J. Martin, "Deconstructing organizational behavior taboos: The supressions of gender conflict in organizations", Organization Science, 1 (1990), 339-359.

Supressed conflict is easier to deny, harder to detect and combat, and more difficult to study.

Deconstruction

A technique to show multiple ways a text can be interpreted. It "reveals power operation in structures of thinking and behavior that previously seemed devoid of power relations".

Most organizations are controlled by men and have assumptions that favor men. Women's interests appear as contradictions.

The initial dichotomy to the Cesearean story is the private/public differences. In reality work and family are intertwined. When work is separated from family, problems of working mothers are private problems that must be solved individually. Childrearing is separated from the rest of social labor. The employement contract separates work and private lives, giving corporate control over behavior at work. The story showed how the company took control of the woman's private affairs.

The primary benefit of the company's attempt to "help" a working woman is the company, not the woman.

An employee's pregnancy reveals organizational taboos. It removes the option of ignoring a person's gender. It shows she is sexually active (but a high ranking male employee is getting none of it!!!). The statement is filled with sexual innuendo too.

To really create a confortable interconnection between public and private, an organizaiton would have to have on-site pediatricians and sick care, flex hours, and safe child care near work. Yet these impact productivity, and in the marketplace these innovative organizationl forms won't survive very well.

Yet the gendered aspects of the public/private dichotomy are critical to the current structure of our organizaitonal, familial, and governmental systems.

Why Gender Discrimination is so persistent

Visable pregnancy, capacity for sexual pleasure, and involvement with intimate emotions and nuturance all in an organzational context are "taboo". Well-intentioned efforts to alleviate gender inequality can force this difference into hiding, leaving it free to surface in more subtle and pernicious forms.

Small scale reforms won't help. The public-private dichotomy is revealed to be a linchpin supporting discrimination against women. The gender segregation of tasks make it impossible to discuss changing gender discrimination without changing gender roles in the family. Small scale reforms merely reify the differences.