Katri Otonkorpi-Lehtoranta

Intersections of gender, age and occupational group in the Finnish defence forces

Purpose – Addressing the challenges expressed by organization researchers and Leslie McCall with her conceptual framework of intercategorical analysis, this paper contributes to the methodological debate on intersectionality. The purpose of this paper is to explore intersectionality on the organizational level in the Finnish defence forces (FDF). In the paper, the authors explore how the interactions between categories of gender, age, and position in the organization explain the concerns of employees in the changing military organization. Furthermore, the authors also investigate the types of intersectional mechanisms behind the empirical observations. Design/methodology/approach – The logistic regression analysis is based on a survey addressed to the whole salaried personnel in the FDF in 2011 (n=8,093, response rate being 54 per cent). Findings – In line with McCall’s (2005) intercategorical approach, the analysis shows that the plain examination of main effects of the variables will not suffice, but th...