Kristina Johansson

Gender-equal organizations as a prerequisite for workplace learning

PurposeThis article explores how the gendering of the learning environment acts to shape the design and outcome of workplace learning. The primary intention is to reflect on the idea of gender-equa ...

The Discursive Resistance of Men to Gender-equality Interventions: Negotiating “Unjustness” and “Unnecessity” in Swedish Forestry

This article adds to the understanding of men’s discursive resistance in relation to gender-equality interventions at work. Using Swedish men forestry professionals as the empirical base, the result shows how discursive resistance were performative acts, part of the construction of the same gender-equality interventions and organizational contexts that they were perceived to describe. In this case, direct opposition to gender equality provided a limited discursive position and sets of logics available in practice. Instead, the possibilities to renegotiate gender-equality interventions as unjust and unnecessary required, we conclude that the industry’s ambition to hire and promote more women was perceived to have led to the use of affirmative action and the disruption of meritocratic principles and that the problems of gender equality were placed in the traditional forestry and among “prejudiced old men,” as oppose to the more “modern” and “women friendly” forestry of today.

Making gender–work practicable: situating men's reconstruction of ‘women's job’ in a Swedish supermarket's micro-politics

Based on empirical data from one Swedish supermarket, this article argues that mens reconstructing of ‘womens work’ in accordance with a masculinised sense of self what Simpson (2004, ‘Masculinity at Work: The Experience of Men in Female Dominated Occupations’, Work, Employment & Society 18, no 2: 349–368) calls ‘gender–work’ is not limited to individual mens perceptions and creations of self. Rather, by investigating the gendered boundary work in which the manager and other workers engage, this study shows how these reconstructions are legitimised and made practicable by organisational micro-politics. By emphasising the specific skills required by ‘their’ department – produce – the male workers distanced themselves from the routine and standardised stocking that dominated the work performed at the supermarket. This notion that working in the produce department required specialised knowledge was legitimised by the manager and the organisation of work at the supermarket. While at times, other workers (most of them women) challenged the boundaries of the produce department, they simultaneously re-established those boundaries by glossing over potential conflicts and maintaining equal treatment existed within the organisation.

#Metoo in the Swedish forest sector: testimonies from harassed women on sexualised forms of male control

ABSTRACT This study adds to the literature on the gendered culture of the forest sector by examining testimonies of sexual harassment in relation to the gendering of forestry-related competence and organisations and the consequences that the sexualisation of social relations in organisations has, mainly for women. The empirical base of the study comprised testimonies within the campaign #slutavverkat published on Instagram to highlight experiences of sexual harassment of women in the Swedish forest sector. Qualitative content analysis of the testimonies suggested that the situations described in the testimonies in #slutavverkat comprise controlling actions that diminish women’s power in the forest sector. Sexualised forms of male control and harassment thus work to remind women that they are first and foremost a representation of women, rather than of forestry professions and knowledge. In that sense, sexualised forms of male control and harassment are part of, rather than deviating from, the overall gendering of forestry as a men-dominated sphere. The study adds to organisational understandings and policy developments on discrimination and harassment and suggests that researchers and policy-makers interested in reducing inequality in forestry need to pay more attention to issues of harassment and sexualisation of social relations.