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122. Paludi, Mariana, Helms Mills, Jean., and Mills, Albert J. (2019) `Cruzando fronteras: the contribution of a decolonial feminism in organization studies.’ Management & Organizational History, 14 (1), pp.55-78.
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to introduce decolonial feminist theorizing to the field of organizational history to explore issues of historical revisionism, hierarchy, power, and coloniality. This paper is a theoretical work and uses empirical material from the archive of the company Pan American Airways (PAA) to exemplify possible interpretations when using decolonial feminist frameworks. We analyzed how representations of Latin Americans explore ideas of race, gender, and nationality? Drawing on the feminist and decolonial literature we suggest that the field of organizational history can profit from the reflexive nature of the colonial past and the possibility of thinking about the future by reflecting on the past (the mestiza way). In short, this work is a contribution to the ‘decolonial turn’, that shifts the way we produce knowledge by understanding that most social problems should be understood through consideration of the implications of modernity and coloniality. The work is part of a larger project on Pan American Airways (PAA) and the production of intersectionality – involving extensive archival research, including analysis of a range of documents such as letters between the airline’s Latin American Division (LAD) and its head office, tourist brochures, magazines, maps, as well as pictures of landscapes and people from the so-called Latin American region.
The article examines popular culture representations of Global South migrants' work through combining a coloniality perspective with an intersectional analysis. In doing so, we analyse two award winning films depicting the experiences of women migrant workers (Fatima and Bread and Roses) in France and the United States of America. The analysis reveals that representations of the effects of intersecting power structures should be understood as a dynamic phenomenon, embedded in different coloniality regimes. Furthermore, it shows how popular culture representations of oppression is multifaced and reflect stereotyping but also the victims' responses to oppressive conditions. These are represented as opportunities for change, but can, sometimes, contribute to reproduce oppression. The article theorises the social and discursive (re)production of intersecting oppressions in popular culture by embedding these within coloniality regimes. It discusses how this coloniality perspective can bring to the fore the complexity of intersecting oppressions and the limited, but significant, forms of agency exercised by colonial subjects.
This paper critically engages with intersectionality in an effort to counter its development into a reified ground and grid for examining and articulating difference in organization studies. We theorize intersectionality as frame/work and problematize the work of its frame through the disruptions and recursions of coloniality. We turn to metonymy for the analytical and conceptual possibilities it offers for interrogating intersectionality and examining the dynamics of difference and power. We analyze engagements with Kara Walker's artwork, Sugar Baby, which invite us to think about intersectionality in metonymic terms. We offer a double reading of this work of representation. The first reading outlines (re)productions and ironic subversions of metonymies of work, race, and gender, while the second scrutinizes them and forwards the significance of positionality and provisionality in intersectional work on coloniality. In doing so, we cultivate intersectionality as a critical idea but also submit it to critical analysis. By theorizing intersectionality as frame/work, we counter its metonymic role as proxy for diverse possibilities for engaging with difference and thereby confront its power dynamics. In closing, we outline the contributions to organizational research and contemplate the implications for “doing intersectionality” in organization studies.
Given the importance of understanding the context of management issues in the world, this article discusses the role of both emic (developing culture-specific concepts) and etic (applying concepts across cultures) research in the international management literature. This paper proposes a more comprehensive mixed methods research cycle that can provide researchers with a deeper understanding of the context in under-researched countries. Using a decolonial lens, this theoretical paper proposes that an emic-etic-emic cycle is the best way to disaggregate contextual issues in organizational research, particularly when dealing with human issues in management. By examining a research project on leadership in Africa and the African diaspora from decolonial perspective, our proposed emic-etic-emic cycle (1) stresses the importance of using an emic approach in addition to the dominant etic approach in cross-cultural management; (2) provides researchers with a deeper understanding of context in under-researched countries; and (3) contributes to decolonial approaches to management, which call for a symmetrical dialogue across borders which decentralizes the dominant Western approach, and provides a deeper understanding of management from an indigenous and local perspective. Contextualizing research using the emic-etic-emic cycle can enhance rigor and relevance of the research.
The agroecology movement in Brazil has politically mobilized the importance of feminism in its slogan. Considering that domination over women persists in the postcolonial context of Latin America, we look at how women in the Brazilian agroecology movement craft resistance in modern-colonial rural Brazil. Grounded on Maria Lugones' decolonial feminism resistance lenses, we conducted narrative analysis and qualitative field research between 2017 and 2018 with female activists in the movement. The results showed that the complex process of gender decolonization involves constructing resistance through active subjectivity and world-traveling strategies that encompass hard and almost invisible work, materialized through artifacts, activities, and re-signifying processes that are part of these women's lives. We contribute to the knowledge on feminist resistance organizing in Latin America and studies on rural women's realities that have often been neglected in Gender and Organization Studies.
This special issue (SI) editorial contributes to ongoing efforts worldwide to decolonise management and organisational knowledge (MOK). A robust pluriversal discussion on the how and why of decolonisation is vital. Yet to date, most business and management schools are on the periphery of debates about decolonising higher education, even as Business Schools in diverse locations function as contested sites of neocolonialism and expansion of Western neoliberal perspectives. This editorial and special issue is the outcome of a unique set of relationships and processes that saw Organization host its first paper development workshop in Africa in 2019. This editorial speaks to a radical ontological plurality that up-ends the classical division between theory and praxis. It advocates praxistical theorising that moves beyond this binary and embraces decolonising knowledge by moving into the realm of affect and embodied, other-oriented reflexive, communicative praxis. It underscores the simultaneous, contested and unfinished decolonising-recolonising doubleness of praxis and the potential of borderlands locations to work with these dynamics. This special issue brings together a set of papers which advance different decolonising projects and grapple with the nuances of what it means to ‘do’ decolonising in a diversity of empirical and epistemic settings.
Feminist theories in management and organisation studies, each with their own ontological and epistemological assumptions, offer critical perspectives of the status quo to challenge our idea of progress in the discipline, yet there is limited engagement with ideas, theories, or practices from the lived experiences of Global South women. Decolonial feminism engages with debates pertaining to coloniality/modernity and indigenous identity and gender in Latin America, while providing a space for the voices and lived experiences of marginalised, non‐Western(ised) women. Positioned in the context of Guatemalan Maya women and deploying critical insights from decolonial feminists, I unpack how the discourse about Global South women silences their voices and agency. Integrating decolonial feminist theory allows us to rethink management and organisation studies as a Western gendered system. Interrupting mainstream narratives to bring a new geopolitics of knowledge and knowing from the perspective of the gendered colonial difference.
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In this paper, we explore how a decolonial framework can inform management and organizational knowledge (MOK) with the objective of fostering a decolonized historic turn (HT) agenda from Latin America. MOK and the HT are demarcated by the predominance of Anglo-Saxon knowledge in which time fosters a colonizing effect. The HT has not promoted the inclusion of authors, theories, concepts, objects, and themes from other geographies. Hence, we have to make use of geopolitics of knowledge to reintroduce space and to deloconize the HT agenda. We believe that it is by exploring the (dis)encounters of the external and the internal sides of the border, in a double consciousness exercise, that we may foster a more plural field of MOK and a richer HT agenda. From this space of diverse epistemic encounter from both sides of the border, it would be possible to recognize and value what has been produced from the colonial difference, not as expressions of exoticism, but as relevant critical forms of knowledge produced and lived from the perspective of different histories and traditions. More than claims of purism, concepts of anthropophagy and sociological reduction may indicate that Latin America great virtue may be represented by its ability to adapt foreign knowledge to local reality generating something new without letting itself being catechized nor becoming a mimicry copy of the colonizer.
This paper shows that, although an encounter between the ideas of Alfred Chandler (from the USA) and Celso Furtado (from Brazil) within the Cold War period could have avoided the crisis of legitimacy faced by strategic management, it was only Chandler who became a universal authority in this field. Chandler and Furtado approached corporations and governments from different perspectives for more than 50 years, and this partially explains the disencounter between them. Although the contemporaneous crises of both US hegemony and strategic management suggest that a multipolar and pluriversal field of strategy is needed, influential authors from the USA have overlooked history and stood for the reinforcement of North/South coloniality to tackle global problems, which they enunciate from a universal and unilateral standpoint. A de-colonial historical analysis of the (dis)encounter between these two authors is undertaken by two Brazilian authors, in this paper, to show that their works are inseparable parts of the same phenomenon, in the same way as modernity and coloniality are. We develop a framework with three levels of analysis to re-frame such a North/South (dis)encounter: at the macro level, the grand narrative of the Cold War; at the meso level, the subaltern knowledges produced by the Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean (ECLAC) and by Celso Furtado; and at the micro level the national identity espoused by each author. We argue that the Chandler-Furtado encounter we produce in this paper helps create conditions for the development of a multipolar and pluriversal field of strategy in the post-Cold War period, which moves beyond the North/South divide.
Transnational migration studies need to be framed within a contextual, dynamic and processual analysis that recognises the interconnectedness of different identities and hierarchical structures relating to, for example, gender, ethnicity, 'race' and class at different levels in society. This article looks at a range of problematic issues in migration studies while also engaging with migration as a gendered phenomenon. I propose a particular analytical sensitivity, which attends to the centrality of power and social hierarchy, building on the idea of intersectionality as a heuristic device. Finally, I consider the potential of using a translocational lens, which is also able to pay attention to the challenges posed by transnationalism.
History as a discipline has been accused of being a-theoretical. Business historians working at business schools, however, need to better explicate their historical methodology, not theory, in order to communicate the value of archival research to social scientists, and to train future doctoral students outside history departments. This paper seeks to outline an important aspect of historical methodology, which is data collection from archives. In this area, post-colonialism and archival ethnography have made significant methodological contributions not just for non-western history, emphasizing the importance of considering how archives were created, and how one can legitimately use them despite their limitations. I argue that these approaches offer new insights into the particularities of researching business archives.
‘Borders’ will be in the twenty-first century what ‘frontiers’ where in the nineteenth. Frontiers were conceived as the line indicating the last point in the relentless march of civilization. On the one side of the frontiers was civilization; on the other, nothing; just barbarism or emptiness. The march of civilization and the idea of the frontiers created a geographic and bodygraphic divide. Certain areas of the planet were designated as the location of the barbarians, and since the eighteenth century, of the primitives. In one stroke, bodies were classified and assigned a given place on the planet. But who had the authority to enact such a classification, and what was the logic of that classification? Furthermore, the classification of the world by region, and the link established between regions and people inhabiting them, was parallel to the march of civilization and companions of it: on the other side of the epistemic frontiers, people do not think or theorize; hence, one of the reasons they were considered barbarians.
This article extends recent developments in critical‐interpretive approaches to organizations by examining the relationship between power, ideology, and organizational narrative. It is argued that the production of organizational reality can be explained in terms of its structuration through ideological meaning formations; such meaning formations simultaneously produce and are created by the structure of power interests in organizations. Organizational narrative is examined as one of the principal symbolic forms through which organizational ideology and power structures are both expressed and constituted.
Purpose
Between 1927 and 1941 Pan American Airways (PAA) operated international flights from the USA with virtually no competition from US carriers. How PAA established and maintained its monopolistic position – by instrumentally creating a myth of “German threat” – and the implications for organizational theorizing and historiography is the proposed focus of this paper.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on a cultural theory approach to “doing history” and Barthes' 1972 notion of myth, this paper uses a critical hermeneutical exploration of the extensive PAA archive collection (at the Otto Richter Library of the University of Miami) and numerous secondary sources (e.g. various written histories). Following Barthes, the paper views myths as monolithic and authoritative historical constructions which conceal their ideological roots and instrumental conditions of creation. Through critical hermeneutics, the paper deciphers the myth of “German threat” by (re)contextualizing it and thus pluralizing history by showing how a threatening image of “foreign” and specifically “German” aviation operation in South America was instrumentally created to privilege PAA's operations and its close relationship with the US State Department.
Findings
Implications for the management theorist and historian as they pertain to a more fragile tone for “doing history” include the acknowledgement of history as multiple socially constructed interpretations of the past, an appreciation for histories that make their conditions of production transparent and the need for (re)writing histories that parade as authoritative monoliths.
Originality/value
The paper offers an empirical example of how an organization's instrumental use of myth facilitates manipulations of history in order to situate and secure the positioning and image of that organization.
http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=ssha_transmodernity;volume=1;issue=2
In the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Mexican and U.S. political leaders, business executives, and ordinary citizens shaped modern Mexico by making industrial capitalism the key to upward mobility into the middle class, material prosperity and a new form of democracy--consumer democracy. This book explains how Mexico's industrial capitalism between 1920 and 1950 shaped the country's national identity, contributed to Mexico's emergence as a modern nation state, and transformed U.S.-Mexican relations.
A distinctive form of anticolonial analysis has been emerging from Latin America (LA) in recent decades. This decolonial theory argues that important new insights about modernity, its politics, and epistemology become visible if one starts off thinking about them from the experiences of those colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. For the decolonial theorists, European colonialism in the Americas, on the one hand, and modernity and capitalism (and their sciences) in Europe, on the other hand, coproduced and coconstituted each other. The effects of that history persist today. Starting thought from these LA histories and current realities enables envisioning new resources for social transformations. These decolonial insights seem to receive only a passing recognition in the Latin American social studies of science and technology projects that have begun cosponsoring events and publications with northern equivalents. My focus will be primarily on the decolonial theory and on just two of its themes. One is the critical resources it offers for creating more accurate and progressive northern philosophies and histories of science as well as social studies of science. The second is insights from Latin American feminists that carry different impacts in the context of the decolonial accounts.
Only recently have the writings of women of color (WOC) significantly influenced the field of feminism. These WOC bring unique identities, concerns, and cultures to the feminist movement. In this article, three waves of feminism are explored in order to understand the roles and perspectives of WOC, the feminisms that they developed, and how their ideas are similar to and different from traditional theories. The effects of privilege, power, race, sexual orientation, and disability are reviewed in understanding how they helped construct ideas on feminism for women who are Asian, Black, Indian, or Latina. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how various dynamics have led to the current state of an intersection of multiple identities and oppressions.
Purpose
Through a case study of Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), this paper sets out to explore the roots of twentieth century globalization and the postcolonial nature of the trading relations involved.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on Foucault's broad notion of “the archive” a critical hermeneutics approach is used to examine a series of company‐produced texts, including minutes, travelogues, company narratives, annual reports, film, diaries, and published histories.
Findings
The paper argues that Pan Am contributed to the “idea of Latin America” and, in the process contributed to practices of dependency that served the interests of the USA. Drawing on a case study of Pan Am, the paper further argues that multi‐national corporations help to establish the contours of international trade by influencing the very character and boundaries of the territories traded in, with troubling implications for the countries traded in.
Research limitations/implications
As a detailed case study extension of the findings to other global trading arrangements needs to take into account to social‐political context and relational histories of the players involved.
Practical implications
The paper generates insights into the role of rhetoric in developing trading relationships and its roots in embedded notions of postcolonial thinking and generalizations.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to an understanding of the role of language and the social construction of national identities involved in the development of international business.
This book is an extended argument on the "coloniality" of power by one of the most innovative scholars of Latin American studies. In a shrinking world where sharp dichotomies, such as East/West and developing/developed, blur and shift, Walter Mignolo points to the inadequacy of current practice in the social sciences and area studies. He introduces the crucial notion of "colonial difference" into study of the modern colonial world. He also traces the emergence of new forms of knowledge, which he calls "border thinking." Further, he expands the horizons of those debates already under way in postcolonial studies of Asia and Africa by dwelling in the genealogy of thoughts of South/Central America, the Caribbean, and Latino/as in the United States. His concept of "border gnosis," or what is known from the perspective of an empire's borderlands, counters the tendency of occidentalist perspectives to dominate, and thus limit, understanding. The book is divided into three parts: the first chapter deals with epistemology and postcoloniality; the next three chapters deal with the geopolitics of knowledge; the last three deal with the languages and cultures of scholarship. Here the author reintroduces the analysis of civilization from the perspective of globalization and argues that, rather than one "civilizing" process dominated by the West, the continually emerging subaltern voices break down the dichotomies characteristic of any cultural imperialism. By underscoring the fractures between globalization and mundializacion, Mignolo shows the locations of emerging border epistemologies, and of post-occidental reason.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. "Don't Panic, I'm Hispanic": The Trends and Economy of Cultural Flows 2. Knowledges: Facts and Fictions of a People as a Market 3. Images: Producing Culture for the Market 4. Screening the Image 5. Language and Culture in the Media Battle Zone 6. The Focus (or Fuck Us) Group: Consumers Talk Back, or Do They? 7. Selling Marginality: The Business of Culture Notes References Index
Acknowledgments. Preface: Uncoupling the Name and the Reference. 1 The Americas, Christian Expansion, and the Modern/Colonial Foundation of Racism. 2 "Latin" America and the First Reordering of the Modern/Colonial World. 3 After "Latin" America: The Colonial Wound and the Geo-Political/Body-Political Shift. Postface: After "America". Notes. Index
I. Empire of the Home 1. The Lay of the Land 2. "Massa and Maids 3. Imperial Leather 4. Psychoanalysis, Race and Female Fetish II. Double Crossings 5. Soft-Soaping Empire 6. The White Family of Man 7. Olive Schreiner III. Dismantling the Master's House 8. The Scandal of Hybridity 9. "Azikwelwa" (We Will Not Ride) 10. No Longer in a Future Heading
The article interrogates transnational feminisms as a concept and as a practice. It frames its analysis using contemporary theories of globalization and the older concept of global sisterhood as a backdrop to the concept of transnational feminism. To assess the practical dimension of transnational feminisms, the analysis focuses on women's rights as a human rights movement and the transnationalization of Latin American feminisms. The article suggests that, although transnational feminisms (particularly feminist postcolonial theories) envision themselves in a new frame and see themselves as committed to intersectional analysis and transversal politics, there are important gaps between the intentions (theory, tactics) and outcomes of their theory and practice.
This paper begins with a story told by a corporation president to illustrate what his organization was doing to "help" women employees balance the demands of work and home. The paper deconstructs and reconstructs this story text from a feminist perspective, examining what it says, what it does not say, and what it might have said. This analysis reveals how organizational efforts to "help women" have suppressed gender conflict and reified false dichotomies between public and private realms of endeavor, suggesting why it has proven so difficult to eradicate gender discrimination in organization. Implications of a feminist perspective for organizational theory are discussed.
This paper discusses the current state of Organization Studies in Latin America, disclosing the epistemic coloniality that prevails in the region. Adopting anapproach,based on the,recognition of the relevance of the geopolitical space as place of enunciation, the paper sustains the relevance of the ‘outside’ and ‘otherness’ to understand,organizational realities in America Latina. The argument isdeveloped,in three sections. The first section establishes the main characteristic ofthe,development ,of Organization ,Studies in Latin America as its tendency towards falsifica-tion and imitation of the knowledge,generated in the Centre. The second section recognizes the role played by the,term ‘organization’ as an,artifice that facilitates the comparison ,of different realities through ,their struc-tural variables, but also the inability of this term to recognize any reality that escapes instrumental rationality and the logic of the market. It also articulates the increasing importance of such ,a concept ,in the context of neo-liberalism. The third section concludes by renewing,the urgency of appreciating the organizational problems of Latin America from the outside by proposing ,a preliminary research agenda built from,original approaches ,that recognize otherness. Key words: epistemic coloniality; Latin America, organization studies, otherness .. . The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising
The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.1 (2002) 57-96
In December 1998 I had the good fortune to be one of the commentators in the workshop "Historical Capitalism, Coloniality of Power, and Transmodernity," featuring presentations by Immanuel Wallerstein, Anibal Quijano, and Enrique Dussel. Speakers were asked to offer updates and to elaborate on the concepts attributed to them. Reflecting on "transmodernity," Dussel made a remark that I take as a central point of my argument. According to Dussel, postmodern criticism of modernity is important and necessary, but it is not enough. The argument was developed by Dussel in his recent short but important dialogue with Gianni Vattimo's work, which he characterized as a "eurocentric critique of modernity." What else can there be, beyond a Eurocentric critique of modernity and Eurocentrism? Dussel has responded to this question with the concept of transmodernity, by which he means that modernity is not a strictly European but a planetary phenomenon, to which the "excluded barbarians" have contributed, although their contribution has not been acknowledged. Dussel's argument resembles, then, the South Asian Subaltern Studies project, although it has been made from the legacies of earlier colonialisms (Spanish and Portuguese). Transmodernity also implies—for Dussel—a "liberating reason" (razón liberadora) that is the guiding principle of his philosophy and ethic of liberation. The dialogues between Dussel and Wallerstein, between philosophy of liberation and world system analysis, and between philosophy of liberation and opening the social sciences, have two things in common. First, both are critical of capitalism, the neoliberal market, and formal democracy. Second, both (and Quijano as well) conceive of modernity as unfolding in the sixteenth century with capitalism and the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit. However, there is a break between Wallerstein, on one hand, and Dussel and Quijano, on the other: they stand at different ends of the colonial difference. To explain this intuition is the main thrust of this essay.
Dussel's remarks can also be applied to Wallerstein's conception of historical capitalism, in that it states that Historical Capitalism is a Eurocentric criticism of capitalism. By introducing the notion of colonial difference, I will be able to expand on Dussel's notion of transmodernity and Quijano's coloniality of power. I will be able also to compare the three in their approach to Eurocentrism and, toward the end of the article, to introduce Slavoj Zizek's own take on "Eurocentrism from the left." My first step, then, will be to distinguish two macronarratives, that of Western civilization and that of the modern world (from the early modern period [i.e., the European Renaissance] until today). The first is basically a philosophical narrative, whereas the second is basically the narrative of the social sciences. Both macronarratives have their positive and negative sides. While Western civilization is celebrated by some, its logocentrism is criticized by others. Similarly, modernity has its defenders as well as its critics. Dussel is located between the two macronarratives, but his criticism diverges from both the criticism internal to Western civilization and the critique internal to the modern world, as in world-system analysis. As a philosopher he is attuned to the first macronarrative, the macronarrative of Western civilization and its origins in ancient Greece. As a Latin American philosopher, he has been always attentive to the historical foundation of the modern/colonial world in the sixteenth century. He shares these interests with Wallerstein and Quijano, both of whom are sociologists. However, Quijano and Dussel share the Latin American colonial experience or, rather, a local history of the colonial difference. Wallerstein, instead, is immersed in the imperial difference that distinguishes the philosophical critique of Western civilization in Europe and the sociological critique of modernity in the United States. In essence, then, the geopolitics of knowledge is organized around the diversification, through history, of the colonial and the imperial differences. Let me specify further the distinctions I am introducing here.
The following argument is built on the assumption (which I cannot develop here) that the history of capitalism as told by Fernand Braudel, Wallerstein, and Giovanni Arrighi and the history of Western epistemology as it has been constructed since the European Renaissance run parallel to...
Once upon a time scholars assumed that the knowing subject in the disciplines is transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured. From a detached and neutral point of observation (that Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez describes as the hubris of the zero point ), the knowing subject maps the world and its problems, classifies people and projects into what is good for them. Today that assumption is no longer tenable, although there are still many believers. At stake is indeed the question of racism and epistemology. And once upon a time scholars assumed that if you ‘come’ from Latin America you have to ‘talk about’ Latin America; that in such a case you have to be a token of your culture. Such expectation will not arise if the author ‘comes’ from Germany, France, England or the US. As we know: the first world has knowledge, the third world has culture; Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo Americans have science. The need for political and epistemic de-linking here comes to the fore, as well as decolonializing and decolonial knowledges, necessary steps for imagining and building democratic, just, and nonimperial/colonial societies.
Gendering the discourse of globalization will help to develop a better understanding of globalization processes and their consequences for women and men. I argue that gender processes and ideologies are embedded in globalizing capitalism in the separation of capitalist production and human reproduction and the corporate claims to non-responsibility for reproduction; in the important role of hegemonic masculinities in globalizing processes, and in the ways that gender serves as a resource for capital. I also discuss some of the consequences for women and men of these processes of globalization.
Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few. Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.
June Jordan (1992) had her eye set on an understanding of freedom that challenged social inequality as being neither natural, normal, nor inevitable. Instead, she believed that power relations of racism, class exploitation, sexism, and heterosexism were socially constructed outcomes of human agency and, as such, were amenable to change. For Jordan, the path toward a reenvisioned world where “freedom is indivisible” reflected aspirational political projects of the civil rights and Black Power movements, feminism, the antiwar movement, and the movement for gay and lesbian liberation. These social justice projects required a messy politics of taking the risks that enabled their participants to dream big dreams.
I often wonder what June Jordan would make of conceptions of social inequality, power, and politics within contemporary social theories. Heady terms such as freedom that were so central to the emancipatory projects of Jordan’s times seem relegated to the dustbin of ideas from the mid–twentieth century. In their place, we encounter understandings of the here and now as curiously “post” or “after” major developments. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postraciality all suggest that we inhabit a post–social movement era, one that may be “post” the possibility of freedom. Yet, as events of 2011 such as Arab Spring and the various Occupy movements remind us, social movements and the emancipatory politics they espouse can emerge overnight. Thus, this malaise of postemancipatory politics emanating from the academy may be more indicative of the mental state of Western scholars in ivory towers than that of people on the ground.
In this context, how might social theory speak more effectively to contemporary social phenomena in ways that address the realities of social inequalities, power, and politics? Two contemporary fields of study that seemingly eschew the backward-looking “posting” of contemporary social phenomena in favor of a forward-looking approach speak to this question. As knowledge projects, American pragmatism and intersectionality both aim to use their tools of analysis to grapple with contemporary social issues, and, as such, both might have implications for contemporary social theory.
Despite differences of longevity and contemporary intellectual focus, both discourses constitute works in progress that engage themes of social inequality, power, and politics. American pragmatism, a well-established field within American philosophy, is currently seeing a revitalized scholarly interest whereby “old” ideas from the classical pragmatism of the early twentieth century are made “new again.” As part of this process of self-reflexive revitalization, themes legitimated within the canon, such as pragmatism’s utility for rethinking democracy, increasingly constitute topics of serious investigation. Yet, despite this revitalization, themes of social inequality, power, and politics are not yet central to contemporary investigations, in part because they were not focal points of classical pragmatism. In contrast, social inequality, power, and politics have been primary concerns of intersectionality since its inception. Catalyzed by the social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s, race/class/gender studies as a knowledge project became visible within U.S. higher education in the 1980s with the arrival of people of color, women, and similarly marginalized groups whose social power had historically limited their ability to legitimate knowledge. Since the 1990s, the term intersectionality has emerged as the umbrella term framing this emerging field of study.
Pragmatism and intersectionality potentially complement each other, in that each discourse speaks to gaps in the other. Pragmatism presents a provocative analysis of community that provides a useful framework for understanding the processes by which social structures are constructed, yet its neglect of power relations limits its own arguments. Intersectionality provides a distinctive analysis of social inequality, power, and politics, yet the relative newness of this field in the academy has produced provisional analyses of these themes. In all, in both discourses, using the pragmatist construct of community and infusing it with intersectionality’s ideas about social inequality, power, and politics might animate new avenues of investigation.
Purpose
The notion of organizations as gendered is not new yet critical gaps in the understanding of the processes responsible for the creation and maintenance of these gendered organizations still exist. Within the existing breadth and depth of feminist organizational scholarship an increasing number of researchers have been drawn to Joan Acker's notion of the “gendered substructure” as one of the more promising frameworks for analysis of the gendering of organizations. In this paper the authors seek to develop an analysis of Acker's gendered substructure through, and reflection on, its application.
Design/methodology/approach
Acker's framework of gendering processes is explored through a case study of the gendering of a single organization over time – Pan American World Airways (Pan Am). The authors' “reading” of the archival materials was informed by a combination of feminist poststructuralism, critical discourse analysis and critical hermeneutics.
Findings
Through an exploration of the roots of Acker's framework and its application to a case study of a single organization over time (Pan Am), the paper contends that its greatest potential lies in examining the four process sets – division of labor, workplace culture, social interactions and (self) reflection – through a fifth process of “organizational logic” that is seen as temporal and contextual. Drawing on poststructuralist feminist theory, it argues that organizational logic can be viewed through analyses of organizational, and organizationally based, discourses.
Originality/value
The paper argues that the (widely recognized) heuristic value of Joan Acker's “gendered substructure” has not been realized due to inconsistencies in its interpretation and application. This study engages Acker's framework in its entirety, as gendering processes do not exist in silos and are likely more interdependent than typically credited. The paper looks at the dynamics of, and between the five sets of, gendering processes.
Brands and branding can sometimes seem pervasive. Yet, the geographies of brands and branding have been relatively neglected and under-researched, especially in economic geography. The focus here is the historically longstanding and well-established brands and branding of goods and services. Drawing on empirical examples to ground its claims, the argument seeks to establish the entangled geographies of branded objects and branding processes, advocates reading their socio-spatial histories, explains their uneven geographies and relationships to uneven development and explores their potential and pitfalls for territorial development locally and regionally. The conclusion is that brands and branding geographies have the potential to stimulate a novel approach to addressing spatial questions at the intersections of economic, social, cultural, political and ecological geographies that can transcend the more ‘traditional’ and longstanding foci of firms and industries for ‘new economic geographies’. Ideas to contribute to future research on brand and branding geographies are then sketched out.
Historians and social scientists analyzing the contemporary world unfortunately have too little contact and hence miss some of the ways that their interests overlap and the research of one field might benefit another. I am, therefore, extremely grateful that the Journal of Consumer Research has invited me to share with its readers an overview of my recent research on the political and social impact of the flourishing of mass consumption on twentieth-century America. What follows is a summary of my major arguments, enough to entice you, I hope, to read A Consumers' Republic (Cohen 2003), in which I elaborate on these themes. Although this essay is by necessity schematic, the book itself is filled with extensive historical evidence and is heavily illustrated with period images. In tracing the growing importance of mass consumption to the American economy, polity, culture, and social landscape from the 1920s to the present, I in many ways establish the historical context for your research into contemporary consumer behavior and markets. I hope you will discover illuminating and fruitful connections between your work and my own.