Book Review: Gender and the Organization: Women at Work in the 21 st Century

Emerging feminist scholarship is generating ‘productive and provocative’ challenges to how we think about organizations: theoretically, empirically and practically (Pullen, 2018; Rhodes, 2018; Just, Muhr & Risberg, 2019). Admittedly, such changes have been slow to arrive; debates around gender and sexuality in management and organization studies have all but stagnated in recent years, while feminism itself has been more or less ignored (Bell, Meriläinen, Taylor, & Tienari, 2019).

Gender and the Organization aims to change all this. Authors Marianna Fotaki and Nancy Harding boldly claim to develop an organizational feminist theory for the 21^st century. Alongside their presentation of a powerful new theoretical framing, they ‘speak back’ to scholarly debates outside management and organization studies, demonstrating how an organizational lens is central to understanding the role of gender in contemporary life. Organizations affect and produce the forms of knowing that circulate within our societies, just as they are affected and produced by them. Illustrating this idea, the book yields vital insights for academics and practitioners, far beyond the business school.

Moreover, as a textual artifact, Gender and the Organization is distinctly performative in its impact on the reader. Fotaki and Harding consciously adopt their own advice, innovating with writing styles that break with established ways of framing academic text. The outcome is an embodied, passionate and reflexive approach to theory development, an in-depth engagement with the people they study and an immersion in a range of eclectic conceptual sources. This volume thus prompts a valuable rethinking of academic life in its various forms.

Gender and the Organization offers a vivid reworking of core issues including gender discrimination in the workplace, the proliferation of patriarchal language in organizations, intersectionality and feminist ethics. The text is underpinned by the idea that the (gendered) subject is a subject of language. In Chapter 2 we are introduced to the notion that women are compelled into speaking about themselves through a language of patriarchy and domination, because no alternative exists. This places them/us in a position of de-realized, inferior subject from the start, while through processes of self-abjection the female subject can become hateful to herself. Even women in powerful positions find themselves struggling to express their experiences, as Chapter 4 highlights. Pointing to well-known studies on the causes of women’s inequality, the authors argue that the conventional frames by which these issues are approached are often unhelpful. These frames reinforce inferiority through the use of linguistic terms that ultimately strengthen what Gibson-Graham refers to as the ‘monster of patriarchy’ (p. 50). Thus, language provides women with few options when they try to speak; the only way to express the self is as the lesser half of a binary in which masculinity takes primacy. For me, this aspect struck a particular chord. As someone who has been called upon in various settings to ‘account for myself’ as female academic and what this entails, the authors’ words ring eerily true. Attempts to articulate one’s self amid the complexity, challenges and joys of work, and of performing a gendered subject position, often fall short. Interpellated by words that are not of one’s own choosing, the female academic repeatedly ‘meets [her]self’ with surprise, alarm and a sense of foreignness (p. 50).

A core aim of Gender and the Organization is to outline various ways of thinking, writing and practising that might take us outside these restrictive frames. For example, the authors focus on women’s perspectives in an empirical study of how female academics reflect and speak on the inequality they experience. The reader is invited to hear the ‘private and less-known language women use when talking among themselves’ (p. 31). Theories including Judith Butler’s ideas on hate speech are deployed to shed light on this. We see how women play with the signifiers available to them, variously internalizing, resisting and occasionally rewriting these in a melee of sometimes contradictory engagements.

In addition to highlighting the importance of language, this book insists on a focus on the role of the organization in social life, and the impact of gender therein. It is not enough to examine the inequities in society that pertain to gender, including those relating to its intersection with class, race, ethnicity and so on. We must also examine the organizations that play a role in generating and maintaining these differences, including via the new forms of labour in which low-status, badly paid, placeless and displaced workers engage (p. 98). As demonstrated in Chapter 5, it is not enough for academics and policy-makers to focus their energies on creating new and better anti-discrimination policies because these are already ‘located within an ontology of organizations that valorizes hierarchy and judges knowledge and skill in ways that disempower certain categories of labour’ (p. 98). These categories include women’s labour and, through such dynamics, ‘organizations create those abjected identities that they are then charged with tackling’ (p. 98). As such, anti-discrimination policies can be transmitters of inequalities. New ideas on transnational feminism are brought to bear on questions of gendered subjectivity, to better understand what it is ‘to be a mobile and precarious worker in transglobal late capitalism’ (p. 98). Arguing for a future-oriented approach to organization studies, the need for, and value of, transnational, organizational, and feminist scholarship is convincingly presented.

As Gender and the Organization unfolds, the reader is left pondering: what is it that counts as a person? What kinds of subjects might we become given our constitution in and through language? How are we connected to those others on whose lives we depend? Finally, how might we imagine ourselves differently? The closing chapter helpfully connects these threads, with its detailed exploration of a new feminist organizational ethics. Questions of difference, otherness, corporeality, relationality and materiality are brought to bear, working with ideas from Rosi Braidotti, Bracha Ettinger and Judith Butler among others. The outcome is a theoretical and ethical proposition for organizations that draws on new forms of subjectivity emerging from increasing political and global mobility, and the growth of alternative spaces in which people organize, among other recent social changes. Specifically, the proposed framing highlights how various forms of subjectivity are inevitably constituted and continually reaffirmed through interdependency, and it is this that makes care relations possible. The subject has affective capacities because it is embodied, and this lays the foundations for our capacity for ethics.

Fittingly, Fotaki and Harding end their book by returning to the practice of academic work in light of these propositions, and consider how the positions and activities therein might be rethought. Playing with the boundaries that have tended to accompany academic practice, they propose a novel rethinking that encompasses a non-Cartesian, reading-writing body that is at once comprised of flesh, thought and affect, impulses that continually impact upon each other. Earlier chapters adopt just such an approach; Chapter 3 for example deals with the ongoing debate around whether the adoption of Jacques Lacan’s work in organization studies represents a furthering of patriarchal modes of thinking. The authors explore the issue by presenting a dialogue between two interlocutors, which is itself performative – the iteration between competing positions leads to a productive ‘encircling’ of this thorny issue. No side ‘wins’, but rather we are presented with two writing/speaking subjects and two positions, and we witness the resulting movement within and between these (p. 68). Through the chosen style, final closure is eschewed in favour of fluidity. The overall effect is to highlight the precarity of claims to knowledge, and to inspire both self-reflexivity and the productive co-development of ideas.

These propositions culminate in a ‘call to action’, for academics as gendered subjects to destabilize and confuse masculinist writing, but also to write from the body in a way that is playful, fluid, seductive and focused on a desire to nurture new ethical relations. Across the various chapters the authors exemplify how new textual strategies, alongside both visual and non-visual methods, can be used to bring subjects and populations that tend to remain marginalized into our research and teaching. Evocative examples from news stories, empirical studies and popular culture are drawn upon. As such this text usefully complements emerging debates on the intersection of feminism and organization studies, and the recent resurgence in feminist practice in social life both inside and outside the academy (Bell et al., 2019).

Gender and the Organization helps us as academics to reflect on the work we do, how we understand ourselves as professionals, and how we might engage more productively with these positions. Fotaki and Harding explore the potential for alienation in academic work, including attendant compulsions to seek positions of authority and mastery that are, in the end, illusory (p. 71). In so doing, they help us understand our co-implication in the production of knowledge. Here again, the authors offer a lived example; they humbly challenge and critique their earlier published work regarding the role of the (Lacanian) hysteric in destabilizing patriarchal organizational discourses as the only way of refuting oppressive languages of gender ‘from within’ the academy. Engaging with and challenging their earlier position by drawing on new theoretical inspirations, Fotaki and Harding now argue that there ‘must be and is an alternative position’ – and exploring this is one of the goals of the current book (p. 72). This represents an instance of relinquishing a position of mastery on the part of academics – a move that the authors themselves advocate. It demonstrates their commitment to the revisability of ideas regardless of whether they have become ‘concretized’ and cited in academic debates. This capability on the part of the authors – to stand outside their previous position and be open to self-reflection and self-critique – is a fine example of putting into practice the overall approach that they elsewhere describe as being one of the aims of the book.

In implementing this approach, Fotaki and Harding lead by example and with passion (Gabriel, 2017, p. 1). Their own reflections on their teaching, practice and location within the academy as Western middle-class professors are clearly presented and examined throughout. Our personal trajectories ‘made us into who we are’, they note (p. 99). Thus while this book can be said to be political in that it seeks to nudge the reader to see the world in a particular kind of way (Orwell, 1946/2004), the authors are explicit about where they come from in proposing the directions they do.

Gender and the Organization proposes a feminist theory about, for, and from within organizations. Fotaki and Harding reframe what organization feminist theory can and should be: an outward-facing movement, in and of itself. Crucially it takes organizations seriously as the generators of new forms of inequality, and as the empirical sites in and through which innovative theories of gender can be made possible. Thus it ‘speaks back’ to other spheres of academia and social life more generally. Inspired by the ways in which organizations actively shape our experiences of the world in which we live, Gender and the Organization offers a new understanding of that world. Meanwhile the text itself represents an exercise in effective feminist ethics and academic practice.