Cashiers' contribution to organizations: A feminist perspective of accounting and countering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper examines how a low‐skilled, gendered occupational group collectively counters representations of its contribution to organizational performance. We situate this process within the literature on counter accounts—alternative representations designed to rectify perceived harms or injustices. Our study focuses on cashiers, referred to as “checkout hostesses” in their organization's gendered terminology, in the highly masculine building supplies sector. Drawing on a feminist theorization of counter accounts and a 1‐year ethnography at two levels (in a store and in a cashiers' working group), we show that cashiers produce three counter accounts: (1) a vocational qualification that highlights their accounting and selling skills, (2) a reframing of their customer credit activities as a contribution to sales, and (3) a quantification of their selling activity in a dashboard tracking sales at the checkout. These counter accounts challenge patriarchal social structures that frame their job as a low‐status “woman's job,” objectify them, and overshadow their contribution to organizational performance. We advance the concept of counter accounts from the inside, showing that they do not merely denounce oppression but also repurpose stereotypical gender and class norms as resources for collective empowerment. We also emphasize how internal organizational support fosters occupational groups' awareness of their agency. Finally, we argue that the potential and limitations of counter accounts must be assessed from the perspective of the vulnerable group itself, broadening their understanding as emancipatory tools produced for the “other” by the “other.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".