Revisiting Class: Thinking from Gender, Race, and Organizations

The study of gender and organizations has been a rapidly developing field in the last 10 years. However, scholars in this area have been slow to integrate race and class into their analyses. One difficulty in accomplishing such an integration is that class has not been sufficiently retheorized in feminist thinking. This article explores such a retheorization using feminist insights that gender, class, and race relations are mutually produced in ongoing processes, that class, like gender and race, is best seen as active practices rather than as classificatory categories, that class should be understood from the standpoints of different class participants, and that “the economic” must be expanded to understand the life situations of women and people of color. I then use this way of thinking about class in developing a framework for looking at inequality within organizations. “Regimes of inequality” are constituted through ordinary organizing processes in which race, class, gender, and other inequality are mutually reproduced. Inequality regimes have certain, but varying characteristics, including different bases of inequality, degrees of visibility, legitimacy, hierarchy, and participation, types of ideologies supporting or challenging inequalities, and organizing mechanisms that maintain and reproduce inequalities.