Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Feminist organization theories develop knowledge about how organizations and processes of organizing shape and are shaped by gender, in intersection with race, class and other forms of social inequality. The politics of knowledge within management and organization studies tend to marginalize and silence feminist theorizing on organizations, and so the field misses out on the interdisciplinary, sophisticated conceptualizations and reflexive modes of situated knowledge production provided by feminist work. To highlight the contributions of feminist organization theories, I discuss the feminist answers to three of the grand challenges that contemporary organizations face: inequality, technology and climate change. These answers entail a systematic critique of dominant capitalist and patriarchal forms of organizing that perpetuate complex intersectional inequalities. Importantly, feminist theorizing goes beyond mere critique, offering alternative value systems and unorthodox approaches to organizational change, and providing the radically different ways of knowing that are necessary to tackle the grand challenges. The paper develops an aspirational ideal by sketching the contours of how we can organize for intersectional equality, develop emancipatory technologies and enact a feminist ethics of care for the human and the natural world.

Keywords

climate change emancipation feminist ethics of care feminist organization theories inequality intersectionality technology

Introduction

Feminist organization theories have a remarkable track record in the broader field of management and organization theories. Three decades after the first systematic theory of gendered organizations, (Acker, 1990, 1992), feminist thinking and theorizing on organizations have developed into a pluralistic and mature interdisciplinary field, with continuous debates among a transdisciplinary community of scholars, activists and practitioners. Gender theory is part of feminist theory, but not all gender theory is feminist in the sense that feminist organization theories always entail a critique of the existing distribution of power in organizations, in society and in knowledge production. Feminist organization theories take issue with dominant frameworks in management and organization theories that centre on objectivity and neutrality, economic rationality and business performance. Their agenda does not stop at critical analysis and deconstruction of management and organization studies orthodoxies. They take the next step to develop alternative value systems, emphasizing that organizations are situated in wider social systems and bear responsibility for social justice, equality, solidarity and care for others. They are committed to material and social change in organizations and societies in line with those values. To do so, feminist organization theories challenge and politicize ways of knowing and knowledge production and envision alternatives to these processes. Feminist organization theories are therefore always political and performative (Calás & Smircich, 2006), harbouring an agenda beyond theoretical contributions and a commitment to change organizations. The main goal is to trouble power relations, imagine better worlds and work to achieve them (Ferguson, 2017, P. 283).

In a recent paper, Bell, Meriläinen, Taylor, and Tienari (2020) distinguish three overlapping modes of feminist research: (1) as a conceptual frame to address specific topics; (2) as an empirical phenomenon of specific feminist types of organization or organizing; and (3) as a methodology for producing knowledge. The first mode of feminist research is the most common mode and can be recognized in the wide variety of feminist perspectives that inform an evenly wide variety of organization theories, from entrepreneurship (Calás, Smircich, & Bourne, 2009; Verduijn, Dey, Tedmanson, & Essers, 2014) to new institutional theory (Kenny, 2013), and technology and innovation (Schiebinger & Schraudner, 2011), from communication (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2003; Buzzanell, 1994), and corporate social responsibility (Grosser & Moon, 2019), to power and resistance (Thomas & Davies, 2005), to name but a few examples. The second mode tends to focus on explicitly feminist and/or women’s organizations often linked to the feminist movement (Grosser & McCarthy, 2019; Vachhani & Pullen, 2019; Weatherall, 2020). While the current popularity of feminism (Lewis, Benschop, & Simpson, 2017) brought a renewed interest in the principles of feminist organizing such as collectivity, solidarity, equality, care and social justice, this remains such a radical challenge to the principles of capitalist business organizing that it is deemed more exotic than an alternative to vested business models. The third mode of feminist theory which insists on the reflexive, ethical and political dimensions of knowledge production is rare, but it is what makes feminist theory a ‘dangerous knowledge’. Unapologetically, feminist theory goes against the dominant epistemic culture in management and organization studies and positions knowledge as political and personal (Bell, Meriläinen, Taylor, & Tienari, 2019). This dominant culture with its alleged ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ of knowledge has strategically concealed its gendered nature, as well as the power relations that determine what counts as knowledge (Calás & Smircich, 2006; Gherardi, 2011; Jones, Martinez Dy, & Vershinina, 2019).

It is not therefore self-evident that the contributions of feminist theorizing are recognized and appreciated, mainstreamed, or even known in management and organization theories. Feminist work gets easily marginalized, isolated, even ghettoized (Harding, Ford, & Fotaki, 2013). There is often opposition against it, and intellectual and political attacks are commonplace (Verloo, 2018). There is resistance to feminist epistemologies and methodologies, and resistance against the content and ideas (Van den Brink, 2015). The success of feminism (Walby, 2011) notwithstanding, most theories of organizations remain silent about gender, ignoring how gender is one of the fundamental organizing principles (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). There are politics of knowledge at work that exclude feminist knowledge as a legitimate source for understanding organizations and organizing, keeping it in a niche out of existing epistemic regimes, mainstream debates, and off the pages of prestigious academic journals (Bell et al., 2019, 2020; Jones et al., 2019).

With theories being performative in the sense that they constitute our social realities, and transform social norms and institutional and organizational arrangements (Pullen, Lewis, & Ozkazanc-Pan, 2019), the exclusion of feminist theories that unpack and delegitimize inequalities in organizations is problematic. What is required, I argue, is a more profound engagement with and thorough integration of the sophisticated theories, conceptualizations and reflexive modes of situated knowledge production that feminist theories have to offer. As challenges for contemporary organizations are not confined to disciplinary boundaries either, our theorizing about these challenges and how to deal with them should be moving beyond existing boundaries. As I aim to demonstrate in this paper, feminist organization theories navigate the crossroads of different disciplines and rethink the processes and practices of knowledge production, necessary for impactful new theories to emerge.

Previous overviews of feminist organization theories have highlighted the contributions that multiple strands of feminist thinking make to organization theories (Benschop & Verloo, 2016; Calás & Smircich, 1996, 2006). Here, I take a different, more thematic approach to discuss the feminist answers that are being developed to what arguably are three of the grand challenges of our times: inequality, technology and climate change. Grand challenges are significant, yet solvable problems that require novel ideas and unconventional approaches to unravel their complexity and advance social progress (Eisenhardt, Graebner, & Sonenshein, 2016). These grand challenges transcend organizations and adversely affect societies and individuals, yet organizations play an important role, both in creating and maintaining the problems and in providing possible solutions. The three challenges of inequality, technology and climate change represent areas of key importance for organizations and society, and they have already been theorized from feminist perspectives. Inequality in organizations is a basic grand challenge for organizations, because it makes visible on which grounds decisions are made about the division of labour, opportunities, rewards, benefits and work pleasures. The legitimacy of those grounds is called into question when today’s globalized workplaces are characterized by employment segregation, marginalization and the oppression of workers at multiple intersections of gender, race, ethnicity and class. Technology constitutes a grand challenge because technological innovations and artificial intelligence rapidly change the nature of work and the workers. Climate change poses a grand challenge for organizations, because ecological sustainability requires a fundamental rethinking of the relations between organizations and the environment, humans and nature. The argument for all grand challenges is that feminist theorizing provides novel ideas and unorthodox approaches to change, coming from its track record in understanding multilevel complexity and articulating alternative ways of organizing. Feminist theories challenge and politicize ways of knowing and knowledge production (Moosa & Tuana, 2014), and imagine fundamentally alternative ways of knowing. Without attention to feminist theories, I argue, organization theories and theorists will not be able to fulfil the social responsibility that makes for better science and better strategies for tackling these grand challenges.

In line with the feminist ethos of situated knowledge and embodied scholarship, I want to acknowledge that I am writing this from the privileged position of a white, tenured, cis-gender woman professor working in a Dutch school of management. My intellectual, political, institutional and geographical locations and background bear influence on how I see developments and priorities in the field, with my viewpoint being inevitably incomplete and selective. Having worked my entire academic life on gender and power in the workplace, I have had the pleasure to see the field flourish, despite counterforces of global capitalism, neoliberalism in the academy, and postfeminist gender regimes. I have also seen how the transformative potential of feminist theories has been obstructed in the field of management and organization by restrictive dominant understandings of what counts as ‘proper’ theorizing and knowledge. I hope that the mission of this journal to be a truly open and inclusive space for theory development across the entire breadth of the field (Cornelissen & Höllerer, 2019) can stimulate the necessary conversation about the politics of knowledge, and can give the credits that are due to feminist thinking about organizations and organizing.

Feminist Theories of Inequality in Organizations

The grand challenge of inequality concerns how organizations contribute to the growing social and economic inequalities in society as organizations provide opportunities, security and income to some and not to others. Whereas mainstream organization theory upholds the myths of neutrality and efficiency of organizational structures, and rationality and meritocracy in organizational practices of hiring, promoting and rewarding employees (Amis, Mair, & Munir, 2020), feminist theories explain how social categories function as core principles of organizing. Social categories structure the division of labour along lines of gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and dis/ability and their intersections (Bendl, Bleijenbergh, Henttonen, & Mills, 2015; Kumra, Simpson, & Burke, 2014). Feminist work develops rich and complex theorizations of the many ways in which organizations produce and reproduce social inequalities at different levels of analysis; from opportunities, tasks and wages, to jobs, careers and professions, and from networks and sectors to countries, regions and cultures.

Below, I first zoom in on a conceptual repertoire on redistribution and recognition, inequality regimes, and intersectionality which feminists have developed to address inequalities in organizations. Next, to interrogate how contemporary capitalism produces inequalities in organizations across the globe, I zoom out to gendered inequalities as theorized in postcolonial and decolonial feminism.

Redistribution and recognition

The power processes producing economic and social inequalities and their intertwinement have always concerned feminists. There is a long track record of compelling feminist critique of what counts as work and gets rewarded in patriarchal forms of capitalism and, relatedly, who counts as a valuable worker. Feminist theories problematize material, economic inequalities and emphasize the need for a redistribution of resources, for example in the feminist debates on the dominance of paid work and the marginalization of unpaid reproductive work, on the comparable worth of allegedly masculine and feminine work and skills (England, 1992) and on the gender wage gap (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, & Fraser, 2018). At the same time feminist theories target social inequalities, taking issue with the symbolic gender order and discursive representations that value masculinity over femininity in organizations (Gherardi, 2014).

Fraser (2009) argues that under the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ struggles for the redistribution of socio-economic resources became subordinated to struggles for recognition of identity and difference. The result is a dangerous liaison of neoliberal capitalism and corporate feminism (Eisenstein, 2005) in which capitalist market values create equal opportunities, empower women and women accordingly need only to ‘lean in’. Through the concept of post-feminism, this cooptation of the feminist agenda is analysed as a selective and restrictive uptake of particular feminist values such as choice and agentic self-determination (Lewis et al., 2017). Representing women as individualist, entrepreneurial women who make their own choices and embrace full responsibility for their own lives and careers (Rottenberg, 2014) lacks, however, a systems-wide critique and may in fact undermine struggles for the redistribution of pay and opportunities. Indeed, advocates of a paradigm that encompasses redistribution and recognition at the same time urge us to move away from the postfeminist dominance of individual choice, empowerment and responsibility and return to a necessary critique of inequalities in structures and systems, involving a feminism for the 99% (Fraser, Arruzza, & Bhattacharya, 2019).

Socialist feminist work has inspired organization studies to look at the detrimental effects of gendered and classed divisions of labour, emphasizing the systemic and structural dimensions of inequalities in capitalist organizations (Benschop & Verloo, 2016). It shows how historically subordinated social groups are associated with devalued competences and precarious jobs (Kalleberg, 2009) and how invoking abstract ideals of meritocracy, quality and leadership reproduce and conceal the privilege of historically dominant groups at work (Scully, 2002; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012a). It also theorizes the power and agency of marginalized women workers, and how they craft ways for micro-emancipation. For instance, a study of migrant women tourism workers from Central and Eastern Europe working in hyper-exploitative employment relations (Rydzik & Anitha, 2020) conceptualizes agency as practices of resilience, reworking and resistance against exploitation. Migrant women are not represented as powerless victims of discrimination but instead recognized as active agents who employ different repertoires of coping with precarious work. Yet, the authors well note the limits of individual agency to combat structural inequalities, and call for collective action and the support of trade unions to aid the necessary redistribution of power.

Inequality regimes

In a recent review of the organizational reproduction of inequality, the authors note that ‘while we have a good understanding of who suffers from bias and disadvantage in organizations, we have much less appreciation of the mechanisms that allow inequalities to persist’ (Amis et al., 2020, p. 4). Feminist theory, however, offers rich contributions that do show how power processes produce gender inequalities through formal and informal organization processes and patterns of everyday interaction which at first glance seem gender neutral yet reflect and maintain a gendered order in which men and particular forms of masculinity dominate (Ely & Meyerson, 2000, p. 590). The notion of inequality regimes, especially, is an example of a distinctly feminist conceptual frame. It bridges theories of patriarchy and capitalism, insights from critical race studies that theorize the intersectionality of race, class and gender (Crenshaw, 1989), and insights on the organization of power relations in organizations (Acker, 2006). Inequality regimes are defined as the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations (Acker, 2006, p. 441). Inequalities in organizations are

the systematic disparities between participants in power and control over goals, resources, and outcomes; workplace decisions, such as how to organize work; opportunities for promotion and interesting work; security in employment and benefits; pay and other monetary rewards; respect; and pleasures in work and work relations. (Acker, 2006, p. 443)

Classed, gendered and racialized inequalities are produced in the formal and informal organizing processes that are used to achieve organizational goals and characterize daily organizational life; processes of organizing work into jobs and hierarchies, recruitment and hiring, wage setting and supervisory practices, and informal interactions at work. Inequality regimes are maintained through direct control in the shape of bureaucratic rules, rewards or coercion and through indirect control in the shape of monitoring technologies, restricting information, or restricted employment opportunities. Acker (2006) also points to internalized control, which refers to beliefs in the inevitability of inequalities, the invisibility of inequalities as inequalities and the legitimacy of privilege. These indirect and internalized modes of control underscore the normalization and institutionalization of inequalities in the workplace (Van Laer & Janssens, 2011).

For example, the work on inequality regimes in the public sector shows how gendered, racialized and classed inequalities persist even in the public sector with extensive equality and diversity policies, because these policies are constantly at risk of being undermined by informal work cultures and workplace interactions (Healy, Bradley, & Forson, 2011).

Intersectionality

Delving deeper into the intersections of class, gender and race, feminist intersectional theory offers an influential framework for understanding the persistence and complexity of inequalities in the workplace. Intersectionality as a concept arose from pioneering work in black feminist scholarship and has gained prominence in the study of multiple inequalities (Collins, 2015; Collins & Bilge, 2020; Crenshaw, 2017). It refers to how social categories such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and dis/ability are inextricably interconnected in the production of equality and inequality, privilege and disadvantage (Crenshaw, 1997). There is a growing consensus across disciplines that paying attention to intersectionality is crucial to analyse manifestations of inequality in their full complexity, as single-axis thinking undermines knowledge production as well as struggles for social justice and equality (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013; Choo & Ferree, 2010). Race, class and gender are the core inequalities that have been at the centre of this strand of scholarship, but intersectionality has also been studied in connection with sexuality, age, dis/ability and other axes of inequality.

Organization studies were relatively late in their uptake of intersectionality, and thus in understanding how gender, class and race are simultaneous processes of identity, as well as intricately linked to institutional and social practices in organizations (Holvino, 2010). In their overview of intersectionality in contemporary studies of work and organizations, Rodriguez, Holvino, Fletcher, and Nkomo (2016) note how most studies on intersectionality in organizations focus on the experiences, narratives and identities of individuals and groups in diverse occupations, sectors and contexts. This allows for theorizing the experiences and identity work of hitherto marginalized groups of black, migrant and ethnic minority women in organizations (Adib & Guerrier, 2003; Atewologun, Sealy, & Vinnicombe, 2016; Bell & Nkomo, 2001; Essers, Doorewaard, & Benschop, 2013). Yet, there is a critique here as well that the focus on intersectional identities tends to de-radicalize intersectionality and keeps it from engaging with systemic inequalities or wider systems of oppression and domination (Dhamoon, 2011). An emphasis on intersectional identities runs the risk of getting caught up in identity politics, attending to multiple differences but without addressing economic power inequalities and ignoring the call for social justice that fuelled the conception of intersectionality in black feminist scholarship in the first place (Liu, 2018).

There is a promising second approach to intersectionality which transcends such an identity focus and does question the systemic power dynamics which arise from the institutionalization of systems of inequality (see, e.g., Boogaard & Roggeband, 2010; Tatli & Özbilgin, 2012). Intersectional thinking of this kind pluralizes feminist organization theories in different ways. For example, Ferguson (2017) points to the importance of indigenous thinking as a necessary component of intersectional feminist analyses of colonial relations. Intersectionality brings histories, politics, cultures and economies in a globalized capitalist world into focus, showing how available subject positions are limited and systems of inequality in organizations are reproduced in different parts of the world. It inspires epistemological reflexivity and invites the production of knowledge from locations in the global South, to include the theorizing based on the world views, experiences and material conditions of indigenous and non-Westernized women (Connell, 2019; Mohanty, 1988, 2003).

Postcolonial and decolonial feminism

Feminist thinking about inequalities in the workplace has contributed to a far more complex picture of the impact of globalization; challenging global/local, North/South and West/Rest dichotomies and connecting it to the sexuality, gender, politics and ethics of organizations (Andrijasevic, Rhodes, & Yu, 2019; Desai & Rinaldo, 2016). For example, Berry and Bell (2012) show how intersections of class, race and gender influence whether someone is constructed as elite ‘expatriate’ or as marginalized ‘migrant’ in the international management literature. In empirical and theoretical work, feminist perspectives examine the gendered effects of globalized capitalism on working relations, employment conditions and labour market status in different parts of the world. Notions such as the ‘gendered global assembly line’ (Bair, 2010) and the ‘global care chain’ (Ehrenreich, Hochschild, & Kay, 2003) bring into focus the geopolitics of global supply chains at the expense of the young women migrating from rural areas to work long hours for minimal wages in global manufacturing in Latin America and South East Asia (for instance, see Alamgir & Banerjee (2019) on the garment industry in Bangladesh), and the women migrating to work as nannies and maids in richer countries, often leaving their own children and elders to be taken care of by unpaid care givers (Herrera, 2013; Kim, 2017). The feminization of these particular types of work is often explained by low wages and legitimized through stereotypes of docile women and essentialist ideas about women’s suitability. As already outlined above, while such studies document how women are subjugated to abusive and exploitative work relations, they also show women’s agency and highlight their strategies to negotiate and resist marginalization.

Disciplinary and geographical differences notwithstanding (Bhambra, 2014), postcolonial, decolonial and anti-colonial feminist scholarship offers sophisticated conceptual instruments to interrogate the continuing economic, political, social and cultural effects of colonialism and the deep embeddedness of colonial relations in contemporary global workplaces. Feminists working with theoretical notions such as subalternity (Ozkazanc-Pan, 2012; Spivak & Said, 1988), othering (Prasad & Prasad, 2002), hybridity (Frenkel & Shenhav, 2006) and representation (Nkomo, 2011) analyse and subvert the complex intersectional patterns of power and privilege, oppression and marginalization in the working lives of women as well as men. This work furthermore shows how it is not an easy task to problematize the hegemonic production of knowledge in the North and search for alternative representations and multiple histories without falling into culturalist essentialism.

To summarize, this section has illustrated some of the riches of feminist theories in relation to the grand challenge of inequalities in organizations. It has shown that feminist work is indispensable to make inequalities visible and acknowledged. It has also shown how feminist theories develop knowledge on the complexities of privilege and disadvantage across multiple intersecting social categories in today’s globalized workplaces, and how these theories politicize that knowledge, siding with those who bear the burden of patriarchal and capitalist systems. Given this state of affairs, I see two important items on the research agenda for this particular grand challenge: first, to keep track of multiple manifestations of intersectional inequality; and second, to imagine possibilities for changing inequalities. New avenues for research concern the strategies and interventions to effectively counter the complex inequalities and promote equality in today’s workplace. Current thinking goes some way in sketching the roads to change, but more work is needed to face the grand challenge of actually changing inequalities. I suggest that one possible way forward is to think about interventions in terms of their contribution to intersectional equality, which builds on the concepts of inequality regimes and intersectionality discussed in this section, combined with a capabilities approach (Woods, Benschop, & Van den Brink, 2021). Intersectional equality is a normative goal and framework that can guide and direct decisions to promote equality in organizations. Achieving intersectional equality requires profound and systemic change in patriarchal capitalist organizations, but with the increasing recognition of the ethical, social and environmental crisis of neoliberal capitalism, the time is now ripe to push for such change. As argued in the introduction, organizations may be as much part of the solution as they are of the problem, when they can be changed to become a central site for interventions towards intersectional equality.

Feminist Theories of Technology in Organizations

The second grand challenge for which there are feminist answers is technology. Technology in terms of machinery, artefacts, tools and techniques to get work done is one of the grand challenges for contemporary organizations. Technology has many faces from industrial technologies, information and communication technologies (ICT), healthcare and reproductive technologies, to digital innovations, domestic technologies, robotics and artificial intelligence. Technological developments evolve fast, reconfigure working times and spaces and make for dramatic shifts both in how work is done and in terms of who is doing the work. The sociotechnical intertwinement of technology and society makes technology a grand challenge for organizations. Mainstream management and organization theories tend to focus on the instrumentality of technology for organizational performance, seeing it as enabling people to do their work faster, more innovatively and effectively, or as a way to dislocate workers (Cascio & Montealegre, 2016). Feminist theorizing addresses this grand challenge in a distinctive way, developing knowledge on the defining role of social categories in the design, implementation and use of technologies in organizations and society at large. Feminists emphasize the mutual shaping of technology and gender – in its intersections with other social categories – over time and across multiple sites (Wajcman, 2010).

The interdisciplinary feminist theories of technology call attention to three focal interests. First, there are relatively straightforward questions about representation, referring to the (non)participation of women and men in different technologies, and about the displacement of gendered jobs by technology. Second, there is critique of dominant frameworks representing technology and technological artefacts as neutral and impartial innovations, deconstructing technology as gendered. And third, feminist work interrogates how technology can be mobilized to undo gender inequality, by problematizing the boundaries between body and mind, human and machine, and idealism and materialism.

Women in technology

Traditionally, technology is stereotypically associated with white men, building on constructions of technology as a strength of men, and emphasizing men’s technological prowess (Cockburn, 1983). Feminists have long unpacked such stereotypes, drawing attention to the technological proficiencies women obtain through their engagement with everyday technologies in the household and the workplace, as well as in the digital sphere with, for example, social media (Rogan & Budgeon, 2018). Nevertheless, the underrepresentation of women in the information science, engineering and technology sector is persistent and well documented (see for instance Kelan, 2008; Kenny & Donnelly, 2020). It means not only that men continue to dominate engineering work, computer science and hi-tech entrepreneurship (Wellner & Rothman, 2020), but the underrepresentation of women in technical designs also profoundly affects how the world is made, as every aspect of contemporary life is touched by sociotechnical systems. As Wajman puts it, ‘unless women are in the engine rooms of technological production, we cannot get our hands on the levers of power’ (Wajcman, 2004, p. 111).

The impact of advanced automation, robots and artificial intelligence is now felt in in all nooks and corners of the labour market, within low-skilled occupations and high-skilled knowledge work alike. Technology and digitalization are not restricted to male-dominated sectors but have entered female-dominated sectors such as healthcare as well. The care–tech link, for instance, illustrates how care and technical work intersect in health care occupations, with medical and nursing models of care increasingly merging (Lindsay, 2008, p. 348). Women’s jobs in these and other sectors are even more at risk of technological displacement due to their overrepresentation in jobs with routine tasks that are prone to automation (Brussevich, Dabla-Norris, & Khalid, 2019).

Yet, the concerns about a dystopic future of unprecedented technological unemployment because of the alleged superior performance of intelligent machines are somewhat tempered by techno-feminist work. Scrutinizing the performance of robots and algorithms, this body of work shows that they only go some way: empathetic robotic care for the elderly, and bias-free and non-discriminatory algorithm decisions are still far away. Cute, wide-eyed robots cannot replace the social and emotional labour women give in complex care work, and algorithms notoriously bear the values and biases of their elite white male developers in Silicon Valley, reproducing their discriminatory practices (Wajcman, 2017). The core message is not the reassurance that sophisticated human work cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence, but that technology is not just happening to an innocent, gender-neutral society. Feminist work of this kind highlights how there is nothing inevitable about the way technology evolves and is used, as technology is deeply social, cultural, political and economic, and it is our own social practices that produce inequalities through technologies (Wajcman, 2015).

Technology is gendered

This brings us to the second issue of how technologies are gendered. Feminists have theorized how intersectional gender relations materialize in technological tools and techniques, rather than such artefacts being neutral or value-free (Wajcman, 2010). Theorizing the genderedness of technology helps to directly address the grand challenge of technology as it deconstructs the sociomaterial and affective dimensions of technology, developing a body of knowledge that can potentially be used to construct technologies differently.

Feminist analyses of sociomaterial dimensions of technological artefacts have shown how artefacts such as electric shavers, cars and watches are classed and gendered by design and use (Oudshoorn, Saetnan, & Lie, 2002). The human tendency to gender machines is particularly evident for robots, with more humanoid robots becoming more gendered (Søraa, 2017), and robots in turn falling victim to gender stereotypes based on their appearance or voice (Eyssel & Hegel, 2012).

The gendering of machines is also apparent in domestic artificial intelligence products such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. These feminized devices respond to voice commands to do various domestic labour tasks, from setting alarms and keeping personal schedules for multiple family members, to playing one’s favorite music, suggesting recipes and ordering food. In the words of Daniel Sutko, ‘the ideal AI performs like the misogynist fantasy of a docile female subject: caring, nurturing, responsive, attentive, helpful but not willful, smart but not overly so, replaceable, customizable, available’ (Sutko, 2020, pp. 17–18). Marxist feminist analyses show how domestic digital technologies are shaped as ‘digital housewives’ or ‘social servers’, reproduce a racialized and gendered division of domestic labour, and make formerly invisible reproductive work visible to bring it under capitalist control (Jarrett, 2015; Schiller & McMahon, 2019). Through the feminization of these domestic digital devices, increasingly affective and intimate data exchanges are invited; Alexa and Siri allow the companies that produce them to learn and monitor intimate details about users’ activities, tastes and personal lives, contributing to surveillance capitalism in the home (Woods, 2018). Importantly, these feminist theories foreground affective dimensions of technologies and digitalization, pointing to the manipulation and exploitation of affective economies and affective transactions (Ahmed, 2004). The intensification of affect in digital organizations serves economic value (Just, 2019) and profit-driven patriarchy (Bergen, 2016).

The feminist deconstruction of gendered technologies raises important questions about the complex relations between technology and power, privacy and capital, gender and media (Woods, 2018) that advance discussions on technology in management and organization studies. Here, feminist theorizing reveals the conservative politics of most technology discussions, by showing how contemporary technologies tune in to a patriarchal status quo rather than transform intersectional gender relations.

Emancipatory technology?

The third core issue of feminist theories of technology highlights the potential emancipatory effects of technology and digital media by examining their ability to undo gender inequalities and/or transform intersectional gender relations. Here, there is some optimism that the virtuality of the internet allows women and non-binary people to escape embodied inequalities, empowers them to shape their own identities online, and participate in technology on their terms. The Stitch’nBitch movement, for instance, of women meeting offline and online in activist, cyberfeminist knitting communities, is analysed as a phenomenon in which the production and consumption of gender, technology and society collide and exemplifies a new materiality (Minahan & Cox, 2007).

Critically questioning and blurring the boundaries of dichotomies is, as mentioned, a core characteristic of feminist thinking, and in the field of technology it takes on the boundaries between human and non-human, organism and machine, body and mind, femininity and masculinity. With tools such as queer theory, assemblage theory and work on the performativity of gendered subjectivity, feminist technology studies can examine how gendered subjectivity is co-produced with technology in multiple forms, instead of presupposing that gender and sexuality are done in predetermined binary ways (Landström, 2007). Another theoretical notion for transcending traditional binaries is the cyborg. Donna Haraway in her famous manifesto presents cyborg feminism, the hybridity of machines and humans and the blurring of boundaries, as part of ‘the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender’ (Haraway, 1987, p. 3). The attention for cyborgs foregrounds the body, a core feminist theme, emphasizing that the intersection of bodies with technology reworks both nature and culture, providing opportunities for women. Cyborgs serve as figurations of posthuman identity, calling attention to the sociomateriality of the body and to possible new forms of gendered embodiment (Balsamo, 1996). The emancipatory hopes for cyborgs cannot always be substantiated though, as they can also reproduce rather than change hegemonic power relations (Muhr, 2011). Cyborg feminism calls for new relations between humans and technologies in the intersectional boundary projects of AI and gender.

To summarize, this section has highlighted how feminist theories of technology shed light on dimensions of technology that remain mostly silenced elsewhere. The sophisticated concepts and insights about how sociomateriality, affect and embodiment shape and are shaped by gendered technologies, digitalizations and AI, disrupt mainstream tales of impartial innovation and utilitarian progress. They show how the grand challenge of technology is inevitably also a political struggle over intersectional gender inequalities in organizations and one that potentially can be done differently. The implications of this work are that the dominant classic binaries in the field of technology oftentimes become denaturalized and delegitimized and are increasingly recognized as technology’s gender troubles (Sutko, 2020). This feminist unpacking of the politics of technology can be seen as a necessary first step, to be followed by other, thought-provoking steps such as the design and implementation of alternative, emancipatory technologies. It may be that current power relations in organizations make it unlikely to ‘expect our AI systems to become feminist’ (Wellner & Rothman, 2020), but that is exactly what is needed. Feminist technological knowledge and relational modes of knowledge production need to be moved from the margins to the centre if we are to develop future technologies that emancipate and can contribute to intersectional equality.

Feminist Theories of Climate Change Challenges to Organizations

The final grand challenge for organizations to be discussed here is climate change. Climate change constitutes an existential challenge for organizations and societies, even threatening the possibilities of human and non-human life on the planet. Yet, businesses tend to respond to urgent and increasing ecological crises of global warming, extreme weather, rising sea levels, pollution, extinction and animal-borne diseases by sticking to a business-as-usual approach (Wright & Nyberg, 2017). Critical approaches to corporate environmentalism and sustainability show how a business case approach, which values sustainability efforts in terms of their contribution to the bottom line, remains the dominant frame for organizations. This is ineffective in making change as it reduces ‘nature’ to something to be managed, reproduces gender inequalities and reinforces a dominant logic of patriarchy (Irving & Helin, 2018; Phillips, 2019).

Climate change is also inherently a feminist issue (Zoloth, 2017). Feminist theories challenge the reduction of climate change to an environmental scientific problem, showing how rational, technological and scientific solutions for mitigation or adaption do not suffice, making the case for an affective, moral and political project instead (Bee, Rice, & Trauger, 2015; Gaard, 2015). This section of the paper sets out to show how feminist theories of climate change offer a rich conceptual vocabulary for rethinking crucial relations between organizations and the environment, humans and nature.

Eco-feminism is the background for contemporary feminist theories of climate change. The term was coined in the 1970s, discredited as essentialist (equating oppressions of ‘woman’ to oppressions of ‘nature’) in the 1990s, but regained momentum in todays’ ecological crises by connecting intersectional feminist and ecological theories and activism (Gaard, 2011; Plumwood, 2004). There are rich varieties of eco-feminism corresponding to different feminist philosophies and politics, going by alternative labels among which feminist environmentalism, queer ecologies, gender and the environment, or gender and climate change (Warren, 2000). From this rich variety, I discuss three core themes in more detail below. The first is the critique of global capitalism and how it produces intersectional inequalities, whereas the second critique involves general dualisms in Western thought. The third goes beyond critique and concerns feminist theorizing about an alternative for climate justice, and the organizational responsibility for climate governance grounded in a feminist ethics of care.

Capitalism critique

The first theme is developed within an interdisciplinary critical feminist scholarship which interrogates climate change as an intersectional gendered, classed and racialized phenomenon, inextricably connected to global capitalism, with differential impact on inequalities in different parts of the globe. The notion of gendered vulnerabilities, that always intersect with race, ethnicity and class, is developed to analyse how climate change (re)produces contextualized social inequalities in global capitalism. Prompted by feminist scholars studying gender inequalities in the South, these analyses show how the material burden of climate change primarily falls on poor women and children in developing countries in the global South, who need to work harder to secure food, water and energy due to climate-induced resource scarcities (Pearse, 2017). Vulnerabilities to climate change are connected to broader social, economic and cultural inequalities, such as those related to colonial histories and consumer capitalism (Pearse, 2017). While it is important to document vulnerabilities of the women and men on the front line of climate change, feminist work makes an effort to refrain from victimizing. It also highlights the situated knowledge, agency and resilience of women and men in their responses and adaptations to climate challenges (Moosa & Tuana, 2014).

Drawing theoretical connections between feminism, capitalism and ecology is seen as a promising route to challenge the structural connections between gender oppression, environmental destruction and capitalism. Combining insights from Marxist eco-feminism and material eco-feminism, Oksala (2018) problematizes the logic of capitalist accumulation and its dependence on the exploitation of women’s reproductive labour and the extraction of natural resources without compensation. She argues that the environment and women’s reproductive labour have intrinsic value that cannot be fully monetized and commodified in the capitalist market economy, and that we need an economic system with market regulation, a fair distribution of resources, and room for values other than profit or growth (Oksala, 2018, p. 231).

Deconstructing dualisms

The second theme of eco-feminism is the problematization of how Western thinking is based on interrelated dualisms such as human/nature, mind/body, masculine/feminine, and reason/emotion (Phillips, 2014). The deconstruction of binary oppositions is a defining element of feminist thought, as it shows how binaries are also hierarchies, laying the foundation for a social ordering that is strictly separated and in which one side is superior and dominant and the other side is inferior and oppressed. In eco-feminism, a fundamental insight is that the culture/nature dualism in Western thought is gendered, because men and masculinity are associated with culture and culture is valued, whereas women and femininity are associated with nature and both are devalued (Gaard, 2011). One of the few feminist organizational thinkers, Mary Phillips, notes how ‘the ecofeminist project offers a means to think through and hence to challenge the ways in which nature and bodies, emotion and femininity are constructed and marginalized by a masculinist logic predicated on instrumental rationality’ (Phillips, 2014, p. 455).

Eco-feminism addresses the power implications of such dualist separation and emphasizes the interdependency and integration of the elements instead (Irving & Helin, 2018; Plumwood, 1993). Humans are seen as an integral part of ecosystems just as any other life form. This idea connects to posthuman feminist theory, calling into question androcentric assumptions of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy (Braidotti, 2016). New materialist feminisms do not stop at the boundaries of human embodiment, however, but question the impact of climate change on other species. The concept of transcorporeality is used in material feminism to emphasize ‘the physical fact of our co-constituted embodiment of humans with other flows of life, matter and energy’ (Gaard, 2015, p. 25). Here, we see the use of a relational ontology that deconstructs the category of human, repositions humans away from the centre in ecosystems, and addresses the human exploitation of other species and their non-human nature (Gaard, 2015). Such a relational ontology is not yet commonplace in the realm of organizations, where we see that all too often, corporations instrumentalize and rationalize nature in ‘a political economy that privileges wealth accumulation at the expense of environmental destruction’ (Ergene, Banerjee, & Hoffman, 2020, p. 4). Feminist economists develop theoretical notions such as social provisioning (Power, 2004) and social reproduction (Bakker, 2007), offering radically different perspectives to the use of natural resources and the unpaid care work of women, by focusing on the everyday practices of sustaining material life, connections between humans and non-humans, and their wellbeing in organizations (Ergene, Calás, & Smircich, 2018). Feminist approaches help to meet the grand challenge of climate change by decentring both humans and organizations, repositioning them in wider ecosystems, in ways that disrupt their hegemonic power.

Ethics of care

This brings us to the third and final theme to be discussed here which concerns feminist philosophical challenges of the normative frameworks for climate justice and responsibility. In contrast to a neoliberal climate governance with its reliance on individual action and behavioural choice, feminist climate justice emphasizes that a systemic redistribution needs to be realized through the collective coordinated action of organizations and governments (Bee et al., 2015). A feminist climate ethics foregrounds relationality, obligation, responsibility, solidarity and care, and as such is inspired by the moral agency in the feminist ethics of care perspective (Gilligan, 1982). It starts from concrete situations and lived experiences of climate change, reflecting on what it means to live a good life and care for the world (Allison, 2017).

A feminist ethics of care requires a relational self, embedded in community, and an ability to engage with a concrete other, taking responsibility and acknowledging what we owe this other (Moosa & Tuana, 2014; Zoloth, 2017). In the relational ontology of an ethics of care, the relation between humans and the environment is a reciprocal relation, with humans responding to the climate, and the climate being affected by us at the same time. Phillips (2019, p. 1161) argues that caring offers a way of being in the world in which meaningful, compassionate and attentive relationships with nature, humans and non-human others can be built. She warns that care does not provide easy solutions, and that putting care in the centre requires a fundamentally different humanity, and a fundamentally different organizing of relationships too. Eco-feminism emphasizes values of compassion, care, empathy and love for the living world in recognition of relational caring obligations and a working justice for all (Allison, 2017).

Overall, this section shows how feminism is not just another approach to think about climate change as a challenge for organizations, but it involves a radical shift for organizations and organizing as we know it through conventional theories and forms of scholarship (Bell et al., 2020). As most insights notably come from feminists working in the philosophical, economic and geography disciplines, there is a pressing need for feminist organization theories to similarly take on board this interdisciplinary work and bring them into the conversation about how to change the role of organizations in climate change. Again, organizations are a huge part of the problem, but they can also serve as an inroad into solutions. I argue that feminist organization theories on climate change are thus uniquely situated to theorize the relations and tensions between economic, social and ecological responsibilities of organizations. Numerous research gaps remain in this area (Grosser & Moon, 2019) and if there ever was an urgent research agenda for feminist organization theorists, it is here and now.

Concluding Remarks

This paper set out to discuss the feminist answers to three grand challenges for organizations: inequalities, technology and climate change. It has shown that feminist theories have a lot to offer to management and organization theories both through critique of dominant frameworks and through the articulation of alternative conceptualizations and value systems. While certainly a heterodox body of work, feminist theories on these grand challenges share concerns about the perpetuation of complex intersectional gendered inequalities at multiple levels of analysis. The significance of this work is that it moves away from comfortable abstractions of ‘actors’ or ‘stakeholders’ and calls attention to the lived realities of concrete Others who, at multiple intersections of class, gender, race and ethnicity and at multiple geopolitical locations, deal with the dark sides of globalized supply chains, technological replacement and environmental destruction. In addition, it shows that inequalities are not inevitable, but are rather the consequence of particular capitalist and patriarchal forms of organizing.

This has far-reaching consequences for how the problems of grand challenges are framed and tackled. Previous suggestions in organization studies to address grand challenges refer to participatory architecture, multivocal inscriptions and distributed experimentation (Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015). These offer important insights by calling for participation of multiple actors, interpretative viability (Benders & Van Veen, 2001) for key interventions and a process of iterative learning. But they also still call on abstract actors, and prioritize traditional managerial and design solutions, which brush over the power inequalities that are revealed by feminist theorizing. With Audre Lorde’s wisdom in mind that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, the challenge is to imagine and craft other tools. Feminist work makes it ‘clearer that there are options for an economy and ecology beyond what is permissible to say and do as knowledge in management and organization studies under advanced market capitalism’ (Ergene et al., 2018, p. 222). Even without a fully articulated answer on how we can organize for intersectional equality, develop emancipatory technologies and enact a feminist ethics of care for the human and the natural world, to have them as aspirations can and should make a difference in the practices of organizing.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Yvonne Benschop is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Institute for Management Research, at Radboud University, the Netherlands. She is Head of the Department of Business Administration and director of the interdisciplinary research hotspot on gender and power in politics and management. Inspired by feminist organization theories and critical management studies, her research focuses on the social responsibilities of organizations for gender equality, diversity and inclusion.

References

Acker

(1990). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4, 139–158.

Acker

(1992). Gendering organizational theory. In Mills

A. J.

Tancred

(Eds.), Gendering organizational analysis (pp. 248–260). Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications.

Acker

(2006). Inequality regimes: Gender, class, and race in organizations. Gender & Society, 20, 441–464.

Adib

Guerrier

(2003). The interlocking of gender with nationality, race, ethnicity and class: The narratives of women in hotel work. Gender Work and Organization, 10, 413–432.

Ahmed

(2004). Affective economies. Social Text, 22, 117–139.

Alamgir

Banerjee

S. B.

(2019). Contested compliance regimes in global production networks: Insights from the Bangladesh garment industry. Human Relations, 72, 272–297.

Allison

(2017). Toward a feminist care ethic for climate change. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 33, 152–158.

Amis

J. M.

Mair

Munir

K. A.

(2020). The organizational reproduction of inequality. Academy of Management Annals, 14, 195–230.

Andrijasevic

Rhodes

K.-H.

(2019). Foreign workers: On the other side of gendered, racial, political and ethical borders. Organization, 26, 313–320.

10.

Arruzza

Bhattacharya

Fraser

(2018). Notes for a feminist manifesto. New Left Review, 114 (Nov Dec 2018), 113–134.

11.

Ashcraft

Mumby

D. K.

(2003). Reworking gender: A feminist communicology of organization. London: SAGE Publications.

12.

Atewologun

Sealy

Vinnicombe

(2016). Revealing intersectional dynamics in organizations: Introducing ‘intersectional identity work’. Gender, Work & Organization, 23, 223–247.

13.

Bair

(2010). On difference and capital: Gender and the globalization of production. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36(1), 203–226.

14.

Bakker

(2007). Social reproduction and the constitution of a gendered political economy. New Political Economy, 12, 541–556.

15.

Balsamo

A. M.

(1996). Technologies of the gendered body: Reading cyborg women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

16.

Bee

B. A.

Rice

Trauger

(2015). A feminist approach to climate change governance: Everyday and intimate politics. Geography Compass, 9(6), 339–350.

17.

Bell

Meriläinen

Taylor

Tienari

(2019). Time’s up! Feminist theory and activism meets organization studies. Human Relations, 72, 4–22.

18.

Bell

Meriläinen

Taylor

Tienari

(2020). Dangerous knowledge: The political, personal, and epistemological promise of feminist research in management and organization studies. International Journal of Management Reviews, 22, 177–192.

19.

Bell

E. L. J.

Nkomo

S. M.

(2001). Our separate ways: Black and white women and the struggle for professional identity. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

20.

Benders

Van Veen

(2001). What’s in a fashion? Interpretative viability and management fashions. Organization, 8, 33–53.

21.

Bendl

Bleijenbergh

Henttonen

Mills

A. J.

(2015). The Oxford handbook of diversity in organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

22.

Benschop

Verloo

(2016). Feminist organization theories: Islands of treasure. In Mir

Wilmott

Greenwood

(Eds.), The Routledge companion to philosophy in organization studies. London: Routledge.

23.

Bergen

(2016). ‘I’d blush if I could’: Digital assistants, disembodied cyborgs and the problem of gender. Word and Text, A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 6, 95–113.

24.

Berry

D. P.

Bell

M. P.

(2012). ‘Expatriates’: Gender, race and class distinctions in international management. Gender, Work & Organization, 19, 10–28.

25.

Bhambra

G. K.

(2014). Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues. Postcolonial Studies, 17, 115–121.

26.

Boogaard

Roggeband

(2010). Paradoxes of intersectionality: Theorizing inequality in the Dutch police force through structure and agency. Organization, 17, 53 –75.

27.

Braidotti

(2016). Posthuman feminist theory. In Disch

Hawkesworth

(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of feminist theory (pp. 673). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

28.

Brussevich

Dabla-Norris

M. E.

Khalid

(2019). Is technology widening the gender gap? Automation and the future of female employment. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.

29.

Buzzanell

P. M.

(1994). Gaining a voice: Feminist organizational communication theorizing. Management Communication Quarterly, 7, 339–383.

30.

Calás

Smircich

(1996). From ‘the woman’s’ point of view: Feminist approaches to organization studies. In Clegg

Hardy

Nord

(Eds.), Handbook of organization studies (pp. 218–257). London: SAGE Publications.

31.

Calás

Smircich

(2006). From the ‘woman’s point of view’ ten years later: Towards a feminist organization studies. In Clegg

Hardy

Lawrence

Nord

(Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies (pp. 284–346). London: SAGE Publications.

32.

Calás

Smircich

Bourne

(2009). Extending the boundaries: Reframing ‘entrepreneurship as social change’ through feminist perspectives. Academy of Management Review, 34, 552–569.

33.

Cascio

W. F.

Montealegre

(2016). How technology is changing work and organizations. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 3, 349–375.

34.

Cho

Crenshaw

K. W.

McCall

(2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies: Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs, 38, 785–810.

35.

Choo

H. Y.

Ferree

M. M.

(2010). Practicing intersectionality in sociological research: A critical analysis of inclusions, interactions, and institutions in the study of inequalities. Sociological Theory, 28, 129–149.

36.

Cockburn

(1983). Brothers: Male dominance and technological change. London: Pluto Press.

37.

Collins

P. H.

(2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1–20.

38.

Collins

P. H.

Bilge

(2020). Intersectionality. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

39.

Connell

(2019). New maps of struggle for gender justice: Rethinking feminist research on organizations and work. Gender, Work & Organization, 26, 54–63.

40.

Cornelissen

Höllerer

M. A.

(2019). An open and inclusive space for theorizing: Introducing Organization Theory. Organization Theory, 1(1), 1–5.

41.

Crenshaw

(1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139.

42.

Crenshaw

(1997). Intersectionality and identity politics: Learning from violence against women of colour. In Shanley

M. L.

Narayan

(Eds.), Reconstructing political theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

43.

Crenshaw

K. W.

(2017). On intersectionality: Essential writings. London: The New Press.

44.

Desai

Rinaldo

(2016). Reorienting gender and globalization: Introduction to the special issue. Qualitative Sociology, 39, 337–351.

45.

Dhamoon

R. K.

(2011). Considerations on mainstreaming intersectionality. Political Research Quarterly, 64, 230–243.

46.

Ehrenreich

Hochschild

A. R.

Kay

(2003). Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

47.

Eisenhardt

K. M.

Graebner

M. E.

Sonenshein

(2016). Grand challenges and inductive methods: Rigor without rigor mortis. Academy of Management Journal, 59, 1113–1123.

48.

Eisenstein

(2005). A dangerous liaison? Feminism and corporate globalization. Science & Society, 69, 487–518.

49.

Ely

R. J.

Meyerson

D. E.

(2000). Theories of gender in organizations: A new approach to organizational analysis and change. Research in Organizational Behavior, 22, 103–152.

50.

England

(1992). Comparable worth: Theories and evidence. New York: Transaction Publishers.

51.

Ergene

Banerjee

S. B.

Hoffman

(2020). (Un)Sustainability and organization studies: Towards a radical engagement. Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840620937892

52.

Ergene

Calás

M. B.

Smircich

(2018). Ecologies of sustainable concerns: Organization theorizing for the anthropocene. Gender, Work & Organization, 25, 222–245.

53.

Essers

Doorewaard

Benschop

(2013). Family ties: Migrant female business owners doing identity work on the public–private divide. Human Relations, 66, 1645–1665.

54.

Eyssel

Hegel

(2012). (s)he’s got the look: Gender stereotyping of robots 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 42, 2213–2230.

55.

Ferguson

K. E.

(2017). Feminist theory today. Annual Review of Political Science, 20, 269–286.

56.

Ferraro

Etzion

Gehman

(2015). Tackling grand challenges pragmatically: Robust action revisited. Organization Studies, 36, 363–390.

57.

Fraser

(2009). Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history. New Left Review (56).

58.

Fraser

Arruzza

Bhattacharya

(2019). Feminism for the 99%. London: Verso.

59.

Frenkel

Shenhav

(2006). From binarism back to hybridity: A postcolonial reading of management and organization studies. Organization Studies, 27, 855–876.

60.

Gaard

(2011). Ecofeminism revisited: Rejecting essentialism and re-placing species in a material feminist environmentalism. Feminist Formations, 23(2), 26–53.

61.

Gaard

(2015). Ecofeminism and climate change. Paper presented at the Women’s Studies International Forum.

62.

Gherardi

(2011). Ways of knowing: Gender as a politics of knowledge. In: Handbook of gender, work and organizations (pp. 37–49). Chichester, UK: Wiley.

63.

Gherardi

(2014). Organizations as symbolic gendered orders. In Kumra

Simpson

Burke

R. J.

(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of gender in organizations (pp. 76–94). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

64.

Gilligan

(1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

65.

Grosser

McCarthy

(2019). Imagining new feminist futures: How feminist social movements contest the neoliberalization of feminism in an increasingly corporate-dominated world. Gender, Work & Organization, 26, 1100–1116.

66.

Grosser

Moon

(2019). CSR and feminist organization studies: Towards an integrated theorization for the analysis of gender issues. Journal of Business Ethics, 155, 321–342.

67.

Haraway

(1987). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Australian Feminist Studies, 2(4), 1–42.

68.

Harding

Ford

Fotaki

(2013). Is the ‘F’-word still dirty? A past, present and future of/for feminist and gender studies in organization. Organization, 20, 51–65.

69.

Healy

Bradley

Forson

(2011). Intersectional sensibilities in analysing inequality regimes in public sector organizations. Gender, Work & Organization, 18, 467–487.

70.

Herrera

(2013). Gender and international migration: Contributions and cross-fertilizations. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 471–489.

71.

Holvino

(2010). Intersections: The simultaneity of race, gender and class in organization studies. Gender Work and Organization, 17, 248–277.

72.

Irving

Helin

(2018). A world for sale? An ecofeminist reading of sustainable development discourse. Gender, Work & Organization, 25, 264–278.

73.

Jarrett

(2015). Devaluing binaries: Marxist feminism and the value of consumer labour. In Fisher

Fuchs

(Eds.), Reconsidering value and labour in the digital age (pp. 207–223). New York: Springer.

74.

Jones

Martinez Dy

Vershinina

(2019). ‘We were fighting for our place’: Resisting gender knowledge regimes through feminist knowledge network formation. Gender, Work & Organization, 26, 789–804.

75.

Just

S. N.

(2019). An assemblage of avatars: Digital organization as affective intensification in the GamerGate controversy. Organization, 26, 716–738.

76.

Kalleberg

A. L.

(2009). Precarious work, insecure workers: Employment relations in transition. American Sociological Review, 74, 1–22.

77.

Kelan

E. K.

(2008). Emotions in a rational profession: The gendering of skills in ICT work. Gender, Work & Organization, 15, 49–71.

78.

Kenny

E. J.

Donnelly

(2020). Navigating the gender structure in information technology: How does this affect the experiences and behaviours of women? Human Relations, 73, 326–350.

79.

Kenny

(2013). A feminist institutionalist approach. In Gender and political recruitment (pp. 34–62). New York: Springer.

80.

Kim

(2017). Digital media and intergenerational migration: Nannies from the global south. Communication Review, 20, 122–141.

81.

Kumra

Simpson

Burke

R. J.

(2014). The Oxford handbook of gender in organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

82.

Landström

(2007). Queering feminist technology studies. Feminist Theory, 8, 7–26.

83.

Lewis

Benschop

Simpson

(2017). Postfeminism, gender and organization. Gender, Work & Organization, 24, 213–225.

84.

Lindsay

(2008). The care–tech link: An examination of gender, care and technical work in healthcare labour. Gender, Work & Organization, 15, 333–351.

85.

Liu

(2018). Re-radicalising intersectionality in organisation studies. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization.

86.

Minahan

Cox

J. W.

(2007). Stitch’nBitch: Cyberfeminism, a third place and the new materiality. Journal of Material Culture, 12, 5–21.

87.

Mohanty

C. T.

(1988). Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review, 30(autumn), 61–88.

88.

Mohanty

C. T.

(2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

89.

Moosa

C. S.

Tuana

(2014). Mapping a research agenda concerning gender and climate change: A review of the literature. Hypatia, 29, 677–694.

90.

Muhr

S. L.

(2011). Caught in the gendered machine: On the masculine and feminine in cyborg leadership. Gender, Work & Organization, 18, 337–357.

91.

Nkomo

S. M.

(2011). A postcolonial and anti-colonial reading of ‘African’ leadership and management in organization studies: Tensions, contradictions and possibilities. Organization, 18, 365–386.

92.

Oksala

(2018). Feminism, capitalism, and ecology. Hypatia, 33, 216–234.

93.

Oudshoorn

Saetnan

A. R.

Lie

(2002). On gender and things: Reflections on an exhibition on gendered artifacts. Paper presented at the Women’s Studies International Forum.

94.

Ozkazanc-Pan

(2012). Postcolonial feminist research: Challenges and complexities. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 31, 573–591.

95.

Pearse

(2017). Gender and climate change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 8(2), e451.

96.

Phillips

(2014). Re-writing corporate environmentalism: E cofeminism, corporeality and the language of feeling. Gender, Work & Organization, 21, 443–458.

97.

Phillips

(2019). ‘Daring to care’: Challenging corporate environmentalism. Journal of Business Ethics, 156, 1151–1164.

98.

Plumwood

(1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge.

99.

Plumwood

(2004). Gender, eco-feminism and the environment. In White

(Ed.), Controversies in environmental sociology (pp. 43–60). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

100.

Power

(2004). Social provisioning as a starting point for feminist economics. Feminist Economics, 10(3), 3–19.

101.

Prasad

(2002). Otherness at large: Identity and difference in the new globalized organizational landscape. In Aaltio

Mills

A. J.

(Eds.), Gender, identity and the culture of organizations (pp. 57–71). London: Routledge.

102.

Pullen

Lewis

Ozkazanc-Pan

(2019). A critical moment: 25 years of Gender, Work and Organization. Gender, Work & Organization, 26, 1–8.

103.

Ridgeway

C. L.

Correll

S. J.

(2004). Unpacking the gender system: A theoretical perspective on gender beliefs and social relations. Gender & Society, 18, 510–531.

104.

Rodriguez

J. K.

Holvino

Fletcher

J. K.

Nkomo

S. M.

(2016). The theory and praxis of intersectionality in work and organisations: Where do we go from here? Gender, Work & Organization, 23, 201–222.

105.

Rogan

Budgeon

(2018). The personal is political: Assessing feminist fundamentals in the digital age. Social Sciences, 7(8), 132.

106.

Rottenberg

(2014). The rise of neoliberal feminism. Cultural Studies, 28, 418–437.

107.

Rydzik

Anitha

(2020). Conceptualising the agency of migrant women workers: Resilience, reworking and resistance. Work, Employment and Society, 34, 883–899.

108.

Schiebinger

Schraudner

(2011). Interdisciplinary approaches to achieving gendered innovations in science, medicine, and engineering 1. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 36, 154–167.

109.

Schiller

McMahon

(2019). Alexa, alert me when the revolution comes: Gender, affect, and labor in the age of home-based artificial intelligence. New Political Science, 41, 173–191.

110.

Scully

M. A.

(2002). Confronting errors in the meritocracy. Organization, 9, 396–401.

111.

Søraa

R. A.

(2017). Mechanical genders: How do humans gender robots? Gender, Technology and Development, 21, 99–115.

112.

Spivak

R. G. G. C.

Said

(1988). Selected subaltern studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

113.

Sutko

D. M.

(2020). Theorizing femininity in artificial intelligence: A framework for undoing technology’s gender troubles. Cultural Studies, 34, 567–592.

114.

Tatli

Özbilgin

M. F.

(2012). An emic approach to intersectional study of diversity at work: A Bourdieuan framing. International Journal of Management Reviews, 14, 180–200.

115.

Thomas

Davies

(2005). What have the feminists done for us? Feminist theory and organizational resistance. Organization, 12, 711–740.

116.

Vachhani

S. J.

Pullen

(2019). Ethics, politics and feminist organizing: Writing feminist infrapolitics and affective solidarity into everyday sexism. Human Relations, 72, 23–47.

117.

Van den Brink

(2015). The politics of knowledge: The responses to feminist research from academic leaders. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 34, 483–495.

118.

Van den Brink

Benschop

(2012a). Gender practices in the construction of academic excellence: Sheep with five legs. Organization, 19, 507–524.

119.

Van Laer

Janssens

(2011). Ethnic minority professionals’ experiences with subtle discrimination in the workplace. Human Relations, 64, 1203–1227.

120.

Verduijn

Dey

Tedmanson

Essers

(2014). Emancipation and/or oppression? Conceptualizing dimensions of criticality in entrepreneurship studies. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, 20(2), 98.

121.

Verloo

(2018). Varieties of opposition to gender equality in Europe. London: Routledge.

122.

Wajcman

(2004). Technofeminism. Cambridge: Polity.

123.

Wajcman

(2010). Feminist theories of technology. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34, 143–152.

124.

Wajcman

(2015). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

125.

Wajcman

(2017). Automation: Is it really different this time? British Journal of Sociology, 68, 119–127.

126.

Walby

(2011). The future of feminism. Cambridge: Polity.

127.

Warren

(2000). Ecofeminist philosophy: A western perspective on what it is and why it matter.: New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

128.

Weatherall

(2020). Even when those struggles are not our own: Storytelling and solidarity in a feminist social justice organization. Gender, Work & Organization, 27, 471–486.

129.

Wellner

Rothman

(2020). Feminist AI: Can we expect our AI systems to become feminist? Philosophy & Technology, 33, 191–205.

130.

Woods

Benschop

Van den Brink

(2021). Intersectional equality: A definition and goal for equality in organizations.

131.

Woods

H. S.

(2018). Asking more of Siri and Alexa: Feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35, 334–349.

132.

Wright

Nyberg

(2017). An inconvenient truth: How organizations translate climate change into business as usual. Academy of Management Journal, 60, 1633–1661.

133.

Zoloth

(2017). At the last well on Earth: Climate change is a feminist issue. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 33, 139–151.

Grand Challenges,Feminist Answers

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Feminist Theories of Inequality in Organizations

Redistribution and recognition

Inequality regimes

Intersectionality

Postcolonial and decolonial feminism

Feminist Theories of Technology in Organizations

Women in technology

Technology is gendered

Emancipatory technology?

Feminist Theories of Climate Change Challenges to Organizations

Capitalism critique

Deconstructing dualisms

Ethics of care

Concluding Remarks

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Author biography

References