"Like it or not, all of us who live in modern society are organization men and women. We tend to be caught in the traditional patterns of dominance and subordination. This book is both pessimistic and hopeful. With devastating thoroughness, the author shows how pervasive these patterns of relationship are in our work lives and personal lives, and how deep they run -- into the very language of the organization and of ordinary life. This is not a book about how (...) women can succeed in business, but a criticism of books like those success manuals and notions like that idea of success. The author sees bureaucrats and clients as the 'second sex'. To fit in properly, they just learn the skills necessary to cope with subordinate status, skills that women have always learned as part of their 'femininity'. Liberal reforms -- placing more women in management positions, for example -- are not enough. What is required is the emergence of an alternative voice, one grounded in the experience and perceptions of women, that will challenge the patterns of control found in every aspect of modern life. Public discourse today is not the language of women even when women speak it. In this brilliant synthesis of the feminist literature and the literature on organizational theory and practice, the author suggests how a feminist discourse could interject into public debate a reformulation of the basic political questions of power, reason, and organization and thereby legitimate a concern of both autonomy and community. In the face of the massive incursions of bureaucracy into daily life, this is an important contribution to the project of human liberation."--Publisher description. (shrink)

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work.jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational (...) thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference. (shrink)

In this article the relevance of the feminist ethic of care for current Dutch social policies is elaborated. It starts from the observation that Dutch society is witnessing two intertwined processes: the relocation of politics and the relocation of care. Together these processes result in the need for new normative frameworks for social policy. Care has to become part of the practices of active citizenship, which should be based on notions of relationality and interdependence. Basic moral concepts of the ethic (...) of care, like attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, trust and asymmetrical reciprocity are introduced. In the final part, the ethic of care is applied to two topical issues: policies on combining paid labour and care and generation-sensitive policies. Finally some norms are proposed to guide social policymaking. (shrink)

How do we know which institutions provide good care? Some scholars argue that the best way to think about care institutions is to model them upon the family or the market. This paper argues, on the contrary, that when we make explicit some background conditions of good family care, we can apply what we know to better institutionalized caring. After considering elements of bad and good care, from an institutional perspective, the paper argues that good care in an institutional context (...) has three central foci: the purpose of care, a recognition of power relations, and the need for pluralistic, particular tailoring of care to meet individuals? needs. These elements further require political space within institutions to address such concerns. (shrink)

This article analyzes feminist organizations as a species of social movement organization. It identifies 10 dimensions for comparing feminist and nonfeminist organizations or for deriving types of feminist organizations and analyzing them. The dimensions are feminist ideology, feminist values, feminist goals, feminist outcomes, founding circumstances, structure, practice, members and membership, scope and scale, and external relations. I argue that many scholars judge feminist organizations against an ideal type that is largely unattainable and that excessive attention has been paid to the (...) issue of bureaucracy versus collectivism to the neglect of other organizational qualities. The varieties of ideology, form, and strategy that feminist organizations embody should be analyzed in relation to outcomes for women, the women's movement, and society. As has recently begun to occur, feminist scholars are encouraged to claim the topic of feminist organizations for themselves. (shrink)