Sexual Orientation at Work

Contemporary Issues and Perspectives

Fiona Colgan, Nick Rumens, Fiona Colgan, Nick Rumens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136278549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comportamiento organizacional

Sexual Orientation at Work: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives brings together contemporary international research on sexual orientation and draws out its implications for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and heterosexual employees and managers. It provides new empirical and theoretical insights into sexual orientation employment discrimination and equality work in countries such as South Africa, Turkey, Australia, Austria, Canada, US and the UK.

This book is novel in its focus on how sexual orientation intersects with other aspects of difference such as age, class, ethnicity and disability. It adopts new theoretical perspectives (e.g. queer theory) to analyze the rise of new 'gay-friendly' organizations, and examines important methodological issues in collecting socio-economic data about sexual minorities.

Providing an accessible account of key issues and perspectives on sexual orientation in the workplace, Sexual Orientation at Work caters to a wide range of readers across business, feminist, and LGBT/Queer Studies fields.

1
Understanding Sexual Orientation at Work

Fiona Colgan and Nick Rumens

Introduction

What does sexual orientation have to do with organisation, with the work-place? The same question has been raised in regard to gender in edited collections similar to this one (Ely, Foldy and Scully, 2003; Jeanes, Knights and Yancey Martin, 2011). In both instances, these questions underscore a widespread and flawed assumption that the workplace is a neutral zone into which such things as sexual orientation and gender are imported. We do not agree. One point of departure for this edited collection is the idea that sexual orientation and the workplace can be considered as mutually influencing, not only in the sense that places of work shape how sexual orientations are understood and experienced but also in the sense that the workplace is sexualised through how sexual orientations are constructed and attributed meaning at work. In this vein, sexuality may be understood to have an orientation that can be turned (in)appropriately towards the people to whom one is attracted sexually and emotionally (Bohan, 1996).

Indeed, the (in)appropriateness of orienting sexuality in one direction or another is structured and regulated by a dominant mode of understanding sexual orientation as dichotomous (heterosexual and nonheterosexual, where the latter stands in for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans [LGBT] sexualities). This in turn pivots on a widely accepted model of sex as either male or female. As the chapters in this edited collection concede in various ways, these are false dichotomies which cause problems for LGBT people at work, with many subscribing to a view that the categories used to define sexuality as culturally contingent and subject to change over time, of which Foucault’s three volumes of the History of Sexuality (1979, 1985, 1986) is often cited to support this understanding of sexuality. The salience of sexual orientation as a focal point of analysis, and indeed as a term used to title this edited collection, is that within ‘institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality not only coherent— that is, organised as a sexuality—but also privileged’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 548), we tend to understand sexual orientation in regard to nonheterosexual sexualities. Ahmed (2006: 69) reflects on this point in a similar way: ‘The emergence of the idea of “sexual orientation” does not position the figures of the homosexual and heterosexual in a relation of equivalence. Rather, it is the homosexual who is constituted as having an “orientation”: the heterosexual would be presumed to be neutral’. In this way, the homosexual is positioned as deviant from the supposedly neutral heterosexual. For the purposes of this book, Ahmed’s framing of sexual orientation is vital because it trains attention on how LGBT sexualities are constructed as ‘(ab)normal’ in the workplace, a focal point which has frequently been beyond the purview of social scientists including organisation studies scholars. In another respect, the association of sexual orientation with LGBT sexualities is limiting in that heterosexuality itself is taken for granted as being ‘natural’, leaving unanswered questions about how it might be understood and experienced otherwise.

When this knowledge is coupled to an assumption that the workplace is asexual, employers are confronted by the prospect of having to manage sexual orientations in particular, and sexualities more generally. Typically in ways that maximise their potential for improving organisational productivity while minimising the risk of interfering with getting the job done. This belief has fuelled countless managerial incursions into organising, controlling and suppressing sexual orientation at work through dress codes, equality and diversity initiatives, sexual harassment policies and so on (Hearn and Parkin, 1995; Skidmore, 2004; Colgan et al., 2009; Brower, 2013). We can see this at work in other ways, too, particularly how heterosexuality is regarded as axiomatic to the extent that the heterosexuality of organisational life becomes invisible. Conversely, other sexual orientations categorised as LGBT are rendered visible, observed in how they have been variously constructed as ‘abnormal’, as ‘Other’, and, thus, susceptible to forms of persecution and discrimination in many places of work around the world (ILGA, 2013). However, in other work contexts, some LGBT sexualities are prized as valuable organisational resources in policy making, enhancing professionalism in human services, penetrating niche markets and creating ‘diverse’ workforces (Humphrey, 1999; Deverell, 2001; Colgan et al., 2009; Rumens, 2011). Clearly sexual orientation in the workplace matters and as such warrants serious scholarly attention as to how it is understood and experienced by organisations and those individuals who occupy and traverse different sexual identity categories.

In light of the above, another point of departure for this edited collection is the argument that LGBT sexualities have not always been paid the attention they deserve by organisation scholars. It is not true to say that research has been ‘silent’ on sexuality generally. Early research focused in two main areas: sexual harassment and sexual minorities (Pringle, 2008). A number of these early works have explored sexuality, work and organisation, using a gender and feminist lens including for example, Hearn, Sheppard, Tancred-Sheriff and Burrell’s edited collection The Sexuality of Organization (1989) and Brewis and Linstead’s Sex, Work and Sex Work (2000). Although this research has shown that sexuality pervades every aspect of organisation, this is still not conventionally acknowledged. Of all the equality strands, sexual orientation remains one of the most ‘sensitive’, and indeed ‘invisible’, areas of diversity; it is much less researched in management and organisation studies than other ‘visible’ forms such as gender or race and ethnicity (Bowen and Blackmon, 2003; Colgan and McKearney, 2011). Assumptions of heterosexuality as natural and privileged obscure the fact that LGBT people are an important constituency of countless organisations who must negotiate the norms, values and practices of knowledge coded in heteronormativity (Pringle, 2008). If we fail to confront the heteronormative bias that pervades many workplaces and the ‘theoretical heterosexism’ (Dunne, 2000: 134) still evident in many studies of organisations, work and family life, we risk becoming blind to the causes and effects of inequalities grounded in organisational heteronormativities and how they impact on LGBT lives. Under these circumstances, individuals and organisations alike are neither engaged nor challenged by the issues raised by LGBT people in the workplace, which we argue ought to be an integral part of understanding the reproduction of myriad inequalities within different workplaces around the globe. The implications of this argument should have particular resonances for those individuals targeted by and charged within organisations to bring certain marginalised groups of people forward from the fringes, including those who identify as LGBT (Bell et al., 2011; Klarsfeld et al., 2014). As many of our contributors argue, part of this enterprise must involve addressing and challenging organisational heteronormativities if we are to understand more fully the needs, interests and voices of LGBT people who are employed in these institutions. As such, this volume offers new research to explain and examine why sexual orientation has been and continues to be a pressing issue at work. As such, it is important and helpful for the reader if we situate this edited collection within the sexuality of organisation literature that has grown over the last three decades or so.

Waves of Research on LGBT Sexualities in the Workplace

Organisational scholarship on LGBT sexualities may be understood as occurring in waves. We employ a wave metaphor here which resonates with but is not a direct copy of how feminism has been conceptualised in terms of emerging and competing politics and theories. In the feminist literature ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’ waves have been used as labels to denote differences in feminist theories, vocabularies, generations and political strategies, sometimes inadvertently obscuring the similarities between each wave (Laughlin et al. 2010). The organisational literature on LGBT sexualities is not as well developed as feminist scholarship, with some scholars criticising the former as theoretically and methodologically limited (Creed, 2005; Ragins and Cornwell, 2001; Croteau, 1996). We agree to some extent, but we point to the progressive signs apparent in the scholarship that has been published over the last decade or so, some of which has been informed by the advancements made by feminist and race studies (for example, Butler, 1990, 2004; Crenshaw, 1991; Acker, 2000; Yuval-Davis, 2006), social constructionism, poststructuralism and queer theory (Ward and Winstanley, 2003; Williams, Giuffre and Dellinger, 2009; Taylor, Hines and Casey, 2011; Rumens, 2012). It is no coincidence that it is these conceptual resources which have allowed unprecedented inroads into analysing sexuality and gender more broadly, uprooting essentialist accounts that treat gender and sexuality as fixed, intrinsic properties of individuals. However, much of the research has, thus far, been limited to a relatively small section of the population in specific parts of the world. As Ozturk (2011) suggests, in addition to developing the research agenda in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, there is a need to expand research relating to heteronormativity and LGBT rights and concerns in other parts of the world where limited conceptual or empirical work has been done (Colgan and McKearney, 2011). These caveats notwithstanding, the wave metaphor is useful because it helps us to carve out and make sense of the shifting contours of LGBT organisational research that have arisen and continue to rise today, to which this edited collection is a vibrant contribution, indicative of a field of inquiry that is fluid and expanding in both ambition and scope.

The First Wave

The first wave dates to the late 1970s and played a leading role in directing attention to the significance of sexual orientation as an organisational issue. Early research mainly focused on the presence, nature and effects of discrimination towards lesbians and gay men in the workplace. For example, UK surveys published in the 1980s (Beer, Jeffrey and Munyard, 1983; GLC, 1985; Taylor, 1986) showed that employment discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation was widespread, legal, expected by lesbian and gay employees and seldom questioned by employers. These studies were important for the concern they displayed about how lesbian and gay workers who suspected that their sexual identity, presumed or known by employers and colleagues, influenced decisions not to recruit and promote them or, in the worst cases, to dismiss them from the workplace. The same research exposed the dire consequences of ‘coming out’ to some employers and colleagues, documented in accounts of bullying, harassment, persecution and violence inflicted on many of those individuals who struggled to participate openly in organisational life.

In this regard, early studies shone a revealing light on homophobia in the workplace, homophobia being a term often used to describe a dread of gay people—as well as an irrational fear of homosexuality—and the behaviours emanating from this fear or ‘phobia’ of homosexuals (Herek, 2004). As organisational research on LGBT sexualities grew and developed, homophobia has regularly been in the spotlight of researchers keen to problematise it not just as individual attitudes and behaviours but also as sexual prejudice that is rooted in social institutions. It is important to note that a number of scholars have employed the term heterosexism alongside or instead of homophobia, with the former describing an ‘ideological systems that denies, denigrates, and stigmatizes any nonhetero-sexual form of behaviour, identity, relationship, or community (Herek, 1990: 317). The relationship between homophobia and heterosexism is complex insomuch as these two terms are sometimes regarded as being mutually exclusive, and/or they are used interchangeably and universally to refer to a prejudice against gays and lesbians. For our purposes, we subscribe to the view put forward by O’Brien (2008), who submits that homophobia and heterosexism are mutually constitutive, not least because individuals who hold anti-gay/anti-lesbian attitudes feel justified in expressing them, particularly within contexts where these attitudes and behaviours are culturally sanctioned. Such prejudice reinforces ideologies and practices of ‘intolerance and hostility and reinscribe homosexuality as something that should be despised and feared and should remain hidden’ (2008: 498).

In one sense the concerns addressed in early organisational research reflected the types of issues being raised in the midst of wider social, cultural and political shifts that were underway in North America, Europe, Australasia and elsewhere (Adam, Duyvendak and Krouwel, 1999). The 1960s was witness to a great deal of social and political unrest which manifested itself in, among other things, antiwar demonstrations, student protests, the rise of second wave feminism and the advent of black and ethnic minority civil rights movements. In 1969 the infamous Stonewall riots took place in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood in New York City, which served as a flash point for the birth of the gay liberation movement. As Richardson and Monro (2012) note, the sexual politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s was radical and militant. Political groups sought to bring to light the discrimination faced by LGBT people in all areas of life, regarding it as a serious social problem (Adam, 1987; Cruikshank, 1992). The tenor of political activism was highly critical of the meanings traditionally attributed to the sexual orientation of ‘homosexuality’ as a psychiatric and medical disorder, disease, perversion and sin, and thus a threat to the moral and social fabric of everyday life. At the same time, the gay liberation movement began to fracture as sexual politics between lesbians and gay men exposed political differences between these groups, most notably around gay men’s presumed ability to access gender privilege (Jeffreys, 1993). Tensions elsewhere within the women’s movement (e.g., ignoring the perspectives of lesbian identified women) also fuelled some lesbians to organise separately. Additionally, bisexuals and trans people experienced exclusion from gay and lesbian movements, propelling bi and trans politics along different but sometimes intersecting lines of flight (Richardson and Monro, 2012). Despite these political differences and tensions, organisational research on LGBT sexualities in this period may be understood as being part of a wider move to expose and critique the nature and exte...