The godmother of gendered organizations: In celebration of the work of Joan Acker

Joan Acker can be considered the godmother of gendered organizations. In this paper, we reflect on the impact that Joan Acker's work has on our thinking and our careers as gender scholars in management and organization studies in Europe. First, we tell our personal stories of close encounters with Joan Acker. Second, we highlight what we consider to be two key contributions of Joan Acker. The first are the interrelated gendered processes regarding structure, culture, interaction and identity from her work in the early 1990s, the second the notion of inequality regimes from her later work on the intersections of gender, class and race. We then discuss how Acker's work has been influential in our research on gendered organizations, and in our teaching when we use it in our explanations of the functioning of gender in organizations to students, and in our work as advisors and consultants for organizations interested in equality, diversity and inclusion. Finally, we elaborate on new directions building on Acker's work, especially in current theorizing on gender and diversity in organizational change.     

‘Why Do All the Women Disappear?’ Gendering Processes in a Political Science Department

The article provides an in‐depth analysis of the gendering processes among PhD candidates in a political science department. It uses Joan Acker's theory of gendered organizations operating through four dimensions: the gendered division of labour, gendered interaction, gendered symbols and gendered interpretations of one's position in the organization. The article combines this approach with theories of hidden discrimination. The key theoretical aim is to contribute to gendered organizational theory by examining the ways in which hidden discrimination and the gendered organization work together. This generates detailed and differentiated knowledge about the mechanisms of hidden discrimination that produce gender inequalities in the department. The findings presented in this article point to the role of gendered division of labour and the lack of information about departmental practices. PhD supervision by men is a particularly strong structural barrier for women because of the gendered nature of interaction in supervision and the difficulties that female PhD students have in a male‐dominated environment. The article further contributes to debates on gendered organizations by focusing upon the gendered symbols of expertise in political science. These symbols reproduce the man as the political scientist norm and result in women interpreting their own position as marginal or as outsiders.     

Celebrating Joan Acker: Sociologist,fearless feminist,friend

Joan Acker's life reflects a time when middle‐class women were expected to be satisfied with maintaining the home front, serving husbands and children, not having paid‐work careers. After living “the ideal” for 37 years, Acker took a new path by earning a Ph. D. and producing path‐breaking scholarship that challenged taken‐for‐granted beliefs about gender, family, work, and organizations. Acker spoke “truth to power” and was an academic heroine in posing feminist challenges to injustices involving gender, social class, and race/ethnicity, particularly (but not solely) related to the workplace. This overview lets Joan tell her story and offers reflections on her milestone publications as seen by Pat Martin.     

“And Let the Grove,If Not the Parlour,Stand”: Home,Memory, and Gender in Mary Leapor's “Crumble-Hall”

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Mary Leapor's “Crumble-Hall” and attempts to shed light on her gendered/class poetics. It argues that the poet uses the house as a metaphor for gendered (male) and social class (gentry) dominance as well as that through memory she assumes (poetic) control over it, demolishes and remakes it, thus forging her female/literary identity. The article also demonstrates that Leapor makes use of both social and psychological space in her poem. By appropriating the country-house convention, she creates a dialectical relationship between external space—the architectural structure; and internal space—the kitchen maid's unconscious; and points out that as the former crumbles, the latter stands because of the significance it acquires. Indeed, her memory of Crumble-Hall not only spawns years of suppression and hardship but also becomes the stepping-stone for her rebellion as well as for the creation of her verse. Her poetic empowerment is projected through the image of the grove surrounding the country house, a multifaceted symbol signifying the interrelation of home, memory, and female literary production. Overall, Leapor re-creates the past glory of the gentry house, depicts her subservient state, conveys her subversion, and finally, establishes her newfound identity as a female poet, all within the framework of fragmented memories. Consequently, she succeeds in promoting the need for gendered and class transgression, in the hope that her sisters can bring about the “crumbling” of their own “house” and remake their “home.”     

Joan Acker's influence on Management and Organization Studies: Review,analysis and directions for the future

This paper pays tribute to Joan Acker by discussing how her ideas have been utilized in Management and Organization Studies (MOS). Through a systematic review of journal articles citing Acker's scholarship from 2000 to 2017 (September), we show how recent scholarship has used Acker to advance discussions in the field and examine how her work was received, and which promises made by her work are still to be met. We identify avenues to carry her legacy forward with a view to realizing the transformative goal she posed as central to meaningful change in social, political and economic life through scholarship in the field of gender and organizations.     

Revisiting Joan Acker's work with the support of Joan Acker

This article is a personal tribute to working with Joan Acker. I worked with Joan in 2012, helping to edit her own thoughts and reflection on how other academics evaluate and used her own theorizing, specifically her seminal work on the gender substructure and inequality regimes. However, while this article is a tribute to Joan, her work and her thinking; it is also a personal thank you to someone I will miss for her generosity and also her activism in challenging inequalities in organizations and beyond. She continues to inspire me and hopefully others to challenge for social justice. In her 80s, Joan remained committed to addressing inequalities in social relations and how these were experienced within a dynamic social and work environment. During our collaboration, she called upon academics to put theory into practice to help address visible and invisible inequalities in organizational processes. This article is inspired by that experience and it will reveal Joan's views about her own, and other academics, theorizing of her two key concepts: the gender substructure of organizations and inequality regimes in organizations and the overlap with intersectionality. This article will offer a unique opportunity to gain insight into Joan's thinking as an academic sociologist as well as a feminist activist thereby uniting Joan as a person with her concepts.     

‘Lady,Leave My Culture Out of It!’ An Interview With Nada Miocevic

Nada Miocevic is a social worker and family therapist who trained at Zagreb University in Croatia and at Melbourne University in Victoria, Australia. She completed her training in family therapy in 1975 at the Bouverie Centre, Melbourne. Since migrating to Australia in 1967, her work with migrant and refugee families has taken her throughout Australia and overseas. Currently she is in private practice. Her work involves conducting training courses in supervision and supervision of supervision, as well as her continuing work with families who experience long‐term illnesses.     

Gendered images of international research collaboration

Joan Acker's theory on gendered organizations offers important tools for understanding subtler forms of inequalities and gendered practices in the workplace. According to Acker, invisible mechanisms in organizations such as the symbolic and material/structural aspects of organizations reproduce gendered inequalities. My application of Acker's theory demonstrates how imagery itself assigns value to collaborative practices in gender stereotypical ways. In an institutional context that devalues international research collaboration among faculty, gendered images of exploiter, patronizing helper, partner, or friend ultimately serve to construct glass fences ‐ obstacles to international collaborative engagement ‐ particularly for women. The reflection and potential recreation of gendered inequalities among academics simultaneously reconstructs inequalities between the U.S. and abroad, as institutional reward structures attach gendered symbolic and material values that (re)shape (international) collaborations themselves. Together, these processes construct the gendered organization of global science and academia.     

Overcoming the Glass Barriers: Reflection and Action in the ‘Women to the Top’ Programme

Numerous equality programmes have been launched with the aim of promoting a more gender equal work life, yet little substantial action has been reported. This article presents a study of the Women to the Top programme in Sweden, supported by the European Union (EU) and aimed at promoting more women into top management positions. The research suggests that large‐scale projects assembling such heterogeneous actors as industry representatives, politicians and scholars tend to generate further reflection and discussion rather than promoting adequate and highly needed action. Drawing upon Brunsson's distinction between action rationality and decision rationality, the relatively modest effects of large‐scale equality programmes are examined, not in terms of a lack of commitment or competence on the part of the participants but as a matter of the disjunction between reflection and action. Reconciling reflection and action, that is, emphasizing not only reflection on gender inequality but also privileging various forms of practical action (such as new policies, the appointment of female managers, restructuring gendered wage inequalities or new recruitment procedures), is therefore a top priority for policymakers desiring more substantial changes in the gendered outline of industry.     

CAT FIGHTS AND GANG FIGHTS

This article uses Joan Acker's (1990) theory of gendered organizations to frame an analysis of the construction of occupational choice. Utilizing interview data collected from correctional officers (N = 36) working in a men's and a women's state prison, I examine these officers' strong preference for work in the men's prison. Reasons for preferring work with men draw on a comparison of male to female inmates in which the latter are seen as emotional and irrational, an ideal typical construction of the men's prison as a "real penitentiary,'and a feeling among officers that supervisors in women's prisons are less able to enforce institutional rules. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this case study for a theory of gendered occupational choice and gendered organizations.     

‘Not one of the family’: Gender and precarious work in the neoliberal university

Gender inequality within the university is well documented but proposals to tackle it tend to focus on the higher ranks, ignoring how it manifests within precarious work. Based on data collected as part of a broader participatory action research project on casual academic labour in Irish higher education, the article focuses on the intersection of precarious work and gender in academia. We argue that precarious female academics are non‐citizens of the academy, a status that is reproduced through exploitative gendered practices and evident in formal/legal recognition (staff status, rights and entitlements, pay and valuing of work) as well as in informal dimensions (social and decision‐making power). We, therefore, conclude that any attempts to challenge gender inequality in academia must look downward, not upward, to the ranks of the precarious academics.     

The tomboyism of faith: spiritual tomboyism in the cult of Sainte Foy

This article offers a reading of premodern, spiritual tomboyism as evident in the cult of Sainte Foy in France during the ninth to eleventh centuries. It draws attention to the signs of differently gendered and aged masculinities in the female child saint. Martyred at the cusp of puberty, Sainte Foy remains forever suspended in her gender development. Bernard of Angers, in the Liber miraculorum, portrays Foy as a trickster tomboy whose miracles are known as her "jokes." But beyond the historical Foy and the textual Foy, there is a third Foy who is embodied in a reliquary statue with an adult male head. In times of social upheaval, Sainte Foy, whose earthly presence is manifest in her relics and reliquary statue, functions as a local patronus who protects her monastery, properties, and devotees. Her male-headed reliquary further affirms her identity as a holy warrior of Christ who fights to uphold the Peace of God. As trickster-tomboy and warrior-patronus, Sainte Foy hovers at and crosses over the boundaries of both gender- and age-based identities and practices.     

A Brazilian pandemia/monium: A researcher’s search for a ‘New Normal’

This is the narrative of a Brazilian PhD candidate during the first four months of COVID‐19 in Brazil. Her trajectory and feelings are expressed in evocative autoethnographic format, juxtaposed with the main feminist debates and concerns taking place in Brazil during the pandemic. As scenario, an unprecedented worldwide sanitary crisis and local economic, political and social crises, challenging activists, feminists and the researcher herself in posing new questions to understand the world, her country and herself during/after crises. Her own feminist lenses cannot read ‘New Normal’ comfortably.     

‘Over the Pond and Across the Water’: Developing the Field of ‘Gendered Organizations’

This article is concerned with the development of gendered organizations as a field of study. It begins by exploring some of the factors that militate against integrating organization studies and gender studies and gendered organizations scholarship over national/continental divides. Increasingly doubtful about whether traditional (mainstream and critical) organization theories will or can adequately address gender, we contend that scholars of gendered organizations should ‘strike out’ on our/their own, ‘boldly going’ into unfamiliar territory to create new, innovative theories, concepts and ideas. We make various suggestions about possible future directions for theorizing and research.     

Fighting racism within ourselves — Even when you have carried your mixed‐race children in your womb

This alternative narrative tells the story of an upper‐middle‐class White feminist scholar, Lili. Lili builds her feminist knowledge by pursuing an equality ideal situated at the crossroads of gender, race, class and religion. Married to a Black Muslim man from West Africa and mother of three mixed‐race sons, Lili's story shows the ambiguities of her own anti‐racist struggles. Her story illustrates how being anti‐racist does not mean that one is free from racism, even in the case of a White woman who has carried her mix‐raced children in her womb. This is a call for humility and self‐awareness when entering in anti‐racism acts.     

Reflections on Joan Acker's influence on us and on her legacy: A dialogue

In reflecting on Joan Acker's legacy and her influence on us, we had the dialogue we reproduce here. We hope it shows our admiration and gratitude for her work.     

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.     

‘Please tell me when you are in pain’: A heartbreaking story of care,grief and female–canine companionship

What could the underdeveloped research area of canine–human companionship teach us about gendered body work as well as offer to the field of organization studies more broadly? This article responds to recent discussions on the animal in the organizational academy. We share an autoethnographic story of female–canine companionship as experienced by one of the authors of the article and her beloved dog, who is currently living on the borderlines between life and death, joy and mourning. We find this example relevant for raising important feminist concerns among organizational scholars about silenced questions around care and grief as well as for developing more inclusive and ethically grounded approaches to exploring research topics dealing with vulnerability. Finally, this article offers a critical reflection on the potential and limitations of alternative research in the field of organization studies that recognizes our affective relations with animals.     

“I wanted a soul mate”: Gendered Anticipation and Frameworks of Accountability in Parents' Preferences for Sons and Daughters

This article draws on qualitative interview data from a diverse sample of parents in New England to explore the preferences they recall having for sons or daughters prior to parenthood. Before their children even arrive, potential parents are not only building the foundation for the gendered interests and tendencies they expect those children to have but also sharpening their sense of themselves as gendered persons, through the connections they anticipate sharing with their future children. Applying Fenstermaker, West, and Zimmerman's (2002) approach to gender as a situated accomplishment, I argue that through their gendered anticipation, parents reproduce a framework of accountability to gendered expectations, casting as essential features of their potential children and themselves gendered tendencies that are better understood as products rather than causes of the interactions parents anticipate. I consider the significance of such anticipation not only for the children these parents eventually raised but also for reproducing the frameworks of accountability that affect other parents and children more broadly.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.