What Counts as Environmental Work? How Gender Regimes Shape Organizational Practice

Ambreen Ben-Shmuel, University of Michigan (Israel)

Although environmental interventions require technical and social approaches, organizations often privilege the former. This pattern’s persistence remains underinvestigated. This study analyzes several years of ethnographic fieldwork in a peacebuilding- and sustainability-focused organization through the four dimensions of Connell’s (2005) gender regime framework to demonstrate how professional logics in fields with asymmetric gender institutionalization produce divergent organizational gender regimes that preference particular forms of knowledge, work, and authority. The peacebuilding domain, which has institutionalized gender frameworks, considers multiple knowledge forms authoritative and relational processes productive; the environmental domain, which lacks comparable institutionalization, privileges technical expertise over social and community-based knowledge. Consequently, organizational actors attempting to translate gender-inclusive practices across domains face epistemic and structural barriers. This study contributes to institutional logics by demonstrating how professional logics shape gender regimes through epistemic mechanisms and extends Connell’s gender regime theory by linking organizational patterns to field-level institutional dynamics, with insights for environmental management. It likewise contributes to the expanding literature on gender and environmental peacebuilding, offering an organizational and institutional lens.