Biography

Dr. Joan Acker has become one of the foremost feminist sociologists in the country, and has been at the University of Oregon for more than thirty years. From exploring both her autobiographical information and her path to becoming an academic, it is clear that her earlier experiences shaped this legacy.
Dr. Acker grew up in Indiana as the child of a politically liberal mother and father. Her father was a writer who had a good job with the American Legion. Her mother was a college graduate who came from an impoverished upper-middle-class intellectual family. Her mother always worked and was a political activist. As a result, Acker saw both as what women normally did.
While growing up in Indiana, she started to notice strange things going on between different races that she perceived as very undemocratic. This started her interest in politics, but she wouldn’t develop a true political education until college.
She attended Hunter College in New York, which is where she began her political education. She had a new stepfather who was a radical and a mother who agreed with her stepfather. She also met radical people among her peers and had professors who connected race and class to subject matter. At Hunter, she majored in sociology and social work.
During her teenage years, she wanted a life of adventure. Specifically, she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. She pursued this goal during her high school and early college years by becoming the editor of her high school news paper and of her college literary magazine. However, she recognized before she was twenty that this did not fit in with her other goals: Becoming a wife and a mother.
She also decided that something else was important to her career path while still in college: She did not want to contribute to capitalist domination. Initially, this led her to become a social worker. She wanted to do something that could be done in most communities so that she could enhance her ability to combine marriage and work. This was also a path chosen to honor Acker’s political commitment to not exploit other people.
Although her social worker career did not directly lead her to becoming an academic, her study of sociology did lead Acker to begin considering “the woman question”. She wrote a paper comparing explanations of women’s positions in Thorsten Veblen and Robert Park’s work. In addition, she did an honor’s thesis on the family court in Manhattan.
After graduating from Hunter College, Acker received her M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1948. Around this time, she got married and pregnant. This led her to work part-time as a social worker in order to take care of her family (which soon grew to three children). The balancing act between work and children was possible (if difficult) in New York City, but it became impossible once her family moved to Mountain View, CA. There, she spent a couple of years outside of the work force. Eventually, she went back to school and became a tenured faculty member at the University of Oregon.

Path to becoming an academic

Joan Acker starts out her autobiographical piece, “I never intended to become an academic or a sociologist. But by now I have spent over thirty years as both”. Her path there was not straightforward, and she pursued other careers first.
While out of the work force, she realized that much of her self-confidence and drive had been lost through years of part-time work and staying at home. She decided that she had to do something to change, but she decided not to go back into social work because she felt like she was battling against impossible problems. Instead, she decided to go back to school. She was accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Oregon’s Department of Sociology.
In 1961, Joan Acker, her husband, and her children moved to Eugene, Oregon. Acker was thirty seven at the time. She found that combining work and school with parenthood much easier in that small town. Her house was two blocks from campus, and the public schools weren’t much further. After finishing her Ph.D, Acker was offered a tenure track position at the University of Oregon. She has been there ever since.

Challenges

Combining work and family life has been a challenge for Dr. Acker. She said that it was possible to do when her and her family originally lived in New York City, but the structure of her husband's work and her new community made it impossible when they moved to Mountainview, California. This proved to be so much of a challenge that she took a few years off of work. One of the ways that she solved this challenge was by having her husband take over many of the housekeeping and child care duties while she finished her dissertation. This particular challenge led her to try and change some of the organizational structures that makes finding work-life balance so difficult.

Another challenge for Acker was finding acceptance in a male-dominated field. She says that the Department of Sociology at Oregon was both welcoming and not welcoming when she first became a faculty member. Certain male faculty members were immensely supportive and understanding, but one in particular gave Acker a very difficult time. Not only did he express his disapproval privately, he also complained in the classroom. Acker overcame these difficulties by simply realizing that there was no alternative to persevering, and with the help of a supportive husband.

Teaching philosophy

Dr. Acker's teaching and course schedule tend to depend on her political interests at the time. This allows her to bring additional consciousness and enthusiasm into the classroom. For example, feminism crept into Acker's consciousness in the 1950's and 60's. This translated into teaching her first class on women, which was a seminar with graduate students.. She followed this was a large course on the sociology of women in 1969. She calls this second course the best course she has ever taught. At the time, she used practically no literature. This was mostly because there was very little critical feminist literature available at the time. She scoured the library and made up course content as she went along. Both the students and Acker were charged with energy and interest, and often there was staqnding room only in the class. It was a night class, and sometimes it ran so late that the cleaning crew kicked her and her students out.

Community action

Acker involved in community activism in college. After being exposed to radical politics through her peers and professors, she supported labor unions and began demonstrating. In addition, she was active in founding a student chapter of the United Office and Professional Workers Union (this was later destroyed by McCarthy-era anticommunism). The group gathered signatures for Henry Wallace and wrote and performed skits opposing the Taft-Hartley act. In addition, it supported antiracism efforts and community organizers.

Before entering the academic world, Dr. Acker spent one year in Dallas, Texas working on a project for the Dallas County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Center. In addition to being activist work in itself, this also motivated her for the future. During her tenure, a psychiatrist working for the center expressed his belief to Acker that blacks were "constitutionally inferior" to whites. The fact that this comment was made at all-and particularly by a mental health professional-infuriated Dr. Acker and drove future action.

Acker continued her political action into her graduate school years. While studying at the University of Oregon, she was among the faculty and students who organized one of the first teach-ins to oppose the Vietnam War. Her and her husband were also active in the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. She also got her students involved in the welfare rights movement.that this comment was made at all-and particularly by a mental health professional-infuriated Dr. Acker and drove future action.

Even after entering academics, Acker has managed to intertwine her professional career with community action. For example, she vocalized her displeasure with the number of women on the faculty at the University of Oregon. She also has taken up the issue of affirmative action on campus, holding talks to force the public and the administration to give more attention to the issue.

Research

Joan Acker's research career has stretched more than thirty years and includes interests such as gender, class, and organizations. More specifically, she focuses on the way gender functions within organizations and has also studied gender in the welfare state extensively. Often times, her research has taken a comparative approach. This is partially due to her visiting professorships at the Swedish Center for Working Life in Stockholm. In addition to her own personal research, she is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. This is a major feminist center on scholarship on gender and women. Most notably, CSWS provides direct funding to support University of Oregon graduate students and faculty members.



More recently, Acker's research has expanded to include the application of her study of gender and class to the growing field of scholarship on globalization. This led to her 2004 publication of the article "Gender, Capitalism, and Globalization". This article, published in Critical Sociology, served two main purposes. Dr. Acker explores how gender is implicated within the globalization process, asking if and how gender enters that process and what the gendered effects of the process are. Next, since both are contested in the literature, she also provides an exploration of the terms "globalization" and "gender".

Dr. Acker starts out with the exploration of these terms. Initially, she seems somewhat skeptical of the concept of globalization. She claims that capitalism has always been global. However, she eventually concedes that some changes have taken place. In the end, she ends up defining globalization as the "increasing pace and penetration of capital, production, and people across boundaries of many kind and on a global basis" (2). While using this somewhat traditional definition, she also emphasizes that globalization includes political and cultural changes in addition to economic ones.

One of Acker's main points about globalization is that gender and race are often invisible within these processes. These processes are often presented as gender neutral. For example, women's unpaid work (as subsistence farmers in developing countries, or housework), are almost never part of the analysis of economists studying globalization. The effect is that this unpaid work is taken for granted, and women are seen as a source of unpaid labor.

Dr. Acker proposes that we "gender" discourses on globalization to expose the differences between the realities of individuals lives and the scholarly reports on globalization. She defines gender as an attribute of social life, and not something that is essential to an individual. She claims that although this is not an essential characteristic, in general women tend to be more disadvantaged in terms of status.

She contextualizes her argument with a history of masculinities within capitalism. This culminates in an exploration of the ways in which globalized, transnational corporations take advantage and worsen existing gender gaps within society. For example, in countries where women are subsistence farmers, countries exploit the desperation of this lifestyle to lull women into low-wage factory positions. She emphasizes the non-responsibility attitude of these corporations, implicating these corporations as part of the cause of the barely-surviving lifestyle suffered by women in countries such as Bangladesh. To make her argument, she cites multiple sociological studies from around the world.

Dr. Acker's critique is searing, but it is refreshing in that it does not paint globalization as a black and white picture in one direction in another like many other theorists and scholars. In fact, in her conclusion she makes the claim that globalization underscores the complexity within labor relations. Her analysis of gender is also very nuanced, and she avoids the pitfalls of applying these concepts across the board by explaining the differences in gendered situations around the globe. Apparent throughout is the fact that Acker is an overall critic of capitalism, and her background in class studies comes through throughout the piece. Overall, this piece provided an interesting, critical, complex look at often overlooked issues within the globalization debate.

Other Selected Works:

Restructuring Welfare: Myths and Lived Realities, with Sandra Morgen and Jill Weigt. Cornell University Press. Forthcoming 2009.

"Glass Ceilings and Inequality Regimes. " Sociologie du travail. 2009, forthcoming .
"Diverting Dependency: The Effects of Diversion on Short Term Outcomes of TANF Applicants." With Ken Hudson and Lisa Gonzales. 2007. Journal of Poverty, 11, 1: 83-105. Class Questions: Feminist Answers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 2006.

"Inequality Regimes: Gender, Class and Race in Organizations." 2006 Gender & Society, 20, 4: 441-464.

"The Gender Regime in Swedish Banks". Scandinavian Journal of Management. 2006. 10, 2:117-130.


"The Gender Regime in Swedish Banks". Scandinavian Journal of Management. 1993. 10,2:117-130.

Doing Comparable Worth: Gender, Class and Pay Equity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1989.

"Differential Recruitment and Control: The Sex Structuring of Organizations", with Donald Van Houten, Administrative Science Quarterly , 19 (June, 1974): 152-63.

"Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual Sexism", American Journal of Sociology, 78, #4, (January, 1973): 174-83.

Accomplishments

Throughout her career, Dr. Acker has received various recognition of her work. A few are listed below, with a few of the most prestigious awards listed in detail.

Hunter College (CUNY) Alumni Hall of Fame, 2007.

Sociologists for Women in Society, Feminist Lecturer Award, 2005-2006
"The SWS Distinguished Lectureship was founded in 1985 as a way of recognizing members whose scholarship employs a feminist perspective and of making this feminist scholar available to campuses that are isolated, rural, located away from major metropolitan, areas, bereft of the resources neede dto invite guest speaker, and/or characterized by hostility to feminist scholarship. A key goal of the program is to provide a feminist voice on capmuses where such perspective is unusual and/or unwelcome"-Sociologists for Women in Society

*American Sociological Association Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, 1993
"The W.E.B. DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award honors scholars who have shown outsanding commitment to the profession of sociology and whose cumulative work has contributed in important ways tot he advancement of hte dsicipline. The body of lifetime work may include theoretical and/or methodological contributions. The award selection committee is particularly interested in work that substantially reorients the field in general or in a particular subfield" -American Sociological Association

*Jessie Bernard Award, American Sociological Association, 1989
"The Jessie Bernard Award is given in recognition of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of womein in society. THe contrbution may be in empirical research, theory, or methodology. It is presented for significant cumulative work done through a professional career. The award is open to women or men and is not restricted to sociologists".-American Sociological Association

*Ford Foundation Fellowship for support of dissertation research, 1965-1966

*Bobbs Merril Award in Sociology, Unvieristy of Oregon, 1965

*University Scholarship, University of Chicago, 1956-1948

*Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude, Honors in Sociology, Hunter College, 1946