Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy,
Amsterdam 1994, dissertation University of Amsterdam INTRODUCTION
3
2. Two options to connect sex-defined to sex-neutral concepts
Viewed sociologically instead of juridically, universalist rule systems are upheld by human
beings who function in 'bureaucratic society' in general and in 'bureaucracies' or
'organizations'
10
in particular and who orient their actions to a consistent hierarchy of
command and obedience based on these rules. Bureaucracies organize production and
domination nationally and internationally; a person who is excluded from positions of
authority inside them has to work for her or his livelihood.
Since the rules on which modern bureaucracies are based mostly have a universalist
character, the rule of formal equality should determine access to leadership positions; this
means that everybody who possesses the knowledge of rules and their application - a
knowledge which is called 'competence', 'quality', 'expertise' - required for a leadership
function, should have the same chance of access, regardless of his or her personal
characteristics.
11
The struggle to have sex defined as one of the personal characteristics which should not
influence access to bureaucratic positions is an important part of the struggle of the feminist
movements of the last two centuries. So far, however, women have mostly been granted
entrance into those bureaucratic positions which give authority over children or over other
women; they have to obey men and seldom command them; if they work among men, they
are treated as dependents instead of as equals.
Social theories on 'bureaucracy' do not mention this phenomenon. This is because they
have been formulated in the same universalist terms as the rules their objects are based on
and therefore they only mention 'men' in the sense of 'people' or 'people' in the sense of
'men', depending on the language; the 'generic he'
12
is used to designate 'the individual',
regardless of its sex. The relations between women and men are considered to be private
and therefore excluded from the analysis.
Feminist social scientists who want to explain either the barriers
to entrance of women into bureaucracies or organizations or the characteristics of the
position of those who happened to gain access, therefore meet with difficult problems. They
have to connect the experience of women inside and outside of bureaucracies
13
and the
feminist concepts formulated by feminists to generalize this experience, with the concepts
organization sociologists developed to explain the position of the different 'individuals' in the
organization and the changes in those positions. To make this connection two options
'manschappij' - 'menship': 'maatschappij' meaning 'society' and 'maat' 'comrade' or 'socius' - to differentiate it from
'patriarchy', in which the membership of society is based on the position of patriarch, and 'heerschappy', 'lordship'
as the society based on the rule of patrimonial lords, which in both cases meant that most men had no
autonomous membership rights; see below, Ch. 5 and 6. See on the continuing existence of 'patriarchy' the
radical feminist classics: Notes from the Second Year, Firestone, Millet, and Greer, all of 1970.
10
See on the difference between these concepts Mouzelis (1971).
11
See for Dutch law in general Asscher-Vonk (1989).
12
See for a definition of this term and a criticism of its use in order to refer generically to 'creatures of unspecified
sex' for instance Silveira (1980).
13
The Dutch radical-feminist writing collective De Bonte Was connected these experiences to each other by
conceptualizing women's activities in the family as 'work for one man' and work outside of the home as 'working
for several men'; see De Bonte Was (1975).
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