Joan Acker

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Joan Elise Robinson Acker (born March 18, 1924 in Illinois - † June 22, 2016 ) was an American Marxist feminist, sociologist and professor at the University of Oregon .

Joan Acker's main areas of research were gender and organizational sociology and inequality research .

Act

Acker received her first degree in 1946 from Hunter College in New York ( Bachelor ). With a two-year scholarship, she studied social work ( Masters ) at the University of Chicago . In the 1950s, she worked as a social worker and lecturer at Berkeley University . With a grant from the Ford Foundation , she completed her studies in 1967 with a Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. There she conducted her first formal study, The Status of Women at the University of Oregon .

Her first publication appeared in 1973 in the American Journal of Sociology under the title Women and Social Stratification, following on from Gerhard Lenski's Privilege and Power (1966). In 1974, together with Donald Van Houten, she demonstrated, among other things, for the Hawthorne studies that male and female workers were treated completely differently by the study management, especially in terms of recruitment and control. She developed this criticism of traditional organizational studies into a criticism of classical organizational theory: With Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies , she postulated in 1990 that there are no gender-neutral organizational structures , but that there are deeply anchored assumptions about gender in organizations and their structures. It should also be noted that the class status of people does not depend on their gender, race / ethical affiliation, but is primarily determined by profit-oriented decisions of entrepreneurs ("capitalists") and their way of organizing and producing production processes shape.

Influenced by the American civil rights movement , Acker generally pleaded for the consideration of intersectionality in sociological research.

Research stays in Europe in the 1990s took her to Scandinavia, among other places: In Sweden she examined banks and published in the Scandinavian Journal of Management . She was visiting professor at the Universities of Lund (1977), Tampere (1992), Oslo (1997), Stockholm (1999), Adelaide (2000) and at the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education (1990). From 1992 to 1995 she was a member of the American Sociological Association . In the academic year 2000, Joan Acker held the Marie Jahoda guest professorship for international women's studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum . She was co-editor of the journal Economic and Industrial Democracy .

Awards

  • University of Oregon Bobbs Merrill Award in Sociology, 1965
  • Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association , 1989
  • American Sociological Association Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, 1993

Fonts (selection)

  • Women and Social Stratification. A Case of Intellectual Sexism , in: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, 1973, H. 4
  • Doing comparable worth. Gender, Class and Pay Equity , Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1989
  • Hierarchies, jobs, bodies. A Theory of Gendered Organizations , in: Gender & Society, Vol. 4, 1990, No. 2
  • Gendering Organizational Theory , In: Albert J. Mills / Peta Tancred (eds.), Gendering organizational analysis. Sage Publications, Oxford 1992, pp. 248-260
  • The Future of 'Gender and Organizations .: Connections and Boundaries , in: Gender, Work and Organization, Vol. 5, 1998, H. 4
  • Gender, Capitalism and Globalization , in: Critical Sociology, Vol. 30, 2004, H. 1
  • Class Questions. Feminist Answers , Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham 2006
  • Inequality regime. Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations , in: Gender & Society, Vol. 20, 2006, H. 4

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In Memory of Joan Acker: 1924-2016
  2. ↑ Myrtle P. Bell: Professional Insights A Conversation with Joan Acker on her work, motivations, and suggestions for future researchers , in: Equal Opportunity International, Vol. 26, 2007, No. 3, pp. 241–249, p. 242 .
  3. ↑ Joan Acker / Donald Van Houten, Differential Recruitment and Control. The Sex Structuring of Organizations , in: Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 19, 1974, pp. 152-164.
  4. ↑ Joan Acker: Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations , in: Gender & Society, Vol. 4, 1990, No. 2, pp. 139–158.
  5. ↑ Iris Bednarz-Braun, Ulrike Heß-Meining, Migration, Ethnic and Gender: Theoretical Approaches - Research Status - Research Perspectives, Wiesbaden 2004, p. 33.
  6. ^ Myrtle P. Bell, Professional Insights. A Conversation with Joan Acker on her work, motivations, and suggestions for future researchers , in: Equal Opportunity International 2007, Vol. 26, 2007, No. 3, pp. 241–249, here: p. 248.
  7. ↑ Joan Acker, The gender regime of Swedish banks , in: Scandinavian Journal of Management, Vol. 10, 1994, No. 2, pp. 117-130.
personal data
SURNAME Acker, Joan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Acker, Joan Elise Robinson (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Illinois
DATE OF DEATH June 22, 2016