Category: Reports

THE JOURNAL

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #99, Fall 2002.

Originally appeared in Transgender Tapestry #99, Fall 2002.

by Diane Dale
On Saturday May 4, two dozen transgender principals and activists from all over the U.S. met in Atlanta to begin the planning of what promises to be a seminal event in the history of our transgender movement?The March For Gender Rights.

JOAN ACKER
University of Oregon and Arbetslivscentrum, Stockholm

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 common sense 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 disembodied 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.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings, Chicago, August 1987. I wish to thank Judith Lorber, Pat Martin, and Ronnie Steinberg who contributed a great deal to this article through their careful and insightful comments and suggestions. Conversations with Harriet Holler, Carole Paleman, and Dorothy Smith also helped my thinking.

REPRINT REQUESTS: Joan Acker, Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403.