Convents without Nuns: Historical Analysis of Women Workers in a Textile Factory.
| Autor | Pereira, Rafael Diogo |
Introduction
An extensive body of work regarding women's involvement in the social and productive domains can be readily found in the Organization Studies field, coming from both national (Bruschini, 2007; Cappelle & Melo, 2010; Carrieri, Diniz, Souza, & Menezes, 2013; Moraes, 1981; P. M. M. Silva, Rocha, Brito, Barreto & Gurgel, 2016; Poster, 1979; Thiry-Cherques, 2003; Vieira, Carrieri, Monteiro, & Roquete, 2017) and international publications (Duffy, Hancock, & Tyler, 2017; Dwivedi, Joshi, & Misangyi, 2018; Kanze, Huang, Conley, & Higgins, 2017; Leslie, Manchester, & Dahm, 2017; Sangster & Smith, 2016). Studies on gender, anchored in the most diverse theoretical traditions, provide clues to the broad set of power dispositives and discourses that were (or still are) directed toward sustaining certain regimes of truth regarding women, in general, and Brazilian women, in particular. Among such truths stand out those which have long contributed to the historical justification of discrimination practices towards women, their relegation to the domestic sphere, the denial of their sexuality and their exclusion from or devaluation of their work in the labor market (Cappelle & Melo, 2010; Moraes, 1981; N. A. Santos, 2016; Rago, 2007).
In this sense, this paper aims to contribute to the historical unveiling of a certain set of dispositives and discourses that befell southeast Brazilian textile factory working women from the end of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century. By making room for reflection, not only about the meanings of being a woman but also a factory worker in southeast Brazil at that time, this paper intends to evidence the historical forces behind the legitimization of some of the interdictions and power relations that can still be identified in contemporary Brazilian society.
In regards to its theoretical architecture, this paper intends to place the concept of gender at the heart of power relations (L. C. dos Santos, Carvalho, Amaral, Borges, & Mayorga, 2016). It is not our intention to argue that the analysis of women's issues from a perspective of power is the only valid one. However, facing the complexity of gender categorization, it is worth noting that by engaging in an analysis based on power relations of such themes we can add to the understanding of a scenario susceptible to changes and interpellations as envisaged by feminism as a social, theoretical and political movement. At the same time, Foucault's concepts of power, discipline and discourse will also be incorporated in this discussion.
Another point worth mentioning is the historical perspective adopted in this paper. According to Barros (2013) and Vizeu (2010), historical research has taken an important place in organizational studies, including the publication of specialized journals such as Management & Organizational History and Journal of Management History. Authors like Clark and Rowlinson (2004) even indicate a movement of "historic turn" (p. 251) in organizational studies, guided by the adoption of a new set of methodologies and perspectives to approach the past in our field, as organization theorists have increasingly come to agree that "history matters" as a way to understand both ourselves and organizations (Rowlinson, Hassard, & Decker, 2014, p. 252).
The inclusion of historical sources, especially documents provided by organizational archives, was once met with reluctance by organization theorists, underutilized and underexplored in their researches (Rowlinson et al., 2014). Now, the repeated calls for more historical researches have been answered, thus leading to the emergence of organizational history as a field located "within the broad universe of organization studies and a constellation of related subfields, particularly business history and management history" (Godfrey, Hassard, O'Connor, Rowlinson, & Ruef, 2016, p. 591). Defined by the authors "as research and writing combining history and organizational theorizing" (p. 592), organizational history covers a wide spectrum of types of research, ranging from primarily historiographical ones (referred to as history-with-theory), to mainly theoretical ones (theory-with-history) (Godfrey et al., 2016).
On the other hand, authors like Maclean, Harvey and Clegg (2016) refer to this new synthesis between history and organization studies as "historical organization studies", defining it "as organizational research that draws extensively on historical data, methods, and knowledge, embedding organizing and organizations in their sociohistorical context to generate historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines" (p. 609). Therefore, no matter how we may call it, it is clear that history has been informing organization studies for a while now, providing data and also assisting in the development of methods that serve as framework to all theoretical approaches that make organization theory, including critical studies (Maclean, Harvey, & Clegg, 2016).
In order to reflect on what we mean by a set of discourses and dispositives that befell on factory women workers at the end of the 19th century and understand the implications on the remaining discourses surrounding women in the workplace to this day, we are going to take Foucault's (2008) conception of history as a starting point for this paper. The author manages to capture history by its ruptures and discontinuities, rejecting, at the same time, the myth of its enlightening origin and the teleological vision of its promised end. The disorganized dispersions and successions of time and discourse are brought to the foreground, inhabited by concrete subjects in constant dispute, constrained and forced to constitute themselves from the strands of power and knowledge present in their time.
By delving into the archives of the textile company, as well as analyzing excerpts from newspapers and other documentary sources of the time, we seek to provide a contextualized reading of the discourses and dispositives surrounding those women factory workers and what role the organization in question played in it. After all, according to Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker (2014), "understanding the past is central to our historical human condition" (p. 269) and as we understand how organizations played a role in shaping discourses and power dispositives placed on women at the workplace, we also try to offer a viable answer to one of the challenges presented by Godfrey, Hassard, O'Connor, Rowlinson and Ruef (2016) to all organizational theorists: to highlight, via historical research, organizations and businesses involvement in larger social phenomena, as well as specific historical moments.
In addition to this brief introduction, four other sections follow. The next section seeks to synthesize the theoretical framework of this article by establishing a dialog between gender and power relations. Next, the methodological aspects are laid out, with an emphasis on the document analysis and the basis of historical documents erected. The following section brings up the analysis, tackling the institution of the convent maintained by the textile company, considering the statements and the disciplinary apparatus present in the everyday lives of these women workers. Finally, the study's contributions and some final considerations are presented.
Gender and its constitutive role
According to Lewis, Benschop and Simpson (2017) organizational studies show an empirical and theoretical insufficiency when dealing with feminism on a poststructuralist epistemological basis, which remain largely unexplored. In view of this shortcoming, addressing some central concepts of this perspective, such as power, discourse and truth effects, holds a certain promise, given the intention to avoid the risk of portraying a feminism which is uncritical and co-opted by the values of economic neoliberalism.
It is worth mentioning that this articulation between gender and power, like the one that is being proposed here, does have some precedence. It is possible to find other works that have traced similar paths, seeking to establish connections between gender, power, subjectivity and resistance (Cappelle, 2006; Meyer, 1996; Souza, Brewis, & Rumens, 2016). As an example, Souza, Brewis and Rumens (2016) evidence the criticism of the theoretical presuppositions that define "man as a human being" (Souza et al., 2016, p. 591), with the attribution of a subaltern status to the feminine, and to all characteristics forcibly imposed on the feminine gender as elements resulting from the juxtaposition to male hegemonic standards. According to the authors, "gender does not mean the terms 'woman' or 'man', since it is not an identity or a categorical term but a power apparatus that constitutes these identities and terms as possible and legible" (Souza et al., 2016, p. 606). In this way, the categories of gender not only function as a way of legitimizing and constituting the possibilities of being of the subjects and their modes of existence, but are also seen as the compulsory identification of an anatomical body positioned within a set of rules and reiterated norms, historically constituted by means of exclusions, prohibitions, denials and rejections, as Foucault (1992) points out in his genealogical analysis of power.
In this sense, under the lens of power relations, it is possible to establish another reading of fundamental concepts for feminist theories, such as that of patriarchy, made subject of discussion from the 1970s onwards with the so-called second wave of the Feminist Movement (Boris & Cesidio, 2007; Delphy, 2009). Thus, feminism traditionally conceives of patriarchy as a social formation, where men were centered at the heart of power, institutionalizing male domination. Under power's perspective, it is possible to re-signify the concept and to understand it in a less static way. Thus, instead of seeing patriarchy as a structure...
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