Handbook of Gender, Work, and Organization

Section Three

Organizing Work and the Gendered Organization

Editorial Introduction

This section explores some of the dynamics that gender the organization and the organizing of work. As we have seen from Section One, gender is both organized by and constitutive of organizing practices. Here we explore the extent to which gender inequality is sustained by these practices, and the attempts to challenge these organizing practices – through explicitly gender-focused practice and strategies or through attempts to ‘neutralise’ gender in organization. These dynamics are explored in a range of organizational contexts, such as in relation to technology which acts as an important means of regulating working practice, with implications for gender. The chapters draw on sociological, anthropological as well as philosophical approaches, and provide cultural context to the experiences in organizations with an international range of case examples employed to illustrate the organizing realities. These chapters, like those in Section One, are also political and practical, in that they seek to find ways of challenging systematic inequalities rather than simply demonstrating how inequality can be seen to exist.

The chapters in this section draw on established debates that have explored gender in relation to work and organization, both as gender in management, and in gendering management. These related but different ways of theorising gender in work and organization contrast the ways in which gender ...