Critical review

Scales, spaces and gendered di�erences: a comment on gender cultures

Linda McDowell

Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK

Received 20 April 1999

1. The politics of commenting

Andrew JonesÕ paper in a recent issue of Geoforum(Jones, 1999) about the assumptions about gender thatin¯uence recruitment to merchantbanking occupationsdrew heavily on my own work in the same area(McDowell, 1997). Replying to such a paper ± one thatboth draws on and develops oneÕs own work ± is alwaysa pleasure. However, in this case the pleasure is bothcomplex and somewhat muted as a network of powerconnects the two of us. Andrew Jones is a graduatestudent who is now working in the same department asme. However, the work which was the basis of his paperÔ(Re)producing gender culturesÕ was undertaken inBristol for a MasterÕs degree. It was also submitted forpublication without comment from me, so denying methe opportunity to reply to the points raised therein atthe same time as the paper appeared. While I am ratheruncomfortable commenting publicly, it does seemworthwhile initiating a debate that others may join asthe paper raises some important issues and suggests aninteresting avenue of further work on multi-site andmulti-national organisations. However, I also want tosuggest here that Jones not only misreads my work onthe cultures of merchantbanking but that his conceptu-alisation of gender is insu�ciently nuanced in its con-tinued reliance on a binary distinction betweenmasculinity and femininity.

2. Gender cultures

In the ®rst part of his paper, Jones claims that heo�ers Ôa spatially aware epistemologyÕ as the basis for atheoretical approach to organisational gender relations.In the development of this purportedly new approach,Jones o�ers the notion of gender culture(s) as his centralconcept. However, apart from arguing that gender mustbe theorised through the daily social practices of or-ganisations ± an argument I certainly agree with, but

which I suggest is not su�cient in developing an un-derstanding of how gender works at work ± I remainunclear from the discussion in the paper quite what theconcept consists of and how it furthers an understandingof the complexity of the social construction of gendereddi�erences. In my book (McDowell, 1997) I argued thatunderstanding the gendered division of labour in in-dustrial economies demands a multi-scale/multi-theo-retical approach. Thus I suggested that an approachwhich combined economic analysis of industrial change,an understanding of the iconography of urban andworkplace space, and explorations of how sexuality,power and desire in¯uence daily social practices withinorganisations, as well as an exploration of their speci®chistories might provide a more critical understanding ofthe ways in which the City was being a�ected by de-regulation and globalisation in the early 1990s thanapproaches with a less comprehensive focus. I was alsocareful to emphasise that the interconnections, and notthe separation as JonesÕ asserts ± of processes at di�erentspatial scales must be addressed. Indeed, I was rathersurprised to be told by Jones that my Ôapproach makes itdi�cult to theorise the gender relations of a given bank(or organisation) (p. 456, original emphasis), as Ithought I had demonstrated exactly how useful it is inundertaking precisely this task. It also seems odd thatJones feels able to argue this when his own research isbased not on interviews within a range of banks to ex-plore the particular nature of their gender cultures butrather interviews with applicants for banking positions.I shall return to the limitations of his method and hissample in a moment.

Jones de®nes gender culture/s (he slips between thesingular and plural use which makes it di�cult to decidewhether a singular or multiple gender cultures arecommon in organisations) as an epistemological toolwhich takes Ôthe organisation itself seriously: the orga-nisation is important both as a structure which shapes adistinct environment of gender relations and also aspace for the playing out of these relationsÕ (1995,

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p. 453). Who could object to this claim, although as Ihave suggested it is important to recognise that thegender relations played out in an organisational spaceare only partially constituted therein, as, in fact, Jonesdoes note later in his paper. Indeed he uses the notion ofpre-organisational gender cultures to capture the ideathat gender relations are constructed in many sites, andare both fragmented and ¯uid. As I argued in my book,through a reliance on the concept of performance,bankers themselves have a strong sense of their workand non-workplace gendered identities. But the culturesof workspaces themselves are neither singular, ®xed norsolely constituted therein and I believe that an analyticalapproach that con®nes itself to the organisation cannotreveal the complexity of workplace cultures.

This criticism is partially anticipated in JonesÕ paper.He recognises that the space of an organisation does notparallel a workplace: Ôorganisations need to be under-stood at a range of scales from trans-national employeenetworks to the hyper-real ÔspacesÕ of teleconferencingand e-mailÕ (p. 453). Thus, as Jones unfortunately doesnot go on to explore empirically, organisations are dif-ferentially a�ected by, and a�ect a multitude of socialprocesses and spatial interactions at di�erent spatialscales from the intensely local interpersonal exchangeson the Ôshop ¯oorÕ as it were to the inter-national spacesof regulatory control. But here, in a general sense, Ithink the parallels between our approaches are clear andclose. We might also note in passing, as I documented inmy research, that di�erent gender cultures (JonesÕ pre-ferred term), or ways of doing gender (my term) varybetween these spaces, as well as in di�erent parts of asingle workplace ± the back o�ces and front arenas ofbanks are a good example, and so it is di�cult to es-tablish a single gender culture that characterises an en-tire organisation. However, in his interesting discussionof the organisation as a multi-place space, I think JonesÕpaper has the potential to stimulate interesting newwork on organisations. I also made a claim for the im-portance of a geographical perspective in a suggestionthat Ôorganisational sociology might be strengthened ifmore attention was given to where things take place aswell as how they doÕ (McDowell, 1997, p. 5, originalemphasis) but I did not develop the notion that Jonesintroduces here of multi-place organisations. This raisesinteresting questions about how gender cultures are re-produced within and between speci®c organisationalsites, especially if the organisation is located in severalnational spaces.

3. The complex constitution of di�erence

I also have a problem with the theoretical status ofthe term gender culture as Jones uses it in his paper. Heasserts that it is an epistemology but its status seems to

me to be more of an empirical regularity whose existenceand e�ects have to be established by careful investiga-tion. Further, as feminist scholars have argued at length,the assertion of the signi®cance of a binary gender dif-ference is insu�cient. Gender, power and sexuality areconnected to class and racial divisions in complex ways,which construct and intercut gender divisions. Indeed,as Jones approvingly notes, I suggested that womenÕsposition in banking is Ôthe outcome of the intersection ofa range of diverse factorsÕ which have to be investigatedin order to show how they di�erentially position menand women in particular ways. In other words, andparaphrasing Joan Scott again here, as I often haveelsewhere, starting with an assumption of gendered in-equality, that women as workers are inevitably and al-ways disadvantaged, is to Ôstart the story too lateÕ (Scott,1988 p. 32). Gender inequality has to be demonstrated,not taken for granted, and it is cross-cut by other socialdivisions. As Pringle (1989, 1998) has so vividly docu-mented in her studies of secretaries and doctors, and as Ifound among banking employees, class-based profes-sional alliances may create power inequalities betweengroups of women employees, rather than gender-basedalliances among them. Indeed, in my research I foundthat the growing recruitment of women to the City in theearly 1990s was one way in which older class patterns ofdominance were being reinforced. Banks were, in otherwords, recruiting the sisters of the men whom they hadalways preferred rather than casting their nets morewidely. JonesÕ sample ± based on recruitment in Cam-bridge and Bristol ± hardly allows him to assess theextent of diversity among potential employees in theCity.

Jones also underplays the crucial argument in mybook about the construction of multiple genderedidentities in particular organisations. In an attempt tochallenge the uniformity or essentialism in claims thatorganisations such as merchant banks are masculinist,and the related claims that women have to adopt amasculinist performance to succeed therein. I demon-strated that there are several ways of doing femininity(and masculinity) ± some of which seem to be moresuccessful than others. Thus I was careful to evaluate therelative position of women at di�erent stages in theircareers and to show, counter to a great deal of thegender and organisational literature, that what seemedat ®rst sight to be quintessentially feminine strategieswere in fact associated with organisational status andconventional measures of success. And as I was alsocareful to show, gender, class and ethnicity/nationalidentities are complex sets of interconnected relation-ships which are mutually constituted and as such mustbe analysed in combination if multiple patterns of rel-ative inequality are to be revealed. One of the things Ifound most intriguing among the men and womenwhom I interviewed was the e�ect that non-British

232 L. McDowell / Geoforum 30 (1999) 231±233

nationality seemed to have on womenÕs success in thethree banks in which I interviewed.

4. Methodological questions

Turning to the empirical section of JonesÕ paper,there he vividly illustrates some of the social variationsthat now seem to exist among applicants to city ®rms.However, there are insu�cient details of the nature ofhis sample to allow readers to actually evaluate hisconclusions. Unless we are able to compare the char-acteristics of applicants who were accepted by ®nancialinstitutions with those who were not, it is hard to assesshis claims about the changing class/gender compositionof recruits. There are few details in the paper of eitherthe banks or the other ®nancial organisations to whichhis sample applied. Are their responses based on acombination of several interviews or just one? Did theyexperience di�erent treatments in di�erent places? Werethey interviewed at their university, in a neutral spaceduring a milk round or in the organisation? Were theyinterviewed more than once by the same potential em-ployee? As I demonstrated in Capital Culture there isconsiderable variation between banks in their cultureand in the type of employees they are searching for to®ll di�erent positions in the organisation. Thus, forexample, one of three banks in which I interviewed hada far more meritocratic recruitment policy than theother two. Jones supported his applicant sample by in-terviews with recruiters from two banks: the ®rst jointlyowned by British and Dutch capital. Unfortunately,details about the ownership of the second of the twobanks are not provided, nor details of whether the

students whom he interviewed had applied to either orboth of these banks. So, while JonesÕ ®ndings are in-teresting and perhaps tell us something about the waysin which the City was changing in the 1990s (I did myinterviews in 1992 and 1993 and Jones in 1996), I amnot sure that they are su�cient to argue that I was toopessimistic (although I wish I had been). After all, mysample included men and women then workingthroughout the entire occupational hierarchy in threebanks several years after the initial impact of ÔBig BangÕ,not just of potential recruits in one relatively buoyantyear. A wonderful follow-up study that either AndrewJones or I should consider ± indeed perhaps we shoulddo it together, and with Thrift and Leyshon too whohave also made various claims about the social com-position and organisational cultures of banks ± is aninvestigation of the class and gender impact of em-ployment decline in the City in the late 1990s. It is oftenin a recession, and the City was just emerging from aset-back in 1992, that the lineaments of organisationalcultures become brutally clear. As the City seems poisedon the brink of job losses again, such a study would betimely.

References

Jones, A., 1999. (Re)producing gender cultures. Geoforum 29, 451±74 .

McDowell, L., 1997. Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City.

Blackwell, Oxford, 1997.

Pringle, R., 1989. Secretaries Talk. Verso, London, 1989.

Pringle, R., 1998. Sex and Medicine: Gender. Power and Authority in

the Medical Profession. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Scott, J., 1988. Deconstructing equality versus di�erence: the uses

of post structuralist theory for feminism. Feminist Studies 14,

33±50.

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