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 multi leveled study that includes many different types of organization theory, differentiated at three levels. The authors note that theories differ in subject matter, in explanatory form, and in terms of purposes.
For example, they note that some organization theorists focus on the individual, while others look at groups or the organization as a whole. There are, they note, four main subject areas in organization research, which can be identified as (1) theories of individual and group behavior, (2) theories of organization structure, (3) theories of organizational processes, and (4) gl...