Gender-Work-Organization.

The research project deals with conceptual questions regarding gender in organisations, focussing especially on the dynamics of status competition and informal practices of exclusion.

Nowadays, a rising number of women reaches management levels, but only very few get the chance to move beyond the “glass ceiling”. Globalisation and intensified competition among companies bring about constant reorganisation practices, e.g. the introduction of lean management. As a consequence of these, male managers face new employment risks and diminishing career prospects. The research project attempts to conceptualise the resulting increased dynamics of status competition among women and men on the basis of Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social habitus and social field. It includes a genealogical chapter focussing on the historical construction of gender during the processes of industrial rationalisation in the 19th and 20th century. Furthermore, it turns to an epistemological understanding of social construction and discusses ethnomethodological and symbolic interactionist approaches of doing gender while doing work. It is argued, that a socio-phenomenological understanding of gendering practices lacks the institutional and structural dimension that is necessary in order to conceive the reproduction of inequality. The main concern of this research is to show how or to what extent Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and social field are apt to explain phenomena of reproduction of inequality, without neglecting the changes that women and men make in the processes of doing gender while doing work – changes of gendered habitus as well as changes in power relations that may loose traditional gendered implications in certain contexts.