Sex, gender, and sexual orientation  (Page 2/7)

In order to “get ahead” in corporate America, it is necessary to have a wife who is also bound to the company. Status differences among categories of employees are formalized by the location of one’s office, where and with whom one eats lunch, the type of office furniture one has, whether one was exempt (salaried) or non-exempt (hourly), unofficially prescribed dress codes dependent upon one’s position. Companies have their own vocabulary or corporate jargon containing hundreds of specialized words and phrases. Impersonality, emotional distance, rationality, team membership, collaboration, consensus, and cooperation are highly prized personal qualities. Ibid. p. 41 .

Conformity in appearance—not merely the way one dresses but the complete look—matters because

leaders in a variety of situations are likely to show preference for socially similar subordinates and help them get ahead.

[in] conditions of uncertainty . . . people fall back on social bases for [determining whom to]trust.

the greater the uncertainty, the greater the pressures for those who have to trust each other to form a homogeneous group.

we don't know how to manage these giant structures; and I suspect no one does. They are like dinosaurs, lumbering on of their own accord, even if they are no longer functional

those on management ladders . . . planned their career . . . though all of life could be encapsulated within the corporation.

corporations . . . create organizational loyalty by ensuring that for its most highly paid members the corporation represents the only enduring set of social bonds other than the immediate family. And the family, too—at least the wife—can be drawn in.

The glass ceiling for women and minorities is a structural problem created by the corporate culture, the wider socioeconomic environment, and the lack of complete bureaucratization and routinization—laws and rules are required in order to overcome the problem—because

the more closed the circle, the more difficult it is for ‘outsiders’ to break in. . . . The more closed the circle, the more difficult it is to share power when the time comes, as it inevitably must . . . corporations must grapple with the problem of how to reduce pressures for social conformity in their top jobs

if [women] were evaluated on non-utilitarian grounds, they were also expected to accept non-utilitarian rewards. . . . Theorists have pointed out that the interstitial position occupied by some white-collar workers makes them manipulable by esteem and prestige symbols, by normative rather than material rewards

[female employees are] locked into self-perpetuating, self-defeating cycles in which job and opportunity structure encourage personal orientations that reinforce low pay and low mobility, and perpetuate the original job structure. The fact that such jobs [are]held almost entirely by women also reinforces limited and stereotyped views of the ‘nature’ of women at work.