(apologies for cross-posting)
8th Biennial International Interdisciplinary conference, 24th – 26th June, 2014
Keele University, UK
Call for abstracts
Discovering gender relations in people’s conduct of organizations
Marie Campbell, University of Victoria (emeritus), Victoria, British Columbia, CANADA
Elena Kim, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, KYRGYZSTAN
Rebecca Lund, Aalto University, Helsinki, FINLAND
Emily Porschitz, Keene State College, Keene, USA
Janet Rankin, Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary Qatar, Doha, QATAR
Jonathan Tummons, Durham University, Durham, ENGLAND
What is gender and how does it relate to organizations, to people’s work knowledge and their conduct of organized work and their everyday lives? In 1990, Joan Acker argued that organizations are neither gender neutral nor asexual and she challenged feminists to continue to explore “how gender provides the subtext for arrangements of subordination” especially those that organize work relations. Acker directed attention to the features of organizations that powerfully constitute gender and inequality. Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography (1987, 2005) offers a theorized approach to the empirical examination of such organizational activity that begins with learning how the people involved enact the organization and its ruling purposes. Smith’s interest, too, is in discovery of how inequality is organized and she calls her approach “a sociology for people”. Its analytic goal to is to open up the abstractions (of organizational theory and managerial language, for instance) that make what happens seem mysterious and even inevitable. The purpose of such an analysis is to show how things actually work.
We invite papers employing any form of analysis that moves beyond categorical understandings of gender to expand our knowledge of how people are organized to relate to each other, especially through the textually-mediated institutional technologies of large organizations. Our interest includes, but is not restricted to the relations of subordination that we understand to be gendered.
An assumption that underpins the analyses that we want to attract is that people’s everyday work constitutes “the social”. To understand the social and its complexities as enacted, we use institutional ethnography to unpick the material actualities of its social organization, as we find them being accomplished through actual people’s work. This analytic approach is a departure from representing social realities through concepts that are understood to intersect and where such imagined (theorized) intersections offer insight into the complexity of social life and relations between people. In taking this approach we aim to move discussion beyond theoretical or abstracted understandings about why gender arises as problematic in organizations. Sometimes conventional and taken for granted beliefs about gender advance the purposes of the institution; sometimes they may be a drag on new ways of doing things, in which case they must be altered systematically. In any case, empirical analysis is especially important to identify the authorized knowledge basis of organizational action so that it can be tracked and analysed. Papers drawing on the traditions of institutional ethnography, governmentality, actor-network theory and related approaches are especially appropriate for this.
Studying people's knowledge and activities, socially organized through institutionally elaborated systems of information and communication and enacted in definite sites, will offer new ways of identifying how relations between people are also being reconfigured. We expect to see how gender, too, is changed as the work of men and women is organized in new ways. From sharing different forms of analysis in the session, larger questions may appear: for instance “Are gender relations a feature of the contemporary organization of global capitalism?” “How does this work?” “What are the broad consequences for the men and women who are involved in and affected by the new organizational systems of knowledge, decision-making and accountability?”
The papers we should like to see at this stream
· Provide a material analysis that draws attention to the institutional forms of organizing men and women at work.
· Expand our empirical understandings of the work processes that are often textually and technologically-choreographed to produce what an organization counts as ‘productive activity’. This might involve describing such arrangements, discovering their associated relations of subordination, and building material accounts of people’s variously situated contributions.
· Explicitly reject analytical and theoretical frameworks that treat organizational structure, people, gender, ethnicity, class, age, ability, etc., as discreet categories that intersect or otherwise influence each other;
· Shed light on how contemporary organizations are being coordinated (and are coordinating their interests and activities) within an increasingly globalized economy.
· Offer empirical and/or theoretical debate and insight into how institutional ethnography and related approaches are useful for understanding gender (and other) relations in contemporary organizations and management.
Abstracts of approximately 500 words, ONE page, WORD NOT PDF, single spaced, excluding any references, no headers, footers or track changes are invited by 1 st November 2013 with decisions on acceptance to be made by stream leaders within one month. All abstracts will be peer reviewed. New and young scholars with 'work in progress' papers are welcomed. In the case of co-authored papers, ONE person should be identified as the corresponding author. Note that due to restrictions of space, multiple submissions by the same author will not be timetabled. Abstracts should be submitted to Rebecca Lund:
rebecca.lund@aalto.fi Abstracts should include FULL contact details, including your name, department, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. State the title of the stream to which you are submitting your abstract.
Acker, J (1990). A theory of gendered organziations. Gender and Society. 4(2) 139-158
Smith, D.E. (2005). Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People . Walnut Creek, CA. AltaMira Press.
Smith, D.E. (1987). The Everyday World as problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston. Northeastern University Press.
Emily Porschitz
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Management
Keene State College
229 Main St.
Keene, NH 03435-2101