‘To Do Or Not To Do (Gender)’ and Changing the Sex‐Typing of British Theatre

Concepts of doing, and undoing, gender have become increasingly prevalent within studies of sex‐typed work. However, these concepts, as currently figured and applied, contain a significant analytical lacuna: they tend not to register changes in the sex‐typing of work. In this study we engage this research gap by addressing the changing sex‐typing of British theatre — specifically, the shift from female‐dominated amateur to male‐dominated professional theatre work. We draw upon and develop concepts of doing and undoing gender to understand changes in the sex‐typing of work. In so doing, we explain how spatially and temporally differentiated ways of doing ‘male’ and ‘female’ become implicated in how people make sense of, and enact, the changing spaces and times of ‘amateur/female’ ‘professional/male’ work. Our analysis of theatre work suggests that, despite recent criticisms of their wider significance, concepts of un/doing gender are useful to understand broader changes in the sex‐typing of work. Thus, it also appears possible to (un)change such sex‐typings by undoing gender. However, our analysis suggests that such subversive acts remain ineffective, unless those involved in such gendered undoings engage with, rather than renounce, the gendered doings that help enact the changing sex‐typing of work.     

‘Writing’ aesth‐ethics on the child's body: Developing maternal subjectivities through clothing our children

What could we learn from the ‘aesth‐ethic’ practices of clothing children? The dual focus of this article is to analyse the everyday clothing of children as well as the development of maternal subjectivities as relevant to discussions of aesthetic labour in the field of organization studies. Drawing upon the literatures on aesthetic labour and maternal subjectivities in the field of organization studies, we develop a fine‐grained understanding of the relatively intense and effortful maternal labours that clothing our children encapsulates. Methodologically, we use autoethnographic diary notes combined with feminist ‘memory work’ to analyse clothing as an affectual form of storytelling or ‘writing’ on the child's body that (re)produces certain sociocultural understandings about mothering, sustainability and childhood(s) in a Nordic context embraced by western consumerism. By considering the limitations of the approach taken to drawing wider conclusions about motherhoods, identity construction and clothing, this article advances our understanding of the development of particular middle‐class maternal subjectivities seeking to problematize mass consumerism through childrenswear, and how idea(l)s concerning gender and childhood(s) are being (re)produced in and through clothing.     

New maps of struggle for gender justice: Rethinking feminist research on organizations and work

The 2018 Gender, Work and Organization conference was held in Sydney. That fact is relevant to the issues now facing feminist organization research. The journal was launched in 1994 in the global North, in the wake of the women's liberation movement but after a first wave of neoliberal politics. Gender studies has changed since then, especially with growing recognition of feminist thought and activism in the global South. There have been changes in the object of knowledge ‐ that is, work and organization ‐ especially managerial transformation of organizations and global economic restructuring. There are related changes in the political arena, most recently the rise of an authoritarian populism with new patterns of masculinity politics. Proposals are made for an agenda of feminist research in this field, relevant to the new circumstances and the continuing struggles for gender equality.     

They are all ‘doing gender’ but are they are all passing? A case study of the appropriation of a sociological concept1

The concept of ‘doing gender’ was placed on the sociological agenda by West and Zimmerman . In their seminal paper published in 1987, they provided a systematic theory of gender as a routine and ongoing process and outlined a distinctly ethnomethodological approach to investigating how gender is enacted, understood and rendered accountable. West and Zimmerman's notion of ‘doing gender’ has subsequently become a central concept in many fields of sociological research, however, upon closer examination although many authors claim to be using the concept – in effect to be doing‘doing gender’– the concept's intellectual roots in ethnomethodology are not always recognised or reflected: in short not all are passing. The purpose of our study is to explore the career trajectory of this concept and to systematically assess the manner in which ‘doing’ has been employed. From a review of 226 journal articles, books, dissertations and association papers, we provide an overview of the uses of this construct and examine the ways in which ‘doing gender’ has been assimilated into current theoretical and methodological practice.     

‘Workaholics’ and ‘whingeing women’: Theorising intimacy and emotion work — the last frontier of gender inequality?

In a variety of discourses and empirical studies it has been argued that compared with women, men show more reluctance to express intimate emotion in heterosexual couple relationships. Our paper attempts to theorise this gender asymmetry in intimate emotional behaviour as a sort of ‘emotional power’, within the wider context of continuing gender inequalities of resources and power in society. To the extent that men's role as breadwinner becomes their central life interest (they become ‘workaholics’), women are left with emotional responsibility for the private sphere, including the performance of the ‘emotion work’ necessary to maintain the couple relationship itself. Increasingly women's dissatisfaction in relationships (which men dismiss as unjustified ‘whingeing’) stems mainly from this unequal division. Yet many women still collude with male power by living the family ‘myth’ and ‘playing the couple game’; they perform emotion work on themselves to convince themselves that they are ‘ever so happy really’, thereby helping to reproduce their own false consciousness. This suggests that gender asymmetry in relation to intimacy and emotion work may be the last and most obstinate manifestation and frontier of gender inequality.     

Discourses of Work–Life Balance: Negotiating ‘Genderblind’ Terms in Organizations

This article examines current debates about gender equality, work‐life balance and flexible working. We contrast policymakers’ and organizational discourses of flexible working and work–life balance with managers’ and employees’ talk about these issues within their organizations. We show how, despite the increasingly gender‐neutral language of the official discourses, in the data studied participants consistently reformulate the debates around gendered explanations and assumptions. For example, a ‘generic female parent’ is constructed in relation to work–life balance and flexible working yet participants routinely maintain that gender makes no difference within their organization. We consider the effects of these accounts; specifically the effect on those who take up flexible working, and the perceived backlash against policies viewed as favouring women or parents. We argue that the location of work–life balance and flexibility debates within a gender‐neutral context can in practice result in maintaining or encouraging gendered practices within organizations. Implications of this for organizations, for policymakers and for feminist researchers are discussed.     

Craft as work–life unity: The careers of skilled working‐class men and their sons and grandsons after deindustrialization

This article focuses on the enduring significance of craft in the careers of Kent Royal Dockyard craftworkers and their sons and grandsons after deindustrialization. The closure of this naval shipbuilding and repair yard together with the subsequent move to post‐industrial employment did not end men's engagement with their craft practices. Instead, this developed into a ‘craft outlook’ defined by a motivation for performing actualizing labour that interwove paid and non‐paid work. Men's careers did not become individualized projects of self as collaborative intergenerational practices gave a long‐term narrative to their careers and lives. Therefore, three contributions are proposed to the literature on working‐class male careers and craft. First, an analytical framework is advanced that empirically distinguishes a ‘craft outlook’ from traditional manual trade employment. Second, a craft outlook reflected ‘whole life careers’ that were constructed from both paid and non‐paid work. Third, the concept of ‘human imprint’ is developed to recognize the generational affirmation produced by the transmission of craft practices.     

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies,modalities, pathways

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market‐oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post‐1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market‐oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.     

The hostile environment,Brexit, and ‘reactive‐’ or ‘protective transnationalism’

The ‘reactive transnationalism hypothesis’ posits a relationship between discrimination and transnational practice. The concept has generally been studied using quantitative methods, but a qualitative approach augments our understanding of two context‐specific dimensions: the nature of the discrimination involved, and the types of transnational behaviour that might be affected. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Bangladesh‐origin Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, in the UK, we demonstrate how anti‐Asian and anti‐Muslim racism have been conflated with intensified anti‐migrant racism in the context of ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies and the EU referendum (Brexit), producing an amplification of racist discourses associated with purging the body politic of its non‐white bodies. The insecurity generated is altering some people's relationships to Bangladesh, incentivizing investment in land and property ‘back home'. While this represents an example of ‘reactive transnationalism', we argue that ‘protective transnationalism’ might be a more appropriate way of describing the processes at work.     

‘In the Company of Men’: A Reflexive Tale of Cultural Organizing in a Small Organization

A tale of fieldwork in a small organization is discussed in this article with a view to highlighting how social processes, cultural understandings and expressions of gender are produced during fieldwork interaction. The tale is told reflexively and retrospectively, recording an ongoing conversation about fieldwork experience. Central to the tale is discussion of how the researcher is drawn into ‘culture–making’ within the organization and the ways in which fieldwork interaction creates a ‘space’ through which organizational members engage with, work through and realize work–place values. In this article there are multiple levels of reflection. At one level it is examined how the organizational–researcher role of ‘emotional nurturer’ was constructed during fieldwork. At the same time some cultural insights drawn from ethnographic inquiry and intensive interviewing within the small organization are presented. The analysis is also shaped by a further layer of post–fieldwork reflection and interpretation which draws in emotional issues and expressions of gender. It is argued that a close scrutiny of fieldwork roles is important to organizational research in that it makes explicit how the researcher–‘native’ interaction is central to the theorizing process and how the researcher can become a participant in organizational culture–making.     

Intersectional Approaches in Health‐Risk Research: A Critical Review

The overall aim of this article is to explore how the intersectional approach is used in health‐risk research. The concept has been recognized in health‐risk research since the early 2000s, but not as much as in the broader field of health‐inequality studies. However, in the past 5 years, Social Science and Medicine has published a series of review articles that argue for the necessity of bringing intersectional perspectives to the field of health‐risk studies more generally and quantitative health‐risk research in particular. Asking what it means for health‐risk researchers to practise intersectionality shows the implications of translating a theoretical approach across fields and disciplines. When applying intersectional theory in relation to health‐risks, the theoretical conceptualization of health and risk are often very limited and treated as fixed categories – something that becomes problematic when taken within an intersectional framework. This does not mean that this work is unimportant, but rather that the link between theoretically driven intersectionality and empirical‐focused health research is weak. In order to overcome the dividing lines of health‐risk research and intersectionality, we argue for a new approach that echoes the ‘doing gender’ of gender studies: doing risk.     

Gender and Disability in Male‐Dominated Occupations: A Social Relational Model

Evidence from male‐dominated sectors points to high levels of disability and the disabling nature of working environments. However, research of this nature assumes a medical model of disability that does not account for the social construction of disability or the lived experiences of disabled employees. Using data from seven focus groups (n = 44) and semi‐structured interviews with professional transport employees with life‐long hidden ‘impairments’, including dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, ADD/ADHD and Asperger syndrome (n = 22), this paper explores the lived experiences of men and women working in a sector traditionally dominated by men, the transport industry. Key themes include homosociality, public–private divide and the impact of changing work practices. Further, the data revealed how those with hidden ‘impairments’ in part construct their identities in relation to both non‐disabled colleagues and those considered stereotypically representing disability (wheelchair users). This study furthers understandings of the relationality of gender and disability in the workplace, and the lived experiences of disabled employees.     

Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.     

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction

This paper sets out an ethnomethodological approach to the study of gender and interaction, and demonstrates how the topic of ‘gender’ can be studied empirically via its categorial reference in talk‐in‐interaction. I begin by charting the history of ethnomethodological accounts and studies of gender, starting with Garfinkel's groundbreaking work and the subsequent ‘doing gender’ project, alongside a more general discussion of feminism's relationship to ethnomethodology. I then consider two related trajectories of research, one in conversation analysis and the other in membership categorization analysis, both of which deal with the explication of gender's relevance to interaction, but in somewhat different ways that raise different problems. Finally, drawing on data from different institutional settings, I show how ‘categorial’ phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phenomena of sequential organization using the machinery of membership categorization alongside conversation analysis. I suggest that the analysis of members' categories in their sequential environment allows language and gender researchers to see how everyday notions of gender are taken up, reformulated, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplish conversational action; that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing of some activity’ ( Sacks, 1992 vol. 1: 597).     

Practising family history: ‘identity’ as a category of social practice

Research on family history argues it performs the task of anchoring a sense of ‘self’ through tracing ancestral connection and cultural belonging, seeing it as a form of storied ‘identity‐work’. This paper draws on a small‐scale qualitative study to think further on the identity‐work of family history. Using practice theory, and a disaggregated notion of ‘identity’, it explores how the storying of family histories relates to genealogy as a leisure hobby, a form of historical research, and an information‐processing activity; and examines the social organization of that narrativity, where various practical engagements render certain kinds of genealogical information more, or less, ‘storyable’. Key features of ‘identity‐work’ in family history, such as the construction of genealogy as a personal journey of discovery and identification with particular ancestors, emerge as a consequence of the procedures of family history, organized as a set of practical tasks. The paper explores ‘identity‐work’ as a consequence of people's engagement in specific social practices which provide an internal logic to their actions, with various components of ‘identity’ emerging as categories of practice shaped within, and for, use. Focusing on ‘identity’ as something produced when we are engaged in doing other things, the paper examines how the practical organization of ‘doing other things’ helps produce ‘identity’ in particular ways.     

State‐Space beyond Territory: Wormholes,Gravitational Fields,and Entanglement

Neo‐Weberian historical sociology and political science establishes that territory is a defining feature of the modern state. Drawing on insights from political geography, I argue that ‘territory’ is not a pre‐existing physical location, but an effect produced by state practices and technologies. The spatial fetish of territory, moreover, distracts analytical attention from the equally important non‐territorial dimensions of the state. To map these new and unfamiliar dimensions, I propose three analogies from the study of physics ‐ wormholes, gravitational fields, and quantum entanglement ‐ as powerful conceptual devices with the potential to reorient social scientists towards a fuller understanding of state‐space.     

Women Constructing Masculinity in Voluntary Firefighting

Within gender studies, research and theorizing have used archetypal ‘masculine’ occupations to explore how masculinity is accomplished and practised in social interaction. In contrast, little work has explored how masculinity is constructed in the voluntary sector. In this paper, we address this gap by exploring how masculinity is constructed and experienced by women volunteers who are active firefighters in rural and regional Victoria. Firefighting is widely recognized as a non‐traditional occupation for women and they are underrepresented as volunteers as well as paid employees. We explore masculinity from the perspective of women volunteers because this can enhance our understanding of masculinity as a relational achievement as well as help to identify practices that they experience as problematic. Our research shows how voluntary work can afford a distinct range of resources for the ‘doing’ of gender and how this reflects the specific organizational and geographical contexts in which such volunteering occurs.     

Sklair,L. The Icon Project: Architecture,Cities and Capitalist Globalization 2017 New York: Oxford University Press 352 pp. £26.49 (hardback) ISBN: 9780190464189

Architecture embeds capital. Theoretical and empirical sociology has addressed a wide variety of social contexts with the aim of illuminating how architecture provides both i) the sites and settings in which labour relations are manifest; and ii) a symbolic intervention that sees accumulation and power celebrated. Against this backdrop, Leslie Sklair's book The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities and Capitalist Globalization contributes significantly to our understanding of how architecture is entangled with the contemporary operation of international capital. Sklair's account argues that iconic architecture ‐ those landscape‐dominating buildings designed by so‐called ‘starchitects’ who are famous in their own right and have a strong aesthetic brand‐exists through and for the further generation of surplus value. Particularly sociological in orientation, The Icon Project adds much to our understanding of the architectural celebration of the transnational consumption and production practices that underpin deeply uneven cities the world over.     

Participants’ productive disruption of a community photo-elicitation project: improvised methodologies in practice

Abstract

This article reports on an attempt to use photo-elicitation to explore contested intergenerational perceptions and experiences of ‘place’ in one English village. Participants actively disrupted the photo-elicitation project and ended up co-creating an enriched research design that allowed them to represent how they experienced ‘place’. The spontaneous, mixed media-elicitation that resulted overturns some of the more straightforward notions that are aligned with photo-elicitation techniques. This article builds on a growing body of critical literature on photo-elicitation and shows how participants’ disruption of a project’s research methods can be both challenging and fruitful in practice. The researcher’s flexibility and willingness to work with participants’ alternative approaches proved extremely effective in allowing participants to communicate their ‘imagined geographies’ and to identify experiences of social inequality. This article explores how the initially problematic in participant involvement can be turned into the productive through the use of ‘improvised methodologies’.