With Special Guest Summer Jackson, Harvard Business School
Joan Acker
By 1990, the first two waves of feminism had passed, but women continued to be marginalized in the workplace. While these waves succeeded in articulating and addressing gender inequalities, men and women were far from being on equitable terms in organizations. Part of the reason, as Joan Acker describes in the 1990 article “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations,” is that prior feminist research had wrongly assumed that organizational structures were gender neutral. Instead, everything about organizations from structures to symbols are inherently gendered, and until that was acknowledged and studied, organizations would continue to reinforce long-standing gender inequality. Acker’s article exemplifies the shift in the gender discourse toward feminism’s “third wave,” where calls for reform the workplace were overtaken by calls to transform it.
Acker’s purpose was to issue a clarion call for new research into a “systematic theory of gender and organizations” that addresses the persistence of gender segregation through organizational practices, the resulting income and status inequalities as a result, and the inherent reproduction of these inequalities through symbols, norms, and structures. Her critique was not only leveled about organizations but also against scholarship which assumed gender neutral structures populated by workers. Furthermore, she pointed out to the limits of only considering questions of efficiency and performance in the study of organizations as it that prevented (feminist) inquiries into the humane treatment of members and improved participation in decision-making. In developing a feminist view of organizations, she hoped to make them more “democratic and more supportive of humane goals.”
Acker builds her case by examining the growing body of evidence from the 1970s and 1980s that gender is a constitutive element of organizations, not separate from it. She writes that “the structure of the labor market, relations in the workplace, the control of the work processes, and the underlying wage relation are always affected by symbols of gender, processes of gender identity, and material inequalities between women and men” (p. 145). Among other processes, she explores how work divisions, ideal work behaviors, and images of success reinforce power and status differences based on gender. Moreover, the tendency to disembody the worker from the job and treat workers as interchangeable entities further exacerbates gender differences rather than resolves them.
Acker’s proposals are even more relevant as the pandemic and various economic downturns have highlighted the problems brought by looking at workers as disembodied and jobs as neutral structures. Such classic work thus raises timely questions around how competitive pressures may further push human approaches to work further away? And how some of the changes brought by the pandemic may be leveraged towards more democratic workplaces?
Part 1. A call for research on gender and organizations (released 14 March 2023)
Part 2. The struggle towards more humane organizations (released 21 March 2023)
Read with us:
Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender & society, 4(2), 139-158.
To Learn More:
Kanter, R. M. (2008). Men and women of the corporation: New edition. Basic books.
Ray, V. (2019). A theory of racialized organizations. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 26-53.
Rivera, L. A. (2012). Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite professional service firms. American sociological review, 77(6), 999-1022.
Turco, C. J. (2010). Cultural foundations of tokenism: Evidence from the leveraged buyout industry. American sociological review, 75(6), 894-913.
Other Talking About Organizations Podcast episodes referenced:
Episode 82. Women of Organization Scholarship — Classics AoM PDW LIVE
Episode 68. Globalization and Culture Clashes — American Factory (Documentary)
Episode 35. The Managed Heart — Arlie Hochschild
Episode 17. Tokenism — Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Title Image Credit: U.S. Department of Defense photo of two “fingerprint center” workers who processed fingerprint cards for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation during WWII; public domain.
