This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative, the Results-Only Work Environment, implemented in the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations “accommodate” individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: How does this initiative attempt to change the masculinized ideal worker norm? And what do women’s and men’s responses reveal about the persistent ways (...) that gender structures work and family life? Data demonstrate the ideal worker norm is pervasive and powerful, even as employees begin critically examining expectations regarding work time that have historically privileged men. Employees’ responses to ROWE are also gendered. Women are more enthusiastic, while men are more cautious. Ambivalence about and resistance to change is expressed in different ways depending on gender and occupational status. (shrink)

Gender scholars draw on the “theory of gendered organizations” to explain persistent gender inequality in the workplace. This theory argues that gender inequality is built into work organizations in which jobs are characterized by long-term security, standardized career ladders and job descriptions, and management controlled evaluations. Over the past few decades, this basic organizational logic has been transformed. In the so-called new economy, work is increasingly characterized by job insecurity, teamwork, career maps, and networking. Using a case study of geoscientists (...) in the oil and gas industry, we apply a gender lens to this evolving organization of work. This article extends Acker’s theory of gendered organizations by identifying the mechanisms that reproduce gender inequality in the twenty-first-century workplace, and by suggesting appropriate policy approaches to remedy these disparities. (shrink)

Changing images of work in discourse both portray and co-constitute the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. Specifically, work metaphors appear in extra-scientific and intra-scientific discourse on workers and work structures in the natural and social world. An analysis of the entomological discourse from the late nineteenth century to the present shows changes in these metaphors that overlap with the discourse of change in human work and organizational structures. For instance, the metaphor of a busy bee within an (...) efficient hive had traditionally evoked a comparison to the modern industrial workplace. The discourse on the hive currently more closely resembles a postindustrial conception of work. Discourse analysis can illustrate the role of language in co-constructing shared changes in image of work. (shrink)