Ames, Lynda JAuthor InformationView Profile. NWSA Journal; Baltimore Vol. 8, Iss. 2, (Summer 1996): 37.
For women, two of the most salient features of the modern world of paid labor are bureaucratized workplaces and a sex-segregated labor market. Most women work in jobs predominantly held by women, most of which are near the bottom of organizations characterized by hierarchy and compartmentalization. These two features of women's jobs are the result of specific forces of domination and oppression, and have consequences for the workplace activities of women.
Jobs at the bottom of bureaucratic hierarchies give incumbents little or no power over their work, or autonomy, or much opportunity to move up in the organization or change the conditions of the work. As women's work, too, jobs are organizationally and culturally defined as relatively unskilled and are consequently demeaned in terms of both pay and respect. Women working in these female-dominated, low-level jobs experience the weight of bureaucratic power and the devaluation of their work on a daily basis. Their day-to-day activities, in response to those conditions, may be both accommodating and contrary to those conditions.
In this paper, I will use the results of a participant-observation study to analyze both the contrary and the accommodating practices of a small group of women secretaries in a large, public bureaucracy. I seek to demonstrate that the structures of domination are seen and resisted by the secretaries, and yet taken for granted and consented to, indeed even constructed by them. The analysis will highlight oppression in women's bureaucratic work.
Women's Work in a Bureaucracy
The work experiences of secretaries reflect two kinds of domination: gender domination and bureaucratic domination. These two dominations are not, though, experienced separately. Bureaucracies were invented as systems of control over workers (Edwards) but were so developed in a fundamentally, irreducibly gendered way (Acker, "Hierarchies"; Young, Justice; Crompton and Jones).
The archetypal secretary is assumed to be female, and specific duties and expectations are derived from that assumption, one based on certain cultural understandings of women (Acker "Hierarchies"; Pringle; Reskin and Padavic). Secretarial positions are not empty places coincidentally filled by women; they were designed for women. Being a secretaryinvolves supporting the work of others, taking care of others in terms of scheduling, preparing, and cleaning up after them (Pringle; Reskin and Padavic). Being a good secretary requires more than just technical competence; it requires a "sunny" disposition and "cooperative" attitude, and it often requires being "sexy" or "attractive" (Pringle; Gaskell; Frye). The job of secretary is women's work by virtue of women's "essential" nature (Needleman and Nelson).
Inherent in that job is an organizationally subordinate work status-the secretary supports someone who is assumed to do the "real" work and who has supervisory control over her. A secretary's own work is deemed thereby relatively skill-less (Crompton and Jones; Gaskell). Further, the work of any subordinate, including secretaries, is defined and enforced by organizational superiors. The secretary herself has little voice in how the work is designed; she is merely expected to execute already defined tasks.
Professional jobs, where "real" work is done, are designed with the assumption that incumbents are men (Pringle; Gaskell; Young, Justice). The job of secretary was, in many ways, designed on the model of wife; the secretary was to be an office wife to a male professional (MacKinnon; Pringle). This model carries over even when the professionals are women, because the abstract jobs of both secretary and professional, subordinate and superior, were constructed under specific, gendered presumptions (Acker, "Hierarchies"; Pringle). Professional jobs, in the abstract, assume a male incumbent, regardless of any actual incumbent, just as secretarial positions assume a female incumbent. Thus it is the structure of gendered bureaucracy, not the specific behavior of the individuals involved, that provides for the domination and oppression of secretaries.
Domination, according to Iris Young, results where there are "institutional constraint[s] on self-determination" (Justice 37). Bureaucracies are hierarchical structures of authority in which there is a separation between task-defining work and task-executing work. The superior status is attached to task-defining work, the work of professionals. Such a separation "enacts domination" (ibid. 37) by removing or at least limiting the possibility of self-determination on the part of subordinates. Because of this separation, moreover, subordinates lack the opportunity to fully develop their abilities, a situation that leads to the exploitation and powerlessness of workers and to a kind of cultural imperialism. This, Young argues, constitutes oppression.
Where there is oppression, according to Young (Justice; "Ideal"), there is often the self-serving denial of difference by elites. This "desire for social wholeness" overlooks or downplays real differences in opportunities for categories of people to "learn and use satisfying and expansive skills" ("Ideal" 234). Liberation and resistance movements involve explicit acknowledgment of such differences.
And yet, while difference is rhetorically denied, elites also make differences matter very much. When subordinates resist oppression, in particular, "dominants respond...by citing the group differences that supposedly warrant different treatment" (Reskin; see also Acker, "Hierarchies"). Differing opportunity structures are denied, while differing outcomes are emphasized and deemed deserved.
Where there is oppression and domination, there is likely to be resistance (Young, Justice; Bookman and Morgen), and where there is resistance, there is reaction and the attempt to restore elite standing. In a bureaucratic setting, we might therefore expect resistance on the part of secretaries -- resistance to the lack of self-determination entailed in their jobs and resistance to the systemic prevention of self-development. One way of resisting might be for subordinates to explicate the differences that the elites rhetorically deny, to make clear the disctinctions that affect the subordinates' lives. We might also expect to observe attempts to exercise some control over task definition and attempts at self-development. Where these `resistances occur, we might expect superiors to articulate clearly why subordinates are not entitled to engage in such attempts and to devise new ways of constricting their employees' opportunities.
In this paper, I will show precisely such attempts at resistance and their consequences. I have referred to subordinates' acts of resistance as "contrarieties." The daily activities I describe are contrary to the expectations of individual professionals, as they also are contrary to the underlying assumptions of the structures of the bureaucracy. By using the term "contrarieties," I intend to emphasize that contrariness in contrast to the instances of consent I also describe. I also intend to contrast secretarial acts of resistance to the openly reconstructive movements described by Young and others (see Bookman and Morgen). The events I report are not instances of conscious revolt, but they are contrary; they are contrarieties. As such, they constitute important, if largely unexamined, challenges to the dominations experienced by women in a bureaucracy.
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