Fakten schaffen. Eine Organisationsethnographie zur Konstruktion von Rationalität, Macht und Geschlecht

This study is an ethnography. I made it in 2005 in the middle-sized, family owned enterprise I call Laser ltd. This company is located in a large German city - former F.R.G. - and produces alarm systems. During my four month field-research the management confronted the staff with a wide-ranging plan of reorganization. They planed (and realized three months later) to make 20 percent of the staff redundant. Furthermore, they wanted to relocate the production from the western to the eastern part of Germany, where personnel costs are much lower. Some studies of the sociological research of organizations which concern "gender" as a central parameter identify an important barrier of equality: the imperative of equality. To speak of the imperative of equality means to emphasize the empirical result that members of organizations have established in the following observation: Which positions employees and managers within organizations hold is independent from gender. The only factors which count are work and results. One aim of my study is to show a new way to interpret this imperative of equality. I argue that the critique of the imperative of equality should be a critique of hegemony, as well as of rationality.