Gender, management and organisation

1
Gender, management and organisation

• Workshop 2

2
Modern Organisations and Pandoras box

• Editorial by Czarniawska-Joerges 1994
• Gender problem minority problem?
• Neither men nor young women wanted to have
  anything to do with the equality programme
• Only one sex is seen as problematic
• Gender construction people are treated
  differently depending on their biological gender,
  even if this is irrelevant in a given context
• Gender issues taboo?
• The importance of language!

3

• Have there been any improvements in relation to
  gender and language use?
• Crux of the womens problem is assumed to be
  that few women are managers
• Admission of women into work organisations a
  major wave of immigration (Knocke, 1991)
• Purpose of research to bring complex phenomena
  to light but also explain how they arise
• Discrimination earlier considered as imperfection
  of organisations but now understood as built into
  organisations
• What is meant by the metaphor Pandoras box?

4
Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies a Theory of Gendered
Organizations

• Article by Joan Acker 1991
• A systematic theory of gender is needed for a
  number of reasons
• Because of gender segregation
• Because of income and status inequality
• Because in organisations widely disseminated
  cultural images of gender are invented and
  reproduced
• Aspects of individual gender identity are
  products of organizational processes and
  pressures (specifically masculinity)
• A feminist (!) project large scale organisation
  should be made more democratic and supportive of
  humane goals

5

•       Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977) Men and
  women of the corporation.
• i.      Gender differences in organizational
  behaviour are due to structure rather than to
  characteristics of women and men
• ii.      dead-end jobs, tokens
• iii.      critic specificity of male dominance
  is absent in Kanters argument

6

• Ferguson (1984) The Feminist Case against
  Bureaucracy.
• Feminist discourse, rooted in womens experiences
  of caring and nurturing outside bureaucracys
  control, provides a ground for opposition to
  bureaucracy and for the development of
  alternative ways of organizing society

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Acker continued

• Gendering occurs in five interacting processes
• TASK Choose one of Ackers five gendered
  processes (pp 167-68). Describe the process to
  the others in the class. Give examples of the
  process in real life. You can think of your own
  experiences in organisations as well.
• Job evaluation
• The abstract, gender-neutral job
• Skills in e.g. money-making valued higher than
  skills with dealing with human relations
• Hegemonic masculinity formed in opposition to
  women and other masculinities

8

• Consequences caring work could be just as well
  rewarded as dealing with money

9
Power

• Green, Parkin and Hearn (2001)
• Affirmative action is a radical approach to equal
  opportunities involving the application of
  different policies or processes to specific,
  often disadvantaged groups, such as black people
  or women, to transform inequalities to equalities
  (Bagilhole, 1997)
• Important to focus on power in organisation
• TASK How do you recognize a powerful person in
  an organisation? When have you experienced
  powerlessness in organisations?

10

• Power traditionally construed as
• Capacity or ability to dominate or influence
  others through reward or punishment
• Some peoples interests never reaching the formal
  level of decision making and agenda setting
• Peoples real interests as being distorted by
  ideological conditioning devices
• Individuals constituted by their discursive
  environments and therefore it is impossible to
  see whether there are real, objective
  interests to be defined

11

• Public/private dichotomies
• Homosociability individuals tend to like and
  prefer others who resemble them

12
Jerosgamos The Metaphor of the Alchemic Wedding

• Archetypes of femaleness
• The complementarity of female/male