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This chapter aims to how Marx's ideas and subsequent Marxist-inspired scholarship have contributed to the analysis of the various forms of work organization. It summarizes Marx's basic philosophy, theory of history, and critique of political economy; it distinguishes more critical and more optimistic variants of Marxist theory; and it then shows how these ideas have been used in the analysis of key organizational forms, contrasting Marxist versus non-Marxist approaches and critical versus optimistic versions of Marxism.

Gender concerns have been almost totally ignored within organizational analysis. This chapter attempts to redress that ignorance. It has four related tasks: (1) to illustrate examples of gender-blind approaches to the study of organizations; (2) by way of a selective review of the organizations and culture debate, to argue for the utility of an organizational culture focus for an understanding of gender; (3) to root an organizational culture focus, along with gender concerns, within a feminist materialist method of analysis; (4) to explore, by way of a strategic application of Clegg’s (1981) “rule” focus, the potential of a feminist materialist analysis for understanding the relationship between gender and organizational culture.

Purpose – There has been very little development of the capacity of dialectical logic during the last hundred years or so, while the capacity of post-Cartesian analytical logics has expanded greatly in response to efforts to understand more and more complex theoretical and empirical problems, though still within the limits of analytical strictures such as externality of relations and the principle of the excluded middle. This chapter pursues relative lines of development in analytical and dialectical logic.

Design/methodology/approach – After presenting as background a congeries of personal experiences, reflections, and reviews, the chapter addresses some of the lessons relating to the neglect of dialectical logic (e.g., the notion of contradiction as error, and the idealization that is condition to it), in order to work toward some clarifications, developments, and challenges of dialectical logic (past, present, and future). Along the way providing comparisons with analytical logic, the emphasis will be on the contributions of several theorists, including Adorno, Marx, and Habermas.

Findings – Some illustrations of under- and undeveloped capacity are proposed with regard to dialectical-conceptual formations of identity/difference relations, unity of opposites, and quality/quantity relations, as well as contradiction as condition and as consequence of processes wherein various realities are produced. A number of challenges are outlined, with an invitation to scholars to pursue better development of the power of dialectical logic.

Research limitations/implications – An unduly defensive posture against perceived threats from both analytics and empirics (experiences of world) has surely been part of the obstacle to advancing dialectical logic, though one should not underestimate the resistances stemming from poor institutional-disciplinary support for the risk-taking activities required for innovation and development.

Originality/value – Dialectical logic is important to investigations of process dynamics in a number of ways, most especially insofar as contradiction is a major driver of processes, in particular processes that tend to follow trajectories that from the perspective of analytical logic are unexpected and/or illogical; for dialectical logic takes the event of contradiction as not merely indicative of error in the process of propositional reasoning but instead or also as an outcome of specifiable sequences of structurally conditioned behaviors, actions, and chains of effects at supra-individual levels of the production of realities.