ABSTRACT

A ‘new’ approach to organizational analysis Organizational analysis is concerned with ‘the process and dynamics that create and maintain given organizational realities and, from a radical perspective, the impact of those realities upon the construction of social relationships’ (Mills and Tancred, 1992: 49). Organizational analysis can help us to understand working life at the micro-level, but the traditional approach to organizational analysis has been criticized by a number of contemporary theorists, writing from a feminist or pro-feminist perspective, for its neglect of gender and diversity. There is now widespread acceptance that organizational analysis has traditionally ‘occurred through a lens which is primarily white and male’ (Cianni and Romberger, 1997: 116), which means that organizational knowledge has hegemonic characteristics (the concept of hegemony is discussed further below). Consider, for example, the influential Hawthorne Studies, which explored the relationship between motivation and performance and involved research with a group of women and a group of men. Contemporary analyses of the studies still often fail to draw attention to the gender of the research participants, when there were clear gender divisions and implications in the findings (compare this with Acker and Van Houten, 1992; Mills, 1992). This type of ‘gender-blind’ approach to research fails to acknowledge gender as a significant dynamic of organizations, which many writers now argue it to be (for example, Cockburn, 1991; Acker, 1992; Mills, 1992; Gherardi, 1996; Wahl and Holgersson, 2003). Thus, the neglect of gender and diversity in organizational analysis has led to the acceptance (particularly in the management literature) of white, non-disabled, heterosexual men’s experiences and interpretations of organizational life as generally valid and universally applicable (Alvesson and Billing, 1997).