Women and Bureaucracies

Since the beginning of the modern women's movement in the late 1960s, at least a minority of women involved with that effort have been more interested in transforming institutions than becoming part of the available mainstream. There has been discussion within the movement itself about whether or not women should become part of mainstream institutions, or whether they would inevitably be corrupted by those institutions and fail to change them in any significant way.

Organization theory focuses on the development, maintenance, and transformation of organizations. It seeks to understand why such entities as bureaucracies come to exist, and continue to resist efforts to change them. Organization theory looks at the dynamics of organizational culture and leadership within organizations and attempts to develop theories about what already exists and what might come to pass in the future.

The intention in this paper is to look at that aspect of organization theory which concentrates on bureaucracies, attempting to understand how gender impacts both the organization theory, and the practice of functioning within bureaucracies. There is also a section that sets forth one feminist critique of bureaucracies.

According to Gortner et al. (1989), there is no such thing as organization theory as a single field. Instead, organization theory is a multileveled study that includes many different types of organization theory, differ

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nityowned, competitive, missiondriven, resultoriented, and customerdriven, certainly mostly things that most citizens would agree were desirable. Change in those directions, however, has been much more problematic. A Feminist Critique of Bureaucracy The feminist critique of bureaucracy is probably most akin to that of Hummel. It also views bureaucracy as dehumanizing, but sees it in terms of standard gender relations. For example, it sees both the bureaucrat and the client as operating in traditionally subordinate female gender roles. Ferguson (1984) concluded her critique of bureaucracies by noting that while women need power in order to change society, they do not need bureaucratic power because it is not changemaking power, but power to reinforce the status quo that is available in bureaucracies. As such, it serves to reinforce traditional gender roles, along with other types of power relations, even when it seems to have a mission to change, or transform, those relationships. A more contemporary feminist critique by Morgen (1994) focused on the way in which feminist health organizations worked against the bureaucratic ideal of impersonal, rolebased, and instrumental social relations. Morgen used interviews, archiv

Category: Psychology - W