Gender Work and Organization最新文献

Enmeshed in the materiality of caregiving, becoming a mother changes how one relates to the world and others. These changes involve how a mother as subject is defined by others through cultural and societal idealizations of motherhood and parenting norms, but also through the leaking boundaries between the mother and other subjects as she is attuned to the needs of caregiving. In this analysis, I consider maternal subjectivity in terms of working as an artist-mother, defined as an artist who is also a mother and whose practice does not distinguish between these roles. In particular, I focus on the process of my development of a creative coding project, Emergent, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this analysis of the process of developing Emergent, I attend to the questions of maternal subjectivity that arose through its production, drawing from the embodied experiences of working as an artist-mother, in order to understand maternal subjectivity through the practice of computation. Here the work of producing art becomes the means of considering maternal subjectivity differently through embodied experience, as the labor affiliated with care-giving is entangled with the process of art making.

The pandemic offered a unique opportunity to shift gendered expectations and create a more equal division of domestic labor in the home. As an organizational unit, the home represents a significant domain to investigate gendered power relations and transformations. Change was especially possible for couples where employed fathers, who typically left for work, began to spend far more time at home. Surveys show that the opposite happened, and the share of domestic work done by women increased. This article explores the social dynamics that drove these trends. We draw on in-depth interviews with 20 couples (for a total of 40 parents). We leverage the variation between the accounts of each partner in a couple to explore how gender contributed to inequality in the home during the pandemic. We show that the physical and symbolic division of domestic space contributed to heightened gender inequalities during the pandemic. We divide our sample into three groups: cases where paternal income exceeds maternal income, cases where maternal income exceeds paternal income, and cases with comparable income levels for both parents. We demonstrate how the division of space, both physically and symbolically, contributes to the ongoing gender inequality experienced by all three groups. Our results expand on quantitative studies which show that gender inequality deepened during the pandemic by revealing the mechanisms and lived experinces behind the trend.

Through an intersectional analysis of gender, class, and migration, this article reveals how a hegemonic culture of workplace masculinity, embodied by a group of ‘gurus,’ is constructed in China's tech companies. The guru masculinity is characterized by proactivity and aggressiveness at work, ‘putting work first’ and overwork, and the ability to navigate boundaryless careers and settle down in first-tier cities. It translates hegemonic masculine norms of material success, enjoying urban life, and men's breadwinner position in contemporary China on the one hand, and responds to a labor regime of precarious employment relations and prevalent overwork norm on the other hand. The article contributes to the literature on hegemonic masculinity in work organizations by showcasing how a hegemonic masculinity in China's tech workplace is constructed at the conjuncture of hegemonic gender norms at a societal level and the distinct labor regime in the tech sector. It also reveals that many male workers fail to conform to this cultural ideal, experiencing masculine frustration rooted in the nature of the ‘workplace masculinity contest,’ uneven urban development, and the demanding labor regime. It thus opens further discussions on how men resist hegemonic gender norms and construct alternative masculinities.

This article explores the role of humor, specifically banter, in addressing gendered organizational tensions within the UK Fire and Rescue Service during a period of modernizing change. Such tensions reflect who holds authority and who is deemed to belong, and we explore how banter is used to both contest and confirm authority associated with the formal rank system and the informal, masculinist ideal-typical worker in this context. We discuss banter's various roles as a cohering mode of humorous workplace communication, one that can reduce tension and consolidate authority and belonging, as well as its boundary setting, testing, and crossing capacities. In terms of the latter, we ask whether banter can genuinely trouble masculinist organizational norms. We conclude that specific humorous episodes that go “beyond banter” create particular ambivalence, but their impact is significantly limited by widespread discursive acceptance of banter as a central and permissible communication mode in the Service's culture.

How does persistent and cumulative gender regulation produce economic insecurity? Trans people face markedly high levels of workplace discrimination, unemployment, and poverty, and therefore offer unique insight into this question. Prior research theorizes how trans workers get repositioned in a binary, patriarchal gender order, but we lack a conceptual model to explain the labor market experience of people who are systematically sanctioned as gender deviants. By analyzing work history interviews from 23 trans women of color based across the United States, this article argues that crossing gender boundaries is a racialized experience that can come with an economic cost. After transitioning, trans women of color face three forms of economic sanctioning: exclusion, a racially gendered glass ceiling, and constrained employment options within a segmented labor market. Thus, work organizations premised on a hierarchical classification scheme have the option, not only to reposition people on the basis of a classification change, but to deem them unassimilable.

In this study, I explore how the subject of inclusion is constituted as intersectional in the organizational discursive practices of a civil society organization promoting migrant and refugee inclusion. Drawing on Crenshaw's notion of political intersectionality and Fraser's politics of recognition and redistribution, I analyze the political dimension of an inclusion project by showing how intersectional categories are connected to differentiated struggles and strategies of inclusion. The ethnographic study illustrates how two subject positions are constituted as being underpinned by either the logic of recognition or redistribution. Moreover, the findings show how the two strategies interact, revealing the dynamics of privilege and disadvantage at play in the inclusion project. The paper contributes to critical studies on inclusion and intersectionality in organizational contexts by extending our understanding of power dynamics and tensions as integral parts of the intersectional approach.

Analysis of the experiences and resulting inequalities in reproductive health in the workplace has generated studies of pregnancy, miscarriage, menstruation, fertility and menopause. One issue that has remained outside of this literature is abortion. How abortion is talked about (or not talked about), experienced and perceived as a workplace issue were the central questions in our research undertaken in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2017. Our study comprised a survey (3180 respondents) followed by a series of online focus groups (61 participants) with trade union members from a broad range of workplaces, with the aim of investigating how abortion was positioned in workplaces within legally restrictive regimes. We conceptualize how self-disciplining, silence and abortion stigma are reproduced in workplaces, drawing on a feminist Foucauldian framework to examine disciplinary power. We examine evidence of how, in conservative societies, abortion talk is suppressed, and we generate new theoretical knowledge on how disciplinary power undermines resistance to anti-abortion norms and demonstrate the function of the normalizing gaze in the workplace. We conclude by offering avenues for future research on abortion stigma and disciplinary power, to extend further knowledge and conceptual framing of abortion as a workplace issue.

A robust and important body of scholarship is exploring the multiple and layered complexities of mothering and paid work. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically contribute to this work by exploring how, at the level of the self, women with children understand themselves in relation to their paid work and their mothering. We have examined this focus using a post-structural feminist lens inspired by Foucauldian ideas related to the subject and technologies of the self. This perspective has focused our attention on the informal practices in an Australian university workplace, where we locate and problematize tensions between industrial and policy provisions designed to support mothers and mother's everyday workplace experiences. Our findings arise from focus groups, in-depth interviews, and our personal narrative accounts and elucidate how despite well-established policy supports, formal and informal workplace practices shape and discipline how mothers come to understand themselves and their paid work in the academy. We find that policy provisions for families in the workplace operate to conceal and legitimate gendered workplace practices, contributing to subjectivities formed through doubt, fear, shame, anxiety, isolation, and guilt. More productively, subjectivities were also born through agency, resistance, and revision, albeit wrapped by additional labor, personal, and professional costs.