Chapter

MENTORING AS PRACTICE,
PRACTICES OF MENTORING

Michela Cozza*
University of Trento

ABSTRACT
Organizations and institutions have recently rediscovered the use of mentoring as an
instrument to support learning and knowing. Practice-based studies offer an interesting
perspective to look both at mentoring as a practice and at practices of mentoring in
organizations.
Then, I will adopt a practice-based approach in order to discuss the mentoring as a
process of learning and knowing. From this perspective, I will analyse mentoring in terms
of situated doing that is something that people do together by discoursive practices and
with artefacts in a relational context. I will look at mentoring as a practical
accomplishment of learning and knowing which is anchored to the working experience.
In fact, mentoring may be conceived as pragmatic. It may be used for different
purposes in various spheres. I will consider the practices of mentoring as social processes
by which newcomer or less experienced individual becomes part of a community of
practices.
Drawing from the experience of a senior member, the novice learns to become a
legitimate participant in the organization, enacting a skilled performance. In this way,
mentoring may be a source of change in organizations. However, for this purpose, it is
necessary doing an articulation work. Actors involved have to agree and share a common
representation of mentoring as a valuable practice for learning and knowing in
organizations.

Keywords: Change, knowing, learning, mentoring, practice-based studies.

*
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Via Verdi, 26 – 38122 Trento, Italy, Email:
michela.cozza@unitn.it.
2 Michela Cozza

INTRODUCTION
Mentoring has generated a great deal of interest in both academic and practitioner
communities (Baugh & Sullivan, 2005) so much that Kirchmeyer (2005) defined it
“fashionable” in accord with Helen Colley (2001). From a count in the social science and
education databases, Colley found the literature on mentoring increased exponentially over
the last 20 years exceeding 1500 articles. The research consistently reports mentoring to be a
valuable tool in both professional and personal development with benefits for mentees,
mentors, organizations and development agencies (Garvey & Garrett-Harris, 2008). Just this
general agreement on the value of mentoring has fuelled the debate among scholars. Critics
argue that the literature is biased toward a favorable view of mentoring and lacking in healthy
skepticism (Scandura, 1998).
Furthermore, there is an open methodological question. For instance, in NESTA’s review
of mentoring literature and best practices this aspect arises in denouncing that “there are few
articles or reports citing specific measurable benefits and impacts… the bulk of the literature
makes generalized qualitative statements of benefit rather than quantifying economic (or
other) impact” (2009, p. 14).
I maintain that just these controversies could limit further understanding of mentoring.
That is way I will frame this chapter into a practice-based theorizing. This approach satisfies
an empirical interest and embraces an epistemological reason. According to Gherardi (2012):

If practices are used as the lenses through which to look at organizations, one sees
the fine details of how people use the resources available to them to accomplish
intelligent actions, and how they give those actions sense and meaning. The study of
practices can be associated with the simply descriptive purpose of depicting the activities
that make up a practice, so that the term “practice” denotes a set of activities which form
a pattern. (p. 2)

From this perspective, I propose “mentoring” as a descriptor of engagement in

organizational practices that entails learning as an integral constituent of a developmental
relationship between organizational members, precisely between a mentor or senior member
and a protégé/mentee or novice. I define mentoring as a practical accomplishment that is a
practice by which newcomers or less experienced individuals become part of a community of
practices (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Thus, they may enact (Weick, 1977) a skilled performance
(Giddens, 1990) anchored to a texture of organizational practices (Cooper & Fox, 1990).
Hence, I maintain that mentoring is based on the mentor’s experience that is in his/her
embodied knowledge (Blackler, 1995), emerging through his/her practices of support,
direction, feedback to one or more novices. Yet, mentoring is a situated or indexical activity
(Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989), and it is a pragmatic processes tailored to the career and
personal development’s needs of a protégé.
In this chapter I will seek to explain this definition of mentoring drawing from the
practice-based theorizing. My intention is not to resolve the above-mentioned controversies of
mentoring literature with a single approach. More modestly, I will attempt to show that,
among the manifold conversations on mentoring, there is one perspective that allows to
problematize the mentoring as a practice, both emphasizing its processual nature (mentor-ing)
 Mentoring as Practice, Practices of Mentoring 3

and looking at some practices of mentoring as empirical references. Starting from the
literature, the next paragraph will be devoted on the one hand to stress the difficulty to
identify the mentoring with a single definition and on the other hand to shed light on the lack
of attention for the micro aspects of mentoring and knowledge-in-action.
Then, I will depict the theoretical background of my reasoning, intertwining it with the
discourse about mentoring as a practical accomplishment. The presentation of the
characteristics of practical knowledge will help to better understand my definition.
I will translate my theoretical cornestones into the analysis of the empirical data arisen
from an action-research project aimed at incentivize, by a telementoring program, the female
attendance on technological-scientific training courses and ICT professions.
Summarizing, the rationale of my discourse would be to shed light on mentoring as a
situated doing that is something that people do together in a relational context where the
knowledge is embedded in objects and technology, as in the case of telementoring that I will
take into account. Mentoring is anchored in discoursive practices by wich people give sense
to what occurs phenomenologically. Yet, I will talk about mentoring as pragmatic given that
it may be addressed to different purposes (for training and work) in various spheres. For
instance it may be used to sustain and stimulate female careers, to reduce the marginalization
of minorities in particular sectors, and to promote the professional development of the
mentee, with acknowledged positive effects on the mentor as well.
Whatever the purpose may be, the practices of mentoring have to be socially recognised
and sustained by the actors involved. In other words, a mentoring initiative could be a
promising process where the organization and its members recognise the value of such a
programme, sustaining its implementation. But the practices of mentoring are not ever
legitimated, unnecessarily they produce agreement: if they modify power relations, visibility,
access to strategic resources, they could cause conflict or generate resistance. For this reason,
I would highlight that mentoring may be a source of organizational change, but the translation
in action of such vocation requires an articulation work that reconcile the viewpoints and
needs of mentees, mentors, organizations and managerial systems.

A PRACTICE-BASED PERSPECTIVE ON MENTORING

Looking for a Definition of Mentoring

Although it is impossible to identify a single work and say categorically that it is the
beginning of mentoring research, most researchers cite Kathy Kram’s (1980) dissertation and
her 1983 Academy of Management Journal article, using this reference as the starting point
for the contemporary research tradition. In her influential article, Kram identified four stages
of mentoring (initiation: during which time the relationship is started; cultivation: during
which time the range of functions provided expands to maximum; separation: during which
time the established nature of the relationship is substantially altered by structural changes in
the organizational context and/or by psychological changes within one or both individuals;
redefinition: during which time the relationship evolves a new form that is significantly
different from the past, or the relationship ends entirely), but at no point provided an exact
definition. In a subsequent book, Kram (1985) noted that mentoring involves an intense
4 Michela Cozza

relationship whereby a senior or more experienced person (the mentor) provides two
functions for a junior person (the protégé), one function being advice or modeling about
career development behaviors and the second function being personal support, especially
psychosocial support.
In fact the traditional literature has mainly stressed two mentoring functions. The first
function is instrumental (or career enhancing) and involves sponsorship, exposure, visibility,
coaching, protection, and the setting of challenging assignments. The second function is
psychosocial (or interpersonal enhancement) and has to do with enhancing interpersonal work
skills, reducing stress, talking out problems, discerning how the worker is perceived by
his/her colleagues, and the role modeling of correct behaviour for the organization or
institution (Fagenson, 1989; Knouse, 2001).
Bozeman and Feeney (2007) judging the above-mentioned Kram’s conceptualization of
mentoring as relatively imprecise, offer the following definition that limits the term
mentoring in order to reduce its ambiguity:

Mentoring: a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and
psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or
professional development; mentoring entails informal communication, usually face-to-
face and during a sustained period of time, between a person who is perceived to have
greater relevant knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is
perceived to have less (the protégé). (p. 731).

Although mentoring is defined in various ways in the literature, the relationship retains its
interactive nature as an exchange between mentor and mentee (Baugh & Sullivan, 2005). It
may be one-to-one, group-to-group, one-to-group and viceversa. Yet, it may be formal,
informal; based on the principle of homogeneity/difference, of affiliation to a
majority/minority.
Mentoring may be used in various spheres – of training and work – to induce
organizational change (de Vries, 2010; 2011), to sustain and stimulate women’s careers, to
reduce the marginalization of minorities in particular sectors, and to promote the professional
development of the mentee, with acknowledged positive effects on the mentor as well (Cozza,
2008; 2011).
Garvey and Garrett-Harris (2008) have carried out a systematic review of over 100
studies and evaluations of mentoring schemes across a range of industry sectors. Basing their
analysis on the number of citations of benefits identified by beneficiaries, they compiled lists
of the most regularly quoted benefits for mentees, mentors, organizations and development
agencies as follows:

 Firstly, there were clearly benefits to the mentee themselves including: improved
performance and productivity; career opportunity and advancement; improved
knowledge and skills; greater confidence, empowerment and well-being; improved
job satisfaction and motivation; higher salaries and increased income; faster learning
and enhanced decision-making skills; improved understanding of the business –
policies, politics, products and customers; improved creativity and innovation;
encouragement of positive risk-taking; development of leaders and leadership
abilities.
 Mentoring as Practice, Practices of Mentoring 5

 The authors also reported as many benefits to the mentors including: improved
performance through enhanced understanding and knowledge; increased business
activity, sales and networking; increased ideas generation and knowledge
enhancement; enhanced confidence, CVs, professional identity and job satisfaction;
successful completion and achievement of objectives; improved communication;
greater job satisfaction, loyalty and self-awareness; new knowledge and skills;
leadership development; fulfilment of human psycho-social needs; advances in
career and opening up of new job opportunities; rejuvenation and improved
motivation; positive attitude to change.
 The organisations that the mentees belonged to enjoyed the following benefits:
improved job creation and business performance; reduced staff turnover and
improved retention rates; improved information flow and communication; help in
disseminating business values and developing the culture; improved productivity;
help in managing talent; improved business stability; cultivating loyalty and
commitment; motivating older managers; improved morale, motivation and
relationships; improving business learning; reduced labour and training costs;
provided cost effective development; improved succession planning; change and
culture change more easily managed; provided and developed effective leadership.
 The enterprise agencies identified benefit in terms of strategic change, facilitation of
partnerships, innovation and change, problem solving and better project
management.

To produce this set of distributed benefits, I maintain that it is relevant an articulation

work (Corbin & Strauss, 1993). It may be defined as all the tasks needed to coordinate
practices of mentoring, and it refers to the agreements established among mentees, mentors
and management. In order to stress the value of the articulation as a necessary part of the due
process for a successful mentoring, I could quote Swap et al. (2001):

Mentoring requires a light – and sophisticated – managerial hand. Therefore, merely

setting up a formal mentoring program may accomplish little, especially if the mentors
are uninterested and neither rewarded nor skilled in teaching. Rather, managers need to
consider how to structure incentive systems so that mentoring is rewarded and recognized
as a valuable contribution to the organization. (pp. 108-110)

A better understanding of these micro-practices of cooperation is of applicative interest

for those who design mentoring initiatives. A practice-based perspective enables to re-frame
and re-focus the mentoring, taking into account the different actors’ viewpoints. A such
approach highlights the under-explored capacity of mentoring to be used strategically for the
organizational change both at individual and collective level.
Yet, I suggest the adoption of a practice-based lens in order to understand the mentoring
as a practical accomplishment through physical activities that are situated in time and space.
Defining mentoring as a situated activity means focusing the (sociological) analysis on
mentoring practices as modes of action and knowing, emerging in situ from the dynamics of
interactions between heterogeneous actors.
I will further discuss my point of view on mentoring, framing it into a practice-based
approach.
6 Michela Cozza

DRAWING FROM PRACTICE-BASED STUDIES

Basic Assumptions

The concept of practice has been rediscovered within organizational studies mainly in the
past decade (Gherardi &Strati, 2012). The “Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory”
(Schatzki, Knorr Cetina & von Savigny, 2001) is the first volume where philosophers,
sociologists and scholars of science are brought together to explore the significance of
practices in human life. Phenomena such as knowledge, meaning, human activity, science,
power, language, social institutions, and historical transformation occur within and are
aspects or components of the field of practices. According to Schatzki et al. (2001):

A central core … of practice theorists conceives of practices as embodied, materially

mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical
understanding. The point of the qualifier embodied is that, as many late twentieth-century
thinkers (above all feminists) emphasize, the forms of human activity are entwined with
the character of the human body … practices are the chief and immediate context within
which the preponderance of bodily properties crucial to social life are formed, not just
skills and activities but bodily experiences, surface presentations, and even physical
structures as well. (p. 11)

Then, the practice turn is positioned as an alternative to cognitivism and the

commodification of knowledge in organizations (Gherardi, 2000). The perspective of practice
supports a sociocultural view of learning and knowing. In fact, from this point of view,
learning is inevitably implicated in the acquisition of knowledge, but it is also implicated in
the acquisition of identity. As Brown and Duguid (2001) state, people do not simply learn
about, they also learn to be. Echoing the words of Schatzki et al. (2001) the learning doesn’t
just involve the acquisition of facts about the world. It also involves acquiring the ability to
act in the world in socially recognized ways. This imply also that what individuals learn
always and inevitably reflects the social context in which they learn it and in which they put it
into practice. Participating in a practice is consequently a way to acquire identity and
knowledge-in-action: in other words, practice is a system of activities in which knowing (as
specific activity) is not separate from doing, but rather it is something that people do together,
collectively and socially, acquiring at the same time an identity that reflects both how a
learner sees the world and how the world sees the learner.
From this point of view, the mentoring may be considered as knowing-in-practice. In this
process, mentors “act like obligatory points of passage enabling the novice to work/learn”
(Fox, 2000, p. 863). In fact mentors are in position to “teach” because they have developed
expertise through years of practice in a particular field or organization. They are experienced
individuals that can help newcomers or novices interpret events, understand technology and
business processes, and identify the values and norms of an organization. This is way,
mentoring can be an important transfer mechanism for knowledge, mainly the tacit one
(Swap, Leonard, Shields & Abrams, 2001). In this transfer of knowledge, all those who
interact possess different “pieces” of practical knowledge which inevitably are transformed
into a new system of knowledge mediated by mentor-mentee interaction. The interpersonal
dynamic, a more informal and long-lasting relationship focused on the experience makes the
 Mentoring as Practice, Practices of Mentoring 7

mentoring a practical accomplishment by which the intangible knowledge assets may be

transferred.
Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) talk about the dimension of tacit and pre-reflexive
knowledge acquired through the participation in a practice and a community of practices.
Michel Polanyi’s (1966) distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge is widely cited in
the literature. Precisely, Polanyi’s most quoted line is probably: “we know more than we call”
(p. 4). This unspeakable, pre-reflexive knowing is what he deems tacit as distinct from
explicit. He argues for two interdependent dimensions (not two types) of knowledge: the
explicit one relies on previously interiorized implicit or tacit dimension. Yet, Polanyi
maintains that the comprehension, that is the acquisition of knowledge from another (from a
mentor), is “both intellectual and practical” (1966, p. 48). By this claim, he militates against
the idea that knowledge circulation involves explicit knowledge alone and states that
“knowledge runs on rails laid by practice” (Brown & Duguid, 2001, p. 204).
As a matter of fact, the way that experts exercise their knowledge is by calling on their
long years and countless working experiences to recognize patterns. They then may
selectively retrieve relevant informations from a given pattern, they may also use stories from
theirs past experiences to dramatize critical skills, managerial systems, and norms and values
common to many organizations. For this reason, also when mentors and mentees are members
of different organizations – as in the case that I will discuss – the mentoring may be a virtuous
transfer mechanism of practical knowledge anchored to experiences. From this perspective,
mentoring is a practical accomplishment closely related to knowing as a situated activity
(rather than an object) both individual and collective.
The main characteristics of this practical knowledge are the following (Gherardi, 2012)
and I will further discuss them:

 A pragmatic stance
 A situated nature
 An anchoring in materiality
 An anchoring in discursive practices

A Pragmatic Stance

Generally, practical knowledge is directed to doing, to take decision in situations, to solve

problems, to maintain and reproduce a community of practices. Wenger and Snyder (2000)
have defined the community of practices as “groups of people informally bound together by
shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise” (p. 139). Participating to one or more
communities of practice is essential for learning and the formation of identity (Wenger,
Trayner & de Laat, 2011). By this participation, people define with each other what
constitutes competence in a given context or – quoting Giddens (1990) – what may be
considered a skilled performance. As Giddens (1984) has noted, all members of society are
capable of skilled social performances. People learn how to interact with others, cooperate,
and gain a sense of identity in the process of socialization (Fligstein, 2001). This participation
in the practices of a community is an ordinary process. It is all the more essential if
individuals are novices or newcomers with the intention to become a full participant in a
8 Michela Cozza

sociocultural and situated practice. Lave and Wenger (1991) have called this process
legitimate peripheral participation. With this theoretical construct they have provided “a way
to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities,
identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice” (p. 29). Then, the concept
denotes the particular mode of engagement of a learner who participates in the actual practice
of an expert, but only to a limited degree and with limited responsibility for the ultimate
product as a whole.
All that I have said so far about the situated learning of a newcomer or novice, raises the
issue of access, given that – as Lave and Wenger (1991) specify – “to become a full member
of a community of practice requires access to a wide range of ongoing activity, old-timers,
and other members of the community; and information, resources, and opportunities for
participation” (pp. 100-101, my emphasis).
From this perspective, mentors generally provide access to privileged information and
familiarized the protégé with nonformal and take-for-granted aspects of the organization.
They teach their protégés to “read” the subtext and how to navigate the subtleties of the
organization’s political system. Particularly useful is know-how, that is, introductions to
influential decision-making networks and contacts developed by mentor.

A Situated Nature

Within the practice-based approach, the concept of situated action applied to mentoring
extends the original idea of it as interaction only between mentor and mentee, to encompass
action with objects in relation to the physical environment and situations. In this way the
analysis of mentoring has to deal with artefacts and objects that may influence the
performances of mentor and mentee in a specific setting. According to Gherardi (2012):

The first lesson taught by the paradigm of situated action is that the context is not a
mere container but rather a resource for action; the second lesson is that the term
“situated action” has a privileged relationship with the idea of the “Other” … and with
Goffman’s theory that ties it to communication … When two people communicate, they
reciprocally make and attention space manifest, and therefore accessible, and their action
is situated because it is oriented by and dependent on the action of the recipient of the
communication. The situation is the result of the interaction between those two people.
(p. 17)

In other words, central to the paradigm of situated action is a revised conception of

context as no longer a container of action but a situation in wich the interests of the actors and
the opportunities in the environment meet and are reciprocally defined. This statement
stresses the above-mentioned necessity of an articulation work in designing and implementing
a mentoring program, in order to combine different viewpoints concerned.
Assuming the situatedness as a characteristic of mentoring, this may be conteptualized as
a practical activity constructed by actors (mentors, mentees, managers of organizations) in
situations and interactions which may occur face-to-face or be mediated by artefacts like
information and communication technologies (ICTs). Inevitably, these technologies redesign
conceptually and “materially” the space and time of the relationships between mentor and
 Mentoring as Practice, Practices of Mentoring 9

mentee. Theirs interactions and identities are constructed through the medium of material
objects. For this reason is necessary to gain better understanding of technological practices
where interaction takes place both in co-presence and at a distance – as in the case of
telementoring – and where communication, trust and responsibility are crucial along the
mentoring process.

An Anchoring in Materiality

The anchoring in materiality follows from the situated action approach just mentioned.
Strati (2007) writes:

Knowledge rooted in practice and situated organizational learning are distinctive

features of the knowledge society characteristic of the contemporary world of industrial
and post-industrial production. They emphasize that it is people who create, invent and
enact organization, doing so not as individual yet interrelated minds but through their
corporeality – which enables them to acquire sensible knowledge as well as to engage in
intellectual ratiocination – and always in relation to the non- human elements that make
up the organizational space. (p. 66)

This quotation prompts to analyze how relations are mediated by a further series of
factors, including the technologies and language used by organizational members, both
experts and novices, for a common purpose (Blackler, 1995). Mainly in knowledge society
people fabricate knowledge, not only through human-to-human relation, but also in relation to
the non-human elements. Learning and knowing into a mentoring relationship too may be
mediated by objects. These objects have not only a discrete nature with a purely instrumental
function. Actually, they embodied the human knowledge. Fox says that “in a sense we cannot
think of the knowledgeable-skilled person outside the prosthetic context of her or his tools
and working materials” (p. 864). This statement becomes clear taking into account the
telementoring.
With the advent of new technologies, the traditional forms of mentoring have been
replaced or integrated by telementoring (or e-mentoring or mentoring on-line), to which
Emery (1999) gives a general definition:

The goal of an online mentoring program is to improve the academic or social

success of a child [or adult] through communication with a mentor online. The
philosophical rationale is that the technology can be used as a communication tool to
create an environments where adults [or experts, professionals] can provide a youth with
individualized academic, motivational and emotional support (History section, para. 7)

In telementoring, the technologies contribute to shape the mentoring relationships as a

sociomaterial relation (Orlikoski, 2007) where the social and the material are entangled in the
fabrication and transformation of knowledge, principally from mentor to mentee.
While the mentor-protégé relationship is central to e-mentoring, CMC also offers
opportunities to establish a community of practice (Allan, 2002; Johnson, Geroy & Griego,
10 Michela Cozza

1999; Wenger, 1997; Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). According to Headlam-Wells et
al. (2005):

An online environment allows group mentoring to take place, which extends the
boundaries of the primary pair relationship and offers access to multiple mentors. It can
also facilitate both synchronous and asynchronous communication. E-mentoring pairs can
explore their value, feeling and objectives at their own pace and more freely than in face-
to-face communication, which can be pressurise through the need to respond
immediately. This environment may be enhanced by the inclusion of online resources. (p.
446)

Thus, the technologies and the material setting where mentoring takes place contribute to
sustain the relationship between mentor and mentee. In other words, this relationship, the
learning and knowing processes, are enabled by an infrastructure that is both technological
and relational (Star, 1999; Star & Ruhleder, 1996)
The term infrastructure, in my analysis, refers to the “something” where communication,
learning and knowing through the ICTs take place, mobilizing a situated, embodied and
embedded knowledge. Then, above all in the case of mentoring as an organizational practice
to give support for those who seek legitimate peripheral participation in a community of
practices, “the infrastructure is something that emerges for people in practice, connected to
activities and structures” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p.112). At this point, I maintain that the
success of any supportive practice of mentoring is predicated on the fabrication both of a
shared knowledge and a relational infrastructure.

An Anchoring in Discursive Practices

Just as the term “sociomateriality” was used in the previous paragraph to make visible the
entanglement between the social and the material, this final section devoted to the
characteristics of practical knowledge is aimed to pinpoint that the discursiveness too is
implied in this sociomateriality.
Language is a situated form of linguistic mediation that supports practically the
mentoring relationship. According to Lave and Wenger (1991):

the characterization of language in learning has, in discussions of conventional

contrasts between formal and informal learning, been treated as highly significant in
classifying ways of transmitting knowledge … learning to become a legitimate
participant in a community involves learning how to talk (and be silent) in the manner of
full participants. (p. 105)

Jordan (1989) makes a suitable observation about language, particularly about the role of
stories in apprenticeship. She says that stories are packages of situated knowledge. In other
words, to acquire a store of appropriate stories and, even more importantly, to know what are
appropriate occasions for telling them are then part of what it means to become a full
participant to a community of practice enacting a skilled performance. But just the stories are
not sufficient. Within a community of practice, the experience is the ground of stories.
 Mentoring as Practice, Practices of Mentoring 11

Swap et al. (2001) have highlighted several important points about the knowing in
organizations through storytelling:

First, managerial systems, norms, and values can be readily communicated through
the narrative and its (often implied) moral. Stories, particularly those are concrete and
readily identified with, are particularly powerful for transferring knowledge rich in tacit
dimensions … knowledge about skills and domain content relies on more explicit,
codified means of communication rather than on stories … Second, a single story, richly
contextualized, may communicate knowledge, often tacit, about more than one
component of a company’s core capabilities … Third, when the story supports the
explicit statements of the company … they provide powerful reinforcement and buy-in by
members. (p. 105)

Sharing experiences in practice, by narratives and other objects, is a situated and

embodied source of learning, as the following analysis of a telementoring initiative shows.

PRACTICES OF MENTORING
Telementoring for Women in Computer Science

The empirical data for this chapter come from an action-research project, conducted by
the University of Trento’s Faculty of Sociology in the period 2003-2005. The aim of this
project was to incentive female attendance on technical-scientific training courses and to ease
access by women to the ICT professions, doing so by organizing counselling and
accompaniment schemes in the Italian Province of Trento. The project moved through four
stages: research, design, implementation, and dissemination. The first two stages involved (i)
a survey of the labour market in the province of Trento and the conduct of interviews to
gather information on male and female careers in the ICT sector, and (ii) organization of the
training and accompaniment of 12 women in technological-scientific sectors. These actions
were undertaken in the next stage, that of implementation, the aim of which was to counteract
the under-representation of the female component in ICT. Accordingly, a training course and
support modules were designed to furnish counselling and accompaniment for women
working in predominantly male sectors like science and technology
The training scheme began with recruitment of participants by means of advertisements
in the local press, flyers and posters. This operation continued on the basis of direct contacts
(through personal acquaintance and word of mouth) with persons who might be interested in
joining the scheme. Because it proved difficult to find 12 participants, it was decided to
replace the selection process with motivational interviews. During these interviews, the
design group – consisting of members of the Department of Sociology and Social Research
(DSSR) and the Laboratory of Information Engineering and Organizational Analysis (LIAO)
at the University of Trento – discussed the form and content of the course with the candidates,
so that it could be personalized and individualized as far as possible. These discussions
brought out a number of aspects which had probably dissuaded candidates from applying. The
duration of the course and its attendance requirement (a large number of hours) were
problematic; and the candidates had differing interests in the topics proposed: they considered
12 Michela Cozza

‘knowing how to do’ to be more interesting than the ‘knowing how to be’ proposed by the
course prospectus.
Because of these difficulties, the classroom group eventually formed was rather
heterogeneous in terms of the occupational situation and training of its members, and very
different from what had been envisaged. In fact, the project was intended for young women
with scientific-technological backgrounds wanting to enter (or already precariously employed
in) ICT occupations, or women who had just started working in the sector and were therefore
at the beginning of their careers. But the group consisted of 14 young women (two
subsequently withdrew) aged 22 and 33, only two of whom had degrees in scientific-
technological subjects, while one had a high-school diploma in technical subjects.
The participants were first asked to write down their expectations with regard to the
course. This activity highlighted three main aspects: the group members’ need to increase
their IT knowledge and skills; issues to do with work flexibility; and problems concerning
access to the labour market. It also highlighted the need to have reference figures (mentors) in
a network to use in the job search process and to acquire skills/knowledge. The participants
also stressed a desire to “find new ways to deal with gender problems in ICT” (personal
communication, May 4, 2005). When expressing their expectations, the participants also said
what they did not want from the course: “too much computer science”, “telementoring as a
waste of time”, “too much theory and too little practice”, “prepackaged solutions” (personal
communications, May 4, 2005), thereby showing an inability to understand their real needs.
On the basis of this information, the design team divided the training course into eight
modules (from creation of the work group to post-course assessment) based on:

 classroom instruction using interactive methods which placed the learner at the
centre of the training interaction;
 distance teaching (DT), this too based on interactive and stimulating methods which
made the learner the protagonist of the training process.

The distance activities involved telementoring as a method to improve the participants’

technical and relational skills, and to teach them new knowledge and abilities. After careful
selection, the role of mentor was assigned to four of the twenty professional women
interviewed during the project’s research stage. Three of these women were employed by IT
companies, while one of them worked at a research institute in Trento. After contacting each
of these organizations and establishing the willingness of the four women to act as e-mentors,
the research group gave the mentors detailed instructions in order to ensure that the initiative
proceeded regularly. The course attendees were divided into three groups, one of which had
two mentors. The mentors undertook their online activities from their workplaces, with the
permission of their employers, while the course attendees participated in the same activities
from the LIAO computer room, or from workstations with Internet access.
Used for the telementoring was an IT platform built by the LIAO on its own distance
training system. On the basis of groups and subgroups created as virtual communities, this
system furnished personalized access and the requisite tools for:

 synchronous communication: moderated chat rooms with personalized access

according to the user’s community;
 Mentoring as Practice, Practices of Mentoring 13

 asynchronous communication: moderated discussion forums for virtual communities

and subcommunities; management of email messaging among members of the
subcommunities;
 the sharing of documents and files: shared libraries with procedures for the creation
of personalized folders by community, subcommunity and user.

These three capabilities were used at different times and for various purposes during the
telementoring activity. Specifically:

 Synchronous communication was the mode selected for group discussion guided and
moderated by the mentor. This mode was chosen because it was indispensable for
organization of the work group and because it responded to the need for immediate
interaction in discussions.
 Asynchronous communication was the mode chosen to support personalized
telementoring actions because it offered greater spatio-temporal flexibility in the
mentor-mentee “private” interaction. This was regarded a particularly positive
feature by the mentors because it enabled them to engage in telementoring
simultaneously with their own work and gave them the time to formulate exhaustive
answers to questions and queries made by the mentees.
 The sharing of documents and files required the use of libraries throughout the
course (for the storage of teaching materials distributed during classroom activities,
the archiving of chat log files, and the distribution of supplementary materials
suggested by the mentors).

The archiving of the conversation log files made it possible to reconstruct the mentor-
mentee relationship and to analyze its efficacy in relation to the project’s objectives. The next
section examines the log files relative to two of the three groups. It was not possible to
analyze the exchanges that took place during the telementoring activity because these were
restricted to the mentor-mentee relationship and were not stored in the platform’s library.
However, the texts considered, although they are brief, fragmentary, and necessarily
conditioned by being produced online and in groups, display a level of intimacy and
familiarity typical of mentoring (or telementoring) relations. I consequently believe that DT
and telementoring closely resembled each other in this course. Only three of the mentors are
quoted, not because their discourse was more representative but because the platform
malfunctioned in the case of the fourth mentor, so that the log files were either lost or
incompletely recorded. Because of the specific nature of online interaction, almost
exclusively instrumental narratives were collected, together with story items drawn from the
mentors’ and mentees’ experience, rather than linear narratives matching the standard
definition of narrative.

Practices of Telementoring

The choice of female mentors was not accidental. Instead, it was influenced by the
opinion of the research group that professional women would provide, by discursive practices
14 Michela Cozza

on-line, the course attendees with successful role-models and give them access to stories and
experiences of other women who, like them, had probably had to deal with a hostile gender
culture in theirs working environment.
Those discursive practices based on embodied experiences in IT organizations, has acted
as the medium for the conveyance of the situated knowledge of the mentors. Then, language
and technology were involved in the becoming of e-mentoring as practice. In other words, the
practice of e-mentoring emerged from the entanglement between social and material into a
relational infrastructure were all these elements were inextricably related for a guidance
purpose based on mentees needs.
After a first four-hour meeting with the participants, the mentors again met the trainees
on the computer platform when the distance training began. In this virtual space, mentor and
mentee exchanged suggestions and opinions on various topics, most of them related to the
influence of gender in the computer professions, the characteristics of ICT world, and the
skills necessary to work in the computer science sector. Besides texts distributed in the
classroom by the teachers, the mentors directed mentees to specific websites furnishing more
detailed information, helping them to analyse the site in terms of its characteristics (usability,
attention to the type and gender of users, etc.) as well as its contents. For instance:

Mentor3: I’ll give you a small assignment: search the Web for blogs for men and
blogs for women… and then try to see if they have typical male and female features, if
there are differences between them… you could use the usability rules that we saw on the
first day. What do you think? (personal communication, June 17, 2005)

Two factors seem to have been most influential on the quality and level of participation
in the online meetings: on the one hand, the endeavour of the mentors to transmit situated and
practical knowledge of the computer sector gained from years of experience, and their
willingness to share personal stories and professional experiences functional to the learning;
on the other, the active eliciting of feedback and dialogue by the mentees.
The first type of narrative that I identified was instrumental. Hence, the instrumental
narrative may be considered a first example of practice of mentoring by which the mentees
learn, provided that – to off-set the disadvantages of physical distance – the contents are
sufficiently involving and the stories shared online are able to stimulate reflexive analysis by
the mentee of his/her own experience (life projects, professional choices etc.) (Moon, 1999).
The mentors used narratives of this kind to share knowledge gained from their own work
experience by introducing the mentees to the backstage (Goffman, 1959) typical of computer
firms, and to offer insights into the organizational practices used to deal with the sometimes
fatal errors and misunderstandings that occur in software production:

Mentor2: Only during tests does one realize that “something doesn’t stand up”, and
only when using the product does the client realize that what s/he requested was not what
s/he really wanted.
Menteeα: So what do you do?
Mentor1: Here the real problems start: the client’s reaction depends on his/her
character … we are people: some of them hide behind “but it’s obvious that this is not
what I wanted”… Or worse: “the documents were incomprehensible. So why did they
approve them?”… What to do about it depends greatly on the client and certainly also on
 Mentoring as Practice, Practices of Mentoring 15

the project manager… In any case it is much simpler to understand the problem and to
agree on how to solve it if you’re dealing with intelligent clients… but the problem
always has to be solved!!! (personal communication, June 17, 2005)

These are realistic images that discredit the stereotype of a rational, neutral technology
uncontaminated by human relationships. Then, these images help to see organizational
practices evoked by mentors as sociomaterial: humans mentioned by mentors (that is the
client, the IT professionals) are constituted through relations with the materiality of artifact
(the product, the documents) which, in turn, is produced through human practices (the use by
the client, the tests by the technicians, the understanding of the problem, the search of a
solution). Also the communication among colleagues – into the community of practices – is
crucial:

Mentor2: What happens in the computer industry? Given the way the production
process is structured, you have to work in a team. This doesn't mean that we always have
to overlap, but that there are usually several people informed about every key activity and
able to take each other's places, without banging their heads on the wall. Besides, this
guarantees greater control and supervision. (Personal communication, June 15, 2005)

The value of the team is related to the structure of the computer industry, but what is all
the more essential is the practice of sharing a repertoire of practical knowledge (the
information about key activity). According to Gherardi (2012) “knowing the stories of the
communities distinguishes the expert from the novice” (p. 128) and, in this case, the mentor
from the mentee.
There were then narratives with a psychosocial value (Fagenson, 1989; Knouse, 2001).
Hence, the psychosocial narrative may be considered another example of practice of
mentoring. These narratives mainly concerned the relationship between professional life and
private life, problems connected with the life/work balance, and the strategies used by the
mentors to manage complex situations. Their success stories gave the young mentees an
opportunity to discuss the difficulties created by organizational models which conflict with
personal interests:

Menteeß: Both of you started at the the bottom… at that time did you feel discriminated
against?… I ask because I’ve noticed being discriminated against as a girl at university…
teachers have often asked me to confirm that I was the author of the papers I submitted for
exams… and I’ve had the feeling that this question was due to a male sense of superiority…
not oppressive… rather subtle… but at times irritating… and I asked myself whether
something similar happened to you at the beginning!
Mentor2: Among colleagues absolutely not. In the firm's attitude towards women
employees, yes, partly. I refer to acknowledgement of merit, for instance.
Mentor2: And menteeγ what can you tell us about your experience at university? Are
there still more girls than boys at the faculty of mathematics?
Menteeδ: I confirm what menteeß said. I’ve noticed it at secondary school. About 30 girls
in around 900 students. The computer science and electronics teachers… they often left us out
or, for instance, they didn’t consider us in projects for the school leaving certificate: in fact I
didn’t know and I don’t know anything about my project for the school leaving certificate, not
even how it went. However I’ve never considered this a problem. I have always gone on just
the same. (Personal communication, June 13, 2005)
16 Michela Cozza

The mentors explicitly encouraged mentees “to take risks” in order to achieve their goals
enacting a skilled performance (Giddens, 1990):

Mentor2: You have to know your limitations and try to exploit them. An important
thing, however, as mentor1 wrote on Monday, is that you shouldn’t be frightened by
difficulties at work. There’s almost always a solution. (Personal communication, June 15,
2005)

Nevertheless, confrontation with reality and the desire to narrate it without censorship
also induced the mentors to describe situations in which gender is a constant source of
discrimination, especially in workplaces exposed to the urgencies of market competition, the
pressure of technological change, and the rules of visibility (Kanter, 1977) and face-work
(Gherardi, 1994):

Mentor1: Part-time work is hardly ever available, and anyway, those who get it are
somehow blocked… I found it very difficult to obtain a reduced time schedule (…) and I
have to apply for it every year… Personally, I believe I’m able to reconcile family and
work; but of course I'm always in a rush!!!
Mentor3: I’ve worked part-time for four years and this has definitely worsened my
position at work.
Menteeδ: in what sense has your work position got worse? Above all, is it due to
choices made at home?
Mentor3: I am excluded from important information. I am not summoned to division
meetings anymore. Often I can’t attend because they hold them in the afternoon…
because I am less present physically, they see me less and it is easier for them to forget
me… despite everything, however, I manage to do a good job. (Personal communication,
June 13, 2005)

These stories have led twelve young women in discovery of a partly unknown world,
offering unusual critical insights and a pragmatic perspective on gender at work organization.
Then, this e-mentoring program has been for mentees a first access to communities of
practices in IT field. Mentors by recounting their professional experience have induced
unconventional learning and stimulated personal and professional empowerment. The on-line
platform has supported the communicative processes and these communicative processes are
entangled in the development of a relational infrastructure.

Evaluation of Telementoring Program

The training project was repeatedly evaluated (before, during and afterwards) at meetings
between the research team and the mentors, and between the research team and the mentees.
The concluding meetings were opportunities to take stock of the experience and to verify the
goodness of the accompaniment model implemented.
The meeting with the mentors highlighted certain strengths and weaknesses in online
interaction supporting young women embarking on careers in ICT. The mentors stressed the
following shortcomings of the project:
 Mentoring as Practice, Practices of Mentoring 17

 The heterogeneous educational backgrounds of the mentees and their differing

experiences of work hampered direct discussion of technical aspects of employment
in the IT sector. In some cases, these factors made mentees lose interest in continuing
contact with the mentors with a view to entry into the ICT labour market.
 Online mentor/mentee communication within the spaces furnished by the platform
required the introduction of typing rules, and it restricted exploration of important
issues concerning the world of work and the presence of women in scientific-
technological occupations. Dealing with these issues online would probably have
given rise to misunderstandings and generic and superficial replies, whereas face-to-
face communication would have produced more effective and thorough discussion.
 The tight schedule of mentor/mentee online meetings imposed by the mentors’
availability within the project’s time constraints clashed with the mentees’ need to
reflect at length on the topics proposed by the mentors. This affected the quality of
the discussions.

But the mentors also stressed positive aspects of the project.

 The face-to-face meeting between mentor and mentee, held in the mentor’s
workplace before the online activity began, enabled each to get to know the other and
gave the mentees an opportunity to visit local IT companies.
 Online communication increased the number of subjects involved in the activity, and
it allowed the mentors – career women whose heavy workloads prevented them from
following the mentees physically – to manage the mentor/mentee relationship within
their own space and time.
 The mentoring role and the sharing of knowledge and experience, also in regard to
the work/life balance, was a constructive experience for the mentors as well, and
gave them the motivation necessary to continue their work with enthusiasm.

Although only some of the mentees expressed a desire to enter employment in the ICT
sector, their replies to a questionnaire administered at the end of the course showed that they
assessed the experience positively, also with regard to applying the knowledge acquired in
their future jobs. The heterogeneous backgrounds of the course attendees had required the
mentors to deal with less technical topics, not specifically connected with IT, furnishing
guidelines and practical tips useful to both women newcomers in an IT company and to
female labour-market entrants. The main criticism made by the mentees concerned the use of
CMC in relation to the platform’s characteristics. The system could not be used to control
interlocutor typing in real time, and this, together with the mentees’ differing technical skills,
caused overlaps in turn-taking. One of the mentors suggested that the platform’s performance
could be improved by a “wait” command which regulated the online written interaction: for
example by blocking the write mode until the other interlocutor had finished typing.
As regards the project’s outcomes in terms of support for female careers in the IT
industry, the research group unfortunately lost contact with the mentees, so that it was not
possible to verify whether their employment situations had changed. However, one of the
companies involved in the research asked one of the mentees to assist with writing an article
18 Michela Cozza

on the training scheme to be published in the company newsletter, while two of the mentors
sent their mentees for job interviews at their companies.

CONCLUSION
At the beginning of this chapter I stressed the fascination exerted by the mentoring both
in literature and in organizations. In fact, mentoring has been adopted in so many different
contexts as the panacea for a variety of organizational ills. For such a variety of purposes the
first difficulty is defining mentoring. The practice-based theorizing helps to problematize the
question of what is mentoring.
Starting from this theoretical framework, I have proposed some insights based on
empirical data in order to translate the cornerstones of the practice-based studies into a
discourse about the mentoring.
The case-study has stressed the possibility to use the mentoring as strategy targeted to
disadvantaged groups. This raises the question if the mentoring programs, with their focus on
individuals rather than systems or organizations, can be an appropriate strategy to address the
disadvantage of target groups. For instance, reconsidering the telementoring experience, the
singular focus on women – even if the mentees were not employed in the mentors’ companies
– obscure the situatedness of gender discrimination phenomenon. In other words, I maintain
that the focus on the individual serves to obscure the organizational context and agenda.
Evoking the previous example, I maintain that a singular focus on the women, as having
deficits or requiring assistance to succeed within organizations, can leave masculinist
organizational cultures intact. In this case, also a mentor’s encouragement to mentees such as
do not be afraid of dominant masculine corporate culture, risks to fail if the agenda for
mentees is not aligned with the agenda for organizations. The aim to become a full member
of a community of practices could be frustrated by the sum of many obstacles along the way
if these are not removed.
This is way the mentoring as practical accomplishment should be anchored to the texture
of organizational practices and it should be pragmatically oriented towards mentees, mentors,
organizations and managerial systems, reconciling theirs viewpoints by an articulation work
that is all the more essential in design phase of a mentoring initiative. I maintain that the
agreement among organizational actors on the mentoring as valuable practice for knowing
and learning in organization is the first (but not exclusive) condition for a beneficial (both
individual and collective) change.

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