So much has been accomplished in studies

THE FUTURE OF ‘GENDER AND ORGANIZATIONS’ 195 The Future of ‘Gender and Organizations’: Connections and Boundaries Joan Acker* ‘Gender and organizati...
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THE FUTURE OF ‘GENDER AND ORGANIZATIONS’

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The Future of ‘Gender and Organizations’: Connections and Boundaries Joan Acker* ‘Gender and organizations’, a fruitful connection between two previously separate areas of study, has had a relatively short but bountiful history. Much of the research and theorizing within the general rubric of ‘gender and organizations’ has required the breaking of conceptual boundaries and the forging of new connections that go beyond the coalescence of two fields of inquiry. We have not exhausted the possibilities suggested by broken boundaries and new connections. This may be a particularly auspicious time to be breaking boundaries, for the apparent worldwide changes in work and organizing are not well enough understood with many of our old intellectual tools. In this paper I discuss briefly what our studies of gender and organization have, in my view, accomplished so far, and then review some issues and questions stimulated by thinking about broken boundaries and new connections, possibilities that, for me, represent part of the future for ‘gender and organizations.’

Accomplishments

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o much has been accomplished in studies of gender and organizations that I cannot attempt a detailed and comprehensive assessment. Instead, I comment only on some central developments in the field. It is clear that in a very short time those working in this field have created a great deal of new knowledge about the gendered structures of organizations, the practices and policies that perpetuate unequal power, rewards and opportunities, the interpersonal interactions that confirm and recreate gendered patterns, and the ideologies that support these processes. Understandings of the centrality of particular male behaviours in creating and maintaining economic and organizational forms of dominance have also grown rapidly, as has our knowledge about the diverse forms of organizational change now under way. The concept of hegemonic masculinities (Connell 1987) has been an important tool in expanding this understanding, although, as Jeff Hearn (1996) has argued, the concept of masculinity is problematic because, among other difficulties, the idea has multiple meanings and its relationship to men’s material practices is often unclear. Bringing emotions, sexuality, and bodies into organizational analysis has also been a creative contribution of ‘gender and organization’. All of these accomplishments constitute part of a powerful critique of abstract,

gender-neutral organizational theory for its failures to represent what actually happens in and between organizations. This, in addition, is a critique of organizational studies as part of the ideological processes that support the ongoing relations of dominance that function through large organizations. That is, representing organizations as gender (and race) neutral obscures the everyday reality of gender and race subordination. Such a critique becomes part of the critique of capitalist organizational societies, a considerably more radical direction than that implied by simply objecting to the lack of attention to women’s inequalities and gendered processes. I recognize that some of us studying gender and organizations may not want to push the critique this far, but I think that this is where it leads us. The radical potential of ‘gender and organizations’ is further evident in the significant boundaries we have crossed in putting these fields together. These can be summarized as follows: 1. Discursively constructed boundaries (Smith 1990), such as those between ‘economy’ and ‘organization’. The gender wage gap and the sex segregation of the labour force are aspects of the ‘economy’ or the ‘market’. Some, perhaps most, of the practices and processes that create these inequalities occur in work organizations. Thus, to study gender inequalities in the economy, we must study

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Address for correspondence: *Joan Acker, Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA.

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gender relations in organizations. Studying social relations of dominance joins us with other critics who argue that social relations cut across disciplinary and conceptual divides. To adequately discuss these relations, we have to talk about organizations and the multiplicity of activities that link them as the sites in which both ‘the economy’ and ‘the polity’ take place (Perrow 1986; Clegg 1990; Friedland and Robertson 1990; Zukin and DiMaggio 1990), thus sites in which we find class, and often race, as well as gender. I think that in our fascination with gender we often fail to adequately attend to the ongoing presence of class and racial aspects of organizing processes. 2. Boundaries between phenomena conceived, when thought about at all, by many organizational theorists as occurring on different analytic and/or societal levels, most particularly those between sexuality/emotions and organization/economy (Hochschild 1983; Adkins and Lury 1996; Pierce 1995). Of course, feminist scholars, including those working on gender and organizations, are not the first, nor only ones, to suggest such connections (Mills 1956); Freud himself argued that the very possibility of ‘civilization’, including economic action, was premised upon certain constructions of sexuality. Scholars of the Frankfurt School, such as Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, made major attempts to explicate such connections (Jay 1973). Leaving aside the complex question of what Freudian theories might contribute to understanding links between economy (another problematic concept) and gender/sexuality/emotion, we can recognize the importance of work on gender and organization for making new sorts of connections. 3. Boundaries between families and work organizations, conceived as separate spheres, have also been probed in our studies of gender and organization. Feminist analyses of the last 30 years have recognized the centrality of these boundaries, as well as the ways that families are affected by work organizations, for understanding gender relations and women’s subordinate situations. At the same time, feminist scholars have understood the ideological consequences of the conceptualization of boundaries that tended to define work as paid work in organizations and unpaid family work as non-work. Analysis from an explicitly gender/organizational perspective has, I think, produced more complex and concrete understandings. We comprehend how these boundaries exist in concrete organizing practices, in the flow of daily life,

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and in discourse, but that social relations span the boundaries, shaping families to the demands of organizations. ‘Gender and organizations’ joins other critical perspectives in other ways; for example, by seeing organizing as process rather than organizations as relatively stable, rational, bounded structures. Gendered inequalities, gendered images, and gendered interactions arise in the course of the ongoing flow of activities that constitute ‘an organization’. A processual view is the only way to capture these emerging and changing realities. ‘Gender and organizations’ contributes to a critical, even radical, perspective when it looks at organizing from the standpoints of participants on the lowest or lower levels and raises questions about the social consequences of the ways we organize. Of course, this is also a long tradition in studies of organizations. However, bringing women and gender into the analysis reveals how limited, even conservative, previous critical perspectives have been. Failing to recognize the gendering of organization as a major locus of social and economic inequality, failing to understand the centrality of forms of masculinity in the historical emergence and present functioning of economic organizations, diminishes the adequacy of arguments about how societies function. In sum, our accomplishments in studying gender and organization have been considerable. We know a great deal about ‘how it works’ and about the difficulties in effecting organizational change toward greater gender parity. We have reconceptualized organizations from gender-neutral, gender-absent processes to processes in which gender is omnipresent. But, there is still a great deal to do. I outline here a few of the issues that challenge us. All of these challenges are linked in one way or another to the changes underway in the organizing of production and work and in the relations between work-life and life outside of work. The first challenge is how to comprehend the remarkably persistent male dominance of organizations and the continuing inequality between women and men, in spite of many other changes. I admit that this may be a case of ‘is the glass half empty or half full’, because it is also true that women now occupy many organizational positions from which they were previously totally excluded. However, there are no clear indications that levels of gender inequality within work organizations are close to elimination. Indeed, in the US, the gender wage gap, a central indicator of inequality, is rising again after several years of decline, although we © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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don’t know precisely where or why this is happening. In taking up this challenge, I reassess my earlier argument about the gender understructure of organization. The second challenge is ‘globalization’, how to think about ‘it’ (whatever it may be) and how gender may be implicated. The third challenge is to push further our understanding of emotions, sexuality, and masculinity as integral aspects of ongoing processes of change and persistence in organizing.

Challenges 1. The first challenge is really one to myself — to assess and extend my earlier argument (Acker 1990, 1992b) that a gendered substructure underlies organizing and helps to explain the persistence of male dominance and female disadvantage, in spite of years of attempts to implement gender equity policies. We now have many studies that show how change toward gender equity is frustrated or minimized by discrimination, male self-interest of both workers and managers, reorganizations in complex processes of change that may elevate some women while providing new opportunities for men, bureaucratic manoeuvring, and ordinary practices and procedures (Acker 1989; Buswell and Jenkins 1994; Cockburn 1991). I have always thought that something else was going on behind or below the actions we could observe. To develop this idea, I (Acker 1990, 1992b) suggested that there is a gender substructure of organization that operates to help reproduce gender divisions and inequalities, even against the best intentions of some women and men working in organizations. This substructure, I thought, could be identified in the demands of the ordinary job, that are structured on the assumption that the ordinary worker is a man, an abstract person who has few obligations outside work that could distract him from the centrality of work. Women, at least stereotypically, do not have these qualities. The substructure is not just ideological, but is manifested and reproduced through the ostensibly genderneutral practices and activities of doing the work of organizing, including the textual tools of management used to specify work tasks, responsibilities, coordination of activities, wage setting procedures, promotion processes, performance assessments, etc. I argued further that the substructure manifested in the organization of work helps to recreate the gendered divide between paid work and unpaid family reproductive work, consigning the latter, and women, to a subordinated and © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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devalued position as practice and belief put the demands of the work organization first over the demands of the rest of life. In this way links are constructed between gendering processes in organizations and gendering processes in areas of economy and society outside the formal boundaries of organizations. As the gender substructure is created and recreated, the organizational context for other manifestations of gender is also created. I have been re-examining this argument because it was based on observations of ordinary bureaucratic practices in longexisting hierarchical organizations. Contemporary changes may alter the conditions that created the gender understructure. For example, organizational restructuring towards less hierarchy, team functioning, and flexibility might offer possibilities for shaping organizing to accommodate non-work aspects of life, reducing the disadvantages for women in paid employment. As part-time or temporary work becomes more and more available, as work moves from the defined workplace to other sites, including the home, a multiplicity of patterns for combining work and family might be possible. Some even predict the end of ‘the job’ as we know it — that is, the end of the full-time, stable, lifelong position. If the gendering of the workplace is partly accomplished through the very existence of ‘the job’, if a job in this sense implies the separation of production and reproduction and the gender based division of labour, as I have argued (Acker 1990), wouldn’t the elimination of ‘the job’ be at least a step forward? Wouldn’t the gender understructure of organization begin to erode? I think it is necessary to be cautious in estimating impacts of present changes; predictions about a radically altered world of work may prove to have been dramatically overblown. With that caveat, less hierarchy and team functioning may well provide some women workers with opportunities to function more as equals with men and to be assessed on individual merits rather than on stereotypical notions about women, as Kvande and Rasmussen (1994) have shown. The end of the ‘job’ as we know it could mean that work becomes more flexible, easing the fit between paid activities and ‘outside lives’. But other outcomes are just as likely, and the relevant research shows that, so far, changes have, at least in the United States, intensified work, lengthened hours, and put more pressures on employed women and men, who are better able than women to avoid the consequent stresses in the family (Hochschild 1997). Thus the gender understructure of organization

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continues to shape work and non-work lives. However, I have become aware that this notion of ‘gendered understructure’ could be taken as an essentialist, ahistorical argument that organizations inherently create gender divisions. To avoid that possibility, I have thought that I need to be better able to show how the understructure works, what practices produce this understructure. To that end, I offer the following ideas — that the underpinnings of gender are produced between as well as within organizations, and that the gender understructure is anchored in the privileging of organizations and in their successful claims for non-responsibility for human reproduction and survival. My conclusions are fairly pessimistic, but I want to emphasize that I am telling only one side of the story. The gender consequences of inter-organizational relations. The gender understructure functions not only through the ordinary practices of particular work organizations, but also in the ordinary activities through which work activities are coordinated across organizational boundaries. I will illustrate this with a story from my own experience. A few years ago I was doing some research on women bank workers in Sweden. I had a Swedish coworker who was essential to the project. She had been an ombudsman in the largest white collar workers’ union, had many connections among women in several unions, and a great store of knowledge. In addition, she was a brilliant interviewer and we worked very well together. She did most of the interviews with the front-line bank employees because my Swedish was not sufficiently good for the task of in-depth interviewing. Then she got pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult, she took considerable medical leave, the project slowed down. I could not find anyone else even remotely as competent as she was. After the baby was born, she took parental leave, at that time guaranteed for 15 months by the Swedish State. As a consequence, the project had no additional interviews. Although I never told her this, I was quite annoyed with what had happened. The pregnancy plus the generous Swedish benefits and rights of parents circumscribed what I could accomplish with the project, I thought. I, of course, supported completely her right to take the leaves guaranteed to her and was in agreement with her decisions about child care. But, I was annoyed and frustrated: had I been a male manager I might have marked her as someone who would not move up to more responsible jobs or, worse, I might have generalized this experience to my evaluations

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of the potential of other young women, contributing to an organizational ‘takenfor-granted’ that young women are not managerial material. I have reflected upon this reaction of mine and have interpreted it as a response to the ineluctable antagonism between the organizing practices of our societies and the carrying out of life-producing activities in the everyday spaces outside of organizations. The research project took place within a web of organizing practices that circumscribed what we could do, when we could do it, and where it could be done. Restrictions were built into schedules and procedures, as well as into contracts between organizations and organizations and individuals, into the design of technology and plans for implementing change. In this case, the most important constraint was time. The project needed to be completed within a certain timeframe to minimize the effects of technological and work organization change. That is, we needed to interview employees within a few months because we wanted to describe how their work was organized at a particular time. We knew that change was underway, as it always was, and we couldn’t wait to finish the project while the new baby grew from an infant to a two-year-old. We also wanted to gather the data before the next round of collective bargaining, another timed event that did not coincide with the rhythm of pregnancy and child birth. The union wanted to see our results before they went into the bargaining sessions because some of the questions we were addressing related to wage demands. The rhythm of funding for the project also created time constraints. My funding was coming to an end, and I wanted to complete the project before that end arrived. At the same time, state and local community organizing practices and the ideologies supporting them also affected our ability to carry out our project. Thus, the intersections of many organizational processes — in banks, in the union, in the research institute, in the community — produced time pressures for this project. These time demands were not synchronized with the time demands of pregnancy, child birth, and infant care. Indeed, they were antithetical. Swedish welfare policies, including maternity and parental leaves and child care centres, allow women (and men) to respond to the time demands of parenthood without the severe penalties experienced by women in the US, but they in no way erase the lack of compatibility between paid work organizations and the rest of life. In this particular case, and I believe in many others, © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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organizational activities (here, the research process) were disrupted by the time-demand incompatibilities. In many other cases, the disruption occurs in the rest of life. Wherever the pressure is felt, the point is that there is a profound lack of fit and the lack of fit extends across organizational boundaries. This case illustrates, I think, some of the limitations to the Swedish policy approach, and those modelled on it, for dealing with the gender understructure of organization — part-time, flexitime, parental leave, day care, all of which allow individuals, usually women, to accommodate the lack of fit in their daily lives. Measures to accommodate individual family and domestic needs can disrupt the orderly flow of organizational work, causing difficulties for managers, supervisors, and co-workers, but these difficulties do not necessarily push organizations to alter their activities, rhythms, and processes, partly because to do so might disrupt the webs of inter-organizational practices essential to the organization. More likely is that, where, as in Sweden, state regulations protect the rights of individuals to do both work and caring, employers will sort both jobs and employees in terms of their expectations about who will use such rights, reinforcing gender segregation in the process (Widerberg 1991). In the US, Arlie Hochschild (1997) has shown in a study of one large ‘family-friendly’ corporation that neither men nor women use the family leaves and reductions in working hours available to them because they know that management does not support its own family-friendly policies and that their career prospects will be ruined if they do not work long hours and take little time off. In any case, this corporation, like most in the US, did not offer any ‘family-friendly’ benefits to production workers — only middle-class career professionals had to regret turning them down. To counter this, one frequently proposed reform that would facilitate work organization gender equality is an equalization between women and men of caring responsibilities in the home. But this is not a minor change, because it implies that neither men nor women could be expected to meet the work demands of most organizations; thus organizations might have to change. Nevertheless, recent legislation in Sweden and Norway requiring that fathers take one month of the total parental leave or lose that portion for the family is a step in that direction. Seventy per cent of Norwegian fathers have taken this leave in the first year of the new law, claiming that the law gives them a certain leverage with their employers © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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that they previously lacked. Whether this one month of ‘daddy leave’ will alter the domestic division of labour over a longer and significant period or turn out to be just an extra month of vacation for new fathers is unclear. Another possibility is that employers and fathers themselves will see men who take expanded care responsibility over an extended time as having made a decision to forego certain kinds of career development and that such men will be sorted into a category of feminized relative losers. The privileging and non-responsibility of organizations. The gendered understructure of organization is powerfully supported by two other processes in contemporary capitalist societies, particularly the US. These are the privileging of economic organizations over other areas of life and the promotion by work organizations, particularly profitmaking organizations, of their nonresponsibility for the reproduction and survival of human beings. Both of these processes are particularly ascendant now, with the widespread acceptance of neoliberal economic ideas and the rule of the ‘market’. Both contribute to the marginalization and devaluation of women and unpaid caring work. The privileging of capitalist organizations is nothing new, but it seems more obvious today than it was during the post World War II years of building welfare states. It means for individuals that the demands of work organizations usually must come first in the daily round of activities. Obviously, most of us have to go to work if we want to eat. Thus, we are hooked into employing organizations, but not on our own terms. Privileging also means that large capitalist, state and voluntary organizations, in pursuing their own ends, have disproportionate influence in defining the society as a whole. While business organizations do not necessarily agree with each other on a range of issues, there is probably consensus on the proposition that what’s good for capital in general is good for the country and the world. In this sense, economic organizations are privileged, come first over the needs of women and men and their families. Privilege is maintained by effective monopoly over the ways that production is created and coordinated and by the control of the bulk of the economic and political resources of the society. Thus, privilege is maintained and extended through concrete organizational practices, such as making political contributions and opposing organized labour. Some of these activities promote organizations’ claims to non-responsibility.

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The non-responsibility of organizations for human survival and reproduction, as well as for the natural environment, contributes to the devaluation and marginalization of caring and reproductive activities and those, mostly women, responsible for these activities. Nonresponsibility consigns caring needs to areas outside the organization’s interests and, thus, helps to maintain the image of the ideal, even adequate, employee as someone without such obligations. Thus, organizational policies and practices continue to encode this gendered notion of the employee. Non-responsibility is constituted through particular practices that are part of the continual organizing of capitalist societies, historically constituted, sometimes contested, and highly variable. These processes are linked into fundamental relations of capitalist societies: those that organize production toward profit and the accumulation of capital and not, in the first instance toward provisioning the population or assuring human reproduction. Thus, claims to nonresponsibility for both human beings and the environment are affirmations of the central aims of profit-making organizations. This idea is not new: the understanding that capitalism is, before all else, organized for accumulation and that profit-making organizations often operate without regard to the well-being of workers and communities goes back at least to Marx. The addition I wish to make is that this aspect of capitalist organization also has consequences for gendered processes. Whether non-capitalist organizations also claim nonresponsibility for reproduction is an historical and empirical question. At the same time that organizations deny responsibility for reproduction, they depend upon the ‘reproduction economy’ (Elson 1994) for their supply of workers and for the sale of many of their products. Large capitalist organizations and the men who lead them have historically (and still do today) sometimes paid attention to the needs of workers and of human reproduction in general. To secure an appropriate and committed labour force, to assure a community of consumers, to achieve legitimacy and civil order, large organizations have adapted to particular conditions of production or acceded to demands for reform from employees, labour unions, other social movements, and from government responding to the politics of these movements. The family wage, labour legislation, welfare state supports, environmental protections all require large organizations to acquiesce in measures to support human reproduction and survival. But acquiescence has rarely been enthusiastic or without

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opposition. The development of the modern capitalist corporation, in particular, can be seen as a process of claiming non-responsibility, having those claims challenged, acting to defeat those challenges, and sometimes giving in. From the first factory acts in Britain, through the efforts to establish the 10 hour day, workers compensation, child labour laws, minimum wage laws to environmental and safety protections, work organizations and associations of organisations have claimed that such protections were antithetical to the health of capital. US corporations seem more resistant than those in other countries, perhaps because the relative power of capital over labour has been stronger there. However, a distinction should be made between measures to support the reproductive needs of their own employees and measures to support the needs of the population in general. Organizations may be willing to give a living wage, some parental leave, medical insurance, and on-site day care, while opposing tax supported measures to give these protections to non-employees. I do not wish to imply that there is some fundamental economic logic of capitalism that results in one way of linking women and reproduction to production, one form of dominance of work organizations over the lives of workers, or one pattern of organizational non-responsibility. As Fred Block (1990) has recently argued, there are different strategies of accumulation and capitalism has prospered with different kinds of government policies. Similarly, capitalist organizations have prospered with different strategies of reproduction, different policies in regard to the reproductive needs of employees, and different stances towards communities and towards government supports for redistribution and reproduction in general. These differences are embedded in different gender and class relations, and, in turn, help to recreate those gender relations. For example, important differences exist between Sweden and the US in the ways that women participate in paid economic activities and in the degree to which work organizations pay attention to reproductive needs of employees and of their societies as wholes. Sweden has a very high female labour force participation rate, but 30 to 40% of women workers are employed part-time. Organizations must pay attention to employees’ reproduction needs because in many instances such attention is guaranteed by law. These supports and protections for reproductive work have not been substantially reduced in Sweden in spite of attacks on the welfare state. In the US, a somewhat smaller percentage of women are © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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employed, but a higher proportion of them work full-time than in Sweden. Organizations are not legally bound to pay much attention to reproductive needs of employees, with the exception of a few protections against dismissal due to pregnancy and allowing some unpaid leave to care for infants and sick family members. Both Sweden and the US are successful, if somewhat troubled, capitalist countries. The lesson is, as Block also points out, that these arrangements are political, not economic. In spite of great variations in the ways that capitalist organizations incorporate some concern for reproductive and survival needs, these are not their central goals. Many organizational practices by default establish the non-responsibility of the organization for human reproduction and survival. As in my example above, scheduling union– management contract talks, scheduling the introduction of new computer systems, setting the end date for research funding have nothing to do with having babies or raising children. And that is the point. These actions, in their everyday inattention to the non-work lives of participants, render peripheral and usually invisible the essential social activities of birthing, caring, and even surviving. Reproduction in this sense is outside organizational boundaries and not a matter of concern. Routine accounting practices also establish and legitimize non-responsibility. Accounting provides quantitative measurement of value involved in production and exchange. Accounting accounts for the costs of production and finance, and is focused on accumulation and profit (Montagna 1990). In the process, accounting defines what is outside the organization, what it is not responsible for — damage to the environment, the costs of raising and educating the next generation of workers, the costs of caring for the homeless or impoverished elderly. Such things are externalities (see also Waring 1988). Such things become costs, and enter the books, only when the government specifies through law that, for example, a company must bear the costs of cleaning up the water it uses, or when the company provides some benefit or service to its workers. Claims for non-responsibility for reproduction are in the ascendancy now and it is easy to identify some of the organizational processes that are contributing to this state of affairs. Employing organizations in the US have a long history of moving their operations to cheap labour areas within the country with no regard to the survival needs of communities where they had been located. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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This is, of course, a global phenomenon now. Patterns of contracting production are creating almost workerless organizations — nonresponsibility is built into the structure — no workers, no responsibility. Liz Claiborne, a foremost women’s clothing firm, is a prime example. In 1990, the company did not own any manufacturing facilities, but worked with 300 suppliers, a large proportion of which were located in Asia (Bonacich and Waller 1994). As Applebaum and Gereffi (1994, p. 44) remark: ‘Contracting means that the so-called manufacturer need not employ any production workers, run the risk of unionization or wage pressures, or be concerned with layoffs resulting from changes in product demand.’ The development of ‘global commodity chains’ (Applebaum and Gereffi 1994) is very complex and rapidly changing, involving many different relationships between organizations on a global basis, and involving different patterns of non-responsibility. Nonresponsibility is also institutionalized on the global level in policies to deal with ‘debt crises’ and other kinds of financial failures. As both the popular press and scholars recognize, banks, stock markets, financial systems are stabilized or bailed out at the cost of the living standards of the majority of the population. Kevin Phillips (1998), a conservative political and economic commentator in the US, has recently warned that this may be the next explosive political issue in the US and he makes proposals for undoing some of the non-responsibility. Current corporate reorganization processes, including down-sizing, elimination of high wage jobs, and wage and salary cuts, can also be interpreted as expanding the range of organizational non-responsibility. The working-class family wage, that support for a gendered pattern of reproduction, is all but gone now. Instead, as corporations deny their own responsibility, women are targeted as failing in their responsibilities as mothers, either because they work too much or work too little. In the US, so-called welfare reform has eliminated the right to survival for most sectors of the population. This reform is a massive victory for non-responsibility and was heavily supported by business groups under an ideological banner much like the ideology of the 1834 Poor Law reform in Britain, the poor must work or be punished. Ideologically, the non-responsibility of corporations is attributed to inevitable economic forces, but responsibility for the consequences is laid upon the people most adversely affected. Even more energetic efforts to assert nonresponsibility are underway in Congress and

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in state legislatures. For example, in Oregon, hotel operators have gotten together to push legislation that would prevent restaurant workers from benefiting from a new state minimum wage. New restrictions on workers’ compensation are being pushed. Timber organizations are working to impede environmental protections of different kinds. Welfare reform, cuts in school lunch funds, efforts to scale back the minimal protections for maternal leave all directly establish non-responsibility. Indeed, today there are so many initiatives to re-establish nonresponsibility that to enumerate them all would almost be to describe in detail what is going on in most legislatures. That is not my intention. I only want to make the point that all of these processes reinforce, even constitute, the ways that gender assumptions are built into organizational functioning. The gender division of labour between caring and providing (Leira 1994) is continually recreated in the activities and actions of the most powerful organizations that either by default or through intentional policy create caring needs as peripheral, invisible and someone else’s (women’s) responsibilities. 2. Globalization. The second challenge has already been introduced above: what are the implications of globalization for thinking about gender and organizations; how is gender implicated in the globalization of economic activities and organizations; can we think of gendering processes as occurring globally? I recognize that the term ‘globalization’ is contested and that it covers a multiplicity of processes and practices. Moreover, globalization is an old process, although the popular press often casts it as a new phenomenon. However, without trying to unravel these conceptual and empirical difficulties, I want to speculate about how the notion of globalization may open up our thinking about gendered organizing. To do this, I make reference in a general way to the very large literature on women and development and gender and economic policy that includes much research on the working lives of poor women, especially women in nonNorthern countries (for example, Bakker 1994; Benería and Roldán 1987; Boserup 1970; Nash and Fernández-Kelly 1983). Reading this literature, as well as other literature on globalization, raises the question of the boundaries of organizations and the parochialness of our thought — what is our unit of analysis or the topic of our studies? Have we, in our research and theorizing about gender and organization, chosen a particular form of

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organizing, the dominant one in industrial countries and schools of business, and called this ‘organization’? Once we take a global look, we can see other forms of capitalist organization in which women are incorporated differently and in which gender has different meanings; the locations of boundaries of the phenomena and of our studies become much less clear. For example, when production is done in the home, with the family organized as an entrepreneurial enterprise as in the satellite factory system in Taiwan (Hsiung 1996), gender, production and reproduction meld in different ways than in Western societies. Do we call that an organization? Is Liz Claiborne, contracting out all production and with relatively few employees, an organization? Do its boundaries extend to Southeast Asia where most of its clothing is produced? Both gender and class patterns look very different depending upon where we locate the boundaries. Moreover, our judgements about the degree of gender inequality in an organization can be strongly influenced by the setting of boundaries. For example, the corporate centre of Liz Claiborne could be gender integrated while high degrees of gender segregation existed in the production factories. Globalizing our thinking, thus, takes us outside the boundaries of what we have called organizations and makes it more difficult to generalize — even about the gendering of capitalist organizations. Globalizing our thinking also makes it clear that gender is involved in different ways even in capitalist organizations that appear to be very similar. For example, core Japanese organizations always excluded women from life-time, high wage, secure employment, while using them as a highly flexible auxiliary labour force. Perhaps some of the now-tarnished Japanese miracle should be attributed to the gender structures of their organizations, as Stewart Clegg (1990) has hinted. Should we think of these various forms as postmodern or post-Fordist organizing or as the re-emergence of early forms of capitalist organizing that integrate women differently into production and employ different forms of exploitation and control? Gender is obviously implicated in globalization, as recognized by the many researchers referred to above and by those who have pointed to the ‘feminization’ of the world labour force (Standing 1988). Gender has been a resource for globalizing firms as they seek out new sources of low-wage labour on the grounds that women (are forced to) work for lower wages than men and, in addition, have more ‘nimble fingers’ than men. In country after country, women © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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and often children have been drawn into production for the world market and into wage labour in multinational organizations. Although such employment often provides welcome income, much research also exposes how exploitative it is. Multinationals, particularly US companies, may find it profitable to reproduce exploitative gender relations (see e.g. Ong 1983). For example, a recent article (Bhopal 1997) details the campaign of intimidation orchestrated by a US company against strong union organizing among electronics workers in Malaysia. The author notes that 85% of the workers were Malaysian women, but does not examine the role that gender might have played in their struggle or the gender consequences of the loss of union rights. A ‘gender and organization’ perspective might contribute to research on such processes by illuminating further the concrete practices that maintain oppressive gender relations. Such knowledge might also have political uses, as suggested by recent campaigns in the US against oppressive labour practices of firms such as Nike and Liz Claiborne. At the other end of commodity chains, many women in the old industrial countries have lost their relatively well-paying industrial jobs and have gone to work for Burger King or the local home for the elderly at lower wages. This process may have been more obvious in the United States than elsewhere, and the directions of the flow of jobs sometimes differs. For example, sometimes jobs that had been exported return to the United States as low-wage, sweat shop work now done by immigrants. The export of jobs has obviously also affected men and masculinity in the old industrial countries, as they are extruded from work organizations into unemployment, less-skilled jobs, or early retirement. This process has been relatively little studied, at least from a gendered organization perspective. Another avenue into global gendering processes is through examination of the activities of those who organize and lead these processes. Globalization has always been driven by organizations dominated by men: in our history the East India Company is an early example. Of course, researchers rarely study how gender influences the orchestration of contemporary globalizing processes, probably because access to those levels of corporate, international agency (IMF, World Bank e.g.), and state decision making is difficult to obtain. One exception is Alison Woodward’s (1996) study of the gendered nature of the European Commission, revealing a highly masculinized bureaucracy dominated by © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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engineers and lawyers with a miserable record on opportunities for women. Press reports of international financial scandals and novels describing the machinations of Wall Street bond salesmen give some insight into the organizing practices, passions, and illusions of men involved in the globalization of financial markets. In an outstanding book about the world of (mostly male) corporate managers, Robert Jackall (1988) chronicles the competition, ambitions, and defeats inherent in life at the near top and top of corporate hierarchies. Although he discusses gender in only one section, in which he describes the difficulties experienced by women in presenting themselves as competent managers, most of the book can be read as an account about men with money and power who are desperately hanging on to that money and power. Similar studies of masculinities in globalizing organizations would be instructive. 3. Emotions/sexuality. To close this discussion, I turn to a different approach to this gendered reality we are attempting to understand, to questions about the implication of emotions and sexuality for understanding male, particularly managerial, behaviours in organizations. I want to speak briefly about the pleasures of technology and power and the effectiveness of violence. I am, of course, building upon the work of many scholars (Adkins 1995; Kerfoot and Knights 1996; Burris 1996), as well as some earlier remarks of mine (Acker 1990) about the work of Sally Hacker (1989). Sally argued that there is sensual pleasure, even an erotic element, in work with technology, developing this argument from her own childhood and adult experiences and her research in which she often immersed herself in work with technology. Such sensual pleasures help to explain how it is that some people develop a passion for their work. Perhaps men dominate in computer science and the computer industries partly because there is an erotic component to the experience with the technology that is lacking for many women. We may have failed to take adequate notice of other pleasures as we have considered the role that emotions play in organizations. Arlie Hochschild’s (1997) recent description of the pleasures of being at work, pleasures that make the workplace a more desirable place to be than the home, is an exception. Pleasure may extend to domination (Hearn 1993). To dominate may produce a rush of exhilaration. Hacker argued that the pleasures of technology often become ‘harnessed to domination, and passion becomes directed toward power over nature, the machine,

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and other people, particularly women, in the work hierarchy’ (Acker 1990, p. 153). Media stories about the success of Bill Gates certainly present him as someone who finds great pleasure in domination, as well as in computers. Could the pleasures of Bill Gates be a key clue to what is happening today in large dominating organizations? Violence is another aspect of organizational life that seems underinvestigated and undertheorized, except in regard to organizations that explicitly deal with violence such as armies, police department, prisons, and football teams. I and my colleague Don Van Houten have recently had an unanticipated encounter with organizational violence in a study of gender and organizational change. We are still trying to interpret these events. We were studying restructuring processes in a professional organization with an expert staff of around 500 and an administrative and support staff of around 400. The restructuring efforts were not going well and the president of the firm was feeling considerable stress because of budget and other pressures, as he himself told us. One day as we arrived for some interviews, we heard that the president had been told the evening before by the chairperson of the board to leave the buildings and remain away until further notice. We heard that he had been escorted from the site by security guards who had also distributed pepper spray and panic buttons to women top administrators, those with whom the president worked most closely. The president was reputed to have threatened to kill himself and to also kill the woman to whom he had made the threat. The president denied these charges, saying that he had been tired and that he had only been joking. The board of directors held several long and secret meetings on the matter and finally decided to accept the president’s version of events and reinstate him. They did not invite any other people involved, including the top women administrators, to give their versions of the problem. The president told us that there had been a conspiracy against him. The other participants in this drama were very guarded; essentially they would not talk about it except in the most vague terms. Nevertheless, we were able to put together a provisional account. The president was a large, imposing, seemingly affable man who sometimes became very angry, exploding into intimidating shouting. In addition, he did not trust the vice-presidents, did not tell them about his underlying policies for budget restraint, and often countermanded his own decisions to the great frustration of other administrators.

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Many of those with whom he worked most closely felt under constant threat. Seven or eight months before the alleged death threats and his suspension, working relationships at the top level had become so difficult that the board asked the president and vice-presidents to seek the assistance of management consulting psychologists, which they did. These consultations did not seem to help, and the pressures continued to escalate until that fateful day. Whatever the president meant, it seems clear that the atmosphere was sufficiently filled with fear of his potential violence that a series of mature and thoughtful people, including the attorney for the firm, could think that he had threatened suicide and murder. This account is influenced by my own encounter with this president. Don and I had given some feedback on our study to those who participated. We thought that it was quite innocuous material, but the president was upset with it. He telephoned me, not Don, who is also a very large man, and forcefully expressed his displeasure. I felt attacked and intimidated, as some of our respondents felt, even though his attack threatened nothing about my work or life. I was amazed at my reaction. Our problem in interpretation is whether we should see this as an instance of individual pathology and group panic or see it as an instance of more general phenomena in gendered organizations. We might follow Kerfoot and Knights (1996) and argue that the president exhibited an isolated and self-estranged masculinity becoming more and more anxious as his efforts at control were ineffectual. Or we might argue, as did one of our informants, that he was really a classic male abusive personality. But we would also like to make a more structural interpretation, that the potential for violence lurks behind managerial authority as it does behind all authority. Many managerial acts, for example firing workers or intimidating those who wish to join a union, have an element of violence. Top managers, usually men, can make violence displays such as shouting, throwing things, banging a table or stomping around the room, usually with impunity. They control by fear of different sorts (Jackall 1988). The legitimacy of violence is distributed hierarchically. When the top manager is male, large, intimidating and unpredictable, the spectre of physical violence may be particularly oppressive for women under his control. The women must find ways to negotiate these violent gender relations to minimize damage to their self-confidence and to their careers. We think this is what happened in our case. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998

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In conclusion, I want to link three disparate challenges in studying gender and organizations. The non-responsibility for reproduction of large organizations is obvious in the process of globalization and in the measures, such as forced domestic austerity to pay foreign debts, long practised to resolve the crises of the global system and its big players. Globalizing processes are often cast as inevitable and ‘economic’, but it is real men who make and remake, within and between their organizations, the so-called economy. What are their pleasures and violences?

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Production: The Apparel Industry in the Pacific Rim. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Boserup, Ester (1970) Woman’s Role in Economic Development. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Burris, Beverly H. (1996) Technocracy, Patriarchy and Management. In Collinson, David L. and Hearn, Jeff (eds) Men as Managers, Managers as Men. London: Sage. Buswell, Carol and Jenkins, Sarah (1994) Equal Opportunities Policies, Employment and Patriarchy. Gender Work and Organization 1, 83–93. Clegg, Stewart R. (1990) Modern Organizations: Organization Studies in the Postmodern World. London: Sage. Cockburn, Cynthia (1991) In the Way of Women. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Connell, R.W. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Elson, Diane (1994) Micro, Meso, Macro: Gender and Economic Analysis in the Context of Policy Reform. In Bakker, Isabella (ed.) The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy. London: Zed Books. Friedland, Roger and Robertson, A.F. (1990) Beyond the Marketplace. In Friedland, Roger and Robertson, A.F. (eds) Beyond the Marketplace: Rethinking Economy and Society. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Hacker, Sally (1989) Pleasure, Power, and Technology. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Hearn, Jeff (1993) Emotive Subjects: Organizational Men, Organizational Masculinities and the (De)construction of ‘Emotions’. In Stephen Fineman (ed.) Emotions in Organizations. London: Sage. Hearn, Jeff (1996) Is masculinity dead? A critique of the concept of masculinity/masculinities. In Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (ed.) Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas. Buckingham: Open University Press. Hochschild, A. (1983). The Managed Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hochschild, A. (1997) The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan Books. Hsiung, Ping-Chun (1996) Living Rooms as Factories: Class, Gender and the Satellite Factory System in Taiwan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Jackall, Robert (1988) Moral Mazesa: TheWorld of Corporate Managers. New York: Oxford University Press. Jay, Martin (1973). The Dialectical Imagination. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Kvande, E. And Rasmussen, B. (1994) Men in maledominated organizations and their encounter with women intruders. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 10, 163–74. Kerfoot, Deborah and Knights, David (1996). ‘The Best is Yet to Come?’: The Quest for Embodiment in Managerial Work. In Collinson, David L. And Hearn, Jeff (eds) Men as Managers, Managers as Men. London: Sage. Leira, Arnlaug (1994) Combining Work and Family: working mothers in Scandinavia and the European Community. In Brown, Phillip and

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Crompton, Rosemary (eds) Economic Restructuring and Social Exclusion. London: UCL Press. Mills, C.W. (1956) White Collar. New York: Oxford University Press. Montagna, Paul (1990) Accounting rationality and financial legitimation. In Zukin, Sharon and DiMaggio, Paul (eds) Structures of Capital: The social organization of the economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nash, June and Fernández-Kelly, María Patricia (eds) (1983) Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor. Albany: SUNY Press. Ong, Aihwa (1983) Global Industries and Malay Peasants in Peninsular Malaysia. In Nash, June and Fernández-Kelly, María Patricia (eds) Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor. Albany: SUNY Press. Perrow, Charles (1986) Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (3rd ed). New York: Random House. Phillips, Kevin (1998) The Lock on Market Forces. The Register Guard, January 4, 1B.

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Pierce, Jennifer L. (1995) Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Dorothy (1990) The Conceptual Practices of Power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Standing, Guy (1988) Global Feminization through Flexible Labor. World Development, 17, 1077–95. Waring, Marilyn (1988) If Women Counted. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Widerberg, Karin (1991) Reforms for Women — On Male Terms — The Example of the Swedish Legislation on Parental Leave. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 19, 27–44. Woodward, Alison E. (1996). Multinational Masculinities and European Bureaucracies. In Collinson, David L. and Hearn, Jeff (eds) Men as Managers, Managers as Men. London: Sage. Zukin, Sharon and DiMaggio, Paul (1990) Structures of Capital: The social organization of the economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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