ABSTRACT
KATHY Ferguson’s (1984) insightful feminist critique of bureaucracy calls for an alternative feminist vision of organizing processes. After tracing the recent capitalist evolution of bureaucratic discourse, she identifies the harmful consequences of bureaucracy and points out the problems of successfully critiquing and transforming bureaucracy from within. Finally, she calls for articulating an alternative vision and accompanying practices grounded in women’s lives. Women’s lives, she argues, are marginalized and different from the dominant discourse. At the same time, women’s experiences are immediately available and provide a starting point that is not totally outside and therefore inaccessible, but rather on the margins. Judi Marshall’s work may be positioned as following from Ferguson’s concluding comments:
Real social change comes about when people think and live differently. Feminist discourse and feminist practice offer the linguistic and structural space in which it is possible to think, live, work, and love differently, in opposition to the discursive and institutional practices of bureaucratic capitalism. At least it is a start. (p. 212)
