‘It's a Man's World!’: Restructuring Gender Imbalance in the Volvo Truck Company?

Abstract

The paper seeks to analyse the relationship between teamwork and gender, in particular how far the new technical division of labour associated with teamwork holds out the prospect of lessening gender segregation in the capitalist labour process. Taking Volvo — a company at the forefront of ‘good work’ experiments — as the focus of the research one could reasonably expect that if teamwork was leading to a lessening of gender segregation in blue collar areas it would be in companies such as Volvo. The evidence suggests that in certain areas and under certain conditions teamworking can lead to more women being employed in blue collar environments on the same terms and conditions as men. However, on adding a normative and governance dimension to teamworking, the evidence is more complex and is suggestive of a strategy drawing upon the utilization of stereotypical images of women as a ‘civilizing’ influence over male workers in a de‐layered organizational environment lacking direct first line supervision. The paper is divided into three substantive sections. The first section will sketch out the development of work organization in the Volvo organization to be followed in the second by a review of the gender segregation literature. The third section of the paper will, through an analysis of Volvo's Commercial Vehicle Division, assess how far teamwork has challenged traditional forms of gender segregation in the capitalist labour process.