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More than Workers, Less than Bosses: Participatory Organizing in Five Buenos Aires Worker Coops
No full textI presented my paper on Tuesday, July 3, in the section “Other Horizons”, which dealt with organizing in more flattened ways.
The conference as a whole was focused on trying to rethink how we might reformulate a critical analysis of capitalism and how the way we organize reinforces capitalism. There were some interesting analyses of capitalism, and capitalist ways of organizing, but no answers to either a different economy, or how we might organize differently in this different economy. Every conference I’ve been at in the last ten years seems to be struggling with the same problem: without being able to redefine the kind of economy we want, we seem unable to redefine the kind of organizing which would bring that about, or exemplify the kind of economic organization we want in our larger society. What seems to be the most promising critique remains the analysis which focuses most precisely on fairness in organizing. The best paper, ‘Back to the future for diversity: A manifesto for less modesty, more bravado”, I attended focused on the point that by being fair, we bring about a more fair society, since how we organize is a way of divvying up the spoils. With Susan Harwood,the author, I intend to discuss setting up a stream at the next Gender Work and Organization conference in 2009, to examine how we might organize in less hierarchical ways.It’s impossible to understand how to organize cooperatively without focusing on ‘sexual difference’, the French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s category for what has not yet been thought within our symbolic structures, but which we must think if we are to confront how patriarchy and hierarchy mutually reinforce each other. An absence of attention to sexual difference in favour of a belief that both women and men can occupy the place of the sexually indifferent individual despite the presence of patriarchy, a belief which maintains that symbolically women are the same as men and experience the processes of organizing in exactly the same way, obscures rather than clarifies how we as women and men might organize in participatory, contiguous or side by side ways to get things done. Without confronting this ruse of the [masculine] neutral, or the rhetoric of the individual without a sex who is in reality male, without ensuring that cooperation means the contiguous organizing of sexual difference next to sexual difference, the female subject next to the male subject who equally act on and define the world, hierarchy inevitably reasserts itself, and cooperation, with its emphasis on the full participation of equals and the equal involvement of all, is subverted.
Given my focus on these symbolic categories of [sexually indifferent] sameness and [sexual] difference as they underlie our assumptions about how we can achieve the egalitarian workplace, what interested me in my study of five worker cooperatives in Buenos Aires in May 2006 were two inextricably intertwined questions concerning how organizing cooperatively could be achieved in the face of hierarchy and patriarchy. First, how comprehensively did the men and women workers think about hierarchy in all its manifestations? What did they mean organizationally when they talked about equality and workers as equals, as ‘more than workers, less than bosses’? How did the women and men working in these cooperatives struggle to embody in their organizing processes and strategies the ethos of cooperation—learned as they said ‘in the tent’--among and between equals who were not the same, who were different, and who experienced the processes of organizing differently? As the workers often proudly informed me, these were worker coops where all decision makers were elected and everyone was paid the same. It wasn’t only the ‘one member, one vote’ enshrined in the general assemblies and in the elections of coordinators, but that ‘we are all members of the cooperative’: all jobs were equally necessary, all were equally valuable, and therefore all were worthy of being paid the same. But elected general assemblies and coordinators and equal pay for all jobs were only part of how worker cooperatives struggled to interpret what cooperation meant in practice. Secondly, how did the workers confront how patriarchy circulates in these ostensibly egalitarian ways of organizing, where everybody was treated the same, everyone could be elected to positions of authority, everyone was paid the same? More specifically, how did the worker coops deal with [sexual] difference, that women and men are not substitutable--that they are equals who are different, and who experience differently the processes of organizing? How did the coops deal with this unacknowledged maleness of the supposedly sexually neutral or sexually indifferent individual, what Irigaray calls the unacknowledged reign of the masculine neutral, which must be confronted if cooperative organizing, with its emphasis on full participation, full involvement, is to succeed? How did the women and men challenge not only the hierarchy which cooperative organizing seeks to dismantle, but the patriarchal privilege that circulates simultaneously in our organizing processes, and which, unless confronted, inevitably reconstitutes hierarchical modes of organizing? These are the questions which will guide this study.Academic & Professional Development Fund (A&PDF
‘It’s not only what we say but what we do’: Pay inequalities and gendered workplace democracy in Argentinian worker cooperatives.
No full textIn a study conducted by the author in 2006 of five mixed-sex, worker-led cooperatives in Buenos
Aires, all of the workers in each of the coops were paid exactly the same. Five years later, only
two of the worker cooperatives – both dominated by women – came even close to maintaining
the same pay for everyone. The other three cooperatives, all dominated by male workers, had
instituted hierarchical pay scales which paralleled a concomitant decrease in workplace democracy.
An increase in pay inequities and a decrease in worker democracy went together; moreover, the
two paralleled an increasingly inhospitable workplace for women. This article addresses two,
interconnected, questions: How did this intertwining of pay and worker democracy happen, and
more specifically, how was this process gendered
The Different Next to the Different: Worker Coops in Buenos Aires, Women and Men, and Rethinking and Redoing the Role of Coordinator presented at the Engineering Leadership: Through Research and Practice Conference in Perth, Australia, July 22-24, 2008
No full textAs well as coordinating the session, I presented my paper as well as M. Synyshyn’s. The response was good, with good questions. However, what I thought was of particular interest to Athabasca University was the involvement and the recognition of aboriginal peoples’ contribution to the University of Western Australia. At the very beginning of the conference the President of the University of Western Australia thanked the aboriginal peoples for the use of their land. This was followed by a speech, and a dance by an aboriginal group of women. As I watched this, which was very moving and heartfelt, I thought that this is certainly something that Athabasca University should do in its
ceremonies.
As well, I have just returned from interviewing Luce Irigaray in France; the paper I wrote was a preliminary to my interview with her.
Paper Presnted:
The Different Next to the Different:
‘More than Workers, Less than Bosses’, women and men, and the intertwining of hierarchy and patriarchy in the struggle to create the egalitarian workplace in five worker cooperatives in Buenos Aires
I. Introduction
Sexual Difference and Dismantling Hierarchy and Patriarchy: The theoretical background to understanding the struggle to create the egalitarian workplace in five worker cooperatives in Buenos Aires
It’s impossible to understand how to organize cooperatively without focusing on ‘sexual difference’, the French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s category for what has not yet been thought within our ostensibly sexually indifferent symbolic structures, but which we must think if we are to confront how patriarchy and hierarchy mutually reinforce each other. In our present day symbolic structures, or the words, stories, philosophies, myths, religions we use to make sense of our world, women lack the place of the subject; they are object. Men remain the fulcrum, the norm, the phallus, the hinge of the logos of Lacan on which all meaning depends, a dance where women must follow the dancer who composed the music, a dancer who is always male. For the male subject to maintain its coherence, woman is consigned to the place of the object, the body, emotion, all of the rejected aspects of the male subject which are then projected onto the place held by woman. As object, women are not differentiated; they all remain the same as each other--‘all dolls are the same’ to quote Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls--and as object to the male subject they are both different from the male subject and lesser . The meaning of these terms of subject and object, like all terms, depends on both exclusion and suppression of that exclusion for its coherence; meaning is always both dualistic and hierarchical, where what is ‘good’ [like mind, male, leader] is defined by what is ‘not good’ [or body, woman, subordinate]. These relations of domination and subordination circulate in our symbolic structures, working always to reconstitute the ‘different from the same’ as lesser.
Irigaray’s further point is that this relationship of the different as always lesser than the same is obscured by the supposedly liberating gesture of sexual indifference, that after all, we are all just individuals, that our sex does not matter, that you are an individual just like me. She argues that this gesture of sexual indifference—of assigning the status of the male subject to woman--does not confer equality on women who lack a place as subjects in our symbolic structures. Instead, it reinforces woman’s subordination to man in the guise of the masculine neutral. Irigaray maintains that it is only with the creation of the female subject through the actions of women and then in our definitions of those actions, will our differentness from each other as women be able to represented. And only then, by creating a place for the female subject who does not extrapolate from the male subject how to be in the world, will we be able to create a space among and between women who are different from each other, will we be able to solve conflict among and between women, will we be able to create a ‘utopian horizon’ which we struggle towards, acting on a world which we define as female subjects. And by extension, only then will differentness be able to be expressed organizationally without being confined to the position of the lesser.
To follow Irigaray’s argument, then, is to emphasize that workers and bosses come in two sexes: the individual without a sex does not exist, and to use the sexless individual as an analytical category simply obscures who has power and who does not. An absence of attention to sexual difference in favour of a belief that both women and men can occupy the place of the sexually indifferent individual despite the presence of patriarchy, a belief which maintains that symbolically women are the same as men and experience the processes of organizing in exactly the same way, obscures rather than clarifies how we as women and men might organize in fully participatory, contiguous or non-hierarchical ways to get things done. Without confronting the rhetoric of the individual without a sex—the individual who in reality is male--without ensuring that cooperation means the contiguous organizing of sexual difference next to sexual difference, the female subject next to the male subject who equally act on and define the world, hierarchy inevitably reasserts itself, and cooperation, with its emphasis on the full participation of equals and the equal involvement of all, is subverted.
Understanding the struggle to create the egalitarian workplace in five worker cooperatives in Buenos Aires
Given my focus on these symbolic categories of [sexually indifferent] sameness and [sexual] difference as they underlie our assumptions about how we can achieve the egalitarian workplace, what interested me in my study of five worker cooperatives in Buenos Aires were two inextricably intertwined questions concerning how organizing cooperatively could be achieved in the face of hierarchy and patriarchy.
First, how comprehensively did the men and women workers think about hierarchy in all its manifestations? What did they mean organizationally when they talked about equality and workers as equals, as ‘more than workers, less than bosses’ to paraphrase Raimbeau (2005, p. 11)? Equality as sameness is what Irigaray has called the great dream of symmetry, which allows the powerful to escape their own complicity in the maintenance of hierarchy, by asserting the two [the sexually different next to the sexually different] are One [the unacknowledged male One standing in for the two, male subject and female subject]. How did the women and men working in these cooperatives struggle to embody in their organizing processes and strategies the ethos of cooperation—learned as they said ‘in the tent’--among and between equals who were not the same, who were different, and who experienced the processes of organizing differently? As the workers often proudly informed me, these were worker coops where all decision makers were elected and everyone was paid the same. And it wasn’t only the ‘one member, one vote’ enshrined in the general assemblies and in the elections of coordinators. It was also that ‘we are all members of the cooperative’: all jobs were equally necessary, all were equally valuable, and therefore all were worthy of being paid the same. But elected general assemblies and coordinators and equal pay for all jobs were only part of how worker cooperatives struggled to interpret what equality and cooperation meant in practice .
Secondly, how did the workers confront how patriarchy circulates in these ostensibly egalitarian ways of organizing, where all work was treated as equally valuable, everyone could be elected to positions of authority, everyone was paid the same? More specifically, how did the worker coops deal with [sexual] difference, the argument, following Irigaray, that women and men are not substitutable—that women and men are equals who are different, who occupy different places in terms of who has power and who doesn’t, and who experience differently the processes of organizing, in particular the processes of decision making which undergird all organizing: of deciding what to do, how and by whom to do it, and then what to do next? How did the worker coops deal with this unacknowledged maleness of the supposedly sexually neutral or sexually indifferent individual which must be confronted if cooperative organizing, with its emphasis on full and equal participation, full and equal involvement, is to succeed? How did the women and men challenge not only the hierarchy which cooperative organizing seeks to dismantle, but the patriarchal privilege that circulates simultaneously in our organizing processes, and which, unless confronted, inevitably reconstitutes hierarchical modes of organizing? Did no more deference to bosses by workers also mean no more deference to men by women?
II. We were all ‘in the tent’ together: The development of shared politicized consciousness and its relationship to equality as sameness or difference
In the next part of this paper, I want to examine how hierarchy and patriarchy--shorthand for sexual hierarchy--intersect to subvert egalitarian organizing processes. More specifically, I want to examine the ways the workers, women and men, attempted to confront those mutually reinforcing hierarchical and patriarchal processes in how they organized together to get work done. I want to begin by examining how the workers developed an ethos of cooperation, or how their shared experience of revolt ‘in the tent’ together led to a sense of politicized consciousness or awareness of their situation. Did their shared experiences ‘in the tent’ lead to their commitment to egalitarian ways of organizing as they struggled to confront the workings of hierarchy in all its forms: not only between workers and bosses, but also between men and women?
The workers’ conceptualization of equality: Do you have to be just like me to be equal to me? Or can we be different from each other and still be equal? Rethinking the male norm.
The answers to these questions rest on how the workers conceptualized equality. Did the workers think that these egalitarian ways of organizing could be achieved through emphasizing that everyone be the same, the women just like the men? By extension, then, did they think that if the women workers were different than the men, they must be lesser, and equality could be achieved only if everyone is the same as everyone else? Did they think that women had to be just the same as men in order for the women to be equal to the men? Or did they attempt to reconcile equality with difference in how they organized, so that being different did not mean being left out or pushed out by the same, however the same defined themselves? Did the workers, both women and men, confront how patriarchy—or sexual hierarchy--circulated within the ostensibly egalitarian organizing processes they put in place, and if they did, what did they do? What did ‘in the tent’ mean for their understanding of what equality meant for how they organized?
The workers agreed on the process, but not on the outcome: they all pointed to how important their shared experience was for all of them, but only the women analysed this shared experience as meaning that they were the men’s equals. The men never mentioned this, any reference to any understanding that the women were their equals; they never talked about this at all.
What they did talk about together was that they all had undergone consciousness raising or demystification before they “recovered their factories”, after “the owners ceased production, stopped paying wages, and went bankrupt”, and before the workers took over the factories and made them produce “without a boss or owner” . However, they used a much more concrete term: the workers called this the experience of the tent, where they were all together before they recovered their factories, and where they learned they were far stronger than they thought, far more capable than they believed. They told me that this experience of the tent produced their commitment to democratic, egalitarian forms of organizing—‘we were all like ants together’ said one woman—just as it shaped them, demystified for them what they thought was going on, allowed them, in the company of their compatriots, to think again what was actually happening, and prepared them for deciding what they wanted to do about their present situation. In the tent they shared the opportunity for “discussion, feedback and comparison”, a process of inclusion and consensus that allowed views to be shared and “competing truths and mystifications of the human condition” dissected (Young, 1993, p. 143-144; cf. Lewis and Barnsley, 1992; Guijt & Shah, 1998). At the same time this shared experience of revolt was a process of politicized consciousness-raising (Raimbeau, 2005, cf. Brown, 1992) that enabled the workers in the tent “to gain a greater sense of self-worth, agency and common purpose” (Young, 1997, p. 370). What the workers--and most had been workers; only 20% of those who joined the recovered factory movement had been managers (Trigona, 2006)-- had to unlearn was deference and passivity, the result of a hierarchical way of working divided between bosses and workers that Morgan (2006) argues creates passivity, dependence, competitiveness and deference . What they had to learn was the opposite. They had to learn to be subjects acting on the world and shaping it in a way that suited them, to learn contiguity in all its aspects, to learn how to confront the mutually sustaining operations of hierarchy and patriarchy as they circulated in the processes of ostensibly egalitarian forms of organizing. To confront the hierarchy between bosses and workers also meant to confront the hierarchy between men and women.
Activism and Hierarchy Antithetical
What their shared experiences in the tent taught the workers was that activism and hierarchy were antithetical. If the recovered factories were to succeed as worker cooperatives, hierarchical relations had to be dismantled, and egalitarian relations among and between workers who were capable, and because of their capabilities, powerful, had to be constructed if they were going to be able to accomplish their goals. If they didn’t construct ways of working together in egalitarian ways, they would revert to the bosses/worker hierarchy, so they had to figure out some way to displace that hierarchy in favour of contiguous relations among and between the workers. For these workers there was a explicit link between the experience of revolt and the development of a democratic consciousness, between how they understood and what they decided to do, or between learning how to think though their own relationship to a problem and not just simply leaving it to others. In making these links they recognized that they were knowers, that through the experience of the tent, they had become ‘political subjects’, to use Raimbeau’s term. By putting themselves in the picture, or grounding the issue in what they knew and had experienced (cf. Lewis and Barnsley, 1992), they took upon themselves the power to make decisions, to decide what is going on, and then what to do about it, structuring into this process both action and responsibility for those actions. They learned in the tent not to leave the thinking to others; they demystified the position of the knower as a position held by someone else that could never be held by them because they could never know enough, to a position that could be held by them, that they too could know the world and act on it. They took to themselves the position of the knower who does, or the subject who acts on the world, and rejected the position of the object that is always acted on. Formulating the position of the knower in a way that was understandable to everyone then, made finding a metaphor that could communicate that common understanding important. That led to the common use of the metaphor of the family to explain how to run an organization—but as we all know, that metaphor has quite different implications, and means quite different things, for women and men. I will return to this later.
“We worked together like ants, you couldn’t tell who was the man and who the woman”
What the tent equally taught the workers was how valuable each of them was for each other, how much they needed each other, how differences which had previously mattered, were no longer important: “we worked together like ants, you couldn’t tell who was the man and who the woman” said one woman to me. When the women talked about being ants together, they meant that everyone was together, women and men. The women didn’t mean that they were the same as the men or each other, but that there were no hierarchies, including sexual hierarchies. There were reasons, then, why the workers kept emphasizing to me that “we are a co-op”: we pay everyone the same, if we defer to others, we will not be able to work together fully and completely.
However, were we equal to each other? To the women, yes; maybe not to the men.
The experience of ‘the tent’, however, seemed to have much greater implications for the women than for the men in terms of their sense of equal worth: the women felt equal to the men, and it was the women who emphasized their equality with men. In the women’s accounts to me when we were apart from the men, they emphasized the shared experience of the tent as eliminating not only hierarchical work relations, but also the patriarchal relations or sexual hierarchies between men and women that worked to subvert the egalitarian ways of working together which the shared experience of the tent inspired. The converse didn’t seem to be true: the men never mentioned feeling equal to the women. The women felt equal to the men, but this equality between the two sexes that the women perceived ‘in the tent’, remained invisible to the men . What exactly, then, did ‘we worked together like ants’ mean for the women and for the men? How were sameness, difference, and equality interpreted in how they organized to get work done together in cooperative ways? This difference between the two sexes informs the next part of the paper.
III. No head of the household, but sisterhood; workers, but not brotherhood:
Reconstructing the patriarchal family in rethinking democratic decision-making and the role of the coordinators
To describe how people related to each other to get work done both women and men used the metaphor of ‘the family’. But like ‘the tent’, ‘the family’ was perceived in different ways. In a patriarchal society the metaphor of ‘the family’, ‘the head of the household’, or ‘parents’, or ‘sisterhood’ or ‘brotherhood’ has quite different implications for women than for men. What did these metaphors of ‘the family’ mean, then, for the construction of an egalitarian, contiguous workplace for the two sexes? How did they deal with power as it circulated in their organizing processes, in all the little ways which reveal who has power and who doesn’t, if we accept that power circulates in our acts of organizing and in the names we give those acts, in the process either confirming or subverting the circulation of hierarchy and patriarchy within those symbolic structures? In particular, how did the workers dealt with the fact that they were not sexless individuals but men and women who experienced the processes of organizing differently, who occupied different positions in a patriarchal society and who acted and then defined those actions within a hierarchical symbolic structure? What are the answers to these questions in terms of the key aspects of non-hierarchical, contiguous, participatory organizing, and how are they embodied in the organizing processes of women and men? What did it mean to figure out what the coordinator did, what aspect of ‘the family’ the coordinator embodied, and in particular, what that meant for women and for men working together?
Democratic organizing practices: confronting hierarchy but not patriarchy
To address this question I will draw on Rothschild’s (2000) analysis of how cooperative, non-hierarchical organizing works, as well as a study of the worker coops of Buenos Aires by Raimbeau (2005, 2006). Although neither study directly addresses how democratic and non-hierarchical principles are subverted by patriarchal practices, what they have done is to provide signposts about what is important in figuring out how to work together collectively and non-hierarchically.
Both studies concurred on the key aspects of the non-hierarchical workplace. Raimbeau asserted that that there is a direct link between the consciousness-raising of the tent and the workers’ commitment to democratic forms of organizing that are the outcome of that shared experience. She identified the following elements as crucial: “the assembly, where every worker has a voice”, the election of non-permanent coordinators who are rotated in and out of their positions, equal pay, and “mechanisms to guarantee transparent accounting”(2005, p. 11). Rothschild’s (2000) analysis replicates Raimbeau’s, pointing out that this mode of organizing is comprised of four essential elements: worker self-management, a non-instrumental way of dealing with each other as workers, democratic decision-making with provision for dissent, and worker ownership, which guarantees the democratic process (cf. Blasi and Kruse, 2003) . It’s not enough to ensure worker participation, Rothschild argues. Workers must benefit through own
(2005). Unlocking Hierarchy: Luce Irigaray, Entrustment and Contiguity
No full textIn this paper I want to address a central conundrum in non-hierarchical organizing: How do we both recognize difference—that we are not all the same—without subjecting difference to its standard placement in our symbolic structures—difference as a necessary support to, but always lesser than, the same? In order to organize non-hierarchically, must we all be the same? If not, how can we be different--and not lesser--as we organize non-hierarchically? How can hierarchical relations not be reconstituted among and between the different as they organize together?
To answer these questions I want to look at three bodies of work which deal the most comprehensively with the assumptions underlying hierarchy and how we might organize non-hierarchically: the work of Helen Brown and her focus on the teaching, learning and sharing of all the skills of organizing in the construction of a flexible non-hierarchical social order, based on the achievement of equality through sameness; the work of the French philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray and her focus on the reconfiguration of the symbolic structures of Western thought through addressing ‘the question of the age which must be thought’-- sexual difference-- and by extension difference and its relationship to sameness; and finally, the work of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, who draw on Irigaray in their theorizing of affidamento or entrustment, a non-hierarchical relationship between the woman who knows and the woman who wants. It is a relationship which, by authorizing a place from which the female subject may speak, is the basis for the reconfiguration of the symbolic structure from hierarchy to contiguity, or for sexual difference next to sexual difference, difference next to difference, creating the conditions of possibility for contiguous organizing.
How, then, are non-hierarchical organizing practices to be achieved? Helen Brown’s work on the teaching, learning and sharing of all the skills of organizing in order to produce the flexible social order which underpins non-hierarchical organizing, as carefully done as it is, founders in two ways. First, the teaching, learning and sharing of all the skills of organizing is indeed a first step towards non-hierarchical relations, but it is not enough because it fails to confront its central dilemma—it depends on the rhetoric of sameness to confer equality, so difference among and between women must be repressed, rather than understood as a source of creativity. Secondly, it founders on the relationship between the one who teaches and the one who learns, between the woman who knows and the woman who wants. How is this relationship between those who want to learn and those who already know different organizing skills to be structured, other than hierarchically? How, in particular, are we to organize non-hierarchically among and between the different, without eventually succumbing to some form of hierarchical organizing?
In her work on sexual difference, the French philosopher Luce Irigaray directly confronts this question of difference as necessarily always lesser than the Same if the construction of the Same is to retain its coherence. In her analysis of our symbolic structures--our languages, the stories, myths, religions and philosophies we tell ourselves to make sense of our world--she maintains that we can rethink these symbolic structures to make a place for sexual difference—and by extension, difference—as contiguous in relationship to each other rather than as hierarchical in relationship to the Same. This Same or the One is theoretically neutral, but is in effect masculine. It is the face of the man who sees himself reflected in the mirror of theory, and, mistaking himself as the sole representative of the human, erases his own sexual difference, and women, leaving no place for sexual difference, and difference, as other than a necessary, but erased, construct. In our present symbolic structures, Irigaray argues, women hold the place of difference. They are only objects; they lack a place from which to speak and name their actions as subjects. Thus, as long as women are without a place in the symbolic structures from which to speak as subjects, as long as sexual difference and difference have no place other than as lesser, hierarchy will inevitably reassert itself.
The work of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective and their theorizing of affidamento or entrustment can provide us with some understanding of how we might go about rethinking the theoretical and practical exemplification of contiguous organizing practices. Entrustment provides us with a way of rethinking the relationship of the woman who knows to the woman who wants as other than hierarchical. It is a relationship based on reciprocity and on honouring the authority of the woman who knows, authority meaning the place from which to speak in the symbolic structure as the female subject, the female subject next to, but not lesser than, the male subject. It means that a place is created where one had not existed before, for sexual difference, and by extension, for difference, to exist in a relationship of contiguity: for sexual difference next to sexual difference, difference next to difference. To the MWBC, honouring the authority of the woman who knows in a reciprocal relationship with the woman who wants, means that in the act of organizing together, we at the same time reconfigure our symbolic structures, where the difference between the woman who wants and the woman who knows can exist in contiguous rather than in hierarchical relations.
As Kate Young has stressed, the most effective organizing is the least hierarchical, and thus the most attentive to how difference can be reconfigured as contiguous. And in so doing, we reconfigure symbolic structures as contiguous: difference next to difference, sexual difference next to sexual difference, where the woman as subject finally speaks, and where hierarchy is no longer inevitable as we organize together
(1998) "Women Organizing and Globalization: Resistance and the Organizing of International NGOs". A paper for presentation to the annual meeting of The Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Canadian Women's Studies Association, Ottawa, Canada. A later version as a chapter for a book is linked to the book in the AU library below.
No full text(1993)Women, Men, Words and Power: A Feminist/Postmodernist Reconceptualization of Organizational Theory as It Pertains to the Organizational Newcomer
No full text(2001). Luce Irigaray, Entrustment and Rethinking Strategic Organizing.
No full textWhy are women and women’s needs persistently marginalized, even in projects designed to alleviate that? Why has there been such difficulty in translating the rhetoric of women’s right to shape society into reality? Feminist theorists have pointed to hierarchical organizing strategies as one key explanation of women’s marginalization, stressing that if organizations do not learn to include everyone inside the organization, they will not have learned the political adeptness necessary to include everyone outside the organization. These feminist organizational theorists go on to argue that non-hierarchical organizing strategies aimed at including everyone are key to ending this marginalization: that by teaching, learning and sharing all the skills of organizing, including political strategizing, women’s marginalization both within and without the organization can be combated.
How exactly, however, are all the skills of organizing to be shared by people who by definition are not the same, without recreating hierarchical relations? It is this link between two different people involved in the process of sharing organizing skills that I wish to explore further, by using the Irigararyan notion of entrustment. It is a way of thinking about how to construct contiguous rather than hierarchical relations between and among the different as together they organize to pursue a goal that could not be achieved individually. At both the theoretical and practical, organizational, level entrustment is fundamental: theoretically it recreates the relations between terms within the symbolic structure as contiguous rather than hierarchical, practically it provides us with ways of working contiguously as we organize together to shape the world in ways that suit all of us rather than just the privileged few
(2008) Rethinking Difference, Rethinking Deference
No full textIt’s impossible to understand how to organize cooperatively without focusing on ‘sexual difference’, the French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s category for what has not yet been thought within our ostensibly sexually indifferent symbolic structures, but which we must think if we are to confront how patriarchy and hierarchy mutually reinforce each other. In this study of the struggle to create the egalitarian workplace in five worker cooperatives in Buenos Aires, I will follow Irigaray’s argument that hierarchical relations will be continuously recreated if the patriarchal underpinnings of our symbolic structures which consign women always to the position of the lesser is not confronted. Workers and bosses come in two sexes: the individual without a sex does not exist, and to use the sexless individual as an analytical category simply obscures who has power and who does not. An absence of attention to sexual difference, which maintains that symbolically women are the same as men and experience the processes of organizing in exactly the same way, obscures rather than clarifies how we as women and men might organize in fully participatory, contiguous or non-hierarchical ways to get things done. Dismantling hierarchical relations between bosses and workers also means dismantling hierarchical relations between women and men: this study is an examination of what was accomplished in these five coops in terms of rethinking deference and rethinking difference
(1985) Women Teachers in Edmonton Public Schools, 1940-1950.
No full textThe Second World War and its aftermath did not create greater opportunities for women workers, although more women worked, and more married women worked, at the end of the
decade than at the beginning. The proportion of women in the professions, and specifically in teaching, declined during
this decade.
In the Edmonton Public School System the proportion of women teachers and administrators at all levels stagnated or
declined during this decade, despite growth in the system after the end of the War. Women teachers with similar amounts of education and experience were also much more
likely to teach elementary school and not to teach secondary or be principals than their male counterparts
(1995). The Sexually Specific Subject, Regimes of Truth, and the Construction of the Leader and of Leadership
No full textPaper presented at the Annual meeting of The Learned Societies, Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, Lacanian Indirection in Social Theory: Art, Ethics and Radical Democracy. Montreal, Canada. 1995
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