Gender, Race, and the Restructuring of Work: Organizational and Institutional Perspectives

Author: Leslie McCall

Publication: The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization. Chapter 4, pp. 74-94

Editors: Stephen Ackroyd, Rosemary Batt, Paul Thompson, and Pamela Tobert 

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Date: May 2006

Abstract: 

This article builds on organizational and institutional approaches to inequality that highlight the substantial degree of variation in inequality across jobs, occupations, industries, firms, regions, and countries that cannot be attributed to human capital differences alone. It begins with a theoretical review of organizational and institutional theories of gender and racial inequality, follows with a brief description of the new context of economic restructuring, and then focuses on the gendered and racialized aspects of economic restructuring and organization-level restructuring. It also examines the institutional differences across advanced industrial countries that have mediated the terms of women’s economic incorporation during this period. While much of the existing empirical and theoretical literature, this article discusses draws on the United States. Given existing strengths and weaknesses of the literature, the primary focus of this article is on gender, and it examines race as it intersects with gender.

Link: Gender, Race, and the Restructuring of Work: Organizational and Institutional Perspectives