Work and Organisations

Work and organisations are all around us, and, in many ways, this is where I first became interested in sociology and the social sciences. Working for some years in urban planning, I realised that how things worked in practice, how decisions were made, was very much the result of what happened within and around organisations, and their, at times, strange local cultures – leading onto an interest in some kind of everyday anthropological studies of organisational life. Two key early focuses were on careers and on the relationship between those working in the organisation and members of the public outside – what are sometimes called organisation-client relations.

Then, teaching on ‘Organisations and Groups’ in the 1970s, it wasn’t too long before I saw all of this as intensely gendered. Specifically, working with Wendy Parkin, the gendered construction of work, organisations and bureaucracies became clear. We decided that while gendered divisions of labour and gendered divisions of authority were fairly well researched, sexuality and sexual processes in organisations, especially other than sexual harassment, were under-recognised. This led to the book, ‘Sex’ at ‘Work’: The Power and Paradox of Organisation Sexuality, published in 1987, with a revised and updated version, and a new ending in 1995. The edited book, The Sexuality of Organization, was produced in 1989 with Deborah Sheppard, Peta Tancred-Sherrif and Gibson Burrell. Wendy and I continued working with an interest in not only gender and sexuality, but also violence in and around organisations. This led to various publications, but especially the book, Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Organizations: The Unspoken Forces of Organization Violations, 2001. This book also kindled a concern with the implications of new advanced technologies. In all this work, we were concerned with power, paradox, and what is unspoken and less visible.

In more recent years, four themes have been highlighted. First, working with David Collinson, gender, men, masculinities and managements, including the 1996 book, Men as Managers, Managers as Men, and more recently co-editing also with Kadri Aavik and Anika Thym, The Routledge Handbook on Men, Masculinities and Organizations, 2024. Second, there has been further work with Wendy on age and ageism at work, as in Age at Work: Ambiguous Boundaries of Organizations, Organizing and Ageing, 2021. Third, the rapidly changing impact of new technologies has been a preoccupation, from the book, Information Society and the Workplace: Spaces, Boundaries and Agency, 2004, to more recent work on online violations. Fourth, work and organisations are increasingly transnational in form and content, as is discussed in the section on ‘Spatial, Transnational and Global’.

Jeff Hearn

Work and Organisations

Selected Works