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.     

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.     

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.     

Joan Acker and the shift from patriarchy to gender

Feminist sociologist Joan Acker is most commonly cited as one of the first to theorize how gender gets institutionalized in organizations and workplaces. But this project was actually an application of a more general theoretical turn in the field Acker was promoting. Acker was centrally involved in an important feminist sociological conversation about whether we should continue to theorize and study ‘patriarchy' or whether our focus should shift to ‘gender'. She argued for the latter and played an influential role in convincing the field to follow this suggestion.     

Joan Acker and Doing Comparable Worth

Joan Acker's seminal book Doing Comparable Worth, based on her first‐hand experience of implementing comparable worth for Oregon state employees, constitutes a major contribution to understanding the obstacles to achieving the goal of equal pay and is a precursor of her inequalities regimes work. For Acker the foundering of the comparable worth exercise on the rocks of management's opportunistic strategy to marginalize trade unions provided a direct experience of how gender and class inequalities are simultaneously produced and reproduced. Consequently, wage setting is always political and change to wages generates widespread resistance above and beyond issues of gender inequalities. While the feminist activists may be rightly criticized for naivety in their belief in a technical solution to gender pay inequalities, their robust critiques of pay practices is sorely missing in today's renewed acceptance of a gender‐neutral labour market, and more limited feminist interest in theories of pay.     

My New Zealand lesbian studies through time and times

In this article Alison J. Laurie reflects on her political activism and how it informs her academic scholarship and research interests relating to lesbian studies in New Zealand. She concludes that her desire for social change and commitment to lesbian community development inspired her early activism and has continued to inform her activism as well as her academic research and writing. She discusses her involvement in lesbian and gay organizations and campaigns, in New Zealand, Scandinavia, the United States and the United Kingdom, and the ideas that have informed and influenced her work. She pioneered the first lesbian studies courses in New Zealand, initially through community education, and from 1990 for university credit, and considers the contribution these courses can make. Finally, she reflects on several of her articles, book chapters and books considering how her work has developed during the past 50 years.     

“We Come Not Here to Talk”—Revisiting the Work of Anna Julia Cooper: An Analysis of Standpoint Theory and Her Placement in the Academic Canon

This paper examines the writings and influence of Anna Julia Cooper. The honest, historical narrative of scholarship is in question when theorists of color are repeatedly forgotten or removed from the academic record. Anna Julia Cooper is just one example of someone who has been overlooked. I detail how Cooper's analysis of group identity, located in shared experience, provided the groundwork for intersectional frameworks and feminist standpoint theory. I further contend that Cooper's lived-experience narrative not only informed her own work but the work of others of her time, including the more esteemed W.E.B. Du Bois. She addressed how race-gendered politics and the legacies of slavery and colonialism shape scholarship. Cooper's critique of academia determined that the relationship between colonialism and academia is intrinsically tied. My analysis examines how the work of theorists of color is often omitted, erased, or contextualized within the writings of white theorists due, in part, to a lack of generational intellectual wealth. A concept that recognizes the historical discrepancy in scholarship between white scholars and scholars of color and how that exclusion has shaped and defined established knowledge. This paper analyzes Cooper's placement within the lineage of the academic canon.     

Work in the shadow of finance: Rethinking Joan Acker's materialist feminist sociology

To commemorate the life and work of Joan Acker, this article focuses on the jewel in the crown of her extensive oeuvre: ‘Hierarchies, Jobs and Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations'. I take as my focus the significance of ‘Hierarchies, Jobs and Bodies' for the development of theorizations of labour and especially for theorizations of post‐Fordist work and working. In so doing, I trace the impact of Acker's interventions across a number of bodies of research and sets of debates across the nearly three decades since its publication. But in addition to tracing this impact, I ask if the relevance of ‘Hierarchies, Jobs and Bodies' still holds today. Does this relevance still hold in a context where finance institutions rather than work organizations have emerged as the key institutions of societal discipline and control? In opening out this line of questioning my intention is to advance the broad project to which Acker was firmly committed, namely, the project of materialist feminist sociology.     

Challenges to Bridging Field and Classroom Instruction: Exploring Field Instructors’ Perspectives on Macro Practice

Field education and macro practice have been highlighted as central educational domains in social work education; however, little scholarship has looked at how macro social work practice competencies have been integrated into field-based learning. This exploratory study aimed to gain perspectives from field instructors regarding macro social work and the integration of macro practice into their work with practicum students. Consistent with scholarship that has elucidated the impacts of neoliberalism on social work, including the marginalization of macro practice, emergent themes demonstrated that field instructors face barriers to incorporating macro work into their training of students. Challenges include prevalence of the medical model, time constraints, and funding limitations. Further, field instructors observed gaps among students, their university, and their organizational setting in regard to expectations for integrating macro practice into field education. Recommendations and directions for future research are discussed.     

Diversity Regimes in Worker Cooperatives: Workplace Inequality under Conditions of Worker Control

Two major shifts in contemporary work organizations—“employee participation” and “diversity management”—have typically been studied in isolation from one another. Building on theoretical work by Acker (2006a,b), we ask how the interaction of these two constructs has affected the pursuit of workplace democracy at two worker cooperatives in Northern California. Using qualitative methods, we find that distinct “diversity regimes” have emerged at these establishments, substantially affecting the configurations of inequality that evolved. We distinguish two types of diversity regimes—“utilitarian” and “communitarian”—which operate either to obscure the workings of inequality or to foster attention to their presence. Our results suggest that how sociodemographic differences are managed has material consequences for the development of egalitarian structures at work.     

Schools as workplaces: Intersectional regimes of inequality

Joan Acker extended her 1990 brilliant and path‐breaking article, ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies', to address the intersectional effects of gender, race and class as ‘inequality regimes' in her 2006 article of that name. This research picks up her challenge to see embodied workers holding jobs in organizations structured simultaneously and interactively by gender, race and class processes. Rather than studying a corporate regime in which the actors are managers, supervisors and workers, this study looks at the organizational interactions among teachers and paraprofessionals in one large, urban and unionized school district in the United States. We look at skill, care and respect as three dimensions of interaction embedded in the occupational demands and specific job requirements of teachers and paraprofessionals, and some of the tensions this regime produces between the largely White teachers and the women of colour who are the paraprofessionals. By highlighting the largely invisible racialized work of supporting the moral worth of students and staff, we extend the understanding of skill and care beyond a binary model.     

Career Rehabilitation: Integration of Vocational Rehabilitation and Career Development in the Twenty‐First Century

The concept of career rehabilitation, a paradigm that proposes integrating perspectives from vocational rehabilitation and career development, is introduced. Counselors are encouraged to assess how vocational handicaps secondary to a disabling problem can affect a client over his or her “worklife” and to adopt a life‐span approach to career decision making of people with disabilities. Four common vocational handicaps are discussed: diminished access to work opportunities, need for workplace accommodations, employer bias in hiring and advancement, and diminished “worklife” expectancy. Counselors testifying in legal forums are encouraged to pursue scholarship on the career development of people with disabilities.     

In remembrance of Professor Joan Acker: A legendary figure in the field of Gender,Work and Organization

This article celebrates Joan Acker's academic life and her enormous contribution to the field of gender, work and organization. It acknowledges not just what she contributed to gender studies and politics but how she combined her analysis and her activism with a concern for equality more generally, especially in relation to social class and race.     

Macro-Focused Social Work Dissertations: A Preliminary Look at the Numbers

Dissertation research is an important indicator of practice trends and emerging issues. The social work profession relies on this scholarship to build its knowledge base thus reducing reliance on cognate fields. It is worthwhile to note how many dissertations are being completed and to review the categories being pursued in dissertation products to see if there are trends or questions that are dominating or masking larger issues in the field. Social work dissertations focused on macro scholarship efforts are of particular interest for the purpose of this article. This research investigates two simple, yet important, questions: How many macro-focused social work dissertations have been awarded in the past 10 years? and What was the content area of these works?     

Tribute to Joan Acker (1924–2016): Views from ‘the South’

This short personal piece provides reflections on the contribution of Joan Acker's theorising and insights for gendered organization scholars working in New Zealand. We have positive recollections of Joan Acker the person, as well as her sharp and thoughtful analyses of gendered inequalities. Her contributions moved beyond gender as intersectionality influenced her later works. Her thoughts on positive organizational change are considered and finally, we offer quotes that will endure.     

Governing through accountability: Gendered moral selves and the (im)possibilities of resistance in the neoliberal university

Drawing on Judith Butler's early work on gender as performance and her later work on the ethically accountable subject, this study examines the production of gendered moral subjects under neoliberal governance in contemporary academia. The analysis of 40 semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with postdoc researchers and assistant, associate and full professors in a Belgian university reveals how in academics’ narratives of their ethical relations of (non‐)accountability towards multiple stakeholders, gendered subjects are performed along the heterosexual matrix reproducing the gender binary. The conjunction of gendered and ethical demands imposed through relations of accountability further opens up distinctively gendered possibilities of consent and resistance under neoliberal governance. We advance the extant literature on gender in academia which largely focuses on women's symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. By locating power in the gendered relations of accountability towards multiple others, it re‐conceptualizes gender as an ontological struggle in the constitution of the self as moral along gendered norms. The study rejoins recent scholarship that calls for the recognition and elaboration of a relational ethics by showing how such ethics enables the emergence of open and responsive subjectivities in relations of accountability.     

Race,poverty, and markets: urban inequality after the neoliberal turn

Classic scholarship on the problem of urban inequality tends to highlight the absence of “the market” and the correspondingly problematic and inadequate role of the state in poor communities. This article explores how the relationship between markets and urban poverty has shifted in recent decades. Scholars have become increasingly attentive to the growing influence of market logics and privatization—core features of “neoliberal” change—in areas such as housing, education, federal policy, local politics, employment, and social services. I discuss how this recent work adds to our understanding of how markets shape urban disadvantage. I also argue that—given the rising influence of market logics in city governance—urban scholarship stands to benefit from a deeper engagement with insights from the field of economic sociology. Building bridges between the two subfields, I argue, will help to specify what markets mean in the lives of the urban poor, and also can bring issues of race and poverty to the attention of economic sociologists.     

What We Should Want with History: A Meditation on Cultural Studies,Methodology, and Politics

This essay evaluates two of the central problems for Cultural Studies as a field: how to generate methodologically rigorous scholarship that is also politically useful; and how to productively use models and theory in the practice of history. Beginning with conversations about the place of (disciplinary) history in Cultural Studies, this essay explores one of the legendary debates in the field: between E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and (at least in theory) Louis Althusser. Though the debate centered on the degree to which the English Civil War could be termed a “bourgeois revolution,” Thompson's fundamental critique concerned Anderson's use of abstract models in history. However, the distinctions Thompson makes are not nearly as clear‐cut in practice – particularly when we look at Ellen Meiksins Wood's attempt to intervene on Thompson's side in her 1991 book The Pristine Culture of Capitlism. Wood's understanding of capitalism relies on an abstract conceptualization of that mode of produciton that is ironically similar to that of Althusser and Anderson. Arguing this as an illustratration of the importance of explicit models and methods, the essay develops Richard Johnson's account of Marx's use of abstraction and theory in his own historical scholarship. Marx's framework is then deployed to reconsider the English Civil War in realation to a key contemporary concern: the origins of copyright and intellectual property. It ends by advocating for what I term anarchic abstraction: a conscious, rigorous, politically‐committed, and dialectical attention to the order and determinations of history with no strict hierarchy given in advance.     

Roses,Poetry and Prose

Otrude Nontobeko Moyo teaches social policy at the University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME, USA. Her teaching and scholarship address work, inequality, and social change. Her recent book is titled Trampled No More: Voices from Bulawayo's Townships about Families, Life, Survival and Social Change in Zimbabwe. Some of her poetry has been published by Off the Coast.     

“A Geography of Disparate Spirits”: Pathology as Oppression in “A Woman is Talking to Death” and “Mental”

This article foregrounds Judy Grahn's commitment to social justice and chiefly considers her nine-part poems: “A Woman is Talking to Death” and “Mental.” These poems illuminate the socially constructed nature of mental illness and challenge readers to consider how and why the characters within them are deemed mentally ill. Little, if any, scholarship has been devoted to using Grahn's poetry, and particularly “Mental,” as a framework for analyzing the pathologization of people, especially women, relative to the system of mental health. Her work remains relevant to critical conversations that illuminate contemporary issues of oppression that still haunt us today.