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Women who are the primary caretaker of the home, as a choice or as a necessity, have to negotiate an effective work-life balance and many times, the need to take care of their home results in lost opportunities for career development and advancement (Maki, 2015). For most, the opportunity to capitalize on the missed opportunities will occur after childbearing years (Maki, 2015). This study reconstructed the advancement to executive leadership of women who were employed at four-year, public universities using narrative inquiry and guided by the conceptual framework of social cognitive theory (Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2013; Bandura, 1989). In this study, six women in higher education were interviewed to discuss work-life balance as it pertains to being an executive leader of a four-year public institution. The participants of this study pinpointed family and work-life balance as important factors for their decision-making process. Balancing work and life can be challenging when you are a person in a leadership position and the degree of difficulty increases when children and family are included. Many women believe that they must choose between their careers and their family. Women postponing their careers for their spouses may not seem abnormal because there tends to be an expectation that male's advancement is prioritized over the woman's (Parker, 2015). As more women are taking on leadership roles, the idea and evolution of establishing and maintaining a strategy for work-life balance becomes a very integral topic and one that needs continuous exploration.

This chapter analyses the other aspect of an oppressor/oppressed relationship by looking at what happens to the oppressed, in this case, the academics and staff not in leadership roles. This chapter looks at why the tactics leaders employ work, and why people do not retaliate, and what systems have been put in place to prevent the people from having any consequential power. This chapter thus looks at how the power of the majority in the academy has been slowly eroded by managerial promises of empowerment, self-governance or having an opinion on the institution's direction when in reality, they have no opinion, and the only decisions they can make are inconsequential. This is why time and time again, we see universities restructure, remove non-profitable courses and increase targets to unrealistic levels to maintain power over the majority.

Education policies in the United States reinforce social stratification by prioritizing and normalizing middle-class whiteness in schools (Leonardo, 2007; Picower, 2009). The teacher labor market has also become more feminized, making white middle-class women paragons of exemplary educators (Rury, 1989; Tolley & Beadie, 2006). These sociopolitical and historical factors continue to play out in the current U.S. education workforce where 80% teachers are white and 76% of teachers are female (Hussar et al., 2020). Meanwhile, student demographics are shifting with students of color comprising over 50% of the public student population (de Brey et al., 2019). Diversifying the educator pipeline is a well-documented strategy to improve educational outcomes for all students, specifically students of color, and to achieve greater equity and inclusion in public education. However, the retention and promotion of educators of color remains a critical and complex issue.

Thus, looking at the intersection of race and gender in the education workplace, the purpose of this chapter is to highlight the experiences and expertise of women K-12 educators of color to identify best practices for career development. Applying Psychology of Working Theory (PWT) and utilizing modified meta-synthesis methodology, the chapter highlights the experiences of Black, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous/Native American women K-12 principals and superintendents to (1) thematize and conceptualize how women of color define their work in education spaces through a PWT lens and (2) understand how PWT themes can illuminate ways to build more diverse and inclusive career pathways for women of color leaders.

Many psychological, cultural, and social barriers exist that impact Black male participation in the workforce. In this chapter, authors discuss the impact that mentorship, racism, society, culture, economics, and other pertinent factors have on the career development of Black men. This chapter examines programs and strategies that effectively address the career development needs of Black men. A review of counseling interventions and their applicability to career counseling with Black men are presented. Emerging trends in career development for Black men are also discussed. In addition, provided in this chapter are personal narratives given by the authors who contextualize their career development experiences through culturally-specific career development theoretical frameworks. Lastly, implications for research, counseling, counselor education, and policy, as well as recommendations for professional development are offered.

Although organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is a concept associated with significant values within the modern workplace, many employees find it challenging to exhibit some necessary extra-role behaviours, such as helping co-workers complete their duties when a situation demands it. Currently, in the South African workspace, fostering OCB among employees is a concern to people practitioners. Specifically, extra-role types of behaviour are declining among professionals as 21st-century technologies promote remote-working policy, leaving employees to work robotically with computers and having no colleagues around to seek or render assistance with their duties. Moreover, professionals are overwhelmed with the timely and endless obligations received frequently and hardly have time and energy for extra-role behaviours. In addition, physical and psychological health-related concerns such as technology stress and career worries are among the contemporary issues affecting human resource (HR) management in this present time. This necessitates more scholarly actions in the niche of OCB, especially identifying and arresting its hindrances. However, a thorough review of the literature on OCB revealed a paucity of scientific reports in the areas of relationships between technostress, career concerns and OCB. Hence, the proposed chapter seeks to bridge the gap in the literature of OCB by theoretically exploring the relationships between technostress, career concerns and OCB in the professional services context in South Africa.

Women's bodies are abject and ‘out of place’ in organisations where (self and other) disciplining of women's bodies serve to regulate and silence women. Yet we know little about how expectations of body and appearance play out in the career decisions and everyday practices of women academic leaders. In this chapter reflexive accounts are used to explore if dress and appearance expectations have implications for women's career development and advancement, specifically in the context of business schools. The literature review and two reflexive autoethnographic accounts provided, illuminate how, through dress and appearance, the pervasiveness of hegemonic masculinity is both sustained and challenged and the potential impacts of this upon women's careers in academia.

This chapter explores the extent to which female public relations (PR) practitioners perform professionalism in the workplace by interrogating and examining their professional behaviours. Using an ethnographic approach, where the researcher is immersed in the field, it uncovers the lived experiences and behavioural responses of women working in PR agency environments in the United Kingdom and enables a rich description of professional behaviours to emerge.

Fawkes argues that research into roles in PR ‘has tended to assess roles using management rather than sociological theory’ (2014, p. 2). That is not to say that all PR research adopts the same paradigmatic stance. Several scholars have encouraged the development of a research agenda rooted in social theory. Holtzhausen called for a move away from what she termed the ‘modernist approach to organizations’ (2002, p. 251), which focuses on management discourse, and encouraged instead a focus on the postmodern concept of discourse, where meaning is constructed and conveyed through social and institutional practices.

In seeking to discover the ‘lived experience’ of female practitioners, this chapter locates professionalism in the context of their behaviours and enables individuals to articulate their understandings of the relationship between performance and professionalism. Using Goffman's (1959) work on social encounters as performances in conjunction with Foucauldian discourse and Feminist theory, this chapter explores the three stages of performing professionalism – preparation, performance and reception – through the eyes of women working in PR agencies in the United Kingdom to explore their lived experience and determine how gender affects their performance of professional behaviour.

For many years, public education has been concerned about the number of teachers of color in public schools, the experiences of teachers of color, and the ability of teachers to understand how to be culturally competent. These concerns have been addressed by programs and projects that focus on recruiting more teachers of color, providing more coaching and mentoring, and/or professional learning. So far, none of these have made a significant difference in addressing any of these challenges. It is time to move from projects and programs and examine the fundamental structures and systems of classrooms that limit, obstruct, and hinder the ability to create workplaces that are equitable and conducive to real inclusivity. In this chapter, we narrate how the Next Education Workforce (NEW) initiative at Arizona State University is cultivating diversity and inclusion in the education workplace by rethinking and redesigning the workplace for educators, especially those from marginalized groups. In partnership with multiple districts across Arizona, NEW is rethinking educator roles and responsibilities in the workplace and their accompanying entry, induction, specialization, and advancement practices and pathways. To mitigate these challenges of the current workplace – where a single educator is responsible for an entire classroom of students – and to work toward a more equitable one, the future workplace must be redesigned so educators operate in teams. By creating teams of educators who work in real time, recognizing educators' unique expertise, and focusing on deepening and personalizing learning – whether content, pedagogical, or lived experiences – we can redesign the workplace, learning environments, and the teaching profession.

This chapter explores the results of an international survey (RAAAP-2) to provide global insight into research management and administration (RMA) as a relatively new field of investigation within the area of higher education management (HEM). Building on that extensive survey, the purpose of this chapter is to investigate qualitatively how and why people become and remain research managers and administrators, focussing primarily on their skills, roles, and career paths.

Findings from the analysis confirm that a career in RMA is rarely an intentional choice and can be described as labyrinthine, which could be even compared and contrasted with a concertine academic career described by Whitchurch et al. (2021). While conclusions confirm the gender implications of the profession, which is overall highly ‘female’; further conclusion sheds light on RMAs across regions and suggests how this varied ecosystem could even undermine the recognition of RMA as a profession.