‘In a Male Workplace, Things Would Never Be Like This’: Using Gendered Notions to Neutralize Conflicts in a Swedish Supermarket

Abstract

This study concerns the ‘practising of gender neutrality’ and the organizational practices that contribute to the creation of gendered notions in a relation of mutual constitution. Based on a case study of one Swedish supermarket, I investigate the gendered notions present in the descriptions of the supermarket activities by relating them to the organization of the work and the gendered and aged employment structure of the supermarket. The findings suggest that the problems which, according to gendered notions were grounded in the nature of men and women, could be related to organizational practices. It was concluded that specific notions of gender were used to neutralize potential conflicts and to make them into a non‐issue for the organization. This study also contributes insights to the discussions surrounding the intersection of age and gender in organizations, and skills and learning in retail work.

The Discursive Resistance of Men to Gender-equality Interventions: Negotiating “Unjustness” and “Unnecessity” in Swedish Forestry

“…Korvajärvi 2002; Brandth and Bjørkhaug 2015; Johansson 2016), gender-equality interventions are proposed not as a way of addressing existing gender hierarchies and segregation at work, but rather as instances that introduce issues of gender, and therefore also conflicts, into otherwise gender-neutral organizations. Previous studies have reported how the practicing of gender neutrality in organizations has worked to make gender a nonissue by referring the distribution of work and workers along gendered lines to the perceived natural abilities and wants of men and women (Grosen, Holt, and Lambrecht Lund 2012; Johansson and Lundgren 2015; Johansson 2016). Further contributing to these insights, our study shows how the numerical domination of men forestry workers is implicitly used to underpin how hiring and promotion, back when it was almost only men who were considered, naturalized male privilege by constituting it as a matter of competence rather than of gender (cf.…”

“…Hence, while gender might be ever present in the form of gender segregation and pay gaps, the practicing of gender neutrality can make gender “disappear” or be “seen as something that is beside the point of the organization” (Acker 2006, 452; cf. Johansson and Lundgren 2015; Johansson 2016). The proliferation of forestry professionals has not just altered the masculine norms of forestry but has also enabled an increasing number of women to partake in forestry.…”

Gender-equal organizations as a prerequisite for workplace learning

“…However, on a more pragmatic note, it is possible to identify a number of common grounds in the empirical findings of the ways in which gender structures and notions shape workplace learning. Drawing from research of the meso level of segregated organizations, “gender-equal organizations” become organizations where the on-going everyday practices and processes involving activities, practices and processes involving work requirements, job evaluations, wage setting, supervision, recruiting and the more informal “doing the job” is not organized along lines of gender division (Acker, 1990, 2006; Abrahamsson, 2001, 2014; Johansson, 2016; Korvajärvi, 2002). Most importantly, perhaps, gender segregation that might exist is not unconscious, neutralized and distanced, but has been carefully mapped and analysed.…”

“…The idea that gender is irrelevant for the organization can be further linked to the tendency to neutralize and conceal gendered structures and notions at work as being distanced from the organization. Such “practicing of gender neutrality” (Korvajärvi, 2002, 2011; Johansson, 2016) act to make issues of gender structures and notions a matter of the private rather than the organizational realm. As “gender issues raise questions that disturb the preferred harmony in everyday life in workplaces”, Korvajärvi (2002, p. 101) concludes that in most cases “[n]either women nor men want to present gender relations as involving conflicts”.…”

Retail therapy: Making meaning out of menial labour

“…Nevertheless, gender, race and class play prominent roles in assigning and organizing the bodies of retail workers and, as such, structure how they experience occupational stigma (Acker, 2006;Henly and Lambert, 2014;Johansson, 2016;McKie et al, 2009;Petersson McIntyre, 2016). Acker (2006) refers to the multitude of ways in which race, gender and class-based disparities of many kinds are maintained and legitimized on the organizational level as 'inequality regimes'.…”