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Gender, Sexuality, Violation and Organizational Worlds
How Did We Get Here?
Organizations are gendered; that much we know. When we started researching and writing together on organizations in the late 1970s our primary interest was on gender relations in organizations. We first began to assemble information on the gender division of labour, the gender division of authority and, to a lesser extent, sexuality in and around organizations. At the time we drew on almost whatever sources we could find (Hearn and Parkin, 1983, 1992). In familiarizing ourselves with what had and had not been studied, we gradually became aware of the inadequacies in much literature of the time. These can be characterized through a number of tendencies:
- to consider gender, if at all, in rather simple, dualist ways, most obviously in the use of sex/gender role models of gender relations that have since been subject to overwhelming critique;1
- to focus primarily, often exclusively, on the division of labour;
- to consider organizations out of the context of their societal relations, including the domestic relations of organizational members; and
- to neglect or ignore sexuality.
Since then, the field of gender relations, sexuality and organizations has expanded greatly, indeed so much so that now we have filing cabinets full of the stuff. In a rather strange way, the development of the field, the state of our filing cabinets and our own biographies have changed in parallel. Our recent lives have mirrored the fields we have chosen to study.2 Thus the task now is not to establish the field of gender relations, sexuality and organizations. That is already done â even though the supposedly non-gendered, but in fact gendered, mainstream keeps remembering to forget the fact. Rather we see our current task as developing and clarifying the field, in terms of specific concepts and issues â in effect trying to move it on, one more time.
Why Organizations?
Organization, singular, refers to the acts and process of social organizing. Organizations, plural, are those particular social collectivities that result from those acts and processes. But organizations are not to be thought of as mere outcomes. Instead they themselves should be understood as social processes that are in a state of becoming something else. Thus organizations, and indeed actions within organizations, are always embodied in social contexts. This context-embeddedness means that it is necessary in conceptualizing, analysing and writing about organizations to bear in mind that attempts to characterize organizations are limited and provisional.
One complication is that organizations are both social places of organizing and social structurings of social relations, whose interrelations are historically dynamic. Another is that organizations are not collectivities formed simply by the individual, intentional action of their founders and members. Rather, organizations always occur in the context of pre-existing (organizational) social relations. The search for any tabula rasa is in vain. To paraphrase Marx: âorganizations make history but not in the conditions of their choosing.â3
The notion of âthe organizationâ is thus itself somewhat problematic. At its simplest, the notion of an organization conjures up the picture of a factory, an office, even a university â something that can be seen, something that appears to function within four walls. But of course such an idea of an organization is a fantasy. The picture of the visible organizations does not even come from the heyday of the Industrial Revolution; it stems if anywhere from the eighteenth century, with the relatively isolated industrial mill that could be seen. It was with the passing of this organizational form to the multiple-unit âorganizationâ that could not be fully seen that, rather paradoxically, the idea of the organization, and thus organization theory, became constituted and more popularly available. By the height of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and many industrialized countries, the isolated organization was already to a considerable extent decomposing and anachronistic. It was indeed its decomposition that was at the same time accompanied by its diffusion and expansion. As organizations âgrew in sizeâ and became more consolidated, and indeed more powerful concentrations of resources, they also became more diffuse and less concentrated at particular times and places. Part of the reason for this was the mode of expansion of some organizations. Their expansion was not just upwards and outwards on the same site (within four walls or expanding those four walls), but it was also through horizontal and vertical connection and integration, and above all through geographical and temporal expansion and diffusion. The organization was no longer a simple place â or indeed a simple time.
The notion of organization, and hence organizations, has thus become progressively more complex. It still refers to the individual organization, but it also encompasses the conglomeration of organizations, as in multi-organizations. In this sense, âthe stateâ, like the transnational corporation, is itself an organization even though it comprises many different organizations within it. And so within each organization (within such multi-organizations) there are of course further smaller sub-units that might often reasonably be called organizations too. At its simplest, one might therefore distinguish: (i) large complex multi-organizations of many other organizations; (ii) intermediate individual organizations; and (iii) small organizational sub-units. There is additionally a fourth category: (iv) cyber or paper organizations that do not exist in a specific timeâplace reality.
Whereas previously most organizations could be relatively geographically and spatially isolated in a particular place, this is increasingly becoming problematic, as organizations become organized across time, space and even cyberspace and cybertime. This means that the rather rapid change in the relationship of time and space â the so-called space-time continuum â makes it increasingly necessary to question the equation of organization and place. Accordingly, this in turn makes the distinction between organizations as places and organizations as the structurings of social relations more important. Thus, the once relatively stable equation of organization and place, the assumed placing of organizations in a specific place, is now being disrupted, and is probably to be disrupted further in the future. This means that the single place-based organization becomes reconceptualized as just one temporary organizational form (of social relations), not the major or most persistent form.
Organizations are commonly seen and understood as places of discourse, of activity, of communication, even of noise, rapidity and speed. Yet what happens in organization often also involves silence, not just in the sense of quietness, but in the sense of that which is not spoken. Organizations are continually structured and practised through the unspoken. Accordingly, one might re-understand organizations as very much (subject to) unspoken forces. These forces include gender, sexuality, violence and violation.
Why Organizational Worlds?
The concept of organization is far from unproblematic. While it may be increasingly difficult to define an organization in a fixed, absolute way, people do live and work in organizational worlds. The use of the term âworldsâ facilitates engagement with the perceptual worlds of organizational members and outsiders, such as customers. If an organizational member or outsider finds something gendered or sexual (or sexualed or sexualized), or harassing, violent or violating in an organization, then it is â for their purposes and in their reality. The concept of âworldsâ also conveys the way in which organizations often carry a sense of (dis)continuity, culture, discourse(s), life-world and moreover hegemonic domination of the âdefinition of the situationâ. Thus part of organizational worlds is the world of recognition (or lack of recognition) â be it of gender inequalities, sexuality, violence or violation. This can be reinforced for some, especially those within total institutions, as the organization is the world of residence. Yet the notion of organizational worlds also speaks to the socio-spatial and globalizing tendencies of organizations and organizational life â a different and indeterminate organizational world of the global. For these reasons, and especially with contemporary and likely future economic, social, technological and spatial changes, we talk of organizational worlds rather than reifying organizations. The discrete, separate organization may become less meaningful, in some senses ceases to exist. Organizational worlds may be a more accurate description of late modern organizational life.
Why Gender?
Gender and gendered power relations are major defining features of most, perhaps all, organizations. What we call âorganizationsâ are not just embedded in gender but entreated, soaked in, pervaded and constituted by and through gender; and furthermore at the same time organizational realities themselves construct and sometimes subvert dominant gender relations and even gender itself. When gender is referred to it may be usual to think of âmen and womenâ and the ârelations between themâ; this is certainly part of gender, but it is only a part. For one thing, gender is just as relevant in relations between women and between men. These are still very much gendered relations. This is somewhat similar to the way questions of race and racialization are often relevant in understanding what is happening in situations and organizations that appear to only involve white people. More generally, gender has now taken on a mass of other more complex meanings; and some discussion of this is now necessary. These differential meanings and understandings of gender are themselves both contested and central to the analysis of (gendered) organizations.
The debate about the meaning of gender has continued to develop rapidly. The distinction between sex and gender was recognized in the 1960s and 1970s by feminists and others attempting to develop a more critical account of womenâs and menâs relations and positions in society. It was a way of making it clear that what was often thought of as natural and biological was in fact social, cultural, historical and indeed political.4 Oakley (1972, 1985) set out this differentiation between âsexâ as biological sex differences and âgenderâ as the social and cultural constructions of those differences. This kind of sex/gender approach has been very important in generating greater attention to studies of sex differences and their relative absence,5 sex/gender roles, sex role socialization and masculinityâfemininity scales. Much of this work in the 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s, particularly within psychology and social psychology, was, however, itself placed within the context of relatively positivist understandings of gender. This applied especially to the development of maculinityâfemininity scales, their empirical refinement and use to correlate with other measures of the person.6
There are many complications in conceptualizing gender and defining what gender is, particularly so within positivist paradigms. One difficulty is: it depends on who is asking the question, and why; and it depends on who is answering the question, and why. For example, feminists are likely to have very different concerns from most men when talking about masculinity. Another pervasive constraint is the persistence of dualisms and dichotomies, for example, female/male; woman/man; feminine/masculine; femininity/masculinity; girls/boys. While clearly these are important differentiations, there is a sense in which they only speak to part of the possibilities of what gender is or might be in different situations and societies. Indeed, no longer is it possible to reproduce the dichotomous separation of sex and gender that characterized sex role theory of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the sex/gender approach to gender somewhat paradoxically takes us back to biology. It rests on the assumption that a woman is someone who is a socially constructed member of the âfemale sexâ, and a man is likewise a socially constructed member of the âmale sexâ. The notion of âsexâ used here is usually shorthand for a number of physiological features, particularly primary sex characteristics and secondary sex characteristics.7
However, all the various primary and secondary features are not always so easily described as simply âfemaleâ or âmaleâ, and indeed may be further complicated by a range of biological, cultural and bio-cultural factors and conditions. Thus both âfemalesâ and âmalesâ, and âwomenâ and âmenâ are variable categories, including old/young, (in)fertile, presumed females/males. Other complications to any simple sex/gender model arise from the existence of considerable cross-cultural variations in usual somatypes between cultures, following from working practices, diet and hereditary patterns.8 Even with these and other difficulties, the sex/gender model has undoubtedly prompted a mass of path-breaking work on gender, gender relations and gendered power relations. Within this general perspective, there are many different approaches â some drawing on the notion of behaviour and developing the notion of sex/gender role; some attending to attitudes, self-concept and gender identity; some focusing on social categories and structural relations, as in the concept of collective sex/gender class. In many of these approaches gender has been understood as a way of moving away from biology and of recognizing a relatively autonomous set of social and cultural relations. Females are not simply âwomenâ, as males are not âmenâ; none of these is a unified category; female/male and women/men are not all inclusive of people and furthermore this varies greatly in different societies.
Of special significance has been the elaboration of distinctly sociological and social structural approaches to gender. These include the articulation of structural concepts of gender relations in patriarchy, gender systems and dominant gender orders. Such analyses were a major point of theoretical and political attention in the 1970s. However, by the late 1970s, at about the same time as sex role approaches were themselves being criticized, there were growing critiques of the concept of patriarchy. Similar arguments have also been made with regard to the critique of categoricalism9 in conceptualizing gender (Connell, 1985, 1987). These developments can also be seen as part of the general critique of positivist social science that has gathered pace since the 1960s.
The outcome of these simultaneous, if somewhat separate, critiques of, first, social psychological concepts of gender as sex role and, second, overly structuralist concepts of gender as determined within patriarchy, has been a movement to a more differentiated, more pluralized, yet still power-laden, approach to gender. This is encapsulated in the notion of gendered power relations. An example of such an approach is that on masculinities by Carrigan, Connell and Lee (1985). This investigated relations between men and between men and women, resistance, social and intrapsychic constructions; and hegemonic, complicit, subordinated forms of masculinities. This reformulation of gender fits closely with revisions of patriarchy (or patriarchies) as historical, multiple structures.10 In recent years, there has been increasing attention to gendered practices, processes of gendering, masculinity/ies; gendered material/discursive practices; gendered discourses and discourses of gender; plural/multiple/composite masculinities and femininities; the interrelations of gendered unities and gendered differences (Collinson and Hearn, 1994; Hearn and Collinson, 1994); and life stories and subjectivities.
Another difficulty, that is receiving increasing attention even in the last few years, lies in the very distinction between âsexâ and âgenderâ. Perhaps the greatest challenge to a simple, dualist view of gender is represented by transsexualism and transgenderism, in its widely different social and cultural forms. This has itself prompted a significant expansion of transgender studies and studies of transgenderism in recent years.11 The sexâgender distinction has itself been subject to critical interrogation and deconstruction in recent years. Bondi (1998) has recently clarified the following three major problems with the distinction:12
- First, there is no convincing evidence that gender itself carries a necessary liberatory potential; just because gender is socially constructed does not mean that it can be changed any more easily than sex.13
- Second, the sexâgender distinction is closely linked to other dichotomies, most obviously natureâculture and bodyâmind. If gender corresponds, it might be asked why a concept of gender is necessary; if gender involves the transcendence of mind over body, then the question remains why should this âunsexedâ mind correspond to gender if it is wholly disconnected from sex. It can thus be argued that the sexâgender distinction reinforces its own dichotomies and even repositions the male/masculinity as the norm.14
- Third, the sexâgender distinction implies that sex and biology are pre-social or free of the social; but biology is itself constituted in the social.15
An influential commentator in this respect has been Butler (1990) who has argued cogently that the sex/gender distinction is itself a social and cultural construction; it is not that gender is the cultural arrangement of sex difference, but that the sex/gender difference is a cultural arrangement, dominantly constructed in terms of the âheterosexual matrixâ. Thereby our attention is directed to the social and cultural construction of the sexed body. This kind of approach has been a major way of reformulating the sociology of the body.16 On the other hand, there is a danger in such an approach that the physical, biological, material body may be lost in the search for social inscription and performativity. In the light of this, a more ...
