ABSTRACT
American sociologist Joan Acker is amongst the most influential writers in and one of the founders of the field of gender, work and organization. Acker’s first publications date from the early 1970s and they revisit key concepts and theories from sociology and organization studies from the perspective of women, demonstrating how power processes result in sexism and organizational hierarchies that favour men over women. In a similar vein, Acker collaborated with Donald van Houten to examine the sex structuring of organizations in their classic 1974 article in Administrative Science Quarterly. In the time and context of the early 1970s, feminist scholarship was being invented by women like Acker, who started carving out places to ask research questions about the positions of women in society, something they had to do in universities largely dominated by men and male perspectives.
