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Abstract
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VioLit summary:
OBJECTIVE:
The goal of this article by Hearn was to examine gender, sexuality, and violence in relationship to organizational structures, goals, and tasks. A model of a violence approach to organizations was discussed.
METHODOLOGY:
A non-experimental review of the literature was employed for the first part of this study. A non-experimental case study review was employed for the application of the author's insights. Interviews were done with men who had committed domestic violence against women and who had been involved in organizations that dealt with that issue. Analysis was done of organizations involved in domestic violence including police, the Crown Prosecution Service, probation service, social services, prisons, housing agencies, solicitors, doctors, psychiatric and other welfare agencies, and programs for men who have been or may become violent. Areas involved in the study of these responsive organizations included gaining general cooperation, gaining research access to men, interviews and accounts by individual men, follow up intervention with agency personnel, general policy responses of agencies to violence, and the agencies' routine conduct.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
The author began by stating that early organizational theory was agendered or gender-neutral although implicit in the theories was male domination and implicit concerns of gender and sexuality. When psychoanalytic organizational theory and research emerged, gender became more center-stage in that violence was a central concern and that practical work began to be dome with survivors of violence. Organizational study of gender and sexuality was said to be well-established and marginal at the same time. Three ways were identified in which this focus was developed: 1) there was a study of sexuality in organizations around the naming and incidence of sexual harassment; 2) there were some empirical studies of heterosexual relationships and sexual liaisons in organizations, and 3) to a lesser degree, there were studies of gay harassment in organizations.
The connection was then made between gender and sexuality and violence. The author argued, first, that an organizational definition of violence should include that which violates or causes violation including force and other violation by a violator of the violated. Three standpoints were identified to further define this: those directly involved, other social actors involved in dealing with the violator, and of the analyst who may or may not be involved in the intervention. Violence, then, could be physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, cognitive, visual, and representational and involve the creation of the conditions of violence, potential violence, threat or neglect. In organizations, the dominance of men over women and children was said to be the dominant form of violence. Forms of sexuality were said to most visible and understandable in their relation to or reconstitution as sexual violence. Other work that prompted a violence perspective on organizations included work on violence by and in organizations and organizational responses to violence. Organizations could be seen as sites or structures of violence. The move toward gender examination was said to open the door for more explicit recognition of sexuality and other violence. The violence perspective itself originally was concerned with power, domination, and control with the organization a euphemism for violence. Two frames of reference have recently emerged: the organization and organizing as violence, including the context and formation of the organization, and the general orientation of the organization to violence and the structure, function, and operation and organizational process. In general organizations were said to be formed in the context of structural relationships of dominating control and violence, but specific organizations were said to be formed through or by specific processes or acts of violence.
Organizations overall were said to have an explicit or implicit relation or orientation to violence. Explicit relations included legitimate use of violence by the organization, organizations created to respond to violence, and organizations explicitly responsive to violence in other ways. Implicit relations were illegitimate use of violence by those in power, organizations where other violence is used, and organizations where violence is not an overt issue. Different organizations had different combinations and processes of violence. These translated into six different types of violence-related organizational approaches. The legitimate use of violence by organizations necessitated a focus on how this violence is articulated and framed within the goals and objectives of the organization; the police were listed as a primary example. Organizations created to respond to violence included violence both as an element in the achievement of goals and an element in the routine performance of work. It included psychological agencies, criminal justice agencies, probation, and anti-violent/peace organizations in which violent acts became "cases" which were often overlain with professional ideology. Organizations explicitly responding to violence in other ways included those which were actively dealing with policies and procedures on violence and sexual violence within the organization. Illegitimated uses of violence by organizations included those organizations which did not have violence as an official part of their goals but officially sanctioned violence, such as corporal punishment in schools. Violence could also be part of unofficial goals and express and reproduce hierarchies, as in the allowing of prisoner violence. Organizations in which other violence is used included violence to resist authority or hierarchies and where the relationship between violator and violated was crucial to understand organizational dynamics. The sixth, organizations where violence is not an overt issue, included those organizations in which violence does not occur, taking about violence is not a dominant part of discussion, or where violence occurs but not overtly. All these were thought to have the potential to be interrelated.
The author examined organizations which deal with domestic violence using the organizational perspective of violence. The complexity of these organizations was increased by the fact that men's violence against women is considered a private issue. Professional interventions around men's violence to women were structured in terms of gender. Men dominated management and in numbers while women were located largely in the middle and lower levels of the hierarchy. The predominant forms of organizations dealing with domestic violence were legitimated violence (police and prison), agencies designed to respond to violence (probation and prosecution offices), and organizations not created for that purpose but overtly dealing with the issue (social services, housing, and so forth). The police and prisons were found to define and relate violence in quasi-legal terms and were supplemented by the legal use of violence and their own hierarchical structure. There was a lack of discretion given to the police in how to deal with domestic violence, whether or not officers considered the case a problem or not. In the professional world, ideology was important but often suffered from managerial interests which went before innovation, and female centered interventions became incorporated within dominant professional and managerial ideals. Many of these organizations had an absence of policies on internal violence as part of the formal operation of the organization. Each agency concerned with violence defined it in a characteristic way and operated according to these implicit professional and occupational ideals. Each organizational response to violence characteristically involved negotiation within a zone of uncertainty about what constitutes violence, why and how violence occurs, and what to do about violence; this allowed for variations in the extent to which men's violence toward women was a priority. Violence had a place within organizational processes as part of the task and culture of the organization, part of the work objective, reproducing of masculinity and men's power, and past events that were externalized and objectified. Men's violation to women outside the organization in question was reduced to an element of the organizational structure in terms of functions, operations, and process.
AUTHOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS:
The author stated that there was a need for more conceptual thinking on the relationship of organizations and violence including the extent to which organizations can be understood as violence. Gendered views of power in the organization was considered a major point of focus.
(CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
Male Offender
Male Violence
Adult Male
Adult Offender
Adult Violence
Gender Factors
Gender Relations
Gender Differences
Social Organization
03-05 |