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Cinderella (1950) a loving parent dies, leaving the child at the mercy of a wicked stepmother; in animations like The Rescuers (1977) a secret agency is entirely devoted to saving orphaned children who have been forced to work. We do not know how young children respond to being immersed, via the screen, in such a sphere of vulnerability, but people now in their 70s and 80s remember most clearly the films that scared them, with long-lasting effects, in their pre-teenage years (Kuhn, 2002). If we follow Judith Butler’s argument about vulnerability, then the child ‘must attach [to a powerful other] in order to persist in and as itself’ (Butler, 1997, p. 8). We can imagine children cuddling up to adults who are watching the film with them. However, in a large number (28) of these animations, resolution of this separation from a parent is found in work, to which the character – now alone or otherwise uncared for – is subjected. Subjection to dangerous, dirty or unfulfilling work The work to which the character is subjected is invariably characterized as violent, degrading and frightening, with numerous depictions of characters crying or being subjected to abuse and domination (Courpasson, 2000; Le Flaive, 1996). Parker (2006, p. 2) evokes what he calls organizational gothic to remind us that: workplaces are often imagined as places of repetitive violence. Bored bodies serving machines; lowering mills and office blocks; rows of heads bent in sullen silence. Whether in Marx, Dickens, Weber, or Kafka, the image is one of repeated acts of indignity, leaving hidden injuries that last a lifetime. To Marx, Dickens, Weber and Kafka we add Disney. Pinocchio (1940) encapsulates this phenomenon particularly clearly. The enslaved puppet – separated from his loving adopted father Gepetto – weeps as he is put to work and then caged by his boss Stromboli who declares ‘Pinocchio, you will make lots of money for me, and when you are too old, you will make good fire wood’. In these early Disney animations feminine work is either portrayed as forced (Snow White, Dumbo, Cinderella, The Rescuers) or unskilled and unfulfilling labour (Lady and the Tramp (1955), The Jungle Book (1967)). In The Jungle Book a young girl, Shanti, fills jugs of water from the river. She sings to herself, both resigned to unfulfilling work and content at her place in the order of things: ‘Father is hunting in the forest; mother is cooking in the home. I must go to fetch the water, until the day that I am grown … Then I will have a handsome husband, and a daughter of my own. And I will send her to fetch the water; I’ll be cooking in the home.’ This sense of either normalized monotonous work (Molstad, 1986) or dangerous and frightening work (Jermier, Gaines, & McIntosh, 2006) is ubiquitous in these early animations, and the work of women and girls is portrayed in an almost universally negative fashion. Manipulation and/or deception by managers or overseers Third, the work being experienced is usually controlled by duplicitous and manipulative individuals – often portrayed as managers or overseers – whose pretence to be caring and compassionate hides their deceitful exploitation of the abandoned child (see Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006; Frost, Dutton, Worline, & Wilson, 2000). The theme of manipulation by managers or overseers appears in no less than 33 of the Disney classic animations. Bosses are represented as pursuing their own high status and wealth accumulation at any cost. Children are tricked into situations where they can be exploited. For example, in Cinderella (1950) the wicked stepmother agrees to let Cinderella go to the ball if she can do all of her chores. When Cinderella miraculously does them all the stepmother still refuses to let her go to the ball and locks her in the attic. Many of these fairy stories have been located in the dominant (managerialist) language of the day – by people in powerful positions in society – i.e. by white, male authors and animators. It could be argued that Disney was not actively or even consciously conspiring to ensure they reproduced patriarchal norms; a defence would be that they were constructing young (usually female) people in crisis through the culturally dominant lenses available to them at that time. However, although the Disney Corporation is notoriously private, we have noted above that historians have found sufficient evidence to argue that Disney himself sought to contribute cinematic works that educated young people into desiring to be middle class and to uphold the conventional American dream. So successful has Disney been at ‘educational entertainment’, blurring the border between entertainment and pedagogy, that the corporation and its products have been called ‘a public school system’ (Bell, Haas, & Sells, 1995, p. 7). As these historians of Disney have suggested about the earlier animations, the ‘lesson’ we also find about work is that manual labour (and thus working class status) is to be avoided, especially, we find, by young women. This running critique of capitalist manipulation and exploitation could be seen as ironic, given that Disney is often portrayed as embodying American capitalism (‘Disney constructs childhood as to make it entirely compatible with consumerism’ (Smoodin, 1994, cited in Giroux & Pollock, 2010, p. 96). However, its intent, we tentatively suggest, was perhaps not to undermine or even critique capitalism, but rather to construct the normative child who would be expected to work hard at school so as to avoid the hard labour of manual work (Sammond, 2005). But the gender norms in these animations can be read as equally oppressive. The exploitative female boss, the ‘Queen Bee’ (Cooper, 1997; Kanter, 1977; Mavin, 2006) or dominant, aggressive woman who blocks the progress of younger females for her own ends, appears in Disney in various guises. For example, Snow White’s stepmother exploits Snow White for her own purpose of remaining the prettiest in the land; female elephants bully and cast out young Dumbo from the circus; the psychopathic Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland is another example, ordering her guards ‘off with her head!’ Perhaps most famous is Cruella De Ville in 101 Dalmations (1961) as the ‘boss’ in charge of her paid henchmen. All these characters encapsulate the ‘role trap’ (Kanter, 1977) of the Queen Bee. In The Rescuers (1977) Medusa, as Queen Bee, explains to her henchman how to manipulate a young girl into mining a rare diamond for her – ‘you must gain their confidence, make them like you’. This portrayal of powerful older working women as deceptive, manipulative and underhand features strongly during this stage of Disney’s characterizations of work. In this pre-feminist phase of Disney animations, therefore, we see girls represented on screen as vulnerable subjects who must find work in order to exist. Feminine passivity is to be admired: its opposite, powerful, strong women, are portrayed as wicked, evil and requiring to be overthrown. In our reading, then, a message conveyed by these films is that the ‘strong’ woman is an excrescence that is to be resisted. The norms circulating in the story-lines of these classic animations are thus (a) the necessity of employment (in the home if one is female) while (b) women who remain on the public stage of the organization are evil. The disavowal of strength in women is reinforced in one of the few portrayals of a strong woman in traditional Disney. In a short segment of Melody Time (1948) Cowboy Bill meets Sue, ‘the first female cowboy Bill had ever seen’. He falls in love with her and they agree to marry. Sue is a superb horsewoman, an excellent buckaroo, but eventually she bounces off (‘due to her bustle’), and bounces higher and higher until she reaches the moon, never to return. The strong woman, we are invited to imagine, cannot exist. Work is thus something that is necessary but feared, and organization is no place in which to be a strong woman. Accentuating the positive in the working role The fourth stage of the Disney characterization of work involves the character directly responding to this individual crisis. The apparent pedagogic message at this point concerns conformity. Despite all of its dangers and negative experiences, individuals should accentuate the positive in organization and bravely soldier on in the face of adversity and abuse (Learmonth & Humphreys, 2011; Luthans & Youssef, 2007). This theme appears in 30 of the feature-length animations, and is perhaps most famously represented within Snow White, Disney’s first full-length animation, in which she sings: ‘Just whistle while you work, and cheerfully together we can tidy up the place. It won’t take long when there’s a song, to set the pace.’ Kanter (1977) again gives us insights into women and work in the era before second-wave feminism started to effect changes. Kanter talks of ‘role traps’, which are a narrow range of ‘roles’ available to women at work. It is at this stage of work that we encounter the full force of the role trap which Kanter (1977, p. 393) calls the ‘pet’ or ‘younger sister’, reflecting an ‘amusing little thing’ with ‘good humour’ about her place in the order of things. This is reflected in subsequent animations. Cinderella, for example, tells herself to ‘keep on believing and that dream you wish will come true’, and in The Rescuers (1977) a captive girl, subjected to forced labour, is told ‘faith is a bluebird you see from afar. It’s for real and as sure as the first evening star. You can’t touch it or buy it or wrap it up tight, but it’s there just the same making things turn out right.’ It is this blind attachment in many of these animations to the belief that things will turn out well that is imitated within the world of work (Rynes et al., 2012; Tsui, 2013). Work, as portrayed in Disney’s classic animations, holds an expectation and a promise of a better future if one labours in the present, albeit a future that (as we adults believe we know) never comes. One of the animations’ messages, therefore, seems to be that manual work is something that must be experienced; it is not to be enjoyed but endured; and if it is endured then perhaps something better might emerge, some time in the future. This bright future will arrive without agentive action on the part of the subject (and indeed females must not be agentive) and, as we see next, rescue arrives. Being rescued and returned to a non-working environment Finally, the Disney characterization of work suggests that if individuals persevere in exploitative situations they will eventually be rescued by well-meaning and decent heroes (Fletcher, 2004). Often these are men saving women (usually pet-like in sensibility and from privileged backgrounds), as in Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1957). Numerous critical pieces have been written on the passivity of the Disney Princess and her need to be saved or rescued by a man (Lieberman, 1972; Orenstein, 2014; Zipes, 1995). However, another female working ‘role trap’ is represented at this stage, the ‘mother’ who helps those in crisis (Bowman, 2011). According to Kanter (1977, p. 233) this is a woman – in an organizational context – to whom men ‘brought their private troubles, and she was expected to comfort them … [reflecting] the assumption that women are sympathetic, good listeners and easy to talk to about one’s problems’. The caring mother is represented in 22 of the Disney animations and is no better captured than in Peter Pan (1953) in which the children’s mother, Mrs Darling, is portrayed as doting and loving, the father as angry and uncaring. Peter Pan continuously returns to the idea that ‘boys [and we are to assume girls] all need a mother’ and how important she is for moral guidance and growing up correctly. When Wendy sings about how a mother is ‘the helping hand that guides you along whether you are right, whether you are wrong’, Disney can be read to be deliberately conveying a message to its adult audience about how mothers should behave. The mother figure is regularly used to resolve crises experienced by one (or more) of the characters. Examples include fairy godmothers employed to care for and rescue the princesses in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty as well as the Blue Fairy, an aged and motherly character who saves Pinocchio from mortal danger. Snow White is both a pet or younger sister and also a mother. On finding the dwarfs’ house Snow White assumes they are orphans because ‘a mother would never leave a house like this’. She ‘naturally’ assumes the mantle of mother within the household despite having little experience in this area (at least we presume this is the case – she is a Princess, after all), sending the dwarfs off to the mines with a kiss on the cheek, cleaning the house and cooking the dinner. She checks their hands on their return, as a mother might do, ordering them to wash them clean before they enjoy their food, chastising them ‘straight outside and wash or you’ll not get a bite to eat!’ Contrast the villainesses, discussed above, who are powerful, agentive, strong, fearless, mature, independent and in control. As Davis (2006) points out, they all suffer the same fate – they are destroyed. The mother, on the other hand, who keeps the home and cares for the family, is valorized. She is the person whose absence has precipitated the child’s terrible adventure, and the person who should be waiting on her return. This takes us to the theme of rescue from unpleasant working experiences that appear in 29 of the feature animations. Classics such as Lady and the Tramp (1955) and The Aristocats (1970) follow a pattern of taking female animals (a dog, Lady, and a cat, Duchess, respectively) away from their pampered non-working lifestyles with wealthy owners into a world of poverty and danger. Their male ‘rescuers’ must grift and use street-wise skills to return the females (and in Duchess’s case her young fatherless family) to their homes, in the process saving themselves from difficult lives. The metaphors of class and gender in these accounts are too obvious to need interpretation. Rescue from dire organizational situations acts as an end point and ‘happily ever after’ that disarms all previous problems. It often locates safety from oppressive working conditions within the home. Parker (2006, p. 2) argues that ‘the assumption that work is boring and degrading, and that escaping from it can be fun, reflects a wider culture that simultaneously celebrates and denigrates management and organization’. Disney, and the contradictions found within the Disney stages of work, suggests something slightly different. Disney is part of a Western culture which celebrates management and organization, but denigrates exploitative management, manual labour and the working class. Both boys and girls watch these films, and boys would not be immune to their messages. The communications directed at boys about their future working lives in the classic Disney canon that contribute to ‘organizational readiness’ is the importance of having high aspirations. The future male entrant to work is told that if he makes it into the managerial class he will avoid denigrated hard, physical work. For the female audience however the opposite message seems to be given. Should she aspire to a senior position at work she will transgress laws of gender and will not be permitted to survive (at least as someone who is appropriately feminine). Any expectation of a girl’s rescue therefore comes from returning to the safety of the home, where the mother figure resides.

Summary Traditional Disney animations and organizational readiness Work is an important theme in Disney’s traditional animations. Our analysis suggests that in the pre-second-wave feminist era these animations represented work as no place for women, and especially not for strong women. To performatively constitute one’s gender as female, within the domain of this norm, is therefore to constitute a self that rejects the public space of organization in favour of the private space of the home. In our reading, a precise image of femininity is therefore offered to young girls. Stacey’s (1994) study of the production and reproduction of feminine identities in relation to the idealized feminine images of Hollywood stars of the 1940s and 1950s suggests that adult women’s femininity is based centrally upon appearance. ‘Femininity,’ she writes (Stacey, 1994, p. 225), may be characterized as ‘the constant reproduction of self as object of consumption for others, which is achieved through the consumption of other objects.’ Disney’s princesses are slim and beautiful and walk like ballet dancers (Do Rozario, 2004); they offer the image of beauty to which young girls may aspire as they grow. But in our reading of Disney animations, femininity is concerned not only with beauty, important though that is, but with ‘character’, and the ideal female is passive, nurturing and belongs in the home. The exiling of women from public spaces was a dominant theme in feminist organizational studies until the turn of the century (Bondi & Domosh, 1998) but what those earlier studies did not show was how childhood influences, speaking within and through animations, could perhaps instigate in girls a desire for (and expectation of) their own subordination. This, we suggest, was the work of the classic Disney animations; the generation of norms of femininity in which work should be left to men who will heroically battle through its trials in order to bring home the monthly salary (note, not the working-class weekly wage). However, that second-wave feminism could take hold so effectively, so that women now occupy public spaces in large numbers, suggests the limitations of even such a popular producer of culture as Disney to influence constructions of the (female) self. Disney’s animations have adapted to changes in gender culture, as we will explore in the next section, where we analyse Disney animators’ articulation of changed dominant gender norms in its contemporary animations. Contemporary Disney animations and their characterization of women and work Of the 1388 directors and writers of the 158 feature animations of the top production companies from 1937 to 2014, 1294 (93.23%) were men; of directors alone, 96.28% were men (Internet Movie Database; IMDb). Although women have contributed to animation since Disney was founded (in particular, in the colouring process, see Tupper, 2014) it was not until 2013 that Disney finally had a female director on one of its classic feature animations (Jennifer Lee, Frozen) – a co-director credit with a man. But despite the absence of women from senior positions, Disney have adopted a ‘revisionist fairy tale slate’ (Fleming, 2015). This is seen most clearly in a live action re-working of Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent (2014), which rewrites the story of its ‘iconic’ female villain and is avowedly feminist. It has a brutal rape scene (metaphorized as the cutting off and stealing of Maleficent’s wings, its horrors all the more vivid because they are left to the imagination) but Maleficent herself finds happiness through love for the young daughter of the rapist. The ‘true love’s kiss’ that awakens the sleeping princess is not that of a prince (a rather weak character in Maleficent), but of a powerful, strong female, transmogrified from wicked witch to mother figure. This ‘feminist turn’ by Disney is, in part, no doubt a reaction to pressure to include new representations of gender, and is seen in portrayals of a cross-dressing female Chinese soldier (Mulan, 1998), an African-American waitress (Tiana in The Princess and the Frog, 2009) and a white scientist (Jane in Tarzan, 1999) all of which have been praised for their somewhat different portrayals of femininity (Lester, 2010; Towbin et al., 2004). However, Disney CEO Michael Eisner has said: We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective. (Cox, 2000) This is a statement which suggests that Disney’s new generation of managers are tapping into the current zeitgeist in order to capitalize even further on the multi-billion-pound cinema and merchandizing industry. Nevertheless, companies are not able to control the effect of their animations once they are in circulation: the performativity of the norms and discourses (perhaps sometimes cynically) circulated through these animations may become part of the discursive formations of new gender norms. We turn now, therefore, to considering how these changes influence the five-stage sequence of work presented in the most recent Disney animations. The common story device of separation from parent(s) to create a sphere of vulnerability continues to inform the first stage. Indeed, the original fairy stories on which the animations were based that did not include this device are often adapted to include it: the tragic death of parents was a new plot device in both The Princess and the Frog (2009) and Frozen (2013). The Princess and the Frog features an orphaned African-American girl – Tiana – who works in two menial jobs to save for her dream of buying her own restaurant. Frozen is a coming-of-age love story between two young princesses who – following the death of their parents – suddenly have the working responsibility (and associated anxieties) of managing a whole kingdom. Jennifer Lee, Frozen’s writer and co-director, encapsulates the difference between, say, Cinderella (1950) and Frozen: ‘Elsa and Anna are princesses because they’ve got the weight of a kingdom on their shoulders, not as the solution to a happy ending’ (cited in Applebaum, 2014). This new generation of animations therefore continues to represent its female characters as vulnerable. However, the characters now more typically seek subordination through immersion in organization, as seen in the second stage of work – subjection to frightening or monotonous labour. This theme is carried on in rather interesting ways that consciously interact with, i.e. cite (and so in some cases undermine) what has gone before. For example, we might contrast the confident, intelligent scientist Jane in Tarzan (1999) with the compliant, house servant Shanti in The Jungle Book (1967), who both meet ‘wild’ male characters in the forest. They each experience the dark sides of labour; but where Shanti expected rescue by a man, Jane has agency: she is resistant (including, initially at least, resisting Tarzan’s advances), ensuring that romance happens on her own terms. The third stage – manipulative and deceptive bosses – remains as strong in recent Disney animations as in their predecessors. Lawyers accept a rival’s bid for the restaurant Tiana wishes to purchase in The Princess and the Frog. She is told: ‘A little woman of your background would have had her hands full running a big business like that … now you’re better off where you are at.’ Frozen has numerous manipulative characters, including the capitalist Duke of Weselton, who is excited about the prospect of ‘unlocking [the kingdom’s/the princesses’] secrets and exploiting its riches’. Bosses are described as ‘vampires’ (Lilo & Stitch, 2002) and ‘fat cats’ (The Princess and the Frog, 2009) embarking on ‘hostile takeovers’ (Hercules, 1997) and requiring ‘witless peasants to dig up my gold’ (Pocahontas, 1995). Many of these stories are couched in a managerialist language that constructs young women’s crises through the dominant cultural lens of the early 21st century: neo-liberal capitalism. But rather than aspiring to become corporate managers, young viewers are now encouraged to think of themselves as future entrepreneurs. This is reflected in the terms by which the characters are rescued, as we will see, because the female becomes agentive and her own rescuer. The fourth stage of work – accentuating the positive – continues in recent animations, but is represented differently. The accentuation of the positive is now portrayed through agentive female characters whose destinies are in their own hands. In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana experiences a flashback to her father saying You wish and you dream with all your little heart but you remember Tiana that old star can only take you part of the way. You gotta help it along with some hard work of your own and then you can do anything you set your mind to. The ‘star’ references several previous appearances of this image in Disney animations including Jiminy Cricket singing ‘When you wish upon a star’ in Pinocchio and Penny wishing upon a star in The Rescuers – but now the element of individualized, hard work by females if their dreams are to be achieved is added. The contrast between the passive Cinderella also wishing upon a star, waiting to be rescued by her prince, and Tiana’s female ‘capitalist spirit’, is encapsulated in her song ‘Almost there’: I remember Daddy told me ‘fairy tales can come true you gotta make ‘em happen, it all depends on you’. So I worked real hard each and every day. Now things for sure are going my way. Just doing what I do, look out boys I’m coming through. We suggest, however, a need for caution before applauding Disney’s portrayal of women as agentive and in charge of their destinies. In Frozen, Elsa’s fear of the danger to others from her inability to control her new powers (as queen and sorceress) causes her to escape the kingdom following her coronation (and inadvertent creation of a perpetual winter). She has a revelatory moment, captured in song: It’s funny how some distance can make everything seem small, and the fears that once controlled me, can’t get to me at all. It’s time to see what I can do, to test the limits and break through. No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free! Elsa gives up trying to be a ‘good girl’ who fulfils the responsibilities of her work, and makes a physical transition before the viewers’ eyes from a relatively plainly dressed girl into a glamorous woman. In this ‘vision of female self-actualization as narrow and horizon-diminishing as a makeover …. the “good girl” goes over to “the bad side” thanks to a quick cosmetic fix-up’ (Stevens, 2014). There is a paradox here. Elsa is transformed into a beautiful, seductive woman: she may be freed from her duties as ruler, but she is not freed from the imposition of rules about how a woman should look (Stacey, 1994). Thus her sense of freedom is a false one: she cannot escape from the norms that govern gender. In the fifth stage in contemporary Disney animations, the female or feminine lead character’s need to be rescued from work takes a new direction. In Frozen, despite teasing the audience (and playing on its collective memory and its expectations of previous performances) with the prospect of a prince as the saviour, in a surprise twist to the animation Elsa’s sister is her (agentive) rescuer and ‘true love’s kiss’. Elsa is saved from her anxieties about managing her kingdom but is not delivered from them: she confronts them head-on with her sister by her side. She seeks resolution of her fears through work and its responsibilities. Frozen, in this reading, is exemplary in articulating and circulating some of the contemporary dominant norms about women and work: women must take on the responsibilities of work, must work hard, but at the same time they must conform to norms of femininity, notably in regard to looks. Meanwhile, the villainess seems to have more or less disappeared from Disney films in the 1990s and the 21st century (Davis, 2006). She is replaced by a wise mother figure, such as Mama Odie in The Princess and the Frog. Mama Odie, like Maleficent (2014), is not exploitative but is an ethical agent; she may adopt a motherly stance but is not self-sacrificial because she has her own needs and desires. The earlier animations’ portrayal of strong women as execrable is replaced by valorization of female strength, both in the young protagonists and the older woman. Contemporary Disney animations and organizational readiness Although contemporary Disney animations continue with similar story-lines as in earlier productions, the characters are portrayed very differently, with the female passivity and retreat from the work and organization of the earlier animations replaced by active, agentive girls and women. Rescue comes not from princes or other male characters who return females to the home, but from themselves as strong females or other females who help these characters face up to the responsibilities of work. Second-wave feminists fought for the rights of women both to enter the public space of organization and to enter as the equals of men. The norms circulating within contemporary Disney animations testify not only to the achievement of at least the first of these goals, but to perhaps unexpected consequences. The recent animations can be read to encapsulate a normative, ethical requirement and expectation that women be active and agentive within public space. Strength rather than weakness is now desirable. In short, our reading of the earlier Disney animations in terms of organizational readiness is that girls could not be women if they were workers; whereas our reading of contemporary Disney animations is that girls cannot be women if they are not visible and active within organization. At the same time they are not freed from a focus on their looks, nor the need to seek a ‘happy ever after’ through finding the appropriate love object.

Discussion and Conclusion Our reading of Disney animations as cultural artefacts illuminates how, over the course of three-quarters of a century, the norms of organizational gender have shifted substantially. But there is no neat division between eras and epochs: the echoes of the old continue to reverberate through the new. Disney’s contemporary animations represent particular gendered norms about work and organization that have moved significantly since its earlier features, but audiences watch the older animations alongside the new. We have suggested that the world of work as shown in the contemporary animations is one where females are expected to be active and agentive occupants of the public space of organization, but that young viewers will also be well versed in the older animations, and they continue to be subjected to ideas governing the necessity to work on their appearance, much as their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers were enjoined to do. This reading is encapsulated in a curious scene repeated in contemporary Disney animations; one that might suggest that girls cannot escape from the taint of that past understanding – that as they become women they should expect to be weak, passive, in need of rescuing, carers rather than creators. The clearest example of this understanding is in Wreck it Ralph (2011), set in a games arcade where Ralph and Venelope are in-game characters. At the animation’s climax Venelope learns that she has been tricked and should in fact be the lead racer and princess of her own video game. Venelope – a feisty, independent character – is transformed into a princess wearing a stereotypical dress. She acts like a princess, changing her voice and mannerisms. This playful citation by Disney of Cinderella or Snow White is revealed to be a ruse: ‘Oh Ralph, what are you, nuts? This isn’t me! [she spins around out of her gown and into her normal clothes] This is me! The code may say I’m a princess but I know what I really am, I’m a racer with the greatest super power ever.’ This extract, we suggest, can be read as a condensation of the circulation of traditional Disney animations alongside the company’s contemporary creations. We noted above how the pre-second-wave feminism Disney films continue to be widely watched. The first, Snow White, for instance, ‘still holds up as a movie, fully immersing audiences young and old in a fairy tale forest of terror and delight’ (Moviefone, 2013). The two epochs are thus not separate and so older discourses of women and work circulate within, through and alongside contemporary understandings. Young viewers are immersed in presentations of contradictory norms of work and women, in our reading: to be a woman requires that you do not enter the public space of organization; to be a woman requires that you engage actively in the public space of organization, looking like a woman ‘should’ look. Indeed, as McDowell and Court (1994, p. 727) have shown, subversion of norms can take many forms, because of the multi-faceted ways in ‘which women are embodied and/or represented as “woman” in the workplace’. This discussion leads to the question of the power of such representations to influence the identity work and work aspirations of young girls as they perhaps sit in their Disney Princess or Pirate outfits, watching Snow White or Wreck it Ralph. Pollen (2011, p. 162) argues that the popularity of the Disney Princess outfits and other similar dressing-up clothes reinforces ‘cultural scripts and brand narratives literally woven into the fabric of the clothes they have been given’, such that the fantasy realm of the playing child is manipulated in such ways that traditional gender stereotypes are perpetuated. However, Wohlwend’s (2012) empirical study of children at play contradicts Pollen’s analysis of the clothes rather than their wearers. Wohlwend (2012) observed how young boys’ play with ‘girl’s’ dolls suggested no such transmission mechanism from agentive object to malleable subject. Rather, young boys’ play rehearsed fluid gender identities that were neither stereotypically masculine nor feminine. At the moment we therefore cannot know how the contradictory message to young girls watching Disney animations – they are told they are expected to work and they are expected not to work – is played out at the level where it may influence how they later prepare themselves for work. We can, however, speculate. Kuhn’s (2002) study of recollections in their later life of early cinema-going experiences suggests that what is remembered is not story-lines or ideas, but feelings. So although film-watching is self-evidently an embodied experience involving sight and sound, Kuhn’s study emphasizes the life-long impact of the emotions that cinema arouses. We add to this Barker’s (2009) analysis of the work the film does on the embodied, emotion-saturated viewer. Action adventure films, for example, invite our bodies to experience the chase and the escape. They seduce us, hold us tight, trap us, and then suddenly throw us off, again and again. The body and the affect constituted in, around and on that body are actively incorporated into understanding of films’ stories. Of animations, she writes that their ‘modus operandi is hands-on play, at which every child is an expert’ (Barker, 2009, p. 137), and she indicates that the tactility of animations taps into sensuality and even the revolutionary potential of children’s play. In Wohlwend’s terms, children take a story from the films they have seen and turn them into new stories that seem hardly explicable to the adult. If so, then children’s bodies are engaged actively in watching films – they are pulled and pushed by them, muscles are engaged and emotions evoked by them. What might have looked like passive absorption of ideas as the child sat in front of the screen becomes in the playground fodder for play, or rather for a visceral and emotive re-enactment and re-invention of story-lines. This haptic theory points to the value of reading emotions invoked when watching Disney animations. In Sobchack’s (2004, p. 76) words, ‘Our embodied experience of the movies … is an experience of seeing, hearing, touching, moving, tasting, smelling, in which our sense of the literal and figural may sometimes vacillate.’ Disney animations provoke fear (of loss of the mother, of being alone, of being stuck in a terrible workplace), hope (of rescue), confusion (if I am a girl and there are such contradictory ways of being a girl, who can I be?), strength (the strength merely to survive in the earlier films, but of agency in the recent films), excitement (at taking responsibility for my own rescue into my own hands), care (for others who need caring for), loathing (of the wicked, whether portrayed as a manager or an older woman), and so on. What such an experience may incorporate into the child’s body is ‘unrepresentable memories’ (Marks, 2000), that is, memories that exist in images and bodies but for which there is no language. Speaking of intercultural cinema in terms that perhaps tell us much also about the child viewer, Marks (2000, p. 195) writes that when language fails, the memory of the senses offers alternative modes of remembering. Thus she talks about ‘sense knowledge’ as a source of social knowledge; and of how we may have two or more sensoriums, such as those of the child and those of the young adult as she decides upon her career choice and makes herself ready to enter the workplace. That is, it is in the child’s sensorium that the impressions of Disney animations’ telling of the gendered world of work are stored, memories that precede the sophisticated language that would make more sense of them, but whose affects are recalled in young adulthood and later. This then is our theory of how Disney animations influence organizational readiness: immersed in their stories the child viewer is engaged in a visceral, affective encounter in which she experiences loss, longing, danger and passive waiting for rescue as she watches the earlier films. But when she views the later films she knows what it is like to be agentive and possess the power to rescue herself (and others) from villains and all they throw at her. She may be dressed like a Princess, in frills and lace, but Princesses, she feels (literally) can act upon the world. Thus we disagree with Miller and Rode’s (1995, p. 102) typification of Disney animations as ‘extracurricular identity-schooling’. Haptic film theory suggests there is no simple cause/effect mechanism in which children absorb the animations’ messages and make their norms their own reality. Further, contemporary film theory, in abjuring earlier accounts of women as passive viewers (e.g. Mulvey, 1975), suggest the relationship between viewer and film is not one-way – in our terms the child does not merely wish to emulate, say, the hero, but engages in a back-and-forth movement with her (Tisseron, 2013). Served up complexly contradictory messages, children are likely to interpret, re-interpret and re-interpret again what they have seen. In other words, they are far from passive: although they are born into languages, discourses and cultures that preceded them and restrict the possibilities of identities, they also play with as well as within the terms of the always-already there. Thus they may learn resistance even as they absorb ways of conforming. If a ‘major virtue of the visual arts is their capacity to make the invisible visible’ (Bersani & Dutoit, 2004, p. 1), then our study suggests important insights into the continuation of organizational gender inequalities. Women who currently occupy organizational space, our account suggests, are there only under sufferance but at the same time they are also there as legitimate occupants – the two positions battle against each other. The scene from Wreck it Ralph condenses within one short scene the problem of continuing gender inequalities: women’s place in organization is won but not yet secured. Indeed, since the completion of our study the release of Disney’s 55th animated classic, Zootopia (2016), has perhaps the clearest example of this dilemma yet. Set in an anthropomorphic city of animals, a young female rabbit secures a position as a rookie police officer (graduating top of her class) but is told by her new (angry male) boss she can do no more than carry out parking duty. The film takes us on an insightful and humorous journey through the difficulties she faces in her working life in successfully trying to find acceptance and equality in an organizational context. And yet, in terms of future generations of women workers and their organizational readiness, the complexities of the paradoxical gendered identities portrayed in Disney animations, and the visceral affective responses we suggest they may evoke in young girls, point towards a certain optimism. So while the earlier animations may arouse fear and the desire for rescue, the more recent may induct young viewers into a sense of their own power and strength. By power, here we mean a corporeal, affective refusal to be passive. Organizational readiness, in this reading, emerges within and through a sensorium that is alert to an expectation of oppression – and how it can be resisted – and the possibilities of refusing passivity in favour of agency. If this is the case, then Disney animations may be far more radical than ever intended by the Disney Corporation: the ‘organizational readiness’ of the next generation of female workers may incorporate an intolerance of contradictions, an understanding of the self as agentive, and therefore a knowledge that the future working self will be able to resist intolerable, paradoxical, or contradictory gendered organizational norms. At least, that is our reading, as adults who have watched 54 Disney animations. We have watched them as cultural artefacts for this paper, but we have also watched them many times – laughing and singing along with them – with our children (and grandchildren).

Appendix I General coding themes Number of characterisztions of traditionally defined work Gender of individual(s) characterized in traditional work – Male

– Female

– Undefined Type of traditionally defined work ● Routine manual (labourer, cleaner, field picker)

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Skilled manual (a tradesperson: plumber, carpenter, builder)

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Professional worker (doctor, lawyer etc)

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Business owner/manager

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Sales/shopkeeper/vendor/seller of goods

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Armed forces/warrior/protector/assassin

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined Characterizations of non-traditional work ● Childcare

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● House (or garden) work

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Royalty

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Slave/forced labour

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Show business/celebrity/actor/actress

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Sportsperson

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Wizard/witch/magical person

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined

● Criminal/outlaw/thief

– Man

– Woman

– Undefined Appendix II Specific themes Marked M and F to denote gender involved on each characterization Apprenticeship

Forced/slave labour

Crying in work

Pay discussed/identified

Working in teams

Laughing at/enjoying work

Violence in work

Manipulation/deception

Complimenting others’ work

Concern over fellow workers

Humour in work tasks/role

Romance pursued in/through work

Appearance changed for job

Doppelganger effect

Death in job

Training/skills development

Profiteering/capitalist spirit

Changing jobs discussed

Child labour

Boredom

Illness at work, mental or physical

Scared/frightened in work

Domination

Accentuating the positive

Moral guidance

Quitting job

Workplace bullying

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.