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Cited by 7,374

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 3 of the 3 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

HIERARCHIES, JOBS, BODIES: A Theory of Gendered Organizations

ACKER, JOAN·1990·Gender & Society
DOI 10.1177/089124390004002002
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Abstract

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work. Abstract jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference.

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Research works printed but not linked: 73

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Metadata

Authors
ACKER, J.
Venue
Gender & Society
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
1990-06
Volume
4
Issue
2
Pages
139-158
ISSN
  • 0891-2432 (ISSN-L)
  • 1552-3977
DOI
10.1177/089124390004002002
OpenAlex
W2047873637
Cited by
7,374
References
3
FWCI
45.10
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: HIERARCHIES, JOBS, BODIES: A Theory of Gendered Organizations. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/089124390004002002
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ACKER, J. (1990). HIERARCHIES, JOBS, BODIES: A Theory of Gendered Organizations. Gender & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124390004002002

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.