DEVELOPING A THEORY OF GENDER AS PRACTICE Notes on Yancey Martin’s Feminist Lecture

In her feminist lecture “ ‘Said and Done ’ versus ‘Saying and Doing, ’ ” Patricia Yancey Martin gives us an exceptionally clear and useful review of the problems of theorizing gender in organizational contexts. Yancey Martin has been working on these issues for more than a decade (cf. Yancey Martin 1990), in a multifaceted research agenda that is one of the key contributions to the current Anglophone soci-ology of gender. This article crystallizes a conceptual perspective that has been emerging in her work. Drawing on a range of theories and on fieldwork in large U.S. corporations, Yancey Martin argues that gender is a pervasive feature at the level of everyday practice in notionally ungendered organizations. She proposes the concept of a two-sided gender dynamic in organizational life: gendering practices, which embody institutionalized gender distinctions, and the process of “practicing gen-der, ” in which particular people constitute gender relations in their continuing workplace activity. In developing these concepts, Yancey Martin is grappling with the glaring con