Developing a Theory of Gender as Practice

Abstract

In her feminist lecture 'Said and Done' versus 'Saying and Doing,' Patricia Yancey Martin gives us an exceptionally clear and useful review of the problems of theorizing in organizational contexts. Yancey Martin has been working on these issues for more than a decade (cf. Yancey Martin 1990), in a multifaceted research agenda that is one of the key contributions to the current Anglophone sociology of gender. This article crystallizes a conceptual perspective that has been emerging in her work. Drawing on a range of theories and on fieldwork in large U.S. corporations, Yancey Martin argues that is a pervasive feature at the level of everyday practice in notionally ungendered organizations. She proposes the concept of a two-sided dynamic in organizational life: gendering practices, which embody institutionalized distinctions, and the process of practicing gender, in which particular people constitute relations in their continuing workplace activity. In developing these concepts, Yancey Martin is grappling with the glaring contradiction that faces every researcher on in the workplace. In modem organizations, gross inequalities (for instance, the exclusion of women from top management, occupational segregation, inequalities of income, inequalities of respect) coexist with apparently gender-neutral organizational norms (as described in classic theories of bureaucracy). Often, large inequalities coexist with a complete denial of any bias or prejudice. Yancey Martin is directing us to a level of reality that is, as she insightfully argues, hard to describe in text and hard to pin down in research. This practice of is local, subtle, often instantaneous, often barely noticed or made a theme in conversation. It is not what researchers can document in a questionnaire, not even (or not easily) in a retrospective interview. Yancey Martin is quite right when she says that practices are guided only sometimes by intention relative to gender (p. 355 [this issue]). That is to say, within a given practice, coexists with other determinants.