Research on Gender: Understanding the World in Order to Change It

Abstract

It is not so very long ago that sociologists, organizational behaviour, industrial relations and management theorists and researchers used to write books about employment and work organizations with virtually no acknow ledgement that the 'workers' and managers they wrote about were men or women. Now the gender segmentation of labour markets, industries, occupations and organizations is generally recognized as a theme that cannot be ignored. The gendered structure of the labour market has received considerable investigation and the processes through which gen der is enacted in workplaces in the course of job-related and social relations has been observed and analyzed to varying degrees in workplace ethno graphies. Feminist exploration of the relationships between sexuality, power and the sexual division of labour, however, has largely been confined in industrial and organizational sociology to concern about the incidence of sexual harassment and a recognition that the packaging of sexuality is part of the hidden agenda, if not the explicit job-specification, of some female