Joan Acker

HIERARCHIES, JOBS, BODIES: A Theory of Gendered Organizations

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work. Abstract jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; mens bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of mens bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference.

Inequality Regimes Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations

In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs.

From Sex Roles to Gendered Institutions

Gender has become, in the last twenty years, part of the everyday language of social science, largely as a consequence of the feminist movement and the accompanying intellectual efforts to better understand the systematic and widespread subordination of women and their domination by men. Although the term is widely used, there is no common understanding of its meaning, even among feminist scholars (Butler 1990). In sociology, feminists began with one view of gender, which has been gradually broadened and changed, although the newer view has not totally displaced the older one. To argue that there are two views of gender within sociology is, of course, to oversimplify a complex discussion containing a number of different positions and overlapping viewpoints. However, casting these positions into two views is, I believe, helpful in highlighting the emergence of a new way of thinking about central institutional processes in our society. In the earlier usage, gender is another word for sex or for women; the study of gender is the study of women, sex roles, or both. Gender, in this view, is an area or a field, but one that is peripheral to the central concerns of sociology, of interest primarily to specialists. In the newer usage, gender is theorized as a basic principle of social structure and cultural interpretation (e.g., Scott 1986; Acker 1988). Rather than being a specialized area within an accepted domain, gender is the patterning of difference and domination through distinctions between women and men that is integral to many societal processes. This way of theorizing gender criticizes and challenges existing frameworks, arguing that women and gender roles cannot just be added to existing theory and that theories that are silent about gender are fundamentally flawed. This more radical view of gender is part of the ongoing development of feminist theory and method; hence the elaboration of gender is still in process. In this essay I explore these different definitions of gender and what it means to talk about gendered institutions. Gender was first employed to emphasize the social and relational nature of differences between women and men in contrast to biological differences between the sexes. Sex was nature and gender was nurture. In the language of sociology, gender roles replaced sex roles, as gender represented more accurately than sex the social construction of identities and roles dividing societies into women and men. Sex and gender were interdependent, but clearly distinguished. Gender was social, thus variable and subject to change, while sex represented the essential and unchanging physical differences in human reproduction. An implicit causal link existed between sex and gender. Positing a clear distinction and a causal link between sex and gender was a useful tactic for those feminist sociologists who took a biosocial view of gender (e.g., Rossi 1984) and saw gendered behavior as at least in part physiologically determined. Although the contribution of physiological differences to social behavior is not settled, for me and others, this distinction between sex and gender became problematic. Variations in actions and feelings among both men and women, as well as similarities between women and men, seemed too great to allow tracing behavior to biological differences. Another problem had to do with the meaning of sex. Sex signifies differences between female and male bodies, such as external genitalia, hormonal production, ovaries and sperm. These differences define the binary categories male and female and serve as signs that persons belong to one or the other. Although the categories are seen as natural, thus prior to social intervention in the form of gender, the identification of certain physical characteristics as the basis for categorizing people and the assignment of

Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism

Although women, as aggregates, have lower social status than men in all known societies, sex-based inequalities have not been considered in most theoretical and empirical work on social stratification. Assumptions about the social position of women, found in the stratification literature, implicitly justify the exclusion of sex as a significant variable. This paper argues that these assumptions are logically contradictory and empirically unsupported. If sex is to be taken as a significant variable, the family can no longer be viewed as the unit in social stratification. Conceptual and methodological problems are generated if the family is not considered as the unit. However, a reconceptualization which includes sex-based inequalities may lead to a more accurate and more complex picture of stratification systems.

The Future of ‘Gender and Organizations’: Connections and Boundaries

‘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.’

Differential Recruitment and Control: The Sex Structuring of Organizations.

Joan Acker and Donald R. Van Houten Organizational theory and research has neglected analyses of sex differences in organizational behavior. When sex differences have been noted, they have been explained in terms of differences in biology, socialization, attitudes, and role commitment. On the basis of a reexamination of the Hawthorne studies and Croziers work on two French bureaucracies, this paper suggests that sex differences may also be due to more structural factors such as differential recruitment and sexlinked control mechanisms. On that basis, the paper suggests a reinterpretation of the findings from those studies. The sex structuring of organizations needs to be taken into account along with organizational factors to arrive at fuller explanations of organizational phenomena.

Gender, Capitalism and Globalization:

Gendering the discourse of globalization will help to develop a better understanding of globalization processes and their consequences for women and men. I argue that gender processes and ideologies are embedded in globalizing capitalism in the separation of capitalist production and human reproduction and the corporate claims to non-responsibility for reproduction; in the important role of hegemonic masculinities in globalizing processes, and in the ways that gender serves as a resource for capital. I also discuss some of the consequences for women and men of these processes of globalization.

Gendered organizations and intersectionality: problems and possibilities

Purpose – Theorizing that was conceived in the 1970s about gendered processes in organizations helped explain gender inequalities in organizations. This article aims to take the opportunity to re‐examine these processes – including the gendered substructure of organizations, gendered subtext, the gendered logic of organization and the abstract worker from the perspective of the original author in a present‐day context.Design/methodology/approach – A reflexive approach was used to consider how gender theorizing itself has become more complex as captured in the notion of intersectionality when gender process interacts with other forms of inequality.Findings – The key finding is the persistence of inequality regimes despite organizational changes, which still make developments in theorizing gender processes relevant.Originality/value – This article is an opportunity to reflect on the conceptualization and development of ones theorizing over three decades, which has suggested that there are still key questio...

THINKING ABOUT WAGES:: The Gendered Wage Gap in Swedish Banks

The gender-based wage gap in Swedish banks began to increase in 1983 after many years of decline. The growth in the gap between the wages of nonmanagerial women and men employees was particularly high. This article asks, How did this happen? Wage setting, part of the processes of control in capitalist economies, is accomplished through concrete practices under specific historical conditions. The author studied these practices and conditions to understand the increasing wage gap. Through interviews and examination of union and management documents, the author constructs an account of a wage-setting process that, in spite of a strong union and centralized bargaining, allows management to make discretionary wage decisions that favor raises for men over raises for women. Since 1983, competition and deregulation in the banking sector as well as union strategies have created conditions in which an increasing proportion of annual wage increases have been distributed on a discretionary basis. This has led to an increase in the wage gap. The author concludes that policies to raise womens relative wages should pursue general, across-the-board bargaining rather than individualized wage setting.

Comparable worth : new directions for research

Comparable worth--equal pay for jobs of equal value--has been called the civil rights issue of the 1980s. This volume consists of a committee report that sets forth an agenda of much-needed research on this issue, supported by six papers contributed by eminent social scientists. The research agenda presented is structured around two general themes: (1) occupational wage differentials and discrimination and (2) wage adjustment strategies and their impact. The papers deal with a wide range of topics, including job evaluation, social judgment biases in comparable worth analysis, the economics of comparable worth, and prospects for pay equity.