Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies:

Abstract

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work. Abstract jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference.

No Room for Balancing: Mothers and Professors in Czech Maternity Hospitals

“…Hospitals and clinics are gendered organizations (Acker, 1990) with very strong formal as well as informal regimes that act to reproduce the duality of mothers and professors. This symbolic duality of professors and mothers is reproduced in the gender universe, the symbol system of gender difference (Harding, 1987) that is not taken into account by the key actors in the hospital hierarchy.…”

“…(Doctor Ice) Besides documenting the gender universe in such accounts, the recollected experiences are significant in terms of gendered organizations, as Joan Acker (Acker, 1990) describes them. Hospitals are seemingly neutral, formal (bureaucratic) organizations, where occupational performance and skill promote career advancement on the basis of democratic principles.…”

“…Personal and family life has to surrender to professional life, to the formal curricula of the hospital, which is informally engaged in reproducing a gendered organisational regime and the gender universe, and in creating symbolic harm (Acker, 1990;Bourdieu, 2001;Harding, 1987). Striving to have both a perfect career and a family was described by female respondents from the research study as being hazardous to one's health, and the resulting arrangement was usually described as being 'good enough'.…”

“…By doing so, we may better understand what factors affect work-life balance in the medical profession, or rather, what lies behind the lack of policies for promoting harmony between work and life in this long-standing and prestigious profession. The sociological analysis presented herein conceptually draws on feminist theories of gendered organisations (Acker, 1990) and conceptualisations of the gender system of gender differences, or the 'gender universe', as introduced by Sandra Harding (Harding, 1987) and developed in the Czech context by Gerlinda Šmausová (Šmausová, 2002). According to this conceptual framework, work-life (im)balance is understood as a gendered and culturally (structurally as well as symbolically) conditioned category with diverging normative expectations towards professional women and men with respect to their commitments in private life and implications for their professional careers.…”

“…The article targets the structural mechanisms that reproduce Czech hospital gender regimes and their effects on work-life balance according to the individual coping strategies of the actors involved. These are conceptually framed using the symbolic system of the gender universe (Harding, 1987) and the theory of gendered organisations (Acker, 1990). The empirical data used in the analysis comes from qualitative research (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014) into Czech reproductive medicine, specifically obstetrics.…”