ORGANIZATION AS GENDERED PROCESSES The idea that social structure and social processes are gendered has slowly emerged in diverse areas of feminist discourse. Feminists have elaborated gender as a concept to mean more than a socially constructed, binary identity and image. This turn to gender as an analytic category (Council 1987; Harding 1986; Scott 1986) is an attempt to find new avenues into the dense and complicated problem of explaining the extraordinary persistence through history and across societies of the subordination of women. Scott, for example, defines gender as follows: \"The core of the definition rests on an integral connection between two propositions; gender is a constitutive ele ment of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power\" (1986, 1067). New approaches to the study of waged work, particularly studies of the labor process, see organizations as gendered, not as gender neutral (Cockbum 1985; Game and Pringle 1984; Knights and Willmott 1985; Phillips and Taylor 1986; Sorenson 1984) and conceptualize organizations as one of the locations of the inextricably intertwined production of both gender and class relations. Examining class and gender (Acker 1988), I have argued that class is constructed through gender and that class relations are always gendered. The structure of the labor market, relations in the workplace, the control of the work process, and the underlying wage relation are always affected by symbols of gender, processes of gender identity, andmaterial inequalities 146 GENDER & SOCIETY / June 1990 between women and men. These processes are complexly related to and powerfully support the reproduction of the class structure. Here, I will focus on the interface of gender and organizations, assuming the simultaneous presence of class relations. To say that an organization, or any other analytic unit, is gendered means that advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emo- tion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine. Gender is not an addition to ongoing processes, conceived as gender neutral. Rather, it is an integral part of those processes, which cannot be prOperly understood without an analysis of gender (Connell 1987; West and Zimmerman 1987). Gendering occurs in at least five interacting processes (cf. Scott 1986) that, although analytically distinct, are, in practice, parts of the same reality. First is the construction of divisions along lines of genderdivisions of labor, of allowed behaviors, of locations in physical space, of power, includ- ing the institutionalized means of maintaining the divisions in the structures of labor markets, the family, the state. Such divisions in work organizations are well documented (e.g., Moss Kanter 1977) as well as often obvious to casual observers. Although there are great variations in the patterns and extent of gender division, men are almost always in the highest positions of organizational power. Managers' decisions often initiate gender divisions (Cohn 1985), and organizational practices maintain themalthough they also take on new forms with changes in technology and the labor process. For example, Cynthia Cockbum (1983, 1985) has shown how the introduc- tion of new technology in a number of industries was accompanied by a reorganization, but not abolition, of the gendered division of labor that left the technology in men's control and maintained the definition of skilled work as men's work and unskilled work as women's work. Second is the construction of symbols and images that explain, express, reinforce, or sometimes oppose those divisions. These have many sources or forms in language, ideology, popular and high culture, dress, the press, television. For example, as Moss Kanter (1975), among others, has noted, the image of the top manager or the business leader is an image of successful, the image of the top manager or the business leader is an image of successful, forceful masculinity (see also Lipman-Blumen 1980). In Cockburn's studies, men workers' images of masculinity linked their gender with their technical skills; the possibility that women might also obtain such skills represented a threat to that masculinity. The third set of processes that produce gendered social structures, includ- ing organizations, are interactions between women and men, women and Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at Radboud Universiteit N ijmegen on October 26, 2011 Acker I THEORY OF GENDERED ORGANIZATIONS 147 women, men and men, including all those patterns that enact dominance and submission. For example, conversation analysis shows how gender differ- ences in interruptions, turn taking, and setting the topic of discussion recreate gender inequality in the ow of ordinary talk (West and Zimmerman 1983). Although much of this research has used experimental groups, qualitative accounts of organizational life record the same phenomena: Men are the actors, women the emotional support (Hochschild 1983). Fourth, these processes help to produce gendered components of individ- ual identity, which may include consciousness of the existence of the other three aspects of gender, such as, in organizations, choice of appropriate work, language use, clothing, and presentation of self as a gendered member of an organization (Reskin and R008 1987). Finally, gender is implicated in the fundamental, ongoing processes of creating and conceptualizing social structures. Gender is obviously a basic constitutive element in family and kinship, but, less obviously, it helps to frame the underlying relations of other structures, including complex orga- paper until people fill them. The rationale for evaluating jobs as devoid of actual workers reveals further the organizational logic the intent is to assess the characteristics of the job, not of their incumbents who may vary in skill, industriousness, and commitment. Human beings are to be motivated, man- aged, and chosen to fit the job. The job exists as a thing apart. Every job has a place in the hierarchy, another essential element in organizational logic. Hierarchies, like jobs, are devoid of actual workers and based on abstract differentiations. Hierarchy is taken for granted, only its particular form is at issue. Job evaluation is based on the assumption that workers in general see hierarchy as an acceptable principle, and the final test of the evaluation of any particular job is whether its place in the hierarchy looks reasonable. The ranking of jobs within an organization must make sense to managers, but it is also important that most workers accept the ranking as just if the system of evaluation is to contribute to orderly working relationships. Organizational logic assumes a congruence between responsibility, job complexity, and hierarchical position. For example, a lower-level position, the-level of most jobs filled predominantly by women, must have equally low Downloaded from gas.sagepub.com at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen on October 26. 2011 Acker / THEORY OF GEN DERED ORGANIZATIONS 149 levels of complexity and responsibility. Complexity and responsibility are defined in terms of managerial and professional tasks. The childcare work- er's responsibility for other human beings or the complexity facing the secretary who serves six different, temperamental bosses can only be mini- mally counted if the congruence between position level, responsibility, and