Casting the Other

Casting the Other: Maintaining Gender Inequalities in the Workplace focuses on the production and maintenance of gender inequalities in organizations. By emphasizing 'difference' as something to be managed many organizations institute the 'problem of difference', and while orgainzations pay lip-service to ideas of equality, their day-to-day practices may be unchanged and unchallenged. Discrimination of various groups such as women, immigrants and older people continues and its dynamics remain unclear, largely because of the difficulties of studying it in the field. Additionally, various programs aimed at removing inequality, such as gender equality of managing diversity programs, may actually promote it by making differences visible and stabilizing them. Management, under these circumstances, comes to refer to the management of appearances which take the place of more radical acts to change the 'status quo'.

Barbara Czarniawska is the Skandia Chair of Management at the Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Gothenburg University. She is the co-editor of the journal Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies and is the book editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Management. Heather Hopfl is Head of the School of Operations Analysis and Human Resource Management at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle.

Casting the Other: Introduction, Barbara Czarniawska and Heather Hopfl 1. How do statistical aggregates work? About the individual and organizational effects of general classifications, Marja Gastelaarsn 2. Gender order and disorder: the articulation of women and disorder as resources in the establishment of new medical practices, Karin Fernler 3. The construction of the female entrepreneur as the Other, Helene Jonson Ahl 4. Keeping the veil of otherness: practising disconnection, Valerie Fournier 5. Construction of gender in corporations, Ulla Eriksson-Zetterquist 6. Individual vs. collective action: gender inequality and women's action strategies in German and Swedish Business firms, Hildegard Theobald 7. Gender-neutral gender and denial of the difference, Paivi Korvajarvi 8. The Black Engel: women from the ruins of the National Board of Building, Leena Erasaari 9. The business case for diversity and the 'Iron Cage', Deborah R. Litvin 10. Casting the native subject: ethnographic practice and the (re)production of difference, Pushkala Prasad and Anshuman Prasad