Gender and Food Retail Trade: Challenging and Reproducing Gender and Gendered Work in Times of Organizational Change
Paper presented at the 29th International Labour Process Conference, Leeds, 5-7 April, 2011
Kristina Johansson
PhD Student,HumanWorkScience
LuleåUniversity of Technology, Sweden
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Abstract
Drawing on interviews with nine upper managers, this paper explores howdifferent organizational models affect gendered constructions of division in Swedish food retail trade. The increased emphasis upon efficiency and cost-reduction has made the nine inquired stores develop towards functional flexibility and work-rotation. In six of the stores, the employees now rotate between working in the check-out counter and replenishing the stocks, thus challenging the traditional gendered constructions of work and workers in the trade. However and as indicated by the results, the binary conceptualizing of gender and gendered work are nevertheless reproduced and reinforced in other aspects; through women’s continual predomination amongst part-time employees and men’s overrepresentation in managerial positions, as well as the development of new gendered divisions. Hence, the changes of contemporary Swedish food retail trade seem to simultaneously challenge and reproduce organizational constructions of division along gendered lines.
Key-words: food retail trade, gendered division, organizational changes
Introduction
Swedish food retail has traditionally been marked by fairly rigid gender structures with part-time working women as cashiers and full-time employed men predominating amongst those replenishing stocks and serving as managers (Carlén 2008). However, the rising demands for efficiency and price-reduction have seen the introduction of new technology and organizational forms such as work rotation. The horizontal loading of work tasks stipulated by work rotation challenges the traditional (gendered) differentials of work and workers and hence brings a subversive potential to renegotiate the constructions of gender and gendered work (Hudson 2004:44; Grönlund 2004). Drawing on social constructionist gender and organization theories (Acker 1999, 2006; Gerhardi 1994; Gunnarsson et al 2003), these changesmake Swedish food retail trade an interesting arena for understanding constructions and reconstructions of gender and gendered work within organizational contexts.Despite this, organizational models are rarely used as a search-light by researchers investigating the gendered division work and workers. Hence, further research is needed, leaving this study with the potential to make important contributions to the understanding of gender and gendered work in food retail trade.
Empirically based upon semi-structured interviews with upper managers in nine food retail stores, this paper aims at exploringorganizational models as specific frames for the division of gender and gendered work in contemporary Swedish food retail trade. The paper is structured as follows:The first two sections draw on extant research and describes food retail trade as on the one hand marked by rigid gendered division of work and workers, and on the other through the restructuring of the contemporary trade and the introduction of new organizational model. Then, the theoretical field of gender and organization are briefly introduced, followed by an out-lining of the study’s methodology. In the fourth and fifth, the findings of this study are presented through an investigating of how the different organizational models affect the gendered division of work and worked in the nine inquired stores. I conclude by highlighting and discussing the different aspects in which the constructions of division seem to be challenged and reproduced.
On the One Hand - Gender and Gendered Work in Food Retail Trade…
As extant research illustrates, gender and gender division are noticeable throughout food retail trade. The first division occurs on the trade level, wherein the majority of the employees (and customers) are women. This correlates with the feminization of customer-service work at large, often symbolically underpinned by the emotional aspects of the work (Petinger 2005:463). Second, the work tasks and positions in the organizations have traditionally been divided and organized along gendered lines. Female employees have been strongly associated with the check-out counter, rendering the cashier an almost exclusively female position. When working in the check-out counter, the employees’ main task is to charge customers for their purchases, making them bound to one particular place and their work-load defined by the fluctuation of customer flow which peaks during the afternoon. The close interaction with customers makes working at the cash register a highly emotional and vulnerable position, leaving the employees with few opportunities to escape from complaining customers or the demand of embodying a service minded persona (Tolich and Briar 1999). It is also a position in which the employee work performance is closely monitored either directly or technologically by both customer and management (Barranco Font 2007; Kvist 2006). The physical work environment of the check-out counter is characterized as highly monotonous and repetitive, leading to a high probability of a variety of debilitating occupational health problems such as sour necks and shoulder (Hedenmo 2000; Zeytinouglu et al 2004:522). Although one single article rarely weigh more than a few kilos, their combined weight is nevertheless profound and the Swedish Commercial Employee’s Union have estimated that a cashier handles 333 kg worth of goods every hour (Hedenmo 2000:15).
In addition to working in the check-out counter, the other predominating task in food retail trade is working on the store-floor replenishing stocks; unpacking the delivered products and placing them on their corresponding shelf in the store. Time wise this work-task is structured by the deliveries and as stipulated by the on-demand logic, the goods should be instantly taken care off, thus leaving the storage-space as well as the stock to a minimum. For the employees, these tasks allow them to move around more freely throughout the store, whose vast area also creates temporary escape zones from the monitoring of management as well as the interaction with difficult customers (Tolich and Briar 1999). The physical aspect of the work depends on the type of goods that are being handled; some departments such as the freezer means working in coldness, whilst for example the fruit and vegetable department require heavy lifting (Zeytinouglu et al 2004:522).Extant research illustrates that although the replenishing of stocks is not as gendered as working in the check-out counter, gender still seems to be part of the distribution of these work-tasks. Findings made by Tolich and Briars (1999) underpin how, despite their identical job-description, managers still predominantly scheduled female employees to work in the check-out counter and men to replenish the stocks. This informal division of work-tasks did not only leave the women stuck to a more monotonous job, it also limited their organizational knowledge and thus their prospects of promotion. In the food retail stores that Elisabeth Sundin studied, both men and women replenished stocks, but not the same stock. While the cutting of meat and the freeze department had the strongest connotation to men and masculinity, the fruit and vegetable department was associated with femininity and women.
Sundin’s findings illustrate how the gender divisions in food retail trade are not a result of the gendered constructions of work-tasks alone, but also of specific gendered conceptualizing of its products, marketplaces and customers that is; the contexts in which retail trade organizations are operating (see also Pettinger 2005:465). This form of division might be most apparent in the larger superstores whose stocks also range over noon-food articles such as kitchen-wear, electronic equipment and constructions material. These products are themselves constructed through specific conceptualizing of gender. Although the actual act of replenishing is the same whether it is pans or screws that need to be re-filled, these gendered processes nevertheless mean that the first are culturally “feminized” and therefore mainly performed by female workers, whilst the second are “masculinised”, hence more likely to be performed by male employees. Furthermore, the fact that male workers predominate in the constructions department not only reinforces the connotation between masculinity and handiness but also communicates to customers what “men” should be interested in and capable of. Thus, the marketplaces of food retail trade also construct and reproduce specific cultural narratives of doing gender, stretching beyond the organizations themselves.
Furthermore, gender becomes noticeable in food retail trade when looking at men and women’s different employment contracts. Part time work represents the dominating form of employment contract in Swedish food retail, a development that began after the deregulation of open hours in 1972 after witch the proportion of full-time contracts decreased from 75 to 32 percentages of total employments in retail trade (Sundin 2001:91). Furthermore, part time employment is highly gendered: the average weekly working time amongst men aged 18-34 was 28 hours, compared to only 23 hours amongst women in the same age group. Similar gender differences were found amongst those aged 35 or older, whilst men worked an average of 36, 5 hours, women worked 6, 5 hours less (Carlén 2007:20). The high proportion of part time employments within retail is often described as a necessity given the trade’s fluctuating demands and customer flow. However, as Håkansson and Isidorsson (1999:55) state, the economical activities alone can not explain the usage of part time employment. Equally relevant are union strength and the high proportion of female employees. The latter is underpinned when looking at the variation of part time employments between different sections in retail trade, which shows that there is a positive correlation between the percentage of male workers and the usage of full time contracts. This means for example that full time employment is far more common in stores selling electronic equipment than in clothing stores, despite the similarities in open hours (Carlén 2005:18ff).
Gender is not only evident horizontally in food retail trade, but also on the vertical level, through which the positions and work tasks assigned to men are often valued higher than those assigned to women. The check-out counters where in women predominate, are not only the most monitored and repetitive work-tasks in the trade, but also a dead-end job leaving the employees with limited prospects of promotion. Women are also working part-time to a far greater extent than men, something that not only means a proportionally reduced earning but also lower hourly wage, poorer working conditions and hours. The vertical dimension of the gendered division in food retail trade is further underpinned by the fact that the positions as managers and shop-owners have traditionally almost exclusively been held by men (Broadbridge 2007; Traves et al 1997; Javefors Grauers 1999).
… On the Other Hand, Restructuring and the Introduction of Work-Rotation
The previous section illustrated how work-tasks and positions traditionally have been differentiated along gender lines in Swedish food retail trade. However and as will be illustrated in the following,an increased emphasis upon cost-reduction and efficiency in contemporary trade has led to the introduction of new organizational models. One of the most predominating is work-rotation, which has the potential to challenge the gendered division of work and workers in the trade. In this section and by focusing on food retail employment, I will first outline some of the more important historical changes that have contributed to this development and second, describe the introduction of work-rotation and its implications for the gender structure in food retail trade.
One of the first steps towards rationalisation and reduced personnel requirement was the revolutionary introduction and wide spread of self-service that took place in Sweden during the 1950’s, thus reshaping not only the interior of the store but also the work tasks performed by the employees (Sandgren 2010). 1972 marks another vital transformation of the trade, namely the deregulations of opened-hours, resulting in a rapid extension of open-hours which gradually made the traditional five-day employment contract redundant (Sundin 2001:91; Freathy 1993:70). A few years later, in the end of 1979, the trade was further rationalised by the introduction of EAN (European Article Number) which computerized previously manual work-tasks such as pricing and cash-registering (Hjelm 2010). The regulatory change of the late 1980’s which allowed more distantly located shopping centres was the starting point for the geographical restructuring of Swedish food retail trade and the growing number of external shopping centres, thus reinforcing the development towards vaster but fewer and more efficient sale units (Swedish Planning-and Buliding Act 1987:10; SCB 2006). The ongoing rationalisations and redundancy of personnel was further fuelled by the economical crisis of the 1990’s, a period during which the number of employees in Swedish retail trade in large shrank from approximately 260000 to 175000. Although the employment levels have partly increased since then, the number of employees has remained relatively intact (Grape and Gustafsson 2007:8). During the initial years of the 21st century these rationalizations in combination with a beneficiary economic situation have helped the trades turn over to reacg record rates (SCB 2007). Nevertheless, the competition between chains and stores has increased, leaving the larger and more efficient stores to out-compete the smaller ones. Thus, whilst the number of stores has been reduced by 40 percentages, the average turnover per store has increased with 150 percentages. Simultaneously, new stores have been established in a rate not seen before, with an average of 60-70 stores being built each year (KF 2009:10).
The restructuring of Swedish food retail trade and the increased emphasis upon cost reduction and efficiency in combination with the fluctuation in demand and customer flow has led to an increasing requirement for a flexible work-force (Kvist 2006:78ff). One way to create flexibility is functional, stipulating that the employees are organized more efficiently through horizontal and/or vertical loading of work tasks and requiring staff to be multi-skilled and capable of switching between different tasks (Håkansson and Isidorsson 1999:30ff; Hudson 2004:44f). Even though functional flexibility and work-rotation aims at promoting efficiency and time saving, it nevertheless has the potential to challenge the gendered construction of division of work and workers since it contradicts organizational sectioning and thus make male and female employees partake in each others work-tasks (Grönlund 2004; Sundin 1999:96).
Despite the increased use of work-rotations in Swedish food retail stores and its potential to challenge the gendered division of work and workers in food retail trade, it is something that rarely has been investigated by scholars. Two exceptions do however exist. Elisabeth Sundin, who focused on the implementation work-rotation, found that although the management of the food retail company which she investigated clearly stated that the work rotation for economical reasons was to be implemented in all stores, this was not enough to change the gendered structures of the stores. Consequently, the most gendered positions and work tasks; cutting of meat and working in the check-out, were in most stores excluded from the work rotation which thereby failed (Sundin 2001). The second contribution to the field is drawn from the sociologist Elin Kvist. Although her field study in a Swedish superstore did not focus on work-rotation alone, one of her findings was that male employees had greater possibilities of negotiating and passing on their hours in the check-out counter to their women colleagues. Thus, despite the implementation of work-rotation, tasks seemed nevertheless informally unevenly distributed between men and women (Kvist 2006).Although both Sundin and Kvist make interesting contribution to the understanding of how work-rotation has affected the gendered division of work and workers in food retail trade, their research alone is not enough to label the question as anything but a knowledge gap. Thus, further research is needed.
Theoretical Points of Departure
This study draws on gender and organization theories. The research field of gender and organization has developed during the last decades, following the pioneer work of researchers such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977), Cynthia Cockburn (1983) and Kathy Ferguson (1984). Today, the field includes a wide spectrum of scholars and theoretical perspectives, joined by the conceptualizing of organizations as gendered, rather than gender-neutral. As described by Joan Acker, the implication of this understanding is something more than merely adding gender to organizational processes and theories. Rather, this means that gender is conceptualized as an integral part of these processes which therefore can not be properly understood without gender analysis (Acker 1990:146). Thus, this also implicates an understanding of gender not as essentially or biologically stabile but as verbs, as something people “do” and construct in social interactions (Butler 1999, 2004; Gherardi, 1994; Gunnarsson et al, 2003). In her scrutiny of the doing gender perspective, Päivi Korvajärvi (1998:22, 2003:54) differentiates between four approaches used by scholars, thereby clarifying the variety of theoretical positions from which researchers such as my self can comprehend the gendered organization: Etnomedological (interactional process and accomplishments) (West and Fenstemarker 2002); cultural (symbols, meanings and subject positions) (Gherardi 1994); processual (process and practises, distinction between men and women) (Acker 1999, 2006) and performative (discursive gender identities) (Butler 1999, 2004).