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.     

林译《迦茵小传》的文学价值及其影响

英国作家哈葛德本是二三流的作家,他的小说<迦茵小传>在其本国并未引起什么反响,但翻译家林纾颇有"化腐朽为神奇"的本领,经他"加工"过的<迦茵小传>虽说与原作出入较大,有失其"真",但此作却取得了极高的艺术成就,成为轰动中国文坛的佳作,在清末文学界引起很大轰动,对中国文学观念的嬗变也产生了积极的影响.因此,特定历史时期出现的林译<迦茵小传>仍具有值得我们研究的文学价值.     

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.     

Women's NGOs at UN Conferences: The 1992 Rio Conference on the Environment as a Watershed Event

SUMMARY

Before the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) was held in Brazil in 1992, the involvement of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in UN conferences was limited. NGOs participate in UN conferences in two ways, at a non-governmental forum usually convened simultaneously with an official UN conference, or as accredited observers to the official conference where government delegations meet and make decisions. Only 200 NGOs were granted access to the official portion of the Decade for Women Conference held in Nairobi in 1985, whereas 1,400 organizations were accredited to attend UNCED in Rio in 1992. And while only a small portion, about 5 percent, of those were women-oriented NGOs, they had a significant impact on the outcome. An entire chapter on women and environmental issues was added to the official conference document, and cross-cutting references to women were included throughout the document. This achievement reflects the work of several uniquely placed women, in and outside governments and the United Nations system, working together to build an international network of women and bring their voices to the table. Moreover, the techniques they developed have been used by women at every major UN conference held since 1992.     

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.     

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.