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Gender mainstreaming has been celebrated as a new policy strategy for change in gender relations. However, its transformative potential seems to be lost in the process of implementation. The aim of this article is to evaluate the policy effectiveness of gender mainstreaming and its ability to bring about change in gendered social structures and practices. Previous research has focused on gender mainstreaming as a policy strategy. This article provides a new perspective on the problems of implementation by approaching gender mainstreaming from an organizational perspective. Gender mainstreaming takes place in certain organizational contexts, implemented by local actors. This article reveals the practices of implementation in the Finnish state administration, specifically in the Ministry of Defence. The analysis is based on a discursive reading of thirteen group and individual interviews collected in the Ministry of Defence in 2012. The article pinpoints two interlinking problems concerning implementation of gender mainstreaming on the organizational level. First, the state officials, who should implement gender mainstreaming, do not have enough information to do so successfully. Second, there is resistance toward gender mainstreaming on the organizational level. This article suggests that negotiations about gender, gender equality and gender mainstreaming as complex issues concerned with social power relations should be included in the process of implementing gender mainstreaming.

This article is concerned with price and pricing in the context of finance led neoliberal reform. It considers the sentiment often encountered in accounts of such reform that price instability is the outcome of the retreat of the state from the regulation of price and its externalization in the competitive play of the market. Drawing on the case of contemporary Finland, and especially a major round of government reform, we show how unstable prices are anchored in a set of coordinating mechanisms that form part of the infrastructure of a reorganizing state. We elaborate, then, a state infrastructure for the coordination of price instability and do so for the price and pricing of labour. This infrastructure is, however, not one that is coherent, centralized or integrated, but is dispersed and disintegrated and operates on multiple scales.

This article investigates how intersectionalities are handled in the orientations and positions of organization members when conducting feminist action research in workplaces. The Finnish Defence Forces are used as an empirical example of a hierarchical and gendered organization. The article employs the work conference method based on democratic dialogue with the aim of bringing together the divergent experiences and perspectives of the organization's members. Our interpretation is that the intersectional application of the work conference method reveals issues that would not have otherwise arisen. The method helps to highlight the habits and routines that are taken for granted in organizations. We suggest the use of the method both for identifying patterns of inequalities and for seeking remedies for them. The experiences gained from the empirical study support a multi‐method approach to action research. A more theory‐based consciousness of social positions and their interconnections will serve the development process. As a result, action research efforts might also become better anchored in organizational structures and practices.

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