Revisiting class: Thinking from gender, race, and organizations

The study of gender and organizations has been a vapidly developing field i n the last 10 years. However, scholars in this area have been stow to integ rate race and class into their analyses. One difficulty in accomplishing su ch art integration is that class has not been sufficiently retheorized in f eminist thinking. This article explores such a retheorization using feminis t insights that gender, class, and race relations are mutually produced in ongoing processes, that class. like gender and race, is best seen as active practices rather than as classificatory categories, that class should be u nderstood from the standpoints of different class participants, and that "t he economic" must be expanded to understand the life situations of women an d people of color. I then use this way of thinking about class in developin g a framework for looking at inequality within organizations. "Regimes of i nequality" are constituted through ordinary organizing processes in which r ace, class, gender, and other inequality are mutually reproduced. Inequalit y regimes have certain, but varying characteristics, including different ba ses of inequality, degrees of visibility, legitimacy, hierarchy, and partic ipation, types ol ideologies supporting or challenging inequalities, and or ganizing mechanisms that maintain and reproduce inequalities.