Gender, Bodies and Work

Citation

Morgan, D. (2006), "Gender, Bodies and Work", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 14 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2006.04414dae.003

Gender, Bodies and Work

Gender, Bodies and Work

David Morgan, Berit Brandth, Elin Kvande,Ashgate, 2005

“Dressing for success”, trying to look “feminine” yet “professional”, concealing the messy traces of the feminine body (menstruation, pregnancy, menopause), negotiating sexual harassment and the “office romance” – these are the day-to-day experiences of women managers in the Anglo-American workplace. While Gender, Bodies and Work does not discuss “women in management”, it is easy to make connections between the lives of women managers and the issues of gender, bodies and work. The book offers some theoretical relationships between these concepts, and provides workplace examples – including pregnancy, tiredness, emotion (“gut feeling”, disgust) and parenthood – across a range of contexts, from the airline industry to agriculture and nursing.

Issues of organizational power and control have been the focus of developing studies of the body and work, in relation not only to gender but also to a range of other issues – how bodies are organized in time and space; how some types of work display the body, while others try to neutralize it; experiences of the body from “inside” and “outside”; how bodies at work can be known and written about. Gender, Bodies and Work draws together these streams of work. As the book’s editors point out:

When we come to the three terms “gender, bodies and work” we seem to be in the position of a trainee juggler about to make the transition from two balls to three (p. 2).

But this is not an additive relationship, and in each of the specific empirical pieces of work presented, the inseparability of the three aspects of embodied lives is reasserted.

The introduction and two introductory theoretical overview chapters are useful for readers new to the field. They also return readers who are more experienced in the field to some of the key concepts and debates. The introduction locates the literature of body/gender/organization in relation to wider developments in social theory, and sociology in particular.

Most of the empirical chapters – and nine out of the 12 chapters are empirical – deal with cases that are located in Norway, reflecting editor David Morgan’s connections with Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. The Norwegian examples provide an alternative to the usual Anglo-American studies, and their distinctiveness shows up mostly in the ways that the cases address the employment policies of the Norwegian Government, especially on work-life balance.

In the overall field of organization studies, the book carries on the task of problematizing “gender”, “bodies” and “work” through a series of cases, most of which present bodies in specific occupations or industries. For instance, the case of men in nursing: against the grain of occupational segregation, male nurses must embody nursing practice, which is coded as female (Dahle, this volume). In a similar reversal, male workers struggle to act as fathers in work cultures where the pervasive assumption is still that parenting and work are in separate boxes, and that it is women who must negotiate the relationship between the two.

Many of the case-study chapters provide fascinating stories of work – especially those “embodied” aspects of work that tend to be hidden, invisible, and discounted in traditional accounts of gender and work. Many will be individually useful to those interested in specific topics such as work-life balance or gender in medical occupations.

Reviewed by Deborah Jones, Victoria Management School, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.

A longer version of this review was originally published in Women in Management Review, Vol. 21 No. 2, 2006.