Handbook of Gender, Work, and Organization

Chapter 18

Sexualities, Work, Organizations, and Managements: Empirical, Policy, and Theoretical Challenges

Jeff Hearn

Linköping University, Sweden; University of Huddersfield, UK; Hanken School of Economics, Finland

Introduction

Sexuality, work, organization, management – which is the odd one out? In considering this question, it is important not to see sexuality as a separate or autonomous phenomenon. Rather, sexualities exist and persist in relations with other social phenomena, social experiences, and social inequalities – around gender, class, ethnicity, racialization, embodiment, and multiple intersectionalities. This means addressing intersectionalities, especially between age, class, disability, ethnicity, gender, generation, ‘race’, religion, and violence, in analyzing organizations and sexuality. Thus my broad approach might be summarized in terms of the political economies of sexualities, and shifts from intersectionalities towards transsectionalities: the ‘transformulation’ of social, in this context sexual, categories, rather than just their mutual constitution and interrelations (Hearn, 2008b).

Within the field of studies that has come to be known as ‘gender, work and organizations’, the question of sexuality has figured perhaps more strongly than might have been expected. Why this should be is difficult to explain, but it would seem to reflect an historical convergence of empirical, policy, political, theoretical, technological, spatial, and indeed personal concerns ...