Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This study explores the significance of race in the gendered organization. Specifically, to what extent are the gendered features of organizational life premised on set of assumptions about race and racial relations? The study is based on an ethnographic examination of the changing conditions in women’s prisons over the course of the last decade. Beginning in the early 1990s, the ideology and enactment of punishment in women’s prisons abruptly shifted. The number of women sentenced to incarceration increased, the period of time women spent behind bars lengthened, and the conditions of prison life became increasingly punitive. In short, women’s prisons adopted the “get tough” and “hard core” punishment practices associated with men’s prisons. Participant observation and interview data reveal that what caused the shift was not so much the larger, top-down policy mandate of the War on Drugs, but a bottom-up legitimation crisis that was linked to overcrowding, recidivism, and limitations on much-needed resources. A crisis of structure gave rise to a crisis of meaning that resonated with the perceptions of working and middle class whites regarding their vulnerability within both the institution and the community. As the racial demographics of the inmate population shifted and resource crises became increasingly pronounced, state actors discovered/constructed a new penal subject—the bad [Black] woman—and altered their control practices accordingly. Study reveals that assumptions about race and state of race relations influence gendered practices and ideologies. The author extends Acker’s (1990; 1992) work by demonstrating that just as organizations are not neutral with respect to gender, gendered organizations are not neutral with respect to race.