Tempered disruption: Gender and agricultural professional services

Alison Sheridan and Lucie Newsome

Gender, Work and Organization, 2021, vol. 28, issue 3, 1040-1058

Abstract: Agriculture has traditionally been framed as men's work, while women's contributions to the sector have largely been rendered invisible. This article examines the emerging agricultural professional services sector, asking how a changing environment for agriculture may be disrupting traditional gender norms framing agricultural employment. Drawing together the literature in gender and agriculture, professional services and entrepreneurship and interviews with 22 women who have built businesses in agricultural professional services in Australia, our analysis identifies that a confluence of macro and micro activities are shaping new opportunities for women in agricultural employment. Through leveraging a changing industry environment, exercising agency, (valuing) local matters and communion, participants are disturbing traditional gendered patterns of agricultural employment. Our analysis highlights how, as participants build their businesses and demonstrate agency in a dynamic environment, they value the integrating, reconciling, and synthesizing they experience from supporting the flow of activities in their communities. In claiming their space in the changing landscape of agricultural professional services, they exemplify communion enriched by agency, and we see a tempered disruption of the gendered norms in agricultural employment. The article contributes to scholarship on agricultural professional work and identifies how historical patterns of employment and masculine privilege are being disrupted.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12623

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:gender:v:28:y:2021:i:3:p:1040-1058

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0968-6673

Access Statistics for this article

Gender, Work and Organization is currently edited by David Knights, Deborah Kerfoot and Ida Sabelis

More articles in Gender, Work and Organization from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().