Imagining gender research: violence, masculinity, and the shop floor

Abstract

This paper starts by arguing that visual data enriches gender research in management and organizations. Through an analysis of drawings by factory shop-floor workers, we show that organizational climate is interwoven with gender dynamics, that shop-floor masculinity is not necessarily heterosexual, and that masculinity in the shop-floor context includes oppression as an element of man's symbolic violence against man. We discuss the usefulness of this type of data in gender research in organizational analysis and explore the ways in which gender violence is expressed in organizations. Moreover, the drawings gathered at a newspaper printing site located in the North of England provide a means of showing the relationship between gender violence and the exercise of masculinities, sexuality and oppression. We conclude that the exercise of hegemonic masculinity is associated not only with sexuality but also with the oppression of subaltern enactments of masculinity.