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Define – used or done or held in accordance with rules, convention or ceremony Precisely what is meant by this term may vary from one writer to another, but includes reference to the formal design of an organisation, perhaps conceptualised as a chart showing job titles, with specific responsibilities arranged into hierarchies of accountability and command. Reference will also be made to the formal. Documented rules and procedures that are understood to govern organisational practice within these hierarchies. We know that women and men tend to occupy different positions within organisational hierarchies. On explanation for the persistence of this is that once segregation has been established it becomes very difficult to the break the pattern. This argument is made by Kanter, a US business consultant and academic, in her book Men and Women of the Corporation (1977), which was one of the first detailed empirical studies of gender and organisation and remains widely cited today. Kanter begins with an observation about numbers; at the time of writing, 96 per cent of mid senior managers in the US were men, and in Indsco (the pseudonym she gave to the organisation she studied) women comprised only 2 per cent of the officials and managers but 87 per cent of the clerical and office workers. The explanation for this, she argues, lies with historical factors which are no longer relevant in today’s world. Namely, she continues, it is the fact that men were the first to colonise the bureaucracies which expanded in the US from the late nineteenth century onwards. Women were relative latecomers, only entering bureaucratic employment as opportunities in domestic service contracted during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The increase in women’s presence was dramatic: in 1870 the US census takers recorded just seven female stenographers (typists); by 1920 the census recorded 500000 women doing the same job. As women entered business organisations they moved into routine clerical work because, Kanter argues, management had already been established as a masculine role – that is, something which men, and not women, carried out. This she claims was simply a function of the need for the newly emergent and rapidly expanding occupation of ‘management’ to create a ‘spirit of managerialism’ that gave ideological coherence to the control of a relatively small and exclusive group of men over a large group of workers and also differentiated to viewpoint of managers from that of the owner-entrepreneurs. (Kanter 1977a:20) Just as the managerial role makes men behave in ways which reinforce male dominance of management positions, Kanter argues that women’s segregation into routine clerical positions, with few possibilities for promotion, causes them to behave in ways which ensure that they stay there. At Indsco great status was conferred on those who moved up the ladder. But for those who did not the message was clear; ‘You do not mean much to your company unless you get the chance to move on’ (1977:131). In this context Kanter argues that if you give people opportunities then their ambitions and their capabilities soar. If opportunity is denied they perish. Using this argument Kanter claims that women struck in dead-end jobs start to appear disinterested in their work, unmotivated and more inclined to familial and domestic concerns. All these are claims which have been made by those who believe that women and men have fundamentally different orientations because of their distinctive genetic make-up. But Kanter’s point is to refute these claims. It is not that women display these tendencies because they are women, but rather because they are stuck in dead-end jobs. A rather different argument about the relationship between gender and organisational structures suggests that, far from a contingent outcome of history, gendered organisational structures are actively sustained by men in their own interests. In this argument, it is not simply gender-neutral organisational imperatives which maintain the historic imbalance between women and men across the hierarchy but the mobilisation of male power. Ressner (1987) in her study of Swedish government bureaucracies argues that bureaucratic hierarchies should also be seen as patriarchal structures and that men dominate not only as managers but also as men. First, attention is drawn to the methods of recruitment and selection. Since the 1970s most Western countries have implemented legislation which makes it illegal to specify a preference for either a male or a female in recruitment and selection of staff. However, even where they appear to be entirely gender-neutral, procedures in this area of organisational practice have been shown to impact differentially on women and men. In some organisations, ‘informal’ recruitment still takes place.
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