Major Themes in Industrialised Societies: Organisations II
- Andrew Sayer and Derek Sayer
We shall make some introductory remarks on the nature and significance of organisations. Then, we shall explore in what ways organisations can be considered to be patriarchal and gendered.
a) Many large organisations populate the economy. Organisations matter to such an extent that some refer to an advanced capitalistic society as an organisational economy. However, this is to exaggerate their significance: capitalist organisations have to sell their products in the market and remain profitable. The society is largely market mediated.
b) Organisations are coordinated by ex-ante plan, which plans, commands and controls activities, and, thus, implies some kind of hierarchy. The hierarchical aspect may be strong (many directives) or weak (much self-responsibility). In any case, not all aspects of an organisation’s activity can be planned and commanded, so internal rules (i.e. habits, routines, norms and culture) have an important part in organisations.
c) The nature of hierarchical command elements in a business organisation has a great impact on its performance and flexibility. It is suggested that that heavy reliance on hierarchical commands may stress cohesion and tight coordination, but it often conflicts with the limits of knowledge of the capitalists, and of the cognition of the workers. Command structures often require costly control, measurement and monitoring. This may also undermine the motivation and creativity of its workers. These problems tend to weigh more heavily in a complex, changeable world, so that de-emphasising hierarchy and command confers competitive advantages. Senior managers, therefore, emphasise flat hierarchies, teamwork and performance-derived rewards for successful internal competition, and try to motivate workers by imbuing them with the business culture.
d) Organisations matter because they shape the worker experiences and lives of many individuals, and communities in which they are situated. Although the individualist ideology of liberal capitalist societies stresses the independence, autonomy and equality, employee’s actions are dictated by a hierarchy, and bureaucratic rules, regulations and procedures.
A classical bureaucratic organisation (e.g., in Taylorism and scientific management literature and in Weberian ideal type of bureaucracy) has a well-defined chain of command, an unambiguous structure of authority that depends strictly on the formal hierarchy. However, it is suggested that work relations have changed to become democratic, emphasis on team-based production, multi-skilling and flexible work. This has increased workers’ responsibility, discretion and skill.
a) While bureaucracies are inevitably hierarchical – they can only be less or more hierarchical - a question remains whether organisations are inevitable patriarchal. Are bureaucracies necessarily gendered, or only contingently and accidentally so? Similarly, are organisations racist, heterosexist and ageist? In other words, are bureaucracies identity-neutral, or identity-sensitive?
b) There is plenty of evidence to suggest that gendered division of work exist within organisations; e.g., gender-typing and gender selection result in many secretaries and clerks being women, and office managers men; and in hospitals, many senior doctors are men while nurses are women.
In addition, it is alleged that bureaucracies are inevitably masculine, even without the gendered division of work, because the masculine nature of formal rationality and calculating behaviour is central to bureaucracies. Indeed, feminine nature of caring and compassion does not fit in hierarchical, procedural organisations.
Whether bureaucratic organisations are necessarily gendered or not is not merely an academic question, but of considerable practical and political significance. If institutions such as bureaucracies cannot be neutral with respect to gender and identity, then this has major implications for political reforms and the construction of a just social world.
c) Traditionally, political economy and economic sociology (such as Marxist and Weberian schools of thought) have argued that organisations operate ‘without regard for persons’, so that any particular associations between institutions and particular identities are contingent (i.e., accidental and historical). That is, not a necessary consequence of bureaucracies themselves but of other influences outside bureaucracies (i.e., non-bureaucratic effects).
However, such views have been contested by ‘embedded approach’ writers, who identify how organisations are culturally-embedded (i.e., bureaucracies shaped by social meanings, norms, conventions and power). Though this approach is not without some problems.
i) The ‘embedded approach’ confuses abstract concepts of bureaucracy from concrete descriptions of such a bureaucracy. One of the problems of the literature is a common tendency to slide between the abstract and concrete, using observations made of concrete bureaucratic organisations to criticise abstractions of the bureaucracy. It recommends historical empirical research to examine how bureaucratic organisations are gendered. Yet, this approach evades abstract and counterfactual questions (i.e., do bureaucracies have to be gendered?). Clearly, it is irrelevant to the economic functioning of a capitalist bureaucracy whether secretaries are female or male, or whether a public hospital has all male or all female doctors.
ii) Turning to the allegation that formal rationality is masculine, such views fail to demonstrate why masculine behaviour is exclusive to men, or feminine behaviour exclusive to women – remembering that women can be masculine. More significantly, if we seriously take the claim that gender has no essence, then the associations between formal rationality and men must be contingent, not necessary.
iii) Moreover, even if it is accepted that formal rationality is unavoidably masculine rather than just contingently coded as masculine, it would still leave open the question of whether organisations adopt formal rationality because of the way it is gendered, or because they need it to conduct their affairs efficiently. Clearly, bureaucracies adopt rationality not because it is masculine but rather it is an effective method of coordinating activities.