‘Belonging’ and ‘Otherness’: Sex Equality in Banking in Turkey and Britain

The struggle for sex equality at work has largely been achieved in the developed world, it is claimed. The number of well‐qualified young women entering white‐collar employment and achieving promotion to first‐line and middle management positions now matches or exceeds their male peers. Many young women have high career aspirations and argue that sex discrimination no longer exists. However, this perception is over‐optimistic. Major sex inequalities persist at senior management level in the salaries and benefits offered to female and male staff and in access to certain favoured occupations and sectors of employment. Questionnaires, interviews and documentary evidence from three Turkish and six British banks and high street financial organizations showed that their claimed commitment to equal opportunities by sex was not matched by their practices. Members of managerial elites (who were almost exclusively male) held firm views about the characteristics of ‘the ideal worker’, which informed organizational ideologies, including human resource policies and practices concerning recruitment and promotion. They also permeated organizational cultures, which affected employees’ working practices and experiences. The outcome of these internal negotiation processes was to differentiate between a favoured group of staff seen as fully committed to the companies’ values, who were promoted and rewarded, and an ‘out’ group, whose members were denied these privileges. This distinction between ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ is gendered not only along the traditional lines of class, age, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability, but also along the new dimensions of marriage, networking, safety, mobility and space. Despite local and cross‐cultural differences in the significance of these factors, the cumulative disadvantage suffered by women staff seeking career development in the industry was remarkably similar.     

Changing Equality Cultures to Move Beyond ‘Women’s Problems’

Conventional equality measures have made a limited impact on women’s position in the workforce. This is not simply the result of measures being inadequately pursued. Instead, this paper argues, there is a more fundamental difficulty with the policy approach: that it focuses on women as having problems which need to be redressed rather than on changing organizations. As a result women are seen as inadequate and men become resentful of the ‘special treatment’ that follows. Changing these perceptions requires cultural change which cannot be achieved via conventional personnel-based equality initiatives. Many organizations are looking for new ways to present and pursue equality programmes such as a stress on providing a ‘business case’ or through a consideration of the value of workforce diversity. The paper assesses the ability of these initiatives to change the culture for equality. It argues that many organizations are merely pursuing a defensive approach which centres on language change and modified initiatives rather than new approaches to winning consent. In contrast it argues that culture change will only be achieved through a more pro-active approach. Various initiatives such as skills audits and training for men are discussed which indicate what can be done in practice.     

‘Have You Got a Boyfriend or are You Single?’: On the Importance of Being ‘Straight’ in Organizational Research

The article focuses on heterosexuality as a covert feature of organization studies as well as of organizational research. In fact, while organization studies have discussed the gendered and the gendering aspects of organizational practices and organizational theory, the implication of heterosexuality has yet to receive intensive analysis in these fields. And while the mutual and reflexive constitution of the observer and the observed has been the topic of a considerable amount of research, the dimension of (heterosexual) desire in this process of mutual constitution is still largely unexplored. Referring to three different episodes that occurred while the author was doing organizational ethnography, the article suggests that a heterosexual model of desire is called into action both in organizational and research activities and that focusing on it can be an occasion to question not only the gender (and heterosexual) biases of organizational practices but also the way in which gender and sexuality are mobilized while doing research. In particular, on the basis of the concept of cathexis, the article shows how heterosexuality is learnt and enacted as a situated practice and through a variety of processes: performing power, negotiating and displaying that one belongs to an organizational culture, obscuring the hetero‐normativity of professional identities and neglecting the emotional engagement that characterizes research activities and that exposes the researcher to an otherwise vulnerable position.     

‘So Much We Still Don't Know’: An Interview with Averil Earnshaw

I was independently told about Averil Earnshaw by three different people in the same six month period. Each of them had heard, or heard of, Averil's presentations on the theme of time-linked intergenerational repetitions, and knew of my own interest in repeating patterns in families. Averil very willingly granted me the interview that follows, and in the course of talking with her, I began to realise that Averil's was yet another story of someone who had formulated an original hypothesis based on repeated clinical observation, and had the courage to present it to gatherings of her peers, only to encounter skepticism, lack of interest, or charges of ‘idiosyncrasy’. Despite Averil's best efforts to show that her hypothesis was consistent with the direction of Freud's own thinking, the psychoanalytic movement had greeted it lukewarmly, and it seemed to me that perhaps it might be of more interest to readers of this Journal, since the older and more psychoanalytically-influenced generation of family therapists (e.g. Bowen, 1978; Skynner, 1976) recognised the general principle of repeating patterns across generations, although not the very particular temporal law that Averil has suggested. The Earnshaw hypothesis is simply enough stated: the emotional and intellectual crises of adults’ lives (including onset of mental and physical illnesses, creative break-throughs and creative blocks) are time-linked to major events in the lives of their same-sex parents at the same age. Often, though not always, says Averil, one experiences a crisis when one is the same age as one's same-sex parent was at the time of the birth of one's next sibling, or even when one is the same age as one's parent was at one's own birth. Averil's short bookTime Will Tell (1995) illustrates this hypothesis with some fifty brief case studies based on biographical data from the lives of famous individuals, as well as with a number of cases from her clinical practice, and examples from her own life. Averil herself recognises that her hypothesis needs to be rigorously tested on a wider sample, but to date, those who have criticised it as ‘merely anecdotal’ have not been willing to undertake such a study.     

‘Doing things with words’: Sociology and ‘Family Policy’ debates

In examining ‘family policy’, previous work on ‘family ideology’ is developed to demonstrate that ‘traditional family sociology’ has been ‘doing things with words’. In this area sociology, far from being innocuous, has had real impact upon society and may well have been oppressive and deeply reactionary.     

Becoming ‘Real’ Entrepreneurs: Women and the Gendered Normalization of ‘Work’

This article focuses on the way in which women entrepreneurs legitimate their place in a gendered economy by reifying a divide between ‘real work’ and ‘not‐real work’. Using ethnographic approaches to follow the everyday lives of several women who own and operate small businesses in the USA, our article documents three gendering practices the women use for ‘becoming real workers:’ embodied, spatial and temporal. The study shows that women entrepreneurs become ‘productive workers’ by recasting reproductive work as non‐productive or not‐real work. At the end, we explore two possible alternative conceptualizations of ‘work’ that could contribute to dissolving this gendered divide.     

Accounting for Exclusion: Giving a ‘Voice’ and producing a ‘subject’

SUMMARY: This article examines a series of accounts of exclusion given by pupils and a teacher in interviews and a group discussion. It is argued that it is important to hear pupils' experiences. However, it is recognised that it is never possible to access an experience directly, since the process of research alway shapes the way an account is constructed. This does not invalidate the research, since it is argued that the way pupils relate to the interviewer and the way they talk about their exclusion seemed indirectly to reflect important differences in the way exclusion is experienced. Specifically, two ways of managing exclusion were identified by pupils: some pupils protested about being excluded and welcomed the invitation to tell their story. Others distanced themselves from the event, by speaking of their exclusion in objective and concrete terms. These styles of accounting are compared to the way in which the head teacher discusses the topic of exclusion.     

‘Now,We Have the Same Rights as Men to Keep Our Jobs’: Gendered Perceptions of Opportunity and Obstacles in a Mexican Workplace

Drawing on extensive qualitative data at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation, this case study investigates professional employees’ perceptions of changes to a prohibitive work policy requiring women to quit working upon marriage and having children. Employees believed the policy change meant working women were valued employees, but how this translated into opportunity highlighted distinct views of the types of positions professional women could occupy at the company, reinforcing sex‐segregated job allocation. Whereas women's narratives pointed to cultural resistance, men's narratives attributed the dearth of women in higher level positions to their lack of professionalism and commitment to work. The work policy change only guaranteed the right for women to work as the company modernized to fit the neoliberal demands of the global marketplace. Now women faced the challenge of turning that right into career advancement in a traditionally masculine‐defined company. I argue that even with the policy change, gendered discourses on women in professional occupations constructed and maintained gender inequities in the workplace. This study contributes to the scholarly discussion on gendered discourses within the context of global restructuring by showing how mechanisms at work maintain gender inequity in the workplace.     

The Institutionalisation of ‘TongNian’ and ‘childhood’ in China and Britain: Exploring Cautious Comparisons

This article engages with the question of how theorisation of the social construction of childhood can be applied across cultural contexts, taking China and Britain as examples. The paper draws on collaborative dialogue between scholars from the People's Republic of China and Britain, and literatures from both Anglophone and Mandarin sources. It takes forward emergent work on theorising childhood from diverse global perspectives by focusing on the institutionalisation of childhood in these countries, with particular reference to language, conceptualisation and legal frameworks relating to chronological age.     

The ‘Sociology’ and ‘Anthropology’ of Berthold von Regensburg*

Abstract This article deciphers the views of the German thirteenth century preacher Berthold von Regensburg about ‘social nature’ as they are demonstrated in his sermon ‘Of the five talents’. Berthold von Regensburg interprets the Gospel parable (Matthew, 25: 14–30) quite freely, in accordance with the social realities of his own time. The ‘talents’ given by God to the human being are their personalities, social vocations, or offices, life-time, wealth, and love to their neighbours. Such an interpretation of the sacral text in the sermon read in a big South German town seems to be a kind of reflection of the burghers’ mentality. The hypothesis finds its further confirmation in other sermons in which he enumerates the professional groups of that society; this analysis is clearly town-oriented. A fuller context for this text is provided in the author's own work especially ‘Questions of Philosophy’Voprosi Philosophii (Moskva, 1990)