Gender and Bureaucracies —A Critique of Ferguson's ‘The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy’

Within the area of gender and organization studies there is a tendency to generalize about organizations and how they affect people working in them. In feminist analysis, salient in Kathy Ferguson's ‘The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy’, there is a tendency to have a one-sided view on bureaucracies and to regard these merely as products of ‘maleness’ and as incompatible with (radical) feminism. On the basis of a case-study of three different bureaucracies, this article questions the assumption of incompatibility and argues for a more nuanced assessment of gender and bureaucracies.