‘Inequality’ and ‘value’ reconsidered? the employment of post office women, 1910–1922

Crowley, Mark J.

doi:10.1080/00076791.2016.1155556

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…A more recent example of gendered roles of historical actors is offered up by Crowley (2016) and engages in a discussion of historical women workers within the civil service and specifically women's contribution of labour during war time to the Post Office in Britain. Women are presented as a special group, offering a specific kind of labour and constrained by the socio-politics of wartime life.…”

Section: Women In Gendered Rolesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminist frustrations: The enduring neglect of a women’s business history and the opportunity for radical change

Mills

Williams

2021

Business History

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In response to a special call of 'bringing gender and feminism from the periphery to the centre of business history' , the authors undertake an in-depth appraisal of Business History's own record, as a key signifier of the field. The scope includes articles and reviews published between 2000 and 2020 and find 17 articles out of 918 (1.85%) and 99 reviews out of 2,217 (4.46%), with a downward trend from 2010 to 2020. To start, the authors engage with a critical question as to the definition of the field itself and explore what those internal to the journal have had to say about its definition. The authors then take a critical look at how women have been socially constructed as (a) historical actors, as (b) gendered roles and as (c) authors of history. To understand what has been included and neglected, the authors investigate and reveal clues as to the barriers and possible entry points.

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Section: Women In Gendered Rolesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminist frustrations: The enduring neglect of a women’s business history and the opportunity for radical change

Mills

Williams

2021

Business History

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“…Notably, Pixley's hierarchy is classed in how it excludes working class men as accountants and is gendered in how it excludes women as potential accountancy workers. Female clerks were far less prevalent in accounting firms than in public bodies such as the Civil Service (Cooper Bros & Co., 1954;Jones, 1995;Crowley, 2016). Pixley did not list the proficiencies of an accountant, thereby mystifying professional activity and rendering the skills associated with an accountant nebulous and difficult to replicate (Wilmott, 1986).…”

Section: Characteristics and Skills: The Influence Of Francis W Pixleymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The recruitment of women into accountancy during this time was carefully controlled, mostly through personal recommendation and women were drawn from the middle-classes (Jones, 1995, 226). While female workers had a visible presence in the Civil Service during WW1 (Crowley, 2016), women in PwC were not permitted to perform accountancy work in the public domain, as the quote above suggests.…”

Section: Ww1 and Its Impact On Women In The Accountancy Professionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this influx of women into the accountancy profession was temporary, as accountancy firms did not adopt the type of post war labour force strategies that retained women as a key component of the workforce, such as those implemented by the Post Office (Crowley, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During this time period, other social changes influenced women's participation in the world of work in general, and the accountancy profession in particular. For example, the imposition of the marriage bar for Civil Service workers, introduced in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Crowley, 2016), forced women to resign from the workplace upon marriage. One deleterious effect of the marriage bar was the confinement of married women to the domestic sphere, where middle-class women in particular were encouraged to take up the 'profession' of household accountancy (Walker, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gender inequality and the professionalisation of accountancy in the UK from 1870 to the interwar years

Evans

Rumens

2020

Business History

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Drawing on historical data largely relating to Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC), this article examines the early professionalisation of accountancy as a gendered process. Mobilising Acker's (1990) theory of the ideal worker, this article highlights articulations of an ideal professional accountant, coded as male and masculine in the gendering of professional skills and knowledge, image management, networking and social class. Additionally, social changes such as WW1 reshaped the masculine nature of the ideal professional accountant in PwC, emphasising a militaristic masculinity, to support the war effort. While women were temporarily employed in accountancy clerical jobs in wartime, this does not appear to have regendered PwC as an organisation inclusive of femininity and women. However, it is noted that some middle-class women challenged exclusionary professional practices within accountancy.The implications of the gendered aspects of the professionalisation of accountancy are discussed throughout the article.

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Mobilising human resources to build a national communications network: the case of Japan before the Pacific War

Hunter

2024

JRAS

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This article analyses labour-intensive workforce strategies in Japan's government-run informational infrastructure (post, telegraph, and telephone) and in the adjunct services associated with their administration in the decades up to the Pacific War. It asks to what extent the growing scale of employment in Japan's communications infrastructure in this period confirms the existence of labour-intensive growth outside the manufacturing sector, and how far the growth of the labour force in post and telecommunications was facilitated by specific labour-absorbing institutions—that is, formal or informal institutions designed to mobilise or incentivise large numbers of employees. The discussion of these two associated questions shows not only that this area of infrastructure provision was highly labour-intensive in terms of the numbers employed and the diverse tasks undertaken, but also that the government-run postal system in effect depended for its growth and development on labour strategies and labour-absorbing institutions analogous to those usually associated with manufacturing development. The article also seeks to establish how far we can see in this sector the gradual improvement in the quality of labour normally associated with the labour-intensive industrialisation process, providing evidence that the evolving institutions were closely associated with a gradual improvement in the quality of labour and its ability to interact with rapidly changing needs and technologies.

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‘Inequality’ and ‘value’ reconsidered? the employment of post office women, 1910–1922

Cited by 8 publications

References 11 publications

Feminist frustrations: The enduring neglect of a women’s business history and the opportunity for radical change

Feminist frustrations: The enduring neglect of a women’s business history and the opportunity for radical change

Gender inequality and the professionalisation of accountancy in the UK from 1870 to the interwar years

Mobilising human resources to build a national communications network: the case of Japan before the Pacific War

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