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Celebrating Joan Acker's contribution to theorising gender and organisation
Edited by Susan Sayce [University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK]
Theorizing gender and organizations began in the late 1960s and early 1970s as feminist scholars criticized conventional organizational research as inadequate because it ignores the importance of gender in working life (e.g. [6] Acker and Van Houten, 1974; [15] Kanter, 1977). Since then, scholars have done a great deal of research on gender processes in organizations, created new concepts, including "gendered" and "gendering," and greatly increased knowledge about how gender inequalities are produced and reproduced. But, a number of issues about how to think about gender inequalities remain unresolved. New questions will undoubtedly keep challenging this field because the empirical terrain is constantly changing. In addition, theorizing gender has become much more complicated because of "intersectionality," the idea that gendered processes do not stand alone, but intersect with and are shaped by race and class processes, as well as other forms of inequality and exclusion. The papers in this issue of EDI deal with issues about theorizing gender and with issues about intersectionality, as well as with questions about how to use this conceptual approach in doing research. I will outline how I presently think about these dilemmas and discuss briefly some of the challenges to researchers in this field arising from changes in economies, technologies, the organization of work and production, and the dominance of neo-liberal market ideologies. The examples I use are primarily from research in the US Research from other fairly successful capitalist countries seems to show similar, but not identical patterns.
Some dilemmas in conceptualizing gender in organizing
Two dilemmas stand out as important in the papers in this issue of EDI :
how to best conceptualize the gendering of organizations; and
how to conceptualize "intersectionality."
The notion of a gendered substructure of organizations is a way to begin to answer the persistent question: why do gender inequalities, including the gap between women's and men's pay and the sex segregation of jobs ([13] IWPR, 2011), survive in spite of powerful women's movements, laws mandating equality, massive movement of women into the paid labor force, and the achievement of gender equality in college graduation? "Gendered Substructure" points to often-invisible processes in the...