Negotiating Gender in Uncertainty: A Mechanism of Women's Marginalization in the Japanese Workplace*

Abstract Women have been long absent from important white-collar positions in large Japanese organizations. Two approaches have been made to understand women's work experiences and career outcomes in these organizations, namely, the structuralist and the rational choice approaches. The underlying assumption of both approaches is that individual women's career orientations are basically fixed and larger factors outside the workplace play central roles to determine women's career outcomes. In order to understand women's work experiences and perspectives more realistically, however, we need to turn our attention to the workplace itself and to examine the mechanisms through which women are constantly marginalized, if inadvertently, in everyday interactions with others. Drawing on a developing perspective that focuses on the dynamic nature of women's career experiences. this paper, based on a case study, demonstrates a major way in which the influences of outside factors, specifically of women's attitude toward work, are in fact reinforced within the workplace. A major component of this mechanism is women's sense of uncertainty generated through their day-to-day work lives.     

Toward a Theory of Worker Participation

This paper proposes that the emergence of shop-floor worker participation projects in many of the largest corporations in the United States has major theoretical interest because it points to a shift in the structure of American management from Taylorist forms of organization toward "post-Taylorist" systems based on "relative worker autonomy" and limited democratic organization on the shop floor. The postulated shift toward "relative worker autonomy" is explored, first, in terms of the contradictions and failures of Taylorism-specifically its failure to integrate workers or bind them effectively, either psychologically or ideologically, to their jobs and firms. While the costs of worker dis-integration have led management to initiate post-Taylorist labor control systems, an analysis of participative experiments suggests that these new systems produce new contradictions engendering worker expectations and entitlements for democracy in the workplace. The analysis suggests the need for a reformulation of current theories of the capitalist labor process that can explain both the emergence of "integrative" labor systems based on participation and democratic legitimations and also the new forms of contestation they produce.     

Does Citizenship Status Matter in Canadian Agriculture? Workplace Health and Safety for Migrant and Immigrant Laborers

This article explores how precarious legal status circumscribes differential inclusion in the agricultural labor market and affects workers' lives through a comparative study of workplace health and safety among temporary migrant guest workers and immigrants in Canada. Original, multimethod research with South Asian immigrant and Mexican migrant farmworkers examines employment practices, working conditions, and health‐care access. We find that both groups engage in precarious work, with consequences for their health and safety, including immigrant workers with citizenship. Nevertheless, migrant guest workers are subject to more coercive forms of labor discipline and a narrower range of social protection than immigrants. We argue that while formal citizenship can mitigate some dimensions of precariousness for farmworkers racialized as non‐white, achieving a more just, safer food system will require broader policies to improve employer compliance and address legislative shortcomings that only weakly protect agricultural labor.     

Narrating Nursing Jurisdiction: “Atrocity Stories” and “Boundary‐Work”

Sociologists have long recognized that the division of labor is, at its root, a process of social interaction. Although “negotiations” figure centrally in symbolic interactionist studies of work, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which the structure of workplace talk contributes to the social constitution of occupations. Drawing on the insights of discourse and conversation analysis, this article examines occupational atrocity stories and considers how they accomplish boundary‐work in the hospital setting. I focus on the stories British nurses told about doctors and use data generated in ethnographic research into the routine accomplishment of nursing jurisdiction. I conclude with some general observations about how the detailed analysis of stories and storytelling can contribute to the wider study of social group formation.     

What's love got to do with it? Passion and inequality in white‐collar work

Emotion has become an increasingly important aspect of work in the 21st century. In this article, we take stock of the extant literature delineating the role of emotions, especially passion as a cultural schema, in white‐collar workplaces. Scholars have covered extensive ground on emotions at work, but the role of passion remains an underexplored yet significant area. Drawing from recent developments in research on white‐collar work, we argue that the passion schema has become a critical marker in the labor market for sorting individuals into occupations, hiring and promotion within organizations, and assigning value to people's labor. Emergent research suggests that because the expression and perception of passion remain ambiguously defined in the workplace and varies by context, it is pivotal in reproducing social inequalities. In this review, we focus on how privileging passion in the workplace and interpreting it as a measure of aptitude impacts social inequalities by race, gender, and social class. We close by setting an agenda for further research on this topic.     

Case Studies of Federal Occupational Health's EAP Responses to Natural Disasters

Summary

Employee assistance professionals have increasingly been called upon to address the emotional and mental health needs of customer organizations and their employees in response to large-scale natural or man-made disasters. In doing so, employee assistance program (EAP) professionals must use a repertoire of responses that encompasses a broad range of interventions, generally anchored in an understanding of and focus on the organization and its culture, mission, management and labor concerns, and other critical characteristics. The EAP's fallback response to a crisis affecting the workplace is often a critical incident stress debriefing or close variant of it. However, EAPs can best serve their customers at all levels with interventions attuned to an understanding of the workplace culture gained through a consultative relationship with management, while factoring in the nature of the disaster, the length of time and characteristics of the disaster's aftermath, and the nuances of the employees' physical and emotional needs throughout the entire disaster response and recovery process.

This article highlights these issues through the presentation of two case studies, gained from the hurricane response activities of the Federal Occupational Health (FOH) EAP. FOH, a service unit within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Program Support Center, has 60 years of experience working in partnership with its federal agency customers to deliver comprehensive occupational health services to improve the health, safety, and productivity of the federal workforce. FOH's EAP contracts with vendor organizations to provide direct employee assistance, work/life, and related services to more than 1.3 million federal employees. The first case study describes (from the first person perspective) an on-site, multi-focused EAP intervention at a federal facility. The second case study describes management consultation with the U.S. Postal Service in response to major hurricane activity.     

Marx,formal subsumption and the law

Recent work rethinking the place of the law in Marxian analysis of capitalist society provides us with a foundation for a renewed look at the labor process. Drawing on this literature, which emphasizes the materiality of institutions through which labor is exploited, and returning to Marx’s discussion of formal subsumption in Capital, I argue that the law was central for subordinating labor. I then present three case studies from industries in Victorian England to demonstrate the diverse ways in which law was implicated in formal subsumption. The case studies focus on the ways in which capitalists used master and servant law, the key law governing the workplace, to subordinate labor. I conclude by considering how these cases provoke us to consider the materiality of the law in labor relations more broadly, and such questions might be pursued in developing capitalist economies such as China.     

Addressing gender discrimination in Vietnam's light manufacturing industry: What role for labor law?

This paper explores women workers’ experiences of gender discrimination at work in Vietnam and whether labor law might enable them to challenge discriminatory practices. Interviews with workers reveal how discrimination is generated and entrenched through seemingly neutral workplace rules and culture. The coercive and intensive nature of assembly work has deterred or prevented working mothers from enjoying fair and decent work. Survey findings on female workers’ mobilization of the law suggest that women who have experienced discrimination in the past are less inclined to choose a legal means when faced with future discrimination. In most cases, women would choose not to take any action or opt for a non-legal means to raise their voices. In conclusion, even though women workers in general do not consider law a potential tool to tackle discrimination, they have absorbed and appropriated the language of the law to make sense of unfair practices at work.     

Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work,Gender, and Beauty

Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on the basis of their physical appearance. The concept advances research on the service economy by moving beyond a focus on emotions to emphasize worker corporeality. This article first untangles aesthetic labor from related concepts, including body work, emotional labor, and embodied cultural capital. Next is a review of three contexts in which scholars have applied aesthetic labor to the workplace: the organization, freelance labor, and the market. Because it situates the value of beauty in context, aesthetic labor foregrounds those power relations that define aesthetics, such as class, race, and gender. The concept incorporates insights from field theories of bodily capital, such that aesthetic labor denaturalizes beauty and seeks to explain the processes through which looks translate into economic and symbolic rewards.     

Stand By Your Man: Wives' Emotion Work During Men's Unemployment

Recent research on unemployment has not sufficiently acknowledged how unemployment reverberates within families, particularly emotionally. This article uses data from more than 50 in‐depth interviews to illuminate the emotional demands that men's unemployment makes beyond the unemployed individual. It shows that wives of unemployed men do two types of emotion work—self‐focused and other‐focused—and both are aimed toward facilitating husbands' success in the emotionally arduous white‐collar job‐search process. This article extends research on emotion work by suggesting that participants perceive wives' emotion work as a resource with potential economic benefits in the form of unemployed men's reemployment. The findings furthermore suggest that as a resource, wives' emotion work is shaped by the demands of the labor market that their husbands encounter.     

Using institutional ethnography's ideological circle to portray how textually mediated disability discourse paralysed a Supreme Court of Canada ruling

Persons with disabilities created through texts as damaged goods are being ‘cured’ by workplace accommodation, a textually mediated work process. Prior to 1999, workplace accommodation in the Canadian federal public service signified the adjustments necessary to enable a disabled worker to fit into a workplace designed for able-bodied workers. In 1999, a Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruling known as Meiorin turned this accommodation provision on its head. Instead of being focused on individual-level fixes so that a disabled worker could be accommodated in an existing workplace, this legislation required employers to transform their workplaces so as to make them ready to receive as many different types of workers as reasonably possible from the outset. Using Dorothy E. Smith's institutional ethnography, I use my experiences as a disability rights activist employed in the Canadian federal public service to explicate how textually mediated disability discourse paralysed this groundbreaking SCC ruling.     

NEGOTIATING DIFFERENCE:

Research on immigrant women workers in the United States and Third World women employed by multinational corporations in export-enclaves has highlighted how global movements of capital and labor are expressed in changing labor processes, working conditions, and ethnic relations in the workplace. Notably absent from this body of literature are the ways in which rural, white American women respond to the new work environments offered by direct foreign investments in the United States. Using in-depth interviews with workers and observations of the workplace and the community we explore how the Japanese purchase of an apparel manufacturing firm in upstate New York reconstituted factory floor relations. In so doing, we extend interpretations of the social construction of the labor process by recognizing the racialized and ethnicized character of rural white women. We also show how both workers and managers construct stereotypic expectations of the other that are manipulated on the shop floor in the struggle for control, recognition, and appreciation.     

The State,Unauthorized Mexican Migration,and Vulnerability in the Workplace

For the last 20 years, migration scholars have generated a number of important empirical insights about the ways in which the state, through the enactment of immigration policies, creates workplace vulnerabilities such as discrimination, harassment, wage theft, workplace raids, and the threat of deportation. Recent studies of illegality also examine the role of the state but do so in a way that explores what legal status means and how it is experienced in everyday lives of migrants marked as “illegal” by the state. This article reviews recent research that shows that the state operates in a gray zone of enforcement that puts migrants in ambiguous social spaces and heightens their vulnerability at work. However, research also finds that migrants find ways to exert their agency in challenging work environments.     

Accomplishing Profession through Self‐Mockery

One influential sociological approach to profession has it that a profession is something constructed by social actors themselves and that this work is performed through the swapping of atrocity stories. While atrocity stories are an important resource for constructing profession, they are not the only ones available to social actors. In this article, I draw on field work in an academic engineering research laboratory to document how social actors use self‐mockery to construct profession. They do this in five ways, including through the use of background knowledge to interpret self‐mockery, by reserving self‐mockery for specific conditions separate from conditions where engineering knowledge is put on display, by maintaining a preference for self‐presentations that exclude self‐mockery toward the speaker's self during presentations in lab meetings and lectures in courses, through the selection of locally insignificant selves for mockery, and by assembling their own accounts of self‐mockery.     

Nothing is as Practical as a Good Theory: Bowen Theory and the Workplace — a Personal Application

Bowen Family Systems Theory is most commonly used to understand and predict family process. It is also applied to other potentially intense relationship systems, especially the workplace. It has been used by workplace consultants and by individuals to understand, and to manage, their own workplace functioning. This paper will draw from several key Bowen concepts to analyse common workplace dilemmas and to suggest responses that may assist the functioning of the individual and the system. The author's own experience as a manager in a child and adolescent mental health programme will be used as the case study to illustrate the theory's application.     

Perceptions of Relational Practices in the Workplace

We examined the intersection of gender and work through an investigation of relationally motivated behaviour in the workplace. Using Fletcher's ethnography of women's relational practices in a masculine work environment as a springboard, we examined Fletcher's typology of relational practice, participants' perceptions of employees who perform these forms of behaviour and whether these perceptions were related to gender. Working adults (N = 128) completed online surveys containing workplace scenarios and rated how effective and submissive they perceived the behaviour to be. Overall, participants rated relational practices as ineffective and submissive, regardless of whether a man or a woman had performed them. However, they reported that they would behave the same way as the target and they offered relationally oriented reasons for their choice. Relational practices remain paradoxical in the workplace, both necessary and devalued.     

Interdisciplinary team discussion on work environment issues related to low back disability: a multiple case study

From both a social and cost-benefit perspective, disability prevention and associated management strategies for assisting employees with back pain are only successful if they address critical return-to-work (RTW) determining factors present in the workplace, including ergonomic factors. Despite our current knowledge of the importance of an integrated team approach targeting these factors, questions remain regarding the conceptual framework adopted by contemporary rehabilitation teams as it relates to work-oriented interventions to accommodate employees back to work. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the work environment issues discussed by an interdisciplinary team engaged in the work rehabilitation process of low back disability cases. A qualitative content analysis was conducted for 10 sample cases that underwent a rehabilitation program in Quebec (Canada). Drawing on the results of these analyses, a framework representing a synopsis of practitioners' involvement in the person-environment dynamic is presented and discussed. This study makes a unique contribution to the understanding of the 'real-life' content of an interdisciplinary activity in disability management, thus, helping rehabilitation practitioners to build knowledge on the practical application of a cross-disciplinary framework to address work environment issues during the RTW process of those patients sick-listed due to back pain.     

Career resilience of female professionals in the male-dominated IT industry in Sweden: Toward a process perspective

Sweden is known to be one of the most gender-equal societies in the world. Thus, it remains as an enigma why a large discrepancy continues to exist regarding the gender balance in career choice and progression in many professions. Drawing on Hirdman's (1988) theory of gendered systems, in this paper, we explore the role of career resilience in the career progression of women who choose to work in the male-dominated IT sector. We draw attention to how the day-to-day process of practicing career resilience in a gendered workplace tends to evolve as women progress in their careers. Based on an interview study with 50 female IT professionals as well as a discourse analysis of 502 newspaper articles on women in this sector, we develop a process model of career resilience in gendered professions, outlining different coping strategies that allow women to develop and enhance such resilience over time. We conclude the paper by providing some practical recommendations.     

Coming Out,But Into What? Problematizing Discursive Variations of Revealing the Gay Self in the Workplace

There is a substantial mainstream literature on coming out in organizations, which investigates the positive effects for gay people of being out at work, but very few contributions that challenge the discourse of coming out. Taking as its starting point Butler's famous question ‘So we are out of the closet but into what?’, this paper problematizes coming out discourses in the workplace. We report on a study in which ten men were invited to talk about their coming out in the workplace. There were three main ways through which our participants constituted themselves as gay men when they talked about coming out: by defining themselves as, and admitting to, being gay; by introducing themselves as being in a gay relationship; and by adopting legitimate subject positions such as the Other, the different one, or the normal gay. Through our analysis, discussions and conclusions, we show how participants position themselves within different discursive variations, thus revealing the multiplicity of ‘the gay self’ and highlighting how coming out repeats and supports normative systems.