Doing gender in the ‘new office’

This paper investigates how gender is performed in the context of an office setting designed to promote intensive, fluid networking. We draw on an ethnographically oriented study of the move of staff into a new office building constructed primarily from glass, and incorporating open plan offices, diverse collective areas and walking routes. Although the designers aimed to invoke changes in the behaviour of all staff, they conceptualized these changes in masculine terms. We therefore analyse the gender norms materialized by the workspaces of the ‘new office’ and how women responded to these. We suggest that the new office encourages an image of the ideal worker which brings together ways of acting and interacting that have been characterized as both masculine and feminine — active movement and spontaneous encounters, but also intensive face‐to‐face interaction and deep relationship‐building. Women are driven into this mode of working in an uncompromising, almost aggressive way, but a straightforward gender‐based dynamic does not emerge in their responses, with conventional gender characteristics being reshuffled and recombined.     

‘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.     

Which is the ‘self’ in ‘self‐interest’?

This article contends that homogenisation of the term ‘self‐interest’– in sociological and economic discourse – has resulted in many misconceptions about what particular doctrines of ‘self‐interest’ were instituted to achieve at certain historical periods and in specific cultural milieux. At its worst, the article argues, this has led to a misunderstanding of the import of particular doctrines of self interest,which are read in terms of general tradition – such as that which views self‐interested conduct as a natural faculty – rather than in terms of the context specific aims of those advocating them. The article attempts to show how, historically, there have been quite significant changes in the characterisation of the ‘self’ deemed to be ‘self‐interested’. In particular, it focuses on the ‘self’ of certain early modern conceptions of self interest, and suggests this creation is best viewed not as a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but as one historically cultivated to counter the exigencies of particular circumstances – the disaster of perpetual ‘warre’ in 17th century Europe – and to meet the purposes of a certain way of life – existence in the civitas.     

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.     

‘Knowing one's place’: gender,mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract In this article I analyse the gendered space of transnational mobility by problematizing migrant subjectivity in everyday practices. In line with feminist perspectives I highlight the significance of the micro‐scale experience of female migrants from Eastern Indonesia in acquiring mobility as a struggle for new subjectivity. I frame this migration as a production of the subjective space of power. Based on in‐depth interviews with returned migrants, I present reflexive accounts of two migrants on contract domestic work abroad to illuminate the changing contours of the relationships between gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity. Households take into account the cultural meanings of space in everyday life including local relations in the decisions on mobility. Strategies of ‘knowing one's place’ reflect women's agency in negotiating alternative roles and positions within the intra‐household dynamics and in the workplace. Women's personal accounts have the potential to illuminate spatial processes of migration as a contested space for the repositioning of self in networks of family, kin, local and global relations.     

‘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.     

Against the norm: the transitional symbiosis of ‘grassroots clientelism’ and ‘rural citizenship’

Clientelism has predominantly been represented in the literature as an expression of backwardness and corruption with little attention being paid to the question of how clientelism has changed over the years. In contrast, this paper examines the particulars of state intervention in the agrarian economy with respect to clientelism and exposes the illogicality of contrasting patron‐client relationships with citizenship. The historical focus is on the ways in which, in the course of post‐dictatorship consolidation in rural Greece throughout the 1980s, the transformation of traditional brokerage‐based clientelism into the bureaucratic clientelism of the political parties actually enhanced the institutions and practices of ‘rural citizenship’. Comparative qualitative research on the driving force of agrarian change shows how Thessalian villagers made the transition from being socially excluded subjects to socially included clients in two lowland village communities and the role played by a dynamic state bureaucracy.     

‘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.     

‘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.     

‘Blair's children’: young women as ‘aspirational subjects’ in the psychic landscape of class

This paper engages with the subjective experience of ‘doing’ aspiration, teasing out the psychic and social costs that accompany this as a classed process. It draws on a qualitative study of young women located in further education and contemplating their futures under New Labour, locating how the political rhetoric of aspiration gets institutionalized within school practices; how it intersects with maternal expectations and practices of involvement; and how these are lived and managed by subjects located in different positions in class‐inflected social space. In attending to the tangled web of institutional, intergenerational and affective practices which shape young women's aspirations, the paper seeks to interrupt the celebratory and simplistic rhetoric of aspiration that characterizes the contemporary socio‐political register of neoliberalism. As these ideals become further entrenched by the current Coalition government, there is an even greater urgency for such sociological enquiries.     

From ‘weak’ to ‘strong’ multifunctionality: Conceptualising farm-level multifunctional transitional pathways

Building on normative conceptualisations of multifunctionality as a decision-making spectrum bounded by productivist and non-productivist action and thought, this paper analyses farm-level multifunctional agricultural transitions. First, the paper suggests that it may be possible to categorise different farm types along the productivist/non-productivist multifunctionality spectrum, and that transitional potential from weak to strong multifunctionality often differs between different categories of farms and types of farm ownership. Second, the paper conceptualises multifunctional transitional processes at farm level over time, and introduces the notions of multifunctional path dependency and decision-making corridors, the latter of which can be understood as ‘bundles’ of decision-making opportunities bounded by productivist and non-productivist action and thought. The analysis suggests that system memory plays an important role in defining the likelihood of multifunctional actions, and argues that transitional ruptures—sudden breaks in transitional pathways—often characterise farm-level transitions. The paper concludes by highlighting the methodological challenges awaiting future researchers of multifunctional agricultural transitions.     

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.     

The nature of ‘schools’in the sociology of knowledge: The case of the ‘Chicago School’

The nature of 'schools’as a metascientific construct is reviewed. Tiryakian's (1979a) increasingly popular construction of a school of sociology is examined and the case of ‘The Chicago School’is considered in detail. The efficacy of a 'schools’approach to understanding the nature of the growth and development of scientific knowledge is called into question. It is suggested that schools, as used in the literature, tend to be convenient groupings of practitioners rather than metascientific categories and that they fail to adequately engage knowledge transformative processes.     

Representations of the ‘Damaged’ Child: ‘Child Saving’ in a British Children's Charity ad Campaign

This article discusses the representation of abused children as ‘damaged’, drawing on a series of three advertising campaigns for a British children's charity. The pictures and text of the advertisements seek to elicit readers’ concern for abused children by portraying them (a) as passive agents in their development and (b) as signifiers of the dangers of the world and the safeness of the home. The portrayal of abused children in the advertisements serves to reinforce a perception of the vulnerability of all children and the need for adult supervision and ‘care’. Without seeking to dismiss the seriousness of abuse or of the work done by children's charities, the article questions the implications of these representations of childhood and ‘damage’, and argues that the dominant representation of abused children drawn on in such campaigns oversimplifies many complexities in the worlds and the lives of children who have been abused.