Grand Challenges, Feminist Answers

Abstract

Feminist organization theories develop knowledge about how organizations and processes of organizing shape and are shaped by gender, in intersection with race, class and other forms of social inequality. The politics of knowledge within management and organization studies tend to marginalize and silence feminist theorizing on organizations, and so the field misses out on the interdisciplinary, sophisticated conceptualizations and reflexive modes of situated knowledge production provided by feminist work. To highlight the contributions of feminist organization theories, I discuss the feminist answers to three of the grand challenges that contemporary organizations face: inequality, technology and climate change. These answers entail a systematic critique of dominant capitalist and patriarchal forms of organizing that perpetuate complex intersectional inequalities. Importantly, feminist theorizing goes beyond mere critique, offering alternative value systems and unorthodox approaches to organizational change, and providing the radically different ways of knowing that are necessary to tackle the grand challenges. The paper develops an aspirational ideal by sketching the contours of how we can organize for intersectional equality, develop emancipatory technologies and enact a feminist ethics of care for the human and the natural world.

Strategies to Improve Women’s Leadership Preparation for Early Career Global Health Professionals: Suggestions from Two Working Groups

“…There are other power dynamics that exist among women themselves in which an intersectional approach is important to elevating women of diverse race, religion, age, ability, gender identity, and sexual orientation [ 33 ]. Cisgender white women should also play critical roles to elevate their non-cisgender, non-white counterparts.…”

What Theory Is and Can Be: Forms of Theorizing in Organizational Scholarship

“…They may reflect for instance on the root assumptions or value orientations that are implicit in our current theoretical resources. Benschop (2021), for example, surveys the dominant root assumptions on gender, class, and race that have influenced research on inequality, technology, and climate change, and offers a re-signification of such categories using feminist theory. Through re-signification, metatheorizing offers at once a synthesis of past research as well as a deeper reading of the theoretical resources that have been routinely used.…”

“…Through re-signification, metatheorizing offers at once a synthesis of past research as well as a deeper reading of the theoretical resources that have been routinely used. Such a synthesis may as a theoretical abstraction be somewhat less 'close to the ground' (Winch, 1958) but it has, as in the above example (Benschop, 2021), direct downstream consequences for the practice of organizational theorizing.…”

“…Finally, it is worth noticing that papers that are written in the tradition of interpretive theorizing tend to follow less of a standard template than those in the explanatory tradition. Papers will of course centrally feature a synthesis of theoretical resources as well as a proposed re-signification, but in some cases these parts may be written up as separate sections, and in other instances may be meshed into one single section (see, for instance, Benschop, 2021). We also noticed that in some cases perspective papers may still be structured and written up as somewhat analogous to a scientific article (see, for instance, Cooren, 2020), whereas in other cases the paper is more essayistic in nature involving a more continuous flow between sections.…”

Caring about the unequal effects of the pandemic: What feminist theory, art, and activism can teach us

“…First, they push back against dominant white, western, masculine, and anthropocentric academic normativity, confronting us with diverse realities of injustice and calling us to action. Second, feminist theorizations bring novel and more inclusive approaches to knowledge production by making space for the conceptualization of diverse experiences and practices of historically marginalized groups (e.g., Ahmed, 2016; Barad, 2017; Benschop, 2021; Butler, 2004; Eddo‐Lodge, 2017; Georgiadou et al., 2021; Holvino, 2010; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Mandalaki & Fotaki, 2020; Nkomo et al., 2019; Zulfiqar & Prasad, 2021).…”