Introduction

In the move to conceptualizing organizations as cultural systems rather than objectively material and technical ones, gender studies have played a large part. Practical rather than theoretical considerations initially led feminist researchers to make this shift, thus challenging the ‘positivist faith’ in organizational theory. The 1970s in Britain saw the passing of equal opportunities initiatives such as the Equal Pay Act of 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. This legislation and the Equal Opportunities programmes which have followed it focused on removing direct discrimination in pay, recruitment and promotion. They were based on a broadly ‘liberal-feminist’ perspective, which assumed that women’s career advancement would follow once the structure of organizations had been correctly modified. This was coupled with a conception of gender as pertaining to the psychological attributes of individual women and men.