Abstract
The frog on the white horse. Thinking about sex, gender, work and organization.
This paper addresses Dutch debates about sex, gender, work and organization. It examines if the introduction of'gender' in organization studies has lived up to its promises of bringing pluriformity, processual analysis and a broadening to social phenomena to the field. To answer this, we distinguish between two major lines of research; one in which the concept of sex is the primary category of analysis and the other that uses the concept of gender in the context of organizations. While we find a variety in epistemology, theoretical perspectives, scope and research topics in both lines of research, we find the three promises of gender to be only partly realized. The potential pluriformity of gender remains underexposed and loses it too often to the dichotomy of sex. Also, research is often not about the process of meaning formation, but is reinforcing old meanings, representing them as static categories. Finally, the analysis of seemingly neutral social phenomena as gendered is still in its infancy. We argue that this is due to a limited use of social constructivist approaches of gender in organization studies to turn the frog into a prince, more attention should be paid multiple manifestations of gender in organizations and to complex processes of meaning formation. A differentiated conceptualization of gender may shed new light on work and organization.
This paper addresses Dutch debates about sex, gender, work and organization. It examines if the introduction of'gender' in organization studies has lived up to its promises of bringing pluriformity, processual analysis and a broadening to social phenomena to the field. To answer this, we distinguish between two major lines of research; one in which the concept of sex is the primary category of analysis and the other that uses the concept of gender in the context of organizations. While we find a variety in epistemology, theoretical perspectives, scope and research topics in both lines of research, we find the three promises of gender to be only partly realized. The potential pluriformity of gender remains underexposed and loses it too often to the dichotomy of sex. Also, research is often not about the process of meaning formation, but is reinforcing old meanings, representing them as static categories. Finally, the analysis of seemingly neutral social phenomena as gendered is still in its infancy. We argue that this is due to a limited use of social constructivist approaches of gender in organization studies to turn the frog into a prince, more attention should be paid multiple manifestations of gender in organizations and to complex processes of meaning formation. A differentiated conceptualization of gender may shed new light on work and organization.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 13-23 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Tijdschrift voor genderstudies |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Publication status | Published - 1998 |