Giving and receiving: Gendered service work in academia
Professor Margaretha Järvinen has published the article 'Giving and receiving: Gendered service work in academia' in Current Sociology in collaboration Nanna Mik-Meyer (CBS).
Deploying the perspective of ‘relational work’, this article investigates the mechanisms behind the gender-unequal distribution of academic service. The concept of relational work is used to analyse how men and women in academia balance collective against individual interests when agreeing or disagreeing on service tasks.
The study is based on qualitative interviews with 163 associate and full professors in the social sciences and CV data on their service contributions.
Four types of relational work are identified: compliance, evasiveness, barter and investment, with compliance being more common among women, evasiveness and barter being more common among men and investment being tied to temporality in a gendered pattern.
The article shows that men are more successful in pursuing individual interests against service demands and how this depends on their relational work as well as organisational role expectations, reducing women’s prospects of ‘saying no’.
Read the abstract (open access): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00113921231224754
Download the article: https://www.sociology.ku.dk/staff/professor-and-associate-professor/?pure=en%2Fpublications%2Fgiving-and-receiving(ea63c00b-4781-4d8c-a709-1bc74d09fc53).html