The Field Guide › Paper
Acker's paper made the argument that organisational structure is not gender neutral, and it changed how the field could think. Her target is the assumption, shared even by many feminist writers on organisations at the time, that the structures themselves (jobs, hierarchies, contracts, the abstract logic of the org chart) are neutral containers into which gendered people are then poured, so that inequality is something that happens inside otherwise impartial machinery. Acker argues the opposite: assumptions about gender are built into the machinery, and their gendered nature is masked precisely by the abstraction. The concept of a job, she shows, presupposes a disembodied and universal worker, someone with no body, no children, no dependants, no need to be anywhere else; and that worker, though never named as such, is in fact a man, because it is men's bodies, sexuality and relation to procreation and paid work that are quietly assumed in the image. Images of masculinity pervade organisational processes, from the language of hierarchy to the norms of commitment, marginalising women while appearing to be nothing more than the neutral requirements of the work. For a corpus about psychological safety this is a foundational structural critique and a necessary corrective to the interpersonal frame. It says that the reason some people find it harder to speak, to be taken seriously, to be read as committed or competent, is not only a matter of team climate or leader behaviour but is embedded in the design of the job and the shape of the hierarchy itself, in what the organisation implicitly takes a worker to be. You cannot make a structure safe by being kind within it if the structure was built around a body that is not yours. Its limits are that it is a theoretical intervention, arguing its case rather than testing it, and Acker herself later extended the frame towards intersecting inequality regimes of gender, class and race, acknowledging that the original account centred gender. (Text drawn from the 1990 Gender & Society paper, 4(2), pp. 139-158.)