JOAN ACKER

Revisiting Class: Thinking

from Gender, Race, and
Organizations

Abstract
The study of gender and organizations has been a rapidly develop-
ing field in the last 10 years. However, scholars in this area have
been slow to integrate race and class into their analyses. One diffi-
culty in accomplishing such an integration is that class has not been
sufficiently retheorized in feminist thinking. This article explores
such a retheorization using feminist insights that gender, class, and
race relations are mutually produced in ongoing processes, that
class, like gender and race, is best seen as active practices rather
than as classificatory categories, that class should be understood
from the standpoints of different class participants, and that "the
economic" must be expanded to understand the life situations of
women and people of color. I then use this way of thinking about
class in developing a framework for looking at inequality within
organizations. "Regimes of inequality" are constituted through or-
dinary organizing processes in which race, class, gender, and other
inequality are mutually reproduced. Inequality regimes have cer-
tain, but varying characteristics, including different bases of in-
equality, degrees of visibility, legitimacy, hierarchy, and participa-
tion, types of ideologies supporting or challenging inequalities, and
organizing mechanisms that maintain and reproduce inequalities.

The study of gender and organizations, a relatively new focus

in feminist social science, has expanded rapidly in the last ten years.

Social Politics Summer 2000

© 2000 Oxford Universky Press

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 Revisiting Class • 193

However, scholars in this field have not responded very energetically

to the strong argument that feminists must not only examine gender
patterns in social life, but must also bring class and race into the
analysis in order to give a full account of the complexities of individ-
ual experiences and social structures. This argument has been widely
accepted among feminist scholars since the 1980s when feminist
writers and academics who were also women of color or Third
World women began pointing out that most feminist scholarship was
actually about White, middle class, heterosexual women, and conse-
quently ignored the lives of women in other class and race situations
(e.g., Hooks 1984; Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982). The validity of this
claim was accepted by many feminist scholars, who then expressed
the commitment to studying "gender, class, and race." But it was
easier to make the pledge than to carry it out in a thorough way.
Researchers could add women of color to a sample, study in depth
the experiences of minority or working class women, or analyze the
intersections of gender, class, and race in particular empirical/histori-
cal cases, but a conceptual integration of "gender, class, and race"
was more difficult to achieve. Considerable progress has been made
in theoretically bringing together gender, class, and race (e.g., Collins
1990, 1995; Crenshaw 1995; Glenn 1999). However, a major prob-
lem persists: class, although regularly invoked as one of the necessary
three, has not been retheorized in a way that facilitates its use in a
combined analysis (Acker 1999). This has particularly serious impli-
cations for the study of organizations because class-based inequalities
affect organizational processes and important aspects of class rela-
tions originate in these processes.
In this paper I first look at some of the reasons that class has been
relatively neglected by feminist scholars. Then I examine some ways
I proposed earlier (Acker 1999) in which feminist insights about gen-
der and race could be used to rethink class, with a focus on bringing
class relations into our understanding of gender and work organiza-
tions. Finally, I propose an intellectual strategy, the concept of re-
gimes of inequality, for studying class and its intersections with gen-
der and race in the ongoing life of work organizations.

Why Many Feminists Forgot About Class

Class was the central concept for understanding structurally based
inequalities at the time that the present feminist movement emerged
in the late 1960s. However, class theories, whether Marxist, struc-
tural-functional, or occupational/categorical, could not account for
the economic and occupational disadvantages that women suffered
in comparison with men in the same class positions. Feminist theo-

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rists attempted to modify male-centered class concepts, hoping to

more adequately account for women's subordination within what
were seen as "general" theories of societal processes. None of these
attempts were wholly successful; components of women's class expe-
riences such as sex segregation of jobs, the gender-based wage gap,
and the assignment to women of unpaid caring labor could not be
attributed solely to class processes such as capitalist exploitation.
Class concepts, it became clear, were modeled on social reality as
seen from male perspectives and could not be simply reshaped to
take into account female reality (Acker 1980; 1999; Hartsock 1983;
Sokoloff 1980). Massive amounts of research were being done on
sex segregation, the gendered wage gap, practices of discrimination,
and women's experiences in the labor force, workplace, and home,
but this empirical work did not result in new theorizing about class.
Efforts to theorize class within a gender perspective declined as schol-
ars were dissatisfied with the results, and debates over the issues al-
most disappeared by the mid-1980s (Barrett and Phillips 1992;
Beechey 1987). Some discussions of conceptual issues and efforts to
formulate new ways of seeing class continued (e.g., Glucksman 1995;
Gottfried 1998; Pollert 1996), but these were no longer the heated
debates in feminist scholarship, nor did they resolve the difficulties.
This meant that the old conceptual formulations that rendered
women invisible and that failed to explain different gender situations
within class societies persisted.
When feminists began trying t6 put together gender, race, and
class, the available concept of class was one that had never been
successfully revised from a feminist perspective (Acker 1999). In ad-
dition, when feminist scholars began to develop gender analyses of
organizations, the concept of class was in deep eclipse in feminist
work. Thus the new research and theory on gender and organizations
developed without much attention to class.
A number of factors contributed to feminists' forgetting about
class. First, the debate had run into a dead end. There was not much
more to say. Some of the impasse can be attributed to the type of
discourse into which feminists had tried to enter: Marxist feminists
had, on the whole, attempted to modify the structural Marxisms that
were predominant among intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. These
were highly abstract theoretical formulations positing relations
among conceptual categories in which it was difficult to see any hu-
man agency or any concrete, embodied practices involved in making
structures (e.g., Wright 1985). Given that these abstractions con-
tained an implicit male point of departure and assumptions about
men's working lives (see, e.g., Hartsock 1983), inserting women and,
for example, unpaid labor undermined these assumptions and threat-

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 Revisiting Class • 195

ened to upset the systematic formulations themselves. An additional

problem was, however, that class theory itself was in a crisis, or so
numerous male writers had been claiming since the early 1970s (e.g.,
Giddens 1973). The world of production and capitalist relations was
changing as the old industrial working class began to decline and
the heavily female service sector rapidly expanded. The old theories
seemed inadequate for representing these changes. Anxiety over the
adequacy of class analysis does not seem to be directly reflected in
feminist discussions, but I think that it contributed to "forgetting."
The political-economic climate also contributed to forgetting
about class. In the 1980s, as we all know, there was a shifting of
influence and power away from working class-based interests and
toward interests allied with big capital and big organizations. Not
that capital had ever been less powerful than labor, but with the
Reagan era in the United States, neoliberal economics, and the cele-
bration of free-market capitalism, backed by antilabor legislation,
there emerged the powerful argument that capitalism is "the only
way." Class relations embedded in capitalist processes, it followed,
were part of "the only way." Class relations, including inequality
and exploitation, as intrinsic to the fundamental and necessary or-
ganization of society, became more legitimate than ever, while gen-
der- and race-based inequalities, at least in public law and public
discourse, were illegitimate. Discussions of class, particularly from a
Marxist or working class perspective, began to be cast as irrelevant.
What was relevant was how to organize production in the most effi-
cient ways, how to tap the knowledge and creativity of employees,
how to use new technologies to the fullest, all in order to win the
competitive battles on the world economic stage. The collapse of the
Soviet Union and of socialism there and in the eastern European
countries furthered the marginalization and irrelevance of class theo-
ries linked to socialist discourses. To talk about class was no longer
cutting edge, it was old-fashioned. Attacks on class exploitation were
out of step. In this climate, many scholars began to develop feminist
thinking in other directions, including toward analyses of culture and
the ways in which cultural constructions contributed to the repro-
duction of exclusions and oppressions based on gender, race, ethnic-
ity, sexualities, etc. This development was also part of the intellectual
scene as "gender and organizations" began to emerge as a distinct
domain of feminist attention.
Class relations are, however, still in existence. Economic power,
exploitation, and capital accumulation have not disappeared, but are
the dominant reality as globalization of production and finance capi-
tal has accelerated. Changes in class relations, and gender and race
relations as well, are related to changes in production, economic or-

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ganization, and technologies. Changes in class relations are also re-

lated to restructuring and downsizing of welfare states that accom-
pany these economic alterations. Therefore understanding class is as
essential as ever for understanding societal problems and individual
fates, including the often differing fates of women and men. Large
organizations, both private and public, are the major players in
global economic processes, or in the "new world order." Top manag-
ers' decisions help to shape class relations, including increasing ine-
qualities everywhere, as they also shape competitive strength and
global financial markets. Looking at class processes within and be-
tween organizations is thus essential for understanding the function-
ing of organizations as well as understanding the often gendered out-
comes of organizational changes for managers and other employees.
However, a concept of class that is still implicitly built on assump-
tions about (usually white) men's working lives is inadequate for the
task. In the next section I explore the possibilities for rethinking class
using feminist insights, focusing on class processes as these occur
within organizations, with the caveat that class processes in organi-
zations also shape class relations in general, between and outside
organizations.

Rethinking Class from a Feminist Perspective

My rethinking of class is rooted in a much-modified Marxist un-
derstanding of class: "class" refers to economic, including produc-
tion and distribution, relations of exploitation, power, dominance,
and subordination that produce inequalities and contradictory inter-
ests. Basic class processes take place within work organizations (Per-
row 1991), although mainstream organizational theorists do not talk
about organizations in the language of class. The wage relation, fun-
damental to understanding class in Marxist theory, is a relation
structured primarily, although not entirely, within organizations.
Organizational hierarchies constitute and replicate dominance-sub-
ordination relations that are characteristic of class. Of course, bu-
reaucratic hierarchies do not always and perfectly replicate class hier-
archies of societies as wholes. Relatively small organizations, for
example, may be primarily middle and working class in composition.
However, on the whole, much of what is designated as "class pro-
cesses" actually occurs in formally organized social entities and can
be usefully studied in those contexts. In addition, organizational de-
cisions taken in one location often shape class (and gender and race)
relations in other locations. For example, decisions by garment man-
ufacturers to relocate production to low-wage countries, and to sepa-
rate design and marketing from production, had class, race, and gen-

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 Revisiting Class • 197

der impacts in U.S. communities and in the countries to which

manufacturing was moved.
Certain feminist insights that originate in our attempts to compre-
hend gender can help in rethinking class. These are, first, that class,
gender, and race are interrelated in practice; class relations are
formed in and through processes that also form gender and race rela-
tions. Second, class is best understood as social relations constructed
through active practices, not as categories or classifications of people
according to socioeconomic characteristics or occupational status.
Third, the complexity of class processes come into view when we
study them from the viewpoints of different participants within or-
ganizations. Finally, we need to expand the notion of "the eco-
nomic" in order to develop a concept of class that can encompass
the economic situations of white women and people of color, as well
as contemporary changes in world class structures.

Class, Gender, and Race as Interrelated and

Mutually Constituted
Feminists have for some time recognized that the diversity of
women's experiences cannot be captured by looking only at gender:
at least class and race must be part of the analysis. Class, race, and
gender interconnections can be traced in the historical development
of contemporary capitalism and the organizations through which it
functions; these interconnections occur both within and between par-
ticular states and nations. The same concrete historical processes pro-
duced the particular forms of what we now call class, race, and gen-
der. For example, the slave trade between emerging capitalist powers
was integral to the early development of capitalism. Slavery consti-
tuted the conditions of exploitation and oppression in which the lives
of women and men, both black and white, in the United States were
constructed as different and unequal. Slavery was not the only eco-
nomic organizational form that shaped race, gender, and class rela-
tions, but it continues to be a salient one. Slavery was not a mass
of free-floating relations, it was organized and occurred within and
between organizations as they engaged in production and trade.
The consequences of this history can be seen today in the ways in
which class relations in the United States are patterned along lines of
gender and race. Such patterns continue, although white women and
people of color have begun to enter organizational positions from
which they were entirely excluded previously. For example, the "rul-
ing class" within large organizations is still primarily a class of white
men, while certain sectors of the "working class" are almost entirely
female—clerical workers, cashiers, waitresses—or are almost en-
tirely white and male—skilled trades. Racial patterning of class divi-

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sions in work organizations persist, with the exclusion of people of

color from certain jobs and positions or their segregation at the bot-
tom of organizational hierarchies.
Class, race, and gender patterns are not just the shards of history,
but are continually created and re-created in today's organizations,
as people are hired, promoted, or fired, as wages are set, and as
managers, supervisors, and workers organize and execute their daily
tasks (Acker 1990). Variations in these patterns are great. In some
cases, as in an advertising agency studied by Alvesson (1993), class
lines are identical with gender lines: all the professionals were men
and all the secretaries were young and pretty women. In other cases,
such as a college that I and Don Van Houten (Acker and Van Houten
1999) recently studied, class lines were not identical with gender divi-
sions. Women were well represented at the upper levels, while cleri-
cal workers were almost entirely women and skilled blue collar
workers were almost entirely men. In both these organizations, peo-
ple of color were excluded, as almost all the employees were white
northern Europeans or Americans. White racial privilege guaranteed
that in these organizations the jobs, all of which were relatively desir-
able, were filled by white people.
The interweaving of gender, race, and class is more fundamental
than the persistent distributions of men and women, white people,
and people of color, into particular class-related jobs or positions,
for the creation of such positions was frequently through processes
in which gender and/or racial vulnerabilities and assumptions played
a part. For example, many light assembly jobs appear to have been
created for women because women were an available and low-paid
labor force and because employers believed that women with their
"nimble fingers" were better suited than men for the work. On the
other hand, as Reskin and Roos (1990) argue, employers may start
to hire women into men's jobs for essentially class-related reasons
(e.g., new technology facilitates the lowering of wages in particular
jobs and women are more willing than men to take them) and then
begin to define these positions as "women's jobs." In some instances,
class relations appear to be gender or race relations; the boss-secre-
tary relation is both a class and gender relation. Or the relationship
between the medical professional and the worker who cleans the
floors in the hospital is very often both a class and a race relation.
Class relations are also constituted in gender and racial images of
the organization and the identities of men and women as organiza-
tional participants. White working class masculinity has been defined
in terms of earning a living wage, putting in a fair day's labor, and
supporting one's family. Working class solidarity has been, and
probably still is, organized around male bonding and these notions

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of male responsibility. At the other end of the class structure, images

of masculinity as competitive, aggressive, and relentlessly focused on
individual success have justified the dominance of particular hege-
monic masculinities (Connell 1987) as well as the actions of organi-
zations headed by men who at least seem to embody these virtues.
While women and men of color now occasionally fill such positions,
some evidence exists that their modes of action are congruent with
the demands of hegemonic masculinity, incorporated into the de-
mands of organizational performance (Wajcman 1998).
The wage relation itself, which is at the core of class as conven-
tionally defined, can be seen as "gendered." The notion that the
wage relation is a gender-neutral contract between employer and em-
ployee is, as Carole Pateman (1988) has argued, based on the idea
that labor power can be separated from the self and sold as the indi-
vidual's property. But this idea depends on the concept of the ab-
stract individual of liberal theory, an individual who of necessity has
no body if he is to represent a generalized human being. That individ-
ual is, in the genesis of the concept, a man. "When the individual
has a female body, problems of separation of the self from the body's
ability to labor become evident, particularly when we consider that
one meaning of to labor is to give birth. If we can argue that labor
power cannot really be separated from the embodied self, then what
we sell in the wage contract is that body, that self. The embodied
self is always gendered, thus the wage relation, too, is gendered"
(Acker 1999, 57).

Class Relations as Active Organizational Practices

Feminist scholars recognized at least 15 years ago that to under-
stand gender it was necessary to study the concrete activities of
women and men, activities through which differences are created and
inequalities maintained. Taking a similar view of class relations is
markedly different from the view that begins with an abstract, theo-
retical construction of class, assigns groups and individuals to posi-
tions within the construction, and then hypothesizes correlations be-
tween class positions and such things as political convictions and
affiliations. If we see class as an ongoing and frequently changing
outcome of concrete practices, we focus much more on the process
than on the "correlates of class." Of course, there is a long tradition
of the view of class as concrete processes and historically identifiable
actions of actually existing people (e.g., Thompson 1963). Contribu-
tions to this perspective from an organizational point of view were
made by the many labor process studies that followed the publication
of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974). Since
that time there have been numerous studies of gender relations in

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work and organizational processes, and many of these can also be

read as studies of class.
Class relations are frequently created and altered outside the local
organizational context in the places in which corporate decisions are
made. These decisions are then transmitted as policies and proce-
dures. Class relations are emergent in widespread management rules
and procedures that are textually mediated and increasingly abstract,
as Dorothy Smith (1987) has pointed out. Studies of wage systems
(Acker 1989; Steinberg 1992) carried out as part of the pay equity
movement in the United States provide examples of widespread, tex-
tually mediated managerial practices that replicate class inequalities
as well as gender and race inequalities.
Class relations are embedded in regulatory practices originating
outside organizational boundaries. They are written into laws, gov-
erning practices, and union-management agreements that specify,
support, and sometimes limit the power of employers to control
workers and the organization of production. Class-based inequalities
in monetary reward and in control over resources, power, and au-
thority, and the actions and routine practices that continually re-
create them, are accepted as natural and necessary for the ongoing
functioning of the socioeconomic system. In contrast, inequality and
exploitation based on gender or race are not required by law, al-
though at one time in the not too distant past this was the case in
most northern industrial countries. In the United States, a civil war,
a civil rights movement, and two mass women's movements extend-
ing over a century were necessary to remove these bases for discrimi-
nation from the laws of the land. Thus at the end of the twentieth
century in the United States, class exploitation and inequity have far
more legitimacy than gender- and race-based exploitation and ineq-
uity, which are illegal and defined as discrimination. The legitimacy
of class is, at the present time, so self-evident that no one with any
political or economic power, at least in the United States, discusses
eliminating wage labor and mandating a communal and cooperative
organization of production, although many at least claim to be in
favor of eliminating gender and race inequality, discrimination, and
segregation.
Wage labor, basic to capitalist class relations, has not always been
so widely accepted. As wage work was established in the United
States in the nineteenth century, it was called wage slavery, not a
fitting occupation for free white men (Glenn 1999; Perrow 1991).
The meaning of wage labor was transformed from slavery to the
fundamental requirement for masculine self-respect in a process that
differentiated free white men from women and African Americans.
The identification of wage labor with masculine self-respect has

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 Revisiting Class • 201

weakened as more and more women have also become wage earners
and female self-respect has also become tied to a wage. Thus the
legitimacy of class becomes even more entrenched. Labor unions
have, at particular times and in particular places, challenged the legit-
imacy of extreme manifestations of class power. Welfare state provi-
sions have provided some protections against the class domination
of the wage labor market (Esping-Andersen 1990), as well as chan-
nels of distribution that affect the extent of class, gender, and race
inequality. However, capitalist welfare states do not challenge the
fundamental legitimacy of class. Social movements, including the
radical feminist movement (Ferree and Martin 1995), have experi-
mented with cooperative and collective forms of organization in
which equality and participation were central goals. At the present
time, such opposition is very low, even as management has adopted
the language of participation and empowerment, while retaining full
power to organize, locate, and terminate employment.
Because of the legality of class and the widespread legitimacy of
class inequalities, class relations may be more difficult to challenge in
work organizations than gender or race relations. However, studies of
attempts to reduce or eliminate gender or race inequities in organiza-
tions show rather modest results (e.g., Cockburn 1991; Reskin 1998).
Gender and race are deeply embedded in organizational history and
present processes that reproduce class. Attempts to eliminate gender-
and race-based subordination and inequality may necessitate changes
in organizational control structures and work processes, threatening
existing class as well as gender and race interests. The probable result
is that those threatened undermine the change effort.

Taking the Viewpoints of Different Organizational Participants

Feminists have argued, convincingly I believe, that to develop
knowledge about different women's situations, the social world must
be viewed from their diverse points. The points of different organiza-
tional participants, both women and men, can be points of entry into
ongoing class processes within organizations. For example, in a re-
cent study of organization change in which I participated, clerical
workers, all women, had a much more critical opinion about ine-
qualities and the possibility for democratic participation in their or-
ganization than did professional workers, few of whom could see
any inequalities in their workplace. Consciously attempting to take
the viewpoint of the relatively more powerless members of organiza-
tions, particularly white women and people of color, can make visi-
ble the many ways in which class relations are mediated by gender
and race.
Taking a variety of points is also a method of examining new

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forms (or re-creating old forms) of class/work relations. For example,

tasks that used to be done by formally employed persons are now
being done by "independent contractors" who have different rela-
tionships with the employer than do regular employees. Contractors'
total compensation may often be less than the total compensation of
regularly employed workers because contractors do not usually re-
ceive benefits such as medical insurance, pension schemes, and vaca-
tions. We might say that the wage relation is still in place, but the
rate of exploitation is higher. (Of course, some independent contrac-
tors such as management consultants may earn more in the contrac-
tor role than they would as organization employees.)
Taking the point of women or people of color, or of any lower-
level organization member, may make visible the "normal violence"
of organizational life that serves as a means of control over chal-
lenges to class, gender, and racial inequalities. By normal violence I
mean the implicit threats (sometimes explicit) and the intimidating
behavior of people in positions of power. Temper tantrums, threats
of firing or demotion, and summary dismissals are not uncommon
events, but ones that may be visible primarily to the targets of attack.
Often interpreted by people in the workplace as psychological and
individual manifestations of imbalance or deviance, normal violence
is systemic, a product of the structures of power and control.
Taking the points of different organizational participants may also
make visible contradictions for particular individuals or groups be-
tween organizational class situations and class affiliations in the larger
society. For example, university faculty from working class back-
grounds face a more problematic environment in academia than fac-
ulty from upper middle class backgrounds (Barker 1995). Or middle
class women may find themselves in jobs such as secretary or research
assistant in which they are subservient to men of similar class back-
grounds. This was probably more common in the past when women
were actively excluded from anything but peripheral, female-segre-
gated positions, but it is still a potential. Another example of a group
experiencing contradictory class situations in the United States is phy-
sicians, many of whose class situations are changing as the organiza-
tion of medical care is transformed with the proliferation of managed
care organizations. Their class situations as small businessmen/profes-
sionals is changing into that of professional wage workers, dramatized
now by their increasing organization into labor unions approved by
the professional body, the American Medical Association.

Expanding the Notion of the "Economic"

Feminists have long contended that what counts as "economic"
must be broadened to encompass the unpaid but economically valu-

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 Revisiting Class • 203

able work done primarily by women. This implies expanding our

notions of the bases for class relations by moving outside the discur-
sive boundaries of existing class theories, which are, it can be argued,
constructed from the perspective of capital as well as from the per-
spectives of working class men of earlier generations.1 Although there
have been a number of different proposals for expanding these
boundaries, one way to do this is to ask, "What are the contours of
class processes that become visible when taking the points of unpaid
women workers or other people outside ordinary, regular employ-
ment?" Taking the point of housewives, many single mothers, the
elderly poor, the chronically ill, or the unemployed reveals that rela-
tions of distribution other than wages, salaries, and profits are essen-
tial to survival in industrial societies, and thus can be seen as eco-
nomic and as components of class structuring (Acker 1988). While
distribution through wages, profit, interest, and rent, the components
of distribution in Marx's writing, are all important, distribution
through marriage and other family relationships and through the
welfare state are essential economic transfers, and most of these are
patterned along lines of gender and race as well as class.2 Thus pri-
vate life becomes enmeshed in the processes constructing the gender
and race contours of class.
From the point of those who are economically disadvantaged,
class situations may not be adequately described by the concepts of
relations of production/employment and distribution. They may put
together their survival, and thus their class situations, through com-
plex maneuvering within and between different organizational loca-
tions of production and distribution. For example, single mothers on
welfare in the United States may have to combine welfare payments,
contributions from ex-husbands or mothers, occasional part-time
work, contributions from food banks, and careful sorting through
thrift shops to be able to get along. Families may piece together vari-
ous unsteady low-wage jobs or work in the informal economy with
transfer payments, backyard gardens (if they have backyards), and a
little hunting (if they live in small towns). Coping strategies on the
fringes of the stable wage and transfer economies are highly variable,
but are the reality for some people in western industrial countries
and for many more in Third World economies. Any expanded defini-
tion of the economy must include these activities if our understand-
ing of class is to be comprehensive enough to be useful.
Private organizations in the United States are major players in po-
litical battles over distribution, including income support programs,
pension provisions, and the funding of medical care. In the present
period in the United States, corporations also influence political deci-
sions that channel government money into corporate purposes, fur-

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ther participating in class processes on a societal basis. I wish to

emphasize two points here: first, class processes are political as well
as "economic," and placing strict boundaries around these concepts
tends to obscure the close connections. Second, in attempting to un-
derstand class as related to gender and race within an organizational
perspective, we should not lose sight of the fact that organizations
are not rigidly bounded entities and should not be studied as such.
Political conflicts in which large corporations invest large sums of
money and influence have consequences for class processes within
those organizations and in the surrounding world.
Much of the preceding discussion has implicitly assumed that the
changing contours of class, gender, and race are produced in particu-
lar organizations located within particular states. Instead, it may be
useful to think about large organizations as spanning national
boundaries and creating class relations that extend beyond the
boundaries of nation-states as well as beyond the boundaries of spe-
cific organizations. For example, the movement by managers of large
organizations of much of the garment and electronic production out
of the western and northern countries has altered class conditions
for many women workers in both the industrial north and low-wage
countries in the south and in Asia, in the process changing their fam-
ily and personal lives. These movements of production to new loca-
tions increasingly create a new international division of labor, and
rapidly changing global class processes in which gender, race, and
ethnic differences are used by capital as resources for profit maximi-
zation. In the process, global inequalities increase. The development
of transnational production organizations raises questions about
how we should define an organization. Does a corporation such as
Nike or Liz Claiborne include within its boundaries the independent
Third World manufacturing company whose business is exclusively
devoted to producing for Nike or Liz? Does the U.S. company have
any responsibility for the terms of labor, the class/race/gender exploi-
tation, in the factory? What are the extended class relations unking
a white American worker to the Filipina who sews his shirt? How,
concretely, does class, race, and gender privilege operate globally? If
we now have a globally dispersed, racially and ethnically fragmented
class structure, what are the possibilities for anything like class con-
sciousness and class solidarity? These are a few of the questions
raised by the present expansion of organizations.

Regimes of Inequality: Studying Class (and Gender and Race)

from an Organizational Perspective
The use, outlined above, of insights from feminist work on gender
for rethinking class produces a multidimensional, highly varying

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 Revisiting Class • 205

view of class as concretely and historically produced in organizing

processes, mediated by race and gender. This view provides one solu-
tion to the problem of combining gender, race, and class (Collins
1995; West and Fenstermaker 1995), a way of beginning to see class,
race, and gender as complexly related aspects of the same ongoing
practical activities, rather than as relatively autonomous intersecting
systems. I want to suggest a strategy for pursuing this analysis fur-
ther, looking at organizations as regimes3 of inequality or historically
specific configurations of class, race, and gender patterns within par-
ticular organizations. This strategy was developed to analyze a recent
study of complex organizational change and conflict (Acker and Van
Houten 1999).
Every organization has an inequality regime, including radically
egalitarian feminist organizations (Ferree and Martin 1995) and egal-
itarian cooperatives such as those of Mondragon, (Hacker 1990) in
which women were consigned to lower level and traditionally female
jobs. The precise patterns of inequality vary widely along a number
of dimensions, including the bases for inequality, the visibility and
legitimacy of inequalities, the degree of hierarchy and participation,
the ideologies supporting and challenging inequalities, the interests
of different groups in maintaining and/or diminishing inequality, the
organizing mechanisms that maintain and reproduce inequalities, the
types of controls and subversions of control, and interaction patterns
and identities of participants. Although variation exists, there are
also common patterns. In addition, inequality regimes are fluid, not
fixed, although the pace of change also varies. In looking at inequal-
ity regimes, we attempt to capture a moving reality, a complex inter-
play at a particular moment in time.
Bases of inequality may vary, although usually class, gender, and
race divisions are present. Other bases for disparities in power and
reward include sexual orientation, age, religion, ethnicity, and physi-
cal ability. Class is embedded in all work organizations in the basic
structure of organizational relations, as I argued above. Class is
emergent in the wage relation and in the very fact of the employment
contract in which the product of labor is owned by the employer.
Gender segregation of some degree exists almost everywhere, with
men disproportionately filling the positions with the most power.
Class, as well as gender and race, is replicated moment by moment
in the supervisory relationship and in the making of managerial deci-
sions. Class, gender, and race are embedded in the technical details
of wage systems (Acker 1989) and in the construction of work sched-
ules. Racial patterning of inequality often results from exclusion: in
the rich northern countries, people with dark skins are frequently
totally absent from organizations or are assigned to special positions

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 206 • Acker

with relatively little power. In the United States, affirmative action

programs have reduced exclusion, but it has not been eliminated (Res-
kin 1998). Most organizations also operate on the assumption that
participants are heterosexual. Although the taboo on homosexuality
may not be as great today as it once was, it still exists, for example,
in gender-loaded interaction expectations, the sexualized culture of
many workplaces (Adkins 1995; Alvesson 1993) or in the expecta-
tions that top executives will have wives, even trophy wives, to facili-
tate their careers.
The visibility of inequality is also highly variable, often differing
on the basis of organizational position or position in the structures
of inequality. One of the privileges of the privileged, it has been ob-
served, is not to see one's own privilege. Managers often fail to be
aware of inequalities that subordinates find oppressive. In two stud-
ies I have done in the last few years, white employees could not see
any racial discrimination, although people of color in the organiza-
tions were painfully aware of discriminatory policies and behaviors.
Similarly, men often find it difficult to see evidence of gender inequal-
ity that is plain to women. Often inequality is so much taken for
granted that invisibility is enhanced. An organizational crisis can
suddenly reveal inequalities previously invisible to many. This hap-
pened in an organization I studied recently when a crisis over lack
of progress in racial equality revealed long-standing gender issues
that had been hidden (Acker and Van Houten 1999).
The legitimacy of inequalities also varies between organizational
participants, between organizations, and at different times in whole
societies. I argued above that class inequalities are highly legitimate
in U.S. organizations, with that legitimacy enforced through laws
and perpetuated by the weakness of organized labor. At the same
time, gender and racial forms of inequality are less legitimate in the
eyes of the law, but not necessarily in the practices of organizations.
Historically, and in other societies with stronger socialist-oriented
labor movements, class inequality has had much less legitimacy, es-
pecially among the working class, although gender inequality may
have been perfectly acceptable. Visibility is related to legitimacy: le-
gitimate manifestations of inequality tend to be either invisible or to
be seen as inevitable. Some manifestations of gender and race in-
equality are, at the same time, class inequality. I think these dispari-
ties tend to be masked by legitimacy. For example, the continuing
ghettoization of women in clerical occupations does not spark indig-
nation. Ideologies support the continued existence of inequality re-
gimes, although in some periods ideologies support opposition to
them. Since the 1980s, ideologies confirming the necessity and inevi-
tability of policies and practices that perpetuate inequality in a free

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 Revisiting Class • 207

market economy seem to have been ascendant in the United States.

The competing ideologies advocating workplace democracy and
worker control prominent in the 1960s and 1970s have all but disap-
peared.
Images and beliefs about organizations legitimize, reinforce, and
even help to create class relations. Gender images are intertwined
with representations that have class and race implications. The leader
or the successful manager still has a masculine image, even though
some women are now in such positions. The organization as fierce
competitor in a challenging and dangerous market arena is a mascu-
line image that, at the same time, confirms the necessity of a strong
leader and thus a hierarchy of power and control (Collinson and
Hearn 1996; Kanter 1977). The masculinity of organizational images
is far from static, varying between organizations and changing over
time (Burris 1996) so that a particular inequality regime might be
confirmed by a type of masculinity not evident in another organiza-
tion.
Class divisions are symbolically and materially defined and af-
firmed in the arrangements of work space, in the size and location
of offices, in access to restrooms and lunch rooms, and in conven-
tions about dress. These material symbolic markers of class also de-
lineate lines of gender and race divisions, as white women and people
of color are crowded into the less advantaged organizational class
territories (e.g., Pierce 1995). Many organizations foster ideologies
of equality for their staff, with visions of less hierarchy, empower-
ment, and participation, even going so far as to eliminate private
offices and to encourage relaxed, informal clothes for managers. To
the extent that these ideologies are accepted, and often they are not,
such beliefs obscure the underlying class, gender, and race relations.
Talk about "diversity" and the importance of fostering diversity may
be another ideological form that substitutes for more structural at-
tacks on inequality and thus legitimates inequalities.
The magnitude and shape of inequalities, as well as the organizing
practices that maintain or lessen inequalities also differ, ranging from
rigid, autocratic hierarchies to relatively flat, team-organized work
processes. Restructuring of hierarchies, departments, and divisions of
tasks, facilitated by new technology, are taking place in many organi-
zations. Flat, collegial organizations seem to contain fewer inequali-
ties than more traditional bureaucracies (Kvande and Rasmussen
1994). However, restructuring and work reorganization may only
remove a layer of middle management and push tasks and responsi-
bilities downward in the hierarchy without eliminating the previous
inequalities. A great deal of recent research shows that, although re-
structuring may reduce certain inequalities, it may also relocate and

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 208 • Acker

reproduce in new patterns of the previously existing inequalities of

gender, class, and race. The transfer of some, or even many, rules
and decisions into computerized systems does not change their class
consequences. Similarly, transferring certain previously supervisory
responsibilities to individual employees or to "teams" does not al-
ways alter their class, gender, and race functions.
Competing interests in maintaining or reducing inequalities usu-
ally exist between different occupational and hierarchical groups. At
the same time, class-based groupings may be split by interests in gen-
der and/or race divisions. For example, during pay equity efforts,
groups of male workers sometimes saw their wage superiority threat-
ened by women workers' demands for equity. Thus common class
interests in raising levels of pay were undermined by these divisions
(Acker 1989). Intentional changes in equality regimes are, in general,
opposed by those whose relative or absolute positions might be
worsened. Thus although support from the top executive seems to
be necessary for reducing class, gender, and race inequalities, such
support does not guarantee success. Farther down the hierarchy, of-
ten at the middle management level, energies are mobilized to save
existing advantages (Cockburn 1991).
Methods of control and modes of compliance with inequality re-
gimes are also various. Controls may be exerted directly and coer-
cively, or they may be built into technology or into bureaucratic proce-
dures.4 Controls may be built into computer processes, as performance
is monitored from a distance: controls may also be up close and inti-
mate as part of daily workplace interaction often laced with sexual
expectations and implications. Controls may be implicit in recruitment
measures and promotion patterns. For example, women may be pre-
ferred for certain jobs because they are believed to be more amenable
to control than are men. Promotion patterns tend to screen out those
who are clearly different from the group in control, thus controlling
through guaranteeing similarity of views and behaviors. Controls are
also exerted through threats of dismissal. Ultimately work organiza-
tions may fall back on violence as a means of control, for example,
forcibly removing noncompliant employees from the premises or call-
ing in the police to control strike activities.
Compliance is often based, I believe, on the perceived legitimacy
of the organization and its practices. But compliance may also be
based on calculated self-interest or fear (Jackall 1988). Few people
have alternatives to work in an organization if they want to ensure
their own survival. Self-interest may often be accompanied by posi-
tive feelings of accomplishment that reinforce compliance. Many jobs
are intrinsically interesting, and have become more so with the work
reorganization of recent years, as studies of organizational restruc-

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 Revisiting Class • 209

turing have found (e.g., Acker 1991). Arlie Hochschild's (1997)

study of a large corporation suggests that many people would rather
be at work than at home because at work they find support, ap-
proval, and accomplishment that is lacking at home. Such feelings of
satisfaction are probably the most effective controls. How wide-
spread such satisfactions may be or how persistent over time are
other questions. Location in the organizational class structure is
probably a mitigating factor, although Hochschild reports this find-
ing for both professional and production line workers. Hochschild
also notes that spending long hours on the job is often effectively
mandatory and a prerequisite to career progress. Thus self-interest,
and fear of failure, probably combine with feelings of accomplish-
ment to ensure compliance.
Inequality regimes vary in terms of stability, and stability is linked
to the political/economic environment and to the controls that domi-
nate particular organizations. For example, during the late 1960s
and early 1970s, the inequality regimes in U.S. universities and col-
leges were severely shaken, as students began to demand not only
reductions of inequality for minorities and white women students,
but also drastic changes in organizational class structures. Graduate
students demanded participation in decision making about curricu-
lum and other matters that faculty, as relatively higher in the educa-
tion class structure, had controlled. Caught in the contradictions be-
tween their beliefs in democracy and their real dictatorial control,
many faculties gave in to the demands. However, as soon as the stu-
dent movements subsided, faculty once more took control. Similar
processes occurred in other public sector organizations in the United
States. For example, welfare recipients very briefly exerted some con-
trol over certain welfare programs, affecting program rules. How-
ever, most inequality regimes seem to me to be relatively stable, held
in place by all the mechanisms I have discussed above, but most cen-
trally by the economic imperative that forces most people to work in
order to survive (Perrow 1991).
This inventory of characteristics of inequality regimes could be
used as the starting point for a detailed description of any particular
organization. While an organization as a whole might be built on
systematic inequalities, and this is almost always the case, particular
subunits might be fairly egalitarian, particularly in this era of "team-
work." Such descriptions could be useful for charting strategies for
changing organizations toward less hierarchical and unequal forms.
Many change efforts have been unsuccessful, partly because those
who attempted to achieve change did not comprehend the deeply
embedded obstacles and active oppositions they would meet. The
notion of inequality regime could at least provide a checklist of these

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 210 • Acker

obstacles, and the probably less numerous opportunities for change.

The idea of inequality regimes can be applied to the extended and
segmented forms of organizing in our globalizing world. As organi-
zations restructure in the process of globalization, those shaping pro-
duction and distribution use existing inequalities in various ways to
maximize control and minimize costs. In the process, certain aspects
of an inequality regime may be externalized and the boundaries of
an organization's inequality regime may extend beyond national
boundaries. As I pointed out above, the most familiar example is the
clothing industry, in which almost all production is now located out-
side the northern industrial countries, often in factories not owned
by the core corporation, but contracting exclusively with it. Class,
gender, and race/ethnic inequality have probably increased in these
transnational organizations, but is externalized to other countries
and outside the formal organization boundaries. The magnitude of
inequality becomes less visible; controls that might be illegal within
the rich industrial countries can be used with impunity, although
these have become the focus of criticism, for example, in the case of
the shoe manufacturer Nike.
Organizations also establish directly owned manufacturing plants,
offices, and operations outside national boundaries. The shape and
visibility of inequality regimes may change in these cases, too. Partic-
ular clerical and service tasks may be exported, attracted by the low
wage levels in some poor countries and facilitated by satellite tech-
nology. Data processing and telephone customer service are exam-
ples. Again, inequality increases as some work gets done for less pay,
at the same time that the inequality becomes less visible to those in
wealthy capitalist countries. Organizational decisions to export cer-
tain processes and functions to take advantage of low wages in less
affluent countries have impacts on the inequality regimes of organi-
zations in affluent countries and in these societies in general. Inequal-
ity within the organizational core may appear to decrease as lower
wage jobs are exported. But the disappearance of these jobs increases
disparities in income and wealth in the surrounding society. Increas-
ing inequality in the northern wealthy nations has been widely docu-
mented. The additional points I emphasize here are that increasing
inequality is an outcome of identifiable decisions that alter the in-
equality regimes of organizations and to understand the ongoing de-
velopment of inequality regimes, our analysis must move outside
conventional notions of organizational boundaries.

Conclusion
Class relations are created and re-created in the ordinary processes
of organizational life. Gender and race relations are closely inter-

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 Revisiting Class • 211

twined with class in these processes. Indeed, what looks like class
from one conceptual point of view may look like gender and/or race
from another point of view. It follows that to understand gender and
race, we must also understand class and vice versa. Class processes
are not simply interior to the rather arbitrary boundaries convention-
ally set for organizations, but extend outward, shaping what we call
"the class structure" of a particular country. At the same time, class
processes within organizations are not peculiar to a particular loca-
tion, but are formed in accordance with surrounding laws, social
conventions, and markets.
The increasing pace of globalization of production, markets, and
competition is facilitated by changes in organizing. Those who con-
trol companies and public entities decide to shed workers, outsource
production and services, hire part-time and contract workers, elimi-
nate layers of middle management, transfer previous management
functions down the hierarchical line or into computers, and increas-
ingly make customers and clients do organizing work (Glazer 1994).
All of these decisions affect class, race, and gender processes both
within and outside organizations. The notion of inequality regimes
is one way of systematically thinking about class, gender, and race
in an organizational frame, suggesting some of the critical questions
we should ask to understand these changes. Are new bases of in-
equality emerging? Are there changes in the connections between
class, gender, and race within organizations? As organizing bound-
aries become more permeable, with significant operating processes
being moved outside formal limits, what are the implications for the
visibility and legitimacy of inequality regimes? Are new forms of hi-
erarchy and control altering inequality regimes? Are inequality re-
gimes becoming more or less stable? What are the impacts of such
changes on class, gender, and race relations in the wider global soci-
ety? What are the prospects for fundamentally altering our regimes
of inequality, given the major shifts in global society that seem to be
under way?

NOTES
1. One way to enlarge our understanding of class is to argue that unpaid
work contributes to the production of value through reproducing labor
power and that the contributions of housework to the production of surplus
value can be determined, expanding the notion of economy and bringing
women doing unpaid work directly into class relations, as some Marxist
feminists suggested in the 1970s. This approach was abandoned, as I noted
above, because exactly how unpaid labor contributed to surplus value could
not be determined and because the narrow focus on value was still firmly
located in the perspective of capitol.

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 212 • Acker

2. That welfare state distributions affect the structures of stratification is

confirmed by research showing that differences between nations in poverty
and inequality are consequences of different welfare state provisions (Korpi
and Palme 1998).
3. This use of the term "regime" is related to R. W. Connell's (1987)
notion of "gender regimes" to refer to specific configurations of gender rela-
tions within particular institutions and organizations. "Regime" has also
been used extensively in discussions of welfare states to indicate different
types of welfare states, generating considerable discussion of the adequacy
of various regime typologies for representing the most significant differences
in various programs. For example, feminist critics of regimes identified by
Esping-Andersen (1990) have shown that his typology is inadequate because
it ignores social programs most important to women (e.g., Orloff 1993). I
do not want to use the idea of regime to construct a typology, but to refer
to a set of identifiable processes that occur together in particular empirical
cases.
4. Writers on organizations have been concerned with control since the
work of Max Weber. My purpose here is not to review a massive literature,
but to argue that control and compliance are varying characteristics of in-
equality regimes.

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