Gender, Bodies and Work

Citation

Jones, D. (2006), "Gender, Bodies and Work", Women in Management Review, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 170-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/wimr.2006.21.2.170.1

“Dressing for success”; trying to look “feminine” yet “professional”; concealing the messy traces of the feminine body (menstruation, pregnancy, menopause); negotiating sexual harassment and the “office romance” – these experiences are the staple day‐to‐day experience of women managers in Anglo‐American workplaces. While this book does not directly address or even discuss “women in management”, it is easy to make connections between the lives of women managers and the issues of gender, bodies, and work. This book offers some theoretical relationships between these concepts, and provides workplace examples across issues of embodiment including pregnancy, tiredness, emotion (“gut feeling”, disgust), and parenthood, and across a range of contexts from the airline industry to agriculture and nursing.

In a famous 1980s artwork by feminist artist Barbara Kruger, the slogan We won't play Nature/to your Culture frames the face of a 1950‐style female model, lying back on the grass with leaves covering her eyes (Buszek, 2005; Kruger, 1983). Kruger's image refuses the association between “woman” and “the body” that runs back long into the western philosophical tradition. The male/female, mind/body binary has long been a target of feminist critics, but their formulations have now proliferated far past a simple opposition to, or even a reversal of, these equations. Alongside these feminist theories of the body, and gradually overlapping with them, have emerged postructuralist conceptions that subjectivity is always embodied – always located in a place, a time, a body (Butler, 1993; Foucault, 1978). And this body – a woman's body perhaps, let us say the body of a woman who works as a cleaner, or as a web designer – is not a kind of pre‐given object, outside the social, but is constantly implicated in the social, and in power relations. Issues of organisational power and control have been the focus of developing studies of the body and work, not just in relation to gender but to a range of other issues: how bodies are organised in time and space; how some types of work display the body, while others try to neutralise it; experiences of the body from “inside” and “outside”; how bodies at work can be known and written about (Hassard et al., 2000; Holiday and Hassard, 2001).

Gender, Bodies and Work draws together the streams of work that I have outlined above. As the book's editors point out in their introduction – “when we come to the three terms ‘gender, bodies and work’ we seem to be in the position of a trainee juggler about to make the transition from two balls to three” (p. 2). But this is not an additive relationship, and in each of the specific empirical pieces of work presented here, the inseparability of these three aspects of embodied lives is reasserted. This book does not represent a dramatic theoretical development, but the introduction and two introductory theoretical overview chapters will be very useful for readers new to the field, as well as returning more experienced readers to some of the key concepts in the field and the debates around them. The introduction by the editors (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande, this volume), locates the literature of body/gender/organization in relation to wider developments in social theory – in sociology particularly. This location is also embodied in the disciplinary location of many of its authors – while one of the editors (David Morgan) and one of the authors of a theoretical chapter (David Knights) work in Management departments, nearly all the other writers are based in sociology. The conclusion to the introduction argues that the book's topics matter partly because they are “at the core of the discipline” of sociology (Morgan Brandth and Kvande, p. 9). This location gives the collection a different twist from, say, a more interdisciplinary collection, such as Holiday and Hassard (2001).

Another distinctive aspect of this collection is that most of the empirical chapters – and 9 out of a total of 12 chapters are empirical – deal with cases that are located in Norway, reflecting editor David Morgan's connections with Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim as well as the University of Keele in the UK, where contributing author David Knights is located. The book's introduction stresses the need for “an analysis which is both more sensitive to cultural variations and local differences and also more systematically aware of global trends and processes” (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande, p. 13). The Norwegian examples here provide an alternative to the usual Anglo‐American studies, and their distinctiveness shows up mostly in the ways that the cases address the employment policies of the Norwegian government, especially on “work‐life” balance issues. Beyond these specifics, however, the authors are not interested in comparing “Norwegian” bodies with, say, types of “British” bodies – “more systematic comparative work” which, as the editors argue, is absent in the field (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande). This call is more central to this topic than the usual suggestions for comparative studies in research agendas, because embodiment is theorised here to draw attention to specific bodies in specific spaces and places. While the theoretical drive of this field is against the universalising of examples from “Northern Europe or North America” (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande), the practice – as so often in management and organisation studies – is different. The practice is to be more interested in specifying differences of gender, class, occupation, and so on within the usual range of “national” domains, rather than either looking beyond them or paying attention to what is locally distinctive about them, and to the ways that these distinctions play out global power relations.

There is a tendency in the introduction – “perhaps a little premature” the editors say (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande, p. 9) – to set up a “conceptual framework”, or, at least, a series of thematic questions which might lead to future typologies, and which also would guide empirical work on gender/bodies/work: how gendered is a given workplace, for instance, in terms of numbers, symbols, power? What are the embodied/disembodied aspects of this work? “How do these themes combine to produce a gendered and embodied narrative about the workplace?” (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande). The two theoretical chapters provide further elaboration to the themes identified in the introduction. The editors comment in the introduction that “once questions of embodiment are allowed into the frame of [organisational] analysis it becomes difficult to understand why they have ever been excluded” (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande, p. 2). This theme is carried on by Morgan (this volume) in his rereading of selected key texts about work (Baldamus, Blauner, Braverman) to show that, in a sense, the body has been present in these texts although “relatively unexplored” (Morgan, this volume, p. 20). He compares this project with similar work on “re‐reading” texts in terms of the presences and absences of gender, and aims to show that while an explicit attention to the body is “new” it is at the same time a concept that is integral to the study of work, even when silenced.

The second theory chapter, “Embodying emotional labour” (Knights and Thanem, this volume) addresses some of the key concepts in work on organisations and the body. It takes as its starting point the concept of “emotional labour”, first distinguished by Hochschild in her study of flight attendants – the ways they are required to be endlessly smiling, polite, caring and attractive, and the toll this takes on them. Emotional labour is defined as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” (Hochschild, cited Knights and Thanem, p. 34). This critical linking of emotion and work has generated a large literature which focuses on control of the body, and has formed a major stream in the literature of gender/bodies/work. Key topics have included ways that women are required to look attractive and act in a feminine way as part of their work in feminine‐coded occupations. This review is more specifically oriented towards organisation studies than the two earlier chapters, and also makes connections with the emerging and related field of “emotions at work”. They point our how “ironic” (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande, p. 32) it is that much of the work on emotions in organisation studies actually ignores the body – and I would argue the problem is much worse in the “management” literature, where emotions appear as a new variable to be “managed” for competitive advantage. This chapter works very effectively as a review of the key concepts of emotions and the body in the workplace context, and the connections between them, but more importantly sets out to correct “the tendency for emotional labour or emotions in organisations simply to be reduced to an object of disembodied cognitive analysis” (Morgan, Brandth and Kvande).

In the overall field of organisation studies, this book can be seen as carrying on the task of problematising “gender” “bodies” and “work” through a series of cases, most of which present bodies in specific occupations or industries. For instance, the case of men in nursing: against the grain of occupational segregation, male nurses must embody nursing practice which is coded as female (Dahle, this volume). In a similar reversal, male workers struggle to act as fathers in work cultures where the pervasive assumption is still that parenting and work are in separate boxes, and that it is women who must negotiate the relationship between the two. The research approach tends to be fairly conventional interpretive descriptions of case study settings – in comparison with the concerns of some theorists of the body who address the challenge of writing about the body in an embodied way by experimenting with innovative research approaches (Holiday and Hassard, 2001). Many of the “case” chapters provide fascinating stories of work – especially those “embodied” aspects of work which tend to be hidden, invisible, and discounted in traditional accounts of gender and work. Many will be individually useful to those researching specific topics such as work/life balance or gender in medical occupations. For teachers, some chapters would be great to drop into course reading lists where “bodies” are usually absent – the chapter on the embodied aspects of work in finance and capital markets for instance would be likely to give the male commerce students in your course a bit of a surprise. Any sections of the book can serve as encouragement to read and write the body into any aspect of gender and work.