Inequality Regimes: Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations
Abstract
In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs.
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1. Some of the analysis in this article is based on chapter 5 in my book Class Questions: Feminist Answers (Acker 2006). I began to develop the concept of inequality regimes in a series of papers beginning in 1999 (see Acker 2000).
2. An outstanding exception to this generalization is Cynthia Cockburn's (1991) In the Way of Women: Men's Resistance to Sex Equality in Organizations. Cockburn's study of gender equality programs in four large British organizations integrates understanding of class processes and racial discrimination in her analysis of efforts to achieve sex equality.
3. I base my analysis primarily on organizations in the United States. However, I also use research that I and others have done in Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where inequality issues in organizations are quite similar to those in the United States.
4. At that time, the employees of all banks in Sweden were organized by the same union, Svenskabankmannaforbundet. Thus, a union-management agreement applied to all banks, although they were separate enterprises. Also, at that time, the union cooperated with management on issues of organization of work. In our study, we did observations and interviews in branches of the two largest Swedish banks.
5. See Rosabeth Moss Kanter's (1977) Men and Women of the Corporation for an early analysis of the gendered realities faced by managerial women, realities of the workplace that made top jobs more difficult for women than for men. These gendered class realities still exist 30 years later, although they may not be as widespread as in 1977.
6. Women have never been more than a tiny fraction of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. In 2004, eight women were 1.6 percent of the CEOs of these companies (see http://www.catalyst.org/ files/fact/COTE%20Factsheet%202002updated.pdf).
7. In some European and Scandinavian countries in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a push for workplace democracy by social democratic parties and labor confederations that resulted in a number of innovations to give workers, usually through their unions, more voice in organizing decisions. In Sweden, for example, a codetermination law was passed in the late 1970s encouraging the signing of labor-management contracts on employee/union participation in many company and workplace issues (Forsebäck 1980). No such broad initiatives occurred in the United States.
8. An example of such naturalization of inequality occurred in 2005 when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, explained the low representation of women in science by saying that women did not have the natural ability to do mathematics that men had. The local and national uproar over this explanation of inequality indicates how illegitimate such arguments have become.
9. The film 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and others captured this alternative view from below. Its great success suggests a wide and sympathetic audience that understood the critique of workplace relations.
10. Charles Perrow (1986) calls these “premise controls, ” the underlying assumptions about the way things are.
11. For a review and assessment of legislation and court antidiscrimination cases related to racial inequality, see Brown et al. (2003, chap. 5).
12. For an analysis of affirmative action and women's employment, see Reskin (1998).
13. Figart, Mutari, and Power (2002) discuss several reasons for the demise of comparable worth, including the privatization of many public services. See also Nelson and Bridges (1999) for a discussion that includes an analysis of court cases undermining pay equity.
14. Cynthia Cockburn (1991) also makes this point.
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