Beyond Hierarchy

Gender And Sexuality In The Social Economy

Sarah Oerton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135345730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the early 1980s there has been a surge of interest in both issues of gender and sexuality in work and organizational life, and in the founding and running of co-operatives and collectives. Since hierarchy rests on divisions which are in part gendered and sexualized, and co-operatives for the most part operate with "flat" or non-hierarchical structures, they could be seen as places where gender and sexuality make little difference to the experiences of workers.; This text takes issue with the assumption that where there is an absence of formal hierarchy in work and organizational life, there is likely to be an absence of gender inequalities. It argues that the matter is more complex than the simple equating of less hierarchy with greater gender equality.

Part I

Chapter 1

Introduction

For some time now there has been a growing interest in the social economy, largely understood as a non-profit or third sector distinct from both the public (statutory) and the private (business) sectors of the economy and comprising, amongst other things, co-operative businesses, campaigning and social movement organizations, mutual aid societies and non-profit, voluntarily-managed associations and groups (Cornforth and Hooker, 1989; Paton, 1991; Taylor 1986; Thomas and Thomas, 1989). This interest in the social economy has been relatively recent however, and there is still much scope for research, particularly in terms of identifying both the distinctiveness and diversity of the sector, as well as looking at how it is constituted in organizational terms. To date, this is a contested project largely because there is no single definition of the social economy that translates easily from location to location. For some, the social economy is often collapsed or elided with the voluntary sector, which itself has been described as a ‘rag-bag’, containing every type of organization not included in either the public or private sectors of the economy and having no one internal defining feature of its own (Hatch, 1980). However, in general terms the social economy is usually understood to comprise value-based organizations orientated towards the provision of some kind of common benefit or public good, rather than the generation of (private) profit. For example, Paton argues that value-based organizations ‘whose members share a strong commitment to a common cause, be it organic gardening, scouting, assisting those with AIDS or feminism’ are the ‘heartland’ of the social economy (Paton, 1991: 6, emphasis added).

Although the organizational principles and practices of the social economy may not always be as clearly developed or articulated as those of the public and private sectors, much of what legitimately constitutes the social economy includes large, bureaucratized organizations, with leaders who exercise power and control over subordinates. However, at the same time as there has been a growth of academic interest in the social economy, there has also been much more acknowledgment in the mainstream literature on work and organizations of the need to ‘de-layer’, to encourage flatter, less or non-hierarchical ways of organizing in all sectors of the economy, and particularly in cases where enterprises are small to medium-sized.¹ In short, it is recognized that there is much value in seeking to reduce power differentials between members/workers within organizational settings in order to reduce or eliminate unnecessary hierarchy. This has involved promoting working practices in many organizations which emphasize collaboration, flexibility and networking. As Ashbridge Management Research Group (1988) claim:

Organizations in future will be … ‘flatter’ and more fluid in structure, and more fast-moving … The need to manage issues across … the organization will lead to the growing importance of ‘horizontal’ management [i.e. the management of lateral relationships] as opposed to ‘vertical’ management [i.e. the management of hierarchical relationships] (Ashbridge, 1988: 37).

One of the central platforms for flatter organization is the devolution of power and control, so that instead of a small number of full-time managers planning and controlling the activities of many workers, organizations now require the collaboration of many specialists who have a significant managerial component to their work and have to be involved in decisions. Hence modern firms are conceived of as necessarily becoming more participative in terms of sharing power and as having to rely increasingly on a common culture to ensure integration and commitment.

Whereas flatter, less or non-hierarchical organization cannot be used as a defining feature of the social economy since in some cases performing the organization’s task may be controlled through bureaucratic procedures and hierarchical structures not dissimilar from those of conventional public or private sector organizations, nevertheless participative, consultative and democratic forms of management have special importance for organizations in the social economy, because of their origins as associations with socially beneficial goals. This means that having a flatter, less or non-hierarchical organizational structure may be integral to the way tasks are carried out in order to ensure that the social goals of the organization are realized. In short, there is a necessary overlap between how they organize and what they are trying to achieve.² If social goals or values include some commitment to participation and democracy, an organization is more or less bound to introduce co-operative and collective ideals into its working practices. It is these organizations that are of central concern in this book.

Across a range of non-profit businesses and voluntarily-managed, grantaided organizations in the social economy, workers have sought to organize in ways which reflect their beliefs about private ownership, returns on capital, and the efficacy of traditional management hierarchies. Such workers are to be found in flatter, less or non-hierarchical organizations which, in principle, at least, allow them to have greater power and control over their work than might be the case in more hierarchical organizations. For the most part this has meant adopting a co-operative or collective structure, and, in the case of some women, working in women-only organizations.³ It is remarkable that flatter organizations have attracted so little academic interest until recently, even though they have been central to the political project of feminism for some considerable time (Brown, 1990; Fried, 1994; Martin, 1990; Rothschild, 1990). In order to explore this neglect it is necessary to briefly review some of the background to the emergence of co-operative and collective forms of organization in the period of second-wave feminism.

Feminism and Flatter Organizations

Historically there have been many attempts by women to promote flatter forms of organization, including worker co-operatives, social movement organizations and some collective voluntary sector projects, where differences between members can be overcome so as to reduce or eliminate hierarchy (Gould, 1980; Kanter, 1975; Rothschild-Whitt, 1979). Such organizations may be seen as archetypes for the democratic, participatory groups characteristic of second-wave feminism, where values of autonomy, flexibility, collaboration and equality are stressed. Furthermore, in the 1970s and early 1980s, many feminists believed that collective and co-operative working was not just the way to organize politically, but was also the solution to hierarchy and class, race and gender inequalities in waged and unwaged work.

Both co-operatives and collectives therefore have been informed by and inform feminist politics. For example, Thornley (1981) noted the influence of feminism among the ‘new co-operators’ in Britain from the 1960s onwards and Jackall and Crain (1984) found that over 60 per cent of co-operators in small co-operatives in the United States were women. Furthermore, almost half the co-operatives sampled in their study were in traditionally feminine sectors of employment (for instance, food-related businesses) and members were mostly young, college-educated and white. Thomas (1990) reports from findings of a 1988 survey of worker co-operatives in the UK that 14 per cent of those cooperatives responding defined themselves as women-only, but his findings do not indicate whether women-only co-operatives differed in terms of the average size of their workforce from mixed-sex co-operatives, or what the proportion of men to women in mixed-sex co-operatives was, so it is difficult to estimate the proportion of women currently employed in the UK worker co-operatives sector. However, it is possible to be fairly confident on the basis of such research, that co-operatives have widespread appeal and support amongst politicized women generally and amongst feminists in particular.

In the early days of second-wave feminism, many women were also attracted to collective working, arguing that it was a desirable and radical way to end (male) power and hierarchy. Women-only collectives, often following in the traditions of women’s action and consciousness-raising groups, saw themselves as accountable in terms of feminist principles and politics. In the 1990s, women-only collectives continue to exist and thrive to a greater or lesser degree; there are still a number of collectively-run women’s centres in the UK, including black women’s centres, rape crisis centres, women’s aid centres/offices/refuges, and well-women or women’s health centres. There are also a handful of centres for counselling and therapy, women’s workshops and lesbian centres. As Trevithick (1987) has stated: The existence of these Centres and Helplines highlight how much practical and emotional support women give to each other and the degree to which more and more women are choosing to join or form women-only groups and organizations’ (Trevithick, 1987: 1). Efforts by feminists to organize without hierarchy and without leaders is informed by an often clear and coherent political analysis therefore, such that the adoption of values of equality and empowerment are seen to arise directly from a feminist analysis of the social order. As Brown argues: ‘Organising within the women’s movement is thus a conscious political act’ (1992: 9).

Flatter organizations may set out as or end up as all-women or women-only. They may be all-women in that no men are available or eligible as prospective workers due to forms of occupational segregation by gender in the labour market, or they may be women-only in that they do not recruit or employ men as part of their overall social and political policies. This book will use the term women’s co-operative or women’s collective to encompass both all-women and women-only organizations, and where it is important to distinguish between the two, this will be made explicit. There is a tendency to assume that because of the attempt to flatten the hierarchical structure of these particular organizations, women workers in both women’s and mixed-sex co-operatives and collectives will enjoy parity and equality with their men counterparts. This book will demonstrate that this does not necessarily follow and that there is a need to address this explicitly in the literature on the structuring of gender and sexuality in work and in organizations. This is something which has been largely neglected in such research until recently, a point that will be developed more fully in Chapter 2.

This book thus seeks to analyse the experiences of waged workers in flatter organizations, with specific reference to gender and sexuality. Given that one of the characteristics of some of the organizations in the social economy is their flatter, less or non-hierarchical structure, it has been all too easily assumed that such organizations will allow workers to realize goals of equity and empowerment, and that gender and sexuality will make little difference to the experiences of workers within such organizations. Where there is an absence of formal hierarchy, so the argument goes, there is likely to be an absence of gendered and sexualized inequalities, since hierarchy is premised upon divisions which are to an extent constituted by gendering and sexualizing processes and practices. As a result, flatter, less or non-hierarchical organizations such as worker co-operatives and grant-aided or voluntary sector collective organizations, perhaps more than other, larger and more bureaucratized organizations in the social economy (or the public or private sectors for that matter), are seen as places in which it is possible for workers, and women workers in particular, to overcome some of the obstacles associated with inequalities of gender and sexuality in more complex, hierarchical organizations in particular and in the labour market more generally. Whether this is the case or not remains to be seen, and the central concern of this book is to explore the extent to which women and men workers in co-operative and collective organizations do achieve goals of equity and empowerment, or whether they are highly constrained by the environment in which they are located.

This book sets out to explore these assumptions on the basis of collecting and analysing fieldwork data on the experiences of both women and men workers in a cross-section of different co-operative and collective organizations. To some extent the literature on worker co-operatives and collectivelyrun organizations in the voluntary sector reflects this expectation that gender is not a problem for workers in these organizations. Such organizations have been studied, both theoretically and empirically, by focusing upon a number of social, political, organizational and economic concerns. Issues of gender and sexuality have not been paramount amongst these concerns. As a result, these dimensions of workers’ experiences in flatter organizations have been seen as, at worst, totally irrelevant or at best as secondary to their experiences of waged work. Where gender has been explicitly addressed, as in studies of women’s co-operatives and women-only collectives (Brown, 1992; Wajcman, 1983), the focus has been upon single-sex organizations, and there has been little research which systematically compares men’s and women’s experiences of waged work in such organizations, and how it informs and is informed by the gender of workers and the gender composition of the organization. This book sets out to remedy this neglect.

The Focus of the Research

The focus of the research undertaken here is to theorize various dimensions of waged work in flatter organizations by means of comparing women’s experiences of such settings with that of their men counterparts. The paucity of comparative studies of women’s and men’s work is largely the result of the high degree of gender segregation by occupation in the labour market (Martin and Roberts, 1984; Rees, 1992). By taking the organization in which workers are situated as the site for analysis, and by approaching the research undertaking with a critical feminist awareness, this book attempts to avoid both the ‘gender-blindness’ of many organizational studies, and the single-sex concentration of much of the research on gender and work. By focusing upon both women and men workers in flatter organizations, both groups can be studied independently of their occupations, since what this research does is group workers according to their organizational location and not their occupational position.

The scope of the research is thus wide-ranging, since it includes focusing upon a range of occupations, including workers in professional, semi-professional, administrative, technical and creative occupations, as well as workers in skilled and semi-skilled manual occupations. It should be noted that this project is therefore one of a few pieces of research which explicitly set out to analyse experiences of waged work in other than a primarily occupationally-differentiated context. It thus seeks to avoid the single-occupation concentration of much of the theoretical and empirical research upon gender and work. This has important ramifications for the arguments developed in this book, in that the analysis seeks to provide insights into the experiences of a range of men and women workers in widely different occupational categories, but whose commonality lies in their location in flatter organizations, with all that that entails.

The book thus focuses upon specific dimensions of the experience of waged work in flatter organizations, including that of being a gendered and sexualized worker as well as that of being a co-operative or collective worker, and how the two are conceptually intertwined. The aim is in part, to explore the extent to which flatter organizations reflect and reinforce gendering and sexualizing processes and practices, and the extent to which such organizations can allow workers to overcome inequalities of gender and sexuality. For if such inequalities are to be countered in any organizational or work setting, it might be reasonable to assume that the flatter the hierarchy, the more equality between women and men workers will prevail. By studying women and men workers in these specific social economy organizations, it is not the intention here to confine the analysis to organizational or economic factors alone, but to consider the structural and discursive processes which constitute and inform women and men workers’ experiences, their identities and value-orientations. In approaching their experiences in this way, the emphasis is upon the ways in which waged work in flatter, less or non-hierarchical organizations both constrains and empowers women and men workers in radically different ways.

From the point of view of theory, this approach to the analysis of waged work and the labour market is valuable because it focuses upon both women and men workers in settings where it has been assumed that gender inequalities have less significance. By using flatter organizations as a critical site for analysis, existing theories of gender and sexuality in work, organizational life and the labour market more generally can be critiqued and developed. In summary, in such specific contexts as worker co-operatives or collectively-run project organizations, traditional theories of the relations between gender, sexuality, power, organizations and the labour market may be considered to have less purchase. But it is precisely because such organizations have been viewed unproblematically as settings in which gendering and sexualizing processes and practices are likely to be absent, that there is an urgent need to make them the prime focus here.

The Theoretical Framework

The book develops a number of lines of argument which seek to contribute to the current state of theory on gender, sexuality, work, organizations and the labour market. To begin with, much of this existing theory recognizes that gender inequalities relegate women to an inferior and subordinate position in both waged and unwaged work. There is a wealth of literature on women’s experiences of paid employment and household or domestic labour which support this view. As a result, this book addresses as one of its main lines of argument, the proposition that the extent to which workers in flatter organizations can overcome gender inequalities is necessarily constrained and limited. In short, it can be argued that working in a flatter organization does not mean that women workers’ experiences will correspond to those of their men counterparts.

This first line of argument draws upon and critiques theories of gender, sexuality and work which are socio-structural in emphasis. Socio-structural theories of women’s work, inasmuch as they tend to homogenize women and downplay differences between women, can lead to an expectation that all women will be subject to socio-structural gender power relations, even single, middle-class and well-educated women of the kind assumed to predominate in flatter organizations (Goffee and Scase, 1985; Jackall and Crain, 1984). Despite attempts by flatter organizations to enable both women and men workers to create and sustain their waged work on equal terms, it is reasonable to suggest that workers in these organizations will largely have failed to overcome structural and discursive processes and practices which position women and men in unequal economic, social and political power relations to one another. These over-arching structural and discursive constraints will necessarily shape the differential experiences of women and men workers in flatter organizations in ways which reflect and reinforce men’s power positions vis-à-vis women.

Much of the socio-structural theorizing of gender, sexuality and work has focused upon the extent to which women’s waged and unwaged work can be explained in terms of wider socio-structural power relations. Women’s work is seen to be characterized by discernible patterns which arise, some have argued, from the structural demands of capitalism. The matter goes deeper than this, however, and some f...