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Gender divisions are embedded in and essential to the structure of capitalist production. While most men and women in the United States both now work for wages, they rarely work together. Gender segregation has been identified as one of the major issues of the earnings gap between men and women. An explanation of the forces responsible for this has been difficult to achieve. Most theories fail to consider the contribution of demand‐side factors to gender segregation. Neo‐Marxist analysis of labour market segmentation and theories of the dual economy have provided new frameworks for investigating these structural or demand‐side features of industrial organisation. The pattern of blue‐collar segregation in US manufacturing industries is examined drawing on these theories. Employment data from the US census is used to identify how the levels of blue‐collar segregation in manufacturing industries are influenced by the industry's location within the core or peripheral sector of the US economy. Many of segregation's proposed remedies stress the role of supply‐side factors. These strategies focus attention almost exclusively on male and female workers and ignore the structure of the workplace. Strategies that ignore the dualistic nature of the US economy offer only partial solutions and may be counter‐productive. If forced to eliminate or reduce segmentation, employers may simply restructure their labour processes in a way that undermines rather than contributes to gender inequality. It is apparent that the pursuit of gender equality in the workplace is intrinsically related to and dependent on the broader efforts of workers to achieve greater control over production, both at the workplace and in the economy as a whole.

I was at Stanford from 1984 to 1986 as a post-doctoral fellow in the NIMH Organizations and Mental Health Training Program. I never thought of myself as a sociologist of organizations or of mental health. As a student of feminist sociologist Joan Acker, my interests were firmly in the area of gender inequality and work, and I went to Stanford primarily for the opportunity to collaborate with Jim Baron. I had been very much influenced by Baron and Bielby's (1980) call to “bring firms back in” to the study of work and inequality. Baron and Bielby's research on job- and firm-level gender segregation and their efforts to probe its underlying organizational dynamics seemed to offer exciting new vantage points from which to understand gender inequality in the workplace.

We examine chairs’ beliefs about the role of gender and gender inequality in their departments. Because work-family concerns have been central to explanations of gender inequality in the academy, we pay special attention to these issues.

We analyze interview data collected from 52 department chairs at one research-intensive, public university.

Although the chairs we interviewed were sympathetic and aware in many respects, their views on gender, work, and family were filtered through the lens of personal responsibility and choice, an outmoded view of work as separate and distinct from family life, and a notion of gender as a personal characteristic rather than an entrenched feature of academic work and careers.

Our focus on departmental leaders fills an important gap in the literature, which has focused more on the perspectives of faculty and less on those with the power to frame gender issues.

This introduction sets forth the main themes of the volume, reviews the methods employed by the contributors, and demonstrates the relationships among the chapters.

Each of the chapters demonstrates the gendered nature of the academy and some of the ways in which women, especially women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, are disadvantaged. None of them provides complete catalogues of the issues confronting women and none reach definitive conclusions regarding the ways and means of transforming the academy. Additional research and experimentation will be required.

The gender transformation of the academy holds the promise of more opportunities for women, especially but not only in STEM disciplines and higher administration, and greater probability of balance between work and personal life for all.

The chapter serves as an overall introduction to the volume and the subject matter more generally.

In 1981, W. Richard (Dick) Scott of Stanford's sociology department described a paradigmatic revolution in organizational sociology that had occurred in the preceding decade. In Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (Scott, 1981), he depicted the first wave of organizational theory as based in rational models of human action that focused on the internal dynamics of the organization. He described the second wave, found in human relations theory and early institutional theory, as based in natural social system models of human action but still focused on the internal “closed system.” A sea change occurred in organizational theory in the 1970s as several camps began to explore environmental causes of organizational behavior. The open-systems approaches that Scott sketched in 1981 were still seedlings, but all would mature. What they shared was an emphasis on relations between the organization and the world outside of it. The roots of these new paradigms can be traced to innovations of the 1960s. Contingency theorists Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch (1967) had argued that firms add new practices and programs largely in response to external social demands and not simply to internal functional needs. James Thompson (1967) argued that organizations come to reflect the wider environment and particularly the regulatory environment.

Library staff are experiencing increased work role complexity as they move from being service providers towards greater instructional roles, providing bibliographic instruction, user education, and information literacy instruction. The purpose of this paper is to explore how library staff relate to their instructional roles and the implications of those self‐understandings for instructional outcomes.

Data collected from qualitative interviews with library staff in Canadian academic and public libraries and diary entries written over a three‐month period were analyzed using NVivo software and an open‐coding, grounded‐theory approach. The study took a phenomenological perspective and was influenced by constructivist sociological role theory.

Data analysis revealed the central place of affect in the experiences of librarians engaged in instructional work, and brought focus to the relational aspects of this work and the affective impact of visibility/invisibility of instructional outcomes. A prominent theme was the expression of “emotional labour”; participants used a variety of methods to manage this occupational stressor as they experienced it within the context of instructional work.

Individuals and organizations will benefit from considering the influence of affect on library staff. Those who educate librarians should seek to improve understanding of affect and its impact on instruction; organizations will benefit from addressing the emotional labour performed as a part of the teaching role.

The study draws attention to the affective experiences of library staff. This is the first research article in the LIS literature to explore emotional labour as it relates to librarians.

Describes the early stages of university executive education, including MBA and non‐degree executive development programmes, and gives examples of early in‐house executive education. Examines the current university EMBA and speciality programmes and today’s in‐house facilities. Sets out advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches, and considers a customized approach ‐ a movement towards jointly designed executive education, combining university and in‐house features. Looks at the future of executive education, the two most important trends being the effects of global competition and evolving corporate needs, and discusses future executive programmes ‐ university, in‐house and cutomized. Highlights the implications of recent developments in technology, and suggests that the underlying theme for tomorrow’s executive education is the likelihood of more company involvement.