ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which gender is embedded in organizational restructuring. Our specific focus is the British banking industry and recent attempts to restructure high-street banking. Here, as in many other sectors, important challenges have been made to long-established organizational paradigms. New forms of management have been privileged, emphasizing innovation, flexibility and the need for cultural change. Alongside this, much has been made of the need to elevate the status of the customer, necessitating new organizational practices of ‘customer care’ (see Halford and Savage, 1995, and Halford et al., 1997, for further discussion). Our investigation of the gendering of these changes raises a number of issues which resonate with wider debates about the nature of ‘economic restructuring’ and organizational change. In the first part of this chapter we examine these issues through a sympathetic critique of approaches used by geographers and economic sociologists within ‘the restructuring paradigm’ (Bagguley et al., 1990). This approach directed attention to the specificity of restructuring processes and delineated some òf the varied strategies which produced changes in employment relations. However, we will argue that it took an overeconomistic view of the dynamics of restructuring, treating organizations as merely instrumental in the process of change and treating people as simply passive recipients of structural organizational change. We will suggest that these interconnected problems diminish the ability of the restructuring paradigm to conceptualize the place of gender in the restructuring process.
