Taking higher education to be an arena in which professional and social interaction has a special propensity to overlap, this paper investigates university students’ experiences and perceptions of sexual harassment. Based on survey data, we find varying responses according to their gender and nationality, indicating that men and Danish students are least likely to experience and perceive situations as sexual harassment. Further, we find a wide-spread normalization of certain potentially offensive acts and behaviours. In addition, students report varying degrees of acceptability of certain acts, depending on context. On this basis, we argue that normalization hinders individual students’ ability to recognize and denounce sexual harassment. The influence of social norms on individual experiences and perceptions, we assert, means sexual harassment is neither an objective category nor an individual responsibility. In consequence, issues of sexual harassment can only be dealt with if and when universities assume responsibility for the norms that prevail within their spheres of influence.

No abstract

Studies of sexual harassment in professional contexts, including academia, provide detailed explanations of the predominance and pervasiveness of sexist organizational norms that enable harassing behavior—and offer a thorough critique of the structures and practices that support and reproduce these norms. When sexist organizational norms are linked to acts of sexual harassment, it becomes clear that harassment is systemic, and that organizations tend to justify and excuse the very norms and behaviors that propagate harassment. Focusing on the context of Danish universities, we do not ask whether sexism exists in Danish society generally and in academia specifically, but rather, why issues of systemic sexism and normalized sexual harassment have been ignored for so long and how sexist organizational norms have been maintained. Based on an investigation of prevalent rhetorical strategies for legitimating sexual harassment and gendered discrimination, we discuss how recognizing these strategies may translate into concerted action against them. Introducing queer organization studies as a lever for such translation, we suggest that a norm‐critical approach may, first, explain how currently dominant norms offer sexist excuses for continued harassment and, consequently, delegitimize and change these unjust norms and the untenable practices they support.

This PhD dissertation investigates the reproduction of sexist and racist harassment and discrimination in workplaces at Danish universities. It contributes to feminist organization studies by exploring: (1) How does the dis/organization of Danish universities enable the reproduction of inequalities, specifically in form of sexist and racist harassment and discrimination? (2) What allows sexist and racist workplace harassment and discrimination to be reproduced both on an institutional-structural and an interactional-individual level? (3) How are sexist and racist harassment and discrimination reproduced intersectionally, and what is distinct in how they are reproduced? Data from the Danish university context provides the empirical basis for the study. The author conducted in-depth interviews with academic faculty at all eight Danish universities. Interviewees were not required to have personal experiences with harassment and discrimination. An approach of anti-narrative research operationalized through embodied queer listening was developed and used in both data generation and analysis to methodologically acknowledge and engage with the interviewees’ vulnerabilities as well as autonomy in relation to organizational norms and power structures. It further allowed engaging with both discursive and affective aspects of data generation and analysis. The findings of the study are structured in six analytical chapters. These outline (I) contextual mechanisms within the Danish academic system that facilitate harassment and discrimination, (II) the unspeakability of racism when speaking of harassment and discrimination, (III) the imperceptibility of harassment, that is, how harassment often becomes affectively noticed before becoming named as such, (IV) ten (de)legitimization strategies that allow harassment and discrimination to persist, (V) expectations in how to speak up about harassment experiences, and finally (VI) insights on the reporting process and its challenges. The dissertation contributes to research on harassment and discrimination within feminist organization studies, developing both theoretical and empirical insights. Overall, it maintains and details how harassment and discrimination are reproduced in a context of in/formality leading to a reproduction of inequality underneath a layer of unspeakability which leads to a lack of responsibility. Finally, implications for organizational practice are discussed, suggesting that organizations need to recognize anti-harassment and anti-discrimination as ongoing, relational organizational practices rather than a goal to be achieved, respond with autonomy-fostering care to the vulnerability involved in harassment experiences, and be able to ‘stay with the trouble’ in addressing the affective ambiguities of harassment and discrimination.

No abstract