assertion that many men’s lives are changing for
the worse, or at spatial variations. As I have
already suggested, feminist theorists, while not
wanting to celebrate the features of the new
capitalism, in which there is no doubt about the
extent of inequalities, have begun to produce an
exciting body of new theory and empirical docu-
mentation of the ways in which organizational
practices and everyday behaviours are part of the
fluid and multiple construction of workers’ iden-
tities. The theoretical insistence of postmodern
and poststructural theorists that identity is provi-
sional, fluid and discursively constructed coin-
cided with a new set of issues in the organization
and restructuring of work. The rising numbers of
women entering the labour force of almost every
industrial and industrializing nation (with the
exception of the former socialist societies in the
early 1990s) challenged, for example, the associ-
ation of waged labour with men and masculinity
and the workplace as either a rational, unemo-
tional and disembodied sphere or an arena for
the display of heroic masculinity and bodily
strength. The ways in which assumptions of
masculine superiority and feminine inferiority
dominated workplace practices of recruitment
and promotion, reward structures and daily social
interactions have been investigated and chal-
lenged in a range of organizations (Acker, 1990;
1992; 1998; Adkins, 1995; Kerfoot and Knights,
1996; 1998). In recent work on industrial
economies, interesting new analyses that link
class, ethnicity and gender together and show the
multiplicity of the ways in which gendered per-
formances at work might challenge binary dis-
tinctions between masculinity and femininity and
the sexed body are beginning to provide new
ways of thinking about the social construction of
identity (Lamphere et al., 1997).Detraditional work?A rather different analysis of the consequences
of new forms of work, especially in the profes-
sions and in elite occupations, which also draws
on postmodern notions about difference, diver-
sity and performance, is to be found in the work
of theorists such as Giddens (1991), Lash (1994)
and Beck (1992; 2000), all of whom have made
significant contributions to debates about the
contemporary features of ‘reflexive modernity’
and the ‘risk society’. Unlike Sennett, these
theorists emphasize the new opportunities that
exist in the breakdown of traditional structures in
the workplace, such as rigid bureaucracies. Instead
of workplaces being dominated by hierarchicalrelationships where success is dependent on
status and experience, these theorists identify
an intensification in processes of individualiza-
tion. By this term, they mean the dominance of
processes in which individuals are required to
create their own self-identities as individuals
and new forms of authority at work. Here there
are clear parallels with Bauman’s notions
about the significance of performance in the
workplace.
These theorists of reflexive modernity go
further, however, in suggesting that the intensifi-
cation of individualization actually challenges,
and even breaks down, existing social forms such
as class, status and gender (Beck and Beck-
Gersheim, 1996), untying individuals from the
rules and norms that dominate modern institu-
tional forms such as industrial organizations.
Consequently, according to Beck (1992), the
significance of social class and gender in influ-
encing individuals’ positions in the labour
market have or will become less important than
individual performance and the social construc-
tion of a particular identity. Thus workers with
standard contracts guaranteeing (perhaps life-
time) employment are being replaced by workers
on contracts where income and temporary security
are linked to the ability to perform (Beck and
Beck-Gersheim, 1996). According to Beck (1992),
‘do-it-yourself ’ workers have to stress their
individuality and uniqueness to sell themselves
to employers. While these claims may have some
purchase in certain sectors of the new knowledge
economy – perhaps in the now rapidly deflating
dot.com companies where image is all – here too
detailed empirical work in a wide range of
sectors will be essential to assess the extent
to which the class and gender inequalities of ‘mod-
ern’ organizations are being dislocated. Adkins
(1999; 2000), for example, in an initial evalua-
tion, is sceptical of the claims about the growing
insignificance of gender as a key social division
in contemporary labour markets and organiza-
tions in most industrial and industrializing
nations. Certainly, current evidence both from
aggregate analyses of the continuing significance
of gender in job segregation and income inequal-
ity (Cully et al., 1999; Forth, 2001; Gallie, 2001;
Gallie et al., 1998) and from case studies under-
taken within organizations (Crompton, 1999;
Halford et al., 1997; McDowell, 1997; Pringle,
1998; Wajcman, 1998), which reveal the contin-
uing significance of discrimination in everyday
social practices at work and in the cultural tradi-
tions that support such discrimination, cast consi-
derable doubts on the generality of Beck’s
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