ABSTRACT
The rediscovery of culture continues its advance through academic disciplines, the latest to seek acceptance within this new orthodoxy is business history. Here culture is placed at the centre of an attempt to position business history at the intersection of management, sociology and economics. Fundamental to this shifting perspective has been the recognition that business organizations are socio-cultural constructs and that their performance is in greater or lesser part subject to this process. 1 In the light of this, research is being directed towards '[generating] a better appreciation of the variety of ways in which the role of culture in business performance can be understood'. 2 Despite the vigour of their support for the concept of culture, many business historians have allowed themselves to be distracted by their own histories. Often economics remains at the heart of their analyses and they fail to see the full implications of and opportunities for their initial premise. Rather than developing a full and open discussion of culture as a central motive force within institutions, their discussions continue to focus upon issues such as the development of 'a check list for assessing the economic value of different cultures'. 3
While this chapter does not claim to present a complete and inclusive historical analysis of culture and institutions, by utilizing recent feminist perspectives on gender, discourse and culture, it does attempt to reveal the greater complexity and value of culture as a concept within institutions that is so often disregarded by the new wave ofbusiness historians. 4 It seeks to achieve this by understanding the influence of gender and class as two intersecting facets of culture which are present within the historical evolution of institutions and their regulation.5 By rejecting the implicit simplicity of approaches that continue to prioritize economics, the historical understanding of change or continuity is given greater sensitivity to both collective and individual subjectivities. Here analysis of two organizations, Barclays Bank and the British Civil Service, has in each case revealed shared understandings of gender and class. For each organization these shared understandings were revealed
The marriage bar: past and present theorizations
During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marriage bars were a frequent phenomena constraining many areas of women's paid employment. While this chapter investigates only the introduction and operation offormal or written marriage bars it is acknowledged that informal or unwritten examples played an extensive part in the restriction of women's employment opportunities. In both cases, their action was to restrict the process of recruitment to single women and, then, to force the resignation of female staff on the point of marriage. Although the power of informal bars could often be greater than that of the formal bar by appearing more natural and receiving less critical attention, formal marriage bars represent a more highly visible form of institutional constraint upon the employment opportunities ofwomen.6 The formal marriage bar thus offers a greater opportunity for the exposition and investigation of institutions within the labour market to which less overt processes can then be compared.
