White-collar Workplace Research Articles

Solidarity and gender in protest novels: Bessie Head’s <i>The Cardinals</i> and Miriam Tlali’s <i>Muriel at Metropolitan</i>

This article analyses the critical role of gender within racial solidarity in anti-apartheid protest writing by comparing Bessie Head’s The Cardinals and Miriam Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan. Both novels depict the protagonist’s experience of being the only Black woman at a white-collar workplace during apartheid. The workplace relationships explored within the novels illustrate the complex role of gender in forming alliances and nurturing solidarity. Although Tlali’s novel prioritises solidarity between Black people in the face of apartheid, areas of significant gender inequalities are present. Head’s The Cardinals, on the other hand, explicitly explores the fissures in Black anti-apartheid alliances created by gender inequalities. The juxtaposition of these two novels challenges a uniform understanding of Black anti-apartheid solidarity, while also elucidating depictions of the competing relationships of solidarity for Black working women in female-authored protest writing. By forcing the reader to consider the place of gender in relation to both collectives of solidarity and to anti-apartheid protest, the novels trigger a rethinking of what traditionally male-dominated protest writing was and could be.

Managers Can Support Employees in Working-Class Contexts by Promoting Growth Mindsets.

White-collar workplaces are critical "gateway" contexts. They play a crucial role in providing valuable opportunities and upward social mobility. Some groups are less likely, however, to feel they belong in these settings. For example, those with a college degree may feel relatively at ease. However, those without may be uncertain about whether they will be fully included. We examine one possibility for addressing these class-based belonging gaps. A growing education literature demonstrates the power of growth mindsets. We extend this research to the workplace and test its benefits. In two preregistered experiments (N = 1,777), we find that endorsing growth mindsets can support working-class (WK) individuals. When managers have a growth mindset, WK individuals report high sense of belonging. The effect occurred because managers with growth mindsets reduced identity threat. A preregistered survey of employees in the real world (N = 300) triangulated these findings. Sense of belonging was higher among those who believed their manager had a growth mindset. Furthermore, they reported greater job satisfaction and commitment. These findings have important implications for the growing conversation on addressing class divides.

Interdependent behavior only benefits employees from working-class backgrounds when it is both enacted and valued.

Social class disparities are pervasive in American society. In higher education, one critical driver of these disparities is the cultural mismatch between the interdependent norms of people from working-class backgrounds and the independent norms that pervade higher education. However, after graduating from college and entering white-collar workplaces, people from working-class backgrounds have frequent opportunities to collaborate in teams-that is, to enact interdependent behavior. Do these opportunities reduce cultural mismatch for people from working-class backgrounds? Across two survey studies and two experiments with college-educated U.S. employees (total N = 2,566), we find that they do not. We theorize and document that this is because there is often a decoupling between enacting interdependent behavior and whether such behavior is valued as part of being a "good" employee. We find that employees from working-class backgrounds only experience a cultural match and its benefits (e.g., sense of fit, high retention intentions) when interdependent behaviors are both enacted and valued. In contrast, when interdependent behaviors are enacted but not valued, employees from working-class backgrounds experience a cultural mismatch. Furthermore, we find that this pattern is unique to employees from working-class backgrounds: Employees from middle-class backgrounds report similar fit and retention regardless of whether there is a coupling of enacted and valued interdependent behavior. Taken together, our results suggest that it is critical to examine multiple elements of culture simultaneously (e.g., both enacted and valued behavior) to fully understand and predict the consequences of cultural (mis)match. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

White-collar comedy and Toho’s ‘Wholesome Color’ in Japan’s era of high economic growth

ABSTRACT Throughout Japan’s era of high economic growth (1952–1971), hundreds of films were produced featuring the salaryman, or male white-collar worker. While each major studio produced films concerning this figure, Toho Studios was best known for their salaryman comedies. This article examines Toho’s popular Company President series (1956-1970), which consists of thirty-three films released across fourteen years. Redefining the concept of ‘comic timing,’ I argue that the series’ comedic vocabulary is organized around historical temporalities and a time-based perception of white-collar work’s specificity. I then connect textual readings of the series to Toho’s own identity crafted in the studio’s promotional magazine and film periodicals. By highlighting its management style and technological superiority, Toho crafted a self-image as a white-collar workplace that is coextensive with the brightness of their workplace comedies. The studio’s emphasis in films and corporate identity on wholesomeness, brightness, and rationalism are placed in tension with Toho’s earlier history of labour relations. Toho and white-collar comedies act as an important example of an ‘employee culture’ that was elaborated in the era of high economic growth, positing the salaryman as a paradigmatic postwar subject.

The Digital Workplace: Navigating in a Jungle of Paradoxical Tensions

Digital technologies have become omnipresent in our professional and personal lives. While they provide numerous opportunities, they also cause tensions, many of which are paradoxical. They confront us with conflicting yet synergetic and interdependent alternatives that persist over time—such as benefiting from the increasing availability and access to information at the risk of information overload and technostress. Thus far, we know little about the specific paradoxes caused by digital technologies in the workplace and how managers perceive and cope with them. This article offers a comprehensive perspective on the multiplicity and interrelatedness of paradoxes in the digital white-collar workplace and suggests how managers can develop effective coping mechanisms for convergent change and transforming work practices in paradoxical environments.

Japanese norms in Japanese workplaces

Japan is known for its exclusionary tendencies and clearly delineated Japanese way of doing things. Seeing as its immigration law was amended in April 2019 to allow more migrant workers into the country, there is some urgency in studying these ethnocentric practices, which often lead to inequalities between Japanese and foreign employees at the workplace. The objective of this opinion piece is to help the reader understand the sociocultural context and rationale behind Japanese norms in blue- and white-collar workplaces, as well as foreign employees’ reactions and points of view. Such understanding will hopefully increase both Japanese and foreign employees’ willingness to accommodate each other, and reduce friction and conflict at the workplace.

“the older I get the less I trust people” constructing age identities in the workplace

In 2006 laws banning age discrimination came into effect in the UK. Even though unions seem to suggest that ‘age’ is a very common form of discrimination, it does not typically attract (at least as yet) the same attention as other more widely discussed cases. Age discrimination is typically associated with discourses around an ‘ageing workforce’, however it affects both younger and older employees. Looking closer at ‘ageing’ discourses it becomes apparent that the boundaries between ‘old’ and ‘young’ are not as clear cut as a first reading would suggest. Further to this, recent sociolinguistic research has repeatedly shown that (age or other) identity is not something people ‘have’ or ‘are’ but something people ‘do’ (e.g., Holmes 2006; Coupland 2009). Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to discuss and problematise the ways in which employees construct age identities in the complex system of white-collar workplaces. The paper draws on recordings of real life routine meeting data featuring primarily employees in a small/medium enterprise (SMEs). Special attention is paid here to one member of the team, Cynthia the youngest member of staff. The discussion also draws on interview data in order to further analyse perceptions and representations of ‘age differences’ in this context. The analysis shows the complex process of negotiation of identity where chronological age is related to ‘expertise’ and ‘experience’ and becomes an important resource participants draw upon in the process of self -and other- positioning.

‘Deskless, commuteless, and theoretically omnipresent’: work, global violence, and capitalist realism in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad

ABSTRACT This essay examines how, through narrating the white-collar workplace, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) engages with structural concerns of contemporary capitalism, global violence, postcolonial oppression, and contemporary technologies as a text written in the wake of the 2007/8 financial crisis. Alongside these concerns and through reading two chapters of Egan’s novel, ‘Selling the General’ and ‘Pure Language’, this article also examines how fictional representation more broadly operates as both an aesthetic mode and as an active component of a political-economic sensibility that is necessary to upholding the capitalist status quo in the contemporary moment: this is, as Mark Fisher describes, capitalist realism. By bringing these critical strands in dialogue with one another, not only does this enable a nuanced reading of how the novel understands and charts the relations between these structural concerns, but it also facilitates a furthering of capitalist realism as a critical framework.

Developing skills in higher education for post-pandemic work

ABSTRACT Many white-collar workplaces have changed substantially because of the pandemic. This paper examines how the rise of technology-based distributed work arrangements impacts on the knowledge, skills and competencies that higher education graduates must possess to be successful in post-pandemic white-collar work environments. In addition, this paper examines prior literature to identify digital forms of Work Integrated Learning as a mechanism through which higher education providers can assist graduates in their post-pandemic transition from university to the workplace.

Directives in Professional Kitchens and Potential Learning Opportunities

AbstractThere has been to date a long tradition of research in workplace discourse. The bulk of the research has focused on professional white-collar workplaces, but a handful of studies have examined working-class settings such as factories and building sites. This area of research has, however, been concerned with interactions involving co-workers. Studies examining interactions between newcomers and experienced others, such as Holmes and Woodhams (2013), are rare. Using data collected in the working-class setting of the professional kitchen, the current study presents interactions between newcomer trainee cooks and the cooks they worked under. It focuses on the use of directives, which was a prevalent feature of their interactions. As individual utterances, the directives would seem to be designed to elicit specific, ad-hoc actions from trainees. However, closer analysis reveals that series of directives may serve important instructional purposes. Findings from the study are useful in raising the awareness of those assigned to mentor trainees in work settings and should enhance on-the-job workplace training as well as support newcomers as they adjust to their new workplaces.

Arthur Hailey as Richard Nixon: Workplace Safety in Airport

In his best-selling 1968 novel Airport, Arthur Hailey takes psychological workplace stresses seriously, and he places white-collar workplace safety at the centre of his novel. The disaster narrative in Airport not only lands an airplane against the odds but also shows how important workplace safety is to the safe and continued functioning of the transportation system. In this way, Hailey’s novel narratively and thematically registers changes in contemporary US culture that would soon take legislative form, as when Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970.

Beauties at Work: Sexual Politics in a Chinese Professional Organization

This article explores new forms of inequality experienced by young white-collar professional women in post-Mao China. Drawing upon ethnographic data collected during a six-month stay in a Chinese company in eastern China, I explore how sexuality is played out in its organizational culture. Through an analysis of management attitudes, everyday office encounters and organizational activities, I illustrate that the workplace culture can be eroticized. Masculine domination pervades company organization, with women controlled through the process of objectification, which intensifies vertical segregation by gender. Despite gendered and sexualized control in the white-collar workplace, I caution against misinterpreting Chinese women’s responses by viewing them through the lens of inappropriate assumptions. I indicate how women’s agency may be enacted, and reveal layers of response and resistance in the face of masculine domination at work.

Single Girls and Working Women: Gender, Power, and Feminism in American History and Culture

Single Girls and Working Women:Gender, Power, and Feminism in American History and Culture Elizabeth Fraterrigo (bio) Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. ix + 359 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-300-11899-5 (cl). Melissa Fisher, Wall Street Women. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. ix + 227 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-5330-0 (cl); 978-0-8223-5345-4 (pb). Katherine Lehman, Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Popular Culture. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. vii + 312 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-7006-1808-8 (cl). Victoria Vantoch, The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 1 + 287 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8122-4481-6 (cl). Since 2007, AMC’s acclaimed television series Mad Men has captivated audiences with its gripping portrayal of men and women in a 1960s New York advertising firm. Through such characters as Don Draper, the consummate adman whose own persona is a carefully calibrated lie, and Joan Holloway, the office vixen whose appearance and demeanor are skillful projections of femininity and sex appeal, Mad Men highlights gender difference while literally showcasing the performative nature of gender. In its depiction of Joan and another character, Peggy Olsen, both unmarried at the beginning of the series, Mad Men also explores the gendered nature of the obstacles and opportunities faced by these ambitious “single girls.” Peggy’s start as a secretary is marked by a dawning impression that success will come from appealing sexually to her male boss; later, she secures a job as a copywriter due to her status as a woman better able than men to pitch products to female consumers. Joan uses her sexual power to curry favor with male bosses, but finds that her considerable intellectual abilities draw less notice. She ultimately rises to become an ad-agency partner, but only after being pressured into sleeping with a prospective client to win an account. For both characters, a woman’s role in the workplace and her access to power is inextricably tied to her gender and sexuality. As a period [End Page 176] drama exploring the workplace culture of Madison Avenue and the personal lives of its characters, Mad Men entertains as it conjures and comments on gender dynamics and sex norms of the 1960s. It also assumes a place in a long history of cultural imaginings about female singlehood and sex and power in the American office. The four books under review here help make sense of the popular appeal of a program such as Mad Men, while also historicizing its themes.1 Together, these works address cultural narratives about gender, sexuality, and work, and probe the experiences of a range of working women including secretaries, stewardesses, and financiers. They explore such important developments as the emergence of a widespread women’s movement that helped to identify and combat gender discrimination. These works also point to striking continuities over time. For instance, both in and out of the workplace, female sexuality has routinely been problematized as a source of woman’s peril or her dangerous power. Within the workplace, a woman’s status has historically been bound by her gender, a fact that has not only shaped women’s lot as workers but also fueled debates about gender equality and difference. Taken together, these works also reveal important connections between cultural representations, gender ideology, and lived experience. Finally, these authors demonstrate links between female workforce participation and an incipient feminist consciousness. At the same time, they illuminate the hesitancy on the part of some working women to embrace the women’s movement, even as it helped open doors in the workplace or provided new ways to understand old problems. Julie Berebitsky examines how Americans have imagined, experienced, and understood sexual encounters in the office since women first entered the white-collar workplace in the nineteenth century. Exploring “a wide spectrum of sexual interaction,” Berebitsky argues that “Americans have seen coercive and unwanted sexual encounters as merely one dimension of the larger sexual culture of the office” (4). Thus feminists’ identification of “sexual harassment” in the 1970s...

Racial Glass Ceilings, Gendered Responses: Taiwanese American Professionals’ Experiences of Otherness

This article examines Taiwanese American professionals’ interpretations of the glass ceiling to illuminate the manifestations of structural inequality at the micro-level of social life. Data are based on 40 in-depth interviews in the Chicago metropolitan area. Findings suggest that racial inequalities are experienced through race relations. Ethnic cultures construct relational fences along racial lines that designate the place of each group in the racial hierarchy. Although frustrated and alienated by their marginalized position, women and men use different strategies to negotiate the meaning of being an “other.” Women act confrontationally to transgress social boundaries, while men adopt acquiescent and coalitional approaches to dwell in their designated territories. I argue that race intersects with gender and citizenship in shaping the salience of individuals’ social identities, which affects their responses to racial inequality in the white-collar workplace.

How class background affects Mexican Americans’ experiences of subtle racism in the white-collar workplace

This research examines three questions. First and most broadly, how are professional Mexican Americans received in white-collar workplaces? Second, do their professional accomplishments buffer them from subtle racism? If not, what are the strategies they employ to manage subtle racism while at work? Finally, do experiences of subtle racism vary depending on whether one grows up poor or middle class? Based on 59 in-depth interviews with 1.5 and second-generation Mexican American professionals, results show those from poor backgrounds report more persistent experiences with subtle racism and they employ specific strategies to manage. This research adds to the literature by examining whether and to what extent class background heightens or minimizes Mexican Americans’ experiences of interpersonal racism in the white-collar workplace. This research also addresses larger debates and theories about whether boundaries between Mexican Americans and whites remain salient once Mexican Americans enter the middle class.

“To Fulfill an Ambition of [Her] Own”: Work, Class, and Identity in The Feminine Mystique

“To Fulfill an Ambition of [Her] Own”Work, Class, and Identity in The Feminine Mystique Katherine Turk (bio) It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to celebrate and reflect upon one of the most important books in American history. The Feminine Mystique is many things: a dystopian account of mid-1960s suburban life; a challenge to dependent wives to trade domestic self-abnegation for a more fulfilling version of the American dream; and above all, an eminently readable text. Among the book’s many achievements are Friedan’s empathetic and nuanced descriptions of the frustration that gripped many white middle-class women in the early 1960s. In the first paragraph, Friedan introduced us to her anonymous main character, the “suburban wife” who “made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies,” and lay anxious and awake next to her sleeping husband. The women we met in The Feminine Mystique felt trapped in a world where men monopolized positions of power and autonomy, and where their corollary duty was to sacrifice their own interests and desires in support of their families. Continually reminded of their privileged position while thwarted in their efforts to capture even a small measure of autonomy, these women were strung out, overextended yet understimulated, at once bored and exhausted, and eternally unfulfilled. With vivid prose, Friedan laid bare the dreadful double bind that ensnared her protagonists: they could not pursue “ambition[s] of their own” that would take them into the male-defined sphere without sacrificing their femininity. And in a world where a woman’s femininity was her currency, taking such a gender-defying risk could seem foolish, or even socially suicidal.1 Through these descriptions, Friedan forced her readers to face the injustices wrapped up in what she termed the “feminine mystique”: the phalanx of culture, expert opinions, and institutions that instructed women who were dissatisfied with their feminine roles to seek solace in ever more femininity. Yet an equally significant element of the book is Friedan’s proposed solution: a new [End Page 25] “life plan” for women whose centerpiece would be employment outside of the domestic sphere. But not just any work would suffice: part-time, pink-collar, and volunteer positions risked recasting women in subordinate roles. Instead, she encouraged women to pursue careers that reflected “the lifelong commitment to an art or science, to politics or profession.”2 To offset the domestic responsibilities that could handicap women as they scaled career ladders, Friedan called for more childcare and maternity leave options. In short, Friedan framed the pursuit of elite education and employment for women—especially in male-dominated fields—as the cornerstone of efforts to recast American gender relations. The benefits of women’s workforce advancement would radiate outward, she claimed. As women developed “independence,” “strength,” and “self-confidence,” they would forge more egalitarian marriages and transform American culture, thereby solving “the problem that has no name.”3 Historians have identified several biases and blind spots in The Feminine Mystique’s conceptions of work and class. In order to entice middle-class women to pursue employment as men’s equals, Friedan carefully packaged the white-collar workplace as a personally fulfilling meritocracy. In so doing, she deliberately downplayed both the critical waged labor women already performed and the systematic barriers to their equal workforce participation.4 For millions—especially working-class women and women of color—holding a job was not a choice but an urgent necessity.5 Further, by identifying flagging confidence as the major obstacle separating women from work that would enhance their lives, Friedan oversimplified both the problem and its solution. Any lack of self-assurance some women experienced was eclipsed by barriers forged beyond their internal lives: the gendered division of labor, disparities in status, pay, and mobility between jobs assigned to each sex, and the discouragement and outright harassment they faced in pursuit of male-typed work, to name just a few.6 By drawing a bright line between careers and other forms of employment, Friedan advanced gendered middle-class assumptions about what kind of work deserved respect and a good wage, even as...

A Cultural Reading of a Chinese White-Collar Workplace Bestseller and its Filmic Adaptation: Li Ke’s A Story of Lala’s Promotion and Go Lala Go!

In 2007, Li Ke’s novel A Story of Lala’s Promotion (Du Lala Shengzhi Ji) became a bestseller among Chinese white-collar workers in foreign-owned (Western) companies and struck a chord with the Chinese middle class. The novel revolves around office politics, Western company culture and the white-collar lifestyle, the ‘shelved ladies’ phenomenon and middle-class aesthetics. To decipher the embedded cultural codes of this book, this study undertakes a textual analysis of the plots of A Story of Lala’s Promotion and its filmic adaptation, Go Lala Go! (Du Lala Shengzhi Ji dir. Xu Jinglei, 2010). This paper conducts a trans-media adaption study (from fiction to film) to examine three interrelated themes in the novel and the film. First, focusing on the influence of Western corporate culture on Chinese white-collar workers under economic globalisation, the widely circulating rules of Western workplaces are interpreted, clarifying the acculturating process of Western culture over its Chinese counterpart. The paper further explains that on the platform provided by foreign companies, and with the influence and training of Western corporate culture, intelligent and diligent young Chinese aspirational women struggle and realise their dreams in the workplace. Second, employing a feminist perspective, an attempt is made to address the situation of contemporary Chinese white-collar women represented by the contemporary social phenomenon of the ‘shelved ladies’, which also serves as an emblem of female independence and individualism. Third, through an analysis of the filmic adaptation, which focuses on the white-collar female’s lifestyle and consumption habits, the paper also highlights the contemporary Chinese population’s pursuit of a middle-class identity and aesthetic that mirrors the overwhelming consumerism of post-socialist China.

Putting the Bias in Skill-Biased Technological Change? A Relational Perspective on White-Collar Automation at General Electric

The skill-biased technological change (SBTC) theory of rising inequality rests on assumptions that are challenged by a relational perspective. This article develops a historical case study of the design and implementation of technologies to automate white-collar work at the General Electric Company (GE) starting in the 1950s in order to interrogate the assumptions on which the SBTC thesis rests. Executives at GE resisted framing computer technologies as automation and sought to neutralize the class-based implications of the term. Yet they actively pursued white-collar automation technologies designed to prevent the industrial relations of the heavily unionized manufacturing sector from being replicated in the growing service sector. A new conception of productivity that locates managers as the core productive workers of the firm is embedded in the company’s internal definition of white-collar automation as information handling, lending legitimacy to the changing distribution of earnings in the following decades. By embedding the history of white-collar workplace computers in an analysis of the labor relations and other business administration problems the technologies were designed to address, this article lends a critical perspective to the SBTC theory of rising inequality.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Sexuality and Gender in the Office

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Sexuality and Gender in the Office Carrie N. Baker (bio) Julie Berebitsky. Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. x + 359 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index.1 $38.00. This newest addition to the series Society and the Sexes in the Modern World, edited by Christine Stansell, is a fascinating history of Americans’ beliefs about sexuality and gender in the white-collar workplace from the mid-nineteenth century to the current day. Richly woven with the stories about women office workers, Julie Berebitsky’s book chronicles in absorbing detail the contradictory narratives of sex in the office, from stories of sexually powerful women tempting vulnerable men, to innocent women in need of protection from predatory, older men. Berebitsky describes the development of the “sexualized office in Americans’ shared imagination” (p. 9) through visual and print media, in mainstream and professional periodicals and prescriptive literature, in confession magazines, erotic pulp fiction, Playboy and popular film, and in cartoons, postcards, and magazine advertisements (some of which are reproduced in the book). Through a close analysis of these stories, commentaries, and images, Berebitsky argues that sexuality constructed gender in the office and was one way in which “power and authority in the office were created, negotiated, expressed, and challenged” (p. 16). She demonstrates how economic and political as well as intellectual and cultural developments influenced Americans’ understandings of sexuality in the office, but she concludes that Americans’ attitudes toward workplace sexuality have remained startlingly consistent over time. Women first began working in offices during the Civil War, and their number grew steadily over time, from fewer than 2,000 in 1870 to 70,000 in 1891, and to half a million in 1920. By 1950, at 5.25 million, office workers made up a third of all workingwomen. As women entered office work, competing narratives emerged about them and the men they encountered. Appearing regularly in newspapers by the late nineteenth century, reports of office sex scandals often involved young unmarried women working for older, established married men. Public discourses portrayed the woman office worker alternatively [End Page 292] as an “unfeeling vamp who made a fool out of a man and mincemeat of his marriage,” as a “vulnerable victim of either a lecherous man or his vindictive wife, who blamed her marital troubles on her husband’s office help,” or as “a new kind of women, a moral and strong-minded individual capable of protecting (or at least standing up for) herself, even in public” (p. 22). On the other hand, the male boss was also portrayed in contradictory ways, as a “victim of his base desires, a sexual predator willing to exploit his position of authority, or a gentleman who had failed in his role as protector of female innocence” (p. 23). Underlying these debates were anxieties about women’s sexual nature and individual agency at a time of increasing female workforce participation, changing gender roles, and evolution of ideas about marriage. Office workers and their advocates laid claim to the middle-class ideology of female passionlessness, virtue, and respectability, whereas others thought women capable of sexual deceit and believed in men’s defenselessness when faced with an alluring young woman. However, there was general agreement that the gender-integrated workplace was a dangerous place, that men’s sexual passions were inevitable, and that women were responsible for controlling sexuality in the office. A major theme of Berebitsky’s book is how sexuality constructed gender in the workplace. She argues that “sexuality has been a signifier for all aspects of masculinity and femininity, a way of picturing and maintaining gender difference—and possibly gender hierarchy—even as women entered into men’s world, took up men’s jobs, and acquired some of men’s power” (pp. 252–53). In a particularly interesting chapter, Berebitsky argues that sexuality in the office played a key role in counteracting the emasculating effect of white-collar office work for men. In constructing a new “white collar masculinity,” men used sexual behaviors toward their female coworkers to claim a type of manly success when other markers...

“We are in a masculine profession…”

The paper discusses the construction gender identities in a complex white-collar workplace. Recent work has repeatedly suggested that gender is not something people have or are but something people do. Despite this rich body of work, gender is still often operationalised as biological sex and is employed as an explanatory variable to account for perceived differences in interaction. By analogy, the paper also addresses the multinational profile of modern workplaces and also problematises the widely held assumption that people from different countries ‘do work’ in distinct ways. The paper draws on recordings of real life routine meetings and interview data. Special attention is paid to Chloe the only senior female member of the team. The analysis shows that the employees draw on both normatively masculine and feminine interactional styles according to the context of the interaction and the co-constructed norms of their community. However the industry is still perceived and constructed as by and large a ‘masculine’ domain.