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This study investigates how a design team with researchers and participants from different parts and levels of an organisation may function as a participatory method for socially transformative innovation. The experiences gained by a design team in one of Sweden’s major forestry companies are examined through a participatory, single case study approach, in which researchers and employees jointly developed new insights and ideas. The results reveal that the design team functioned well in terms of channelling the participants’ expertise and experiences into innovative ideas, but less well as regards aligning the latter with the company’s regular management procedures, thus reducing the function of the design team to an abstract symbol of organisational ‘modernity’, rather than an effective instrument for social transformation.

Purpose: In Sweden, gender mainstreaming policies have a long political history. As part of the national gender equality strategy of the Swedish forest industry, the ten largest forestry companies committed themselves to gender mainstream their policies. Limiting the impact of policies and the agency of change, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the varied and conflicting meanings and constitution of the concepts, the problem and, in extent, the organisational realities of gender mainstreaming.

Design/methodology/approach: In both, implementation and practice, gender mainstreaming posse challenges on various levels and by analysing these documents as practical texts from the WPR-approach. This paper explores constructions of gender and gender equality and their implications on the practice and the political of gender mainstreaming in a male-dominated primary industry.

Findings: The results show that the organisations themselves were not constituted as the subject of the policy but instead some of the individuals (women). The subject position of women represented in company policy was one of lacking skills and competences and in the need of help. Not only men and the masculine norms but organisational processes and structures were also generally invisible in the material. Power and conflict were mainly absent from the understanding of gender equality. Instead, consenting ideas of gender equality were the focus. Such conceptualisations of gender equality are beneficial for all risk concealing power structures and thereby limit the political space for change.

Originality/value: By highlighting the scale of policy and the significance of organisational contexts, the results indicate how gender and gender equality are constitutive through the governing technologies of neoliberal and market-oriented ideologies in policy – emphasising the further limiting of space for structural change and politicalization within the male-dominated organisations of Swedish forest industry.

Using forestry and mining as empirical cases, the chapter analyses to what extent gender equality efforts in men-dominated industries can be understood as organizational innovations and how the degree of newness in these efforts affects the prospects of evoking structural changes in the gendered patterns of these industries. In the studied gender-equality efforts in one major forestry company and one major mining company in Sweden, carried out during the last ten years, innovative measures of creative workshops, cooperation with gender researchers, and challenging masculinities are identified. Their level of contextual innovativeness is high, although their universal innovativeness is low. The gendered aspects of the innovativeness encompass identification of hitherto unmet needs of gender equality among individuals, organizations and society to some extent. The prospects of the measures evoking structural change in a transformative way vary, with challenging masculinities exposing the highest potential, but only if thoroughly realized.