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1 – 10 of 902Regine Bendl and Angelika Schmidt
In this paper the authors aim to examine the forms in which feminist activism is played out at contemporary managerial universities and pose the following question: what notions…
Abstract
Purpose
In this paper the authors aim to examine the forms in which feminist activism is played out at contemporary managerial universities and pose the following question: what notions of feminist activism and feminist theory have to be revisited in order to sustain the target of gender equality and support its move further into the centre and the mainstream of managerial universities?
Design/methodology/approach
Based on action research the authors document a workshop which they organised for different constituencies (administrators, researchers and feminist activists) working towards gender equality at an Austrian university and discuss its results in the context of feminist theory.
Findings
The five voices collected at the workshop show that feminist theories are still the underlying guiding principles for feminist activism towards gender equality at managerial universities. As this is the first time that different generations of feminist activists have been present at managerial universities and are working in a top‐down environment supported by administrators responsible for gender equality, common practices that have been successful to implement gender equality in the past have to be refined and new spaces for collaboration established.
Originality/value
This is the first paper that explores the multiple voices amongst those engaged in the process of transformation towards gender equality at contemporary managerial universities. It shows that an open discussion of complementary and conflicting ways in which the representatives can construct their selves, their strategies and their actions is required in order to start “managing the management” anew – from a higher level than the feminist grassroots activists in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Claire Jin Deschner, Léa Dorion and Lidia Salvatori
This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper is a reflective piece on a PhD workshop on “feminist organising” organised in November 2017 by the three authors of this paper. Calls to resist the neoliberalisation of academia through academic activism are gaining momentum. The authors’ take on academic activism builds on feminist thought and practice, a tradition that remains overlooked in contributions on resisting neoliberalisation in academia. Feminism has been long committed to highlighting the epistemic inequalities endured by women and marginalised people in academia. This study aims to draw on radical feminist perspectives and on the notion of prefigurative organising to rethink the topic of academic activism. How can feminist academic activism resist the neoliberal academia?
Design/methodology/approach
This study explores this question through a multi-vocal autoethnographic account of the event-organising process.
Findings
The production of feminist space within academia was shaped through material and epistemic tensions. The study critically reflects on the extent to which the event can be read as prefigurative feminist self-organising and as neoliberal academic career-focused self-organising. The study concludes that by creating a space for sisterhood and learning, the empowering potential of feminist organising is experienced.
Originality/value
The study shows both the difficulties and potentials for feminist organising within the university. The concept of “prefiguration” provides a theoretical framework enabling us to grasp the ongoing efforts on which feminist organising relies. It escapes a dichotomy between success and failure that fosters radical pessimism or optimism potentially hindering political action.
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Jim Barry, John Chandler and Elisabeth Berg
The paper seeks to offer a consideration of the adequacy of the concept of abeyance in accounting for women's movement processes in non‐social movement organisations in periods…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper seeks to offer a consideration of the adequacy of the concept of abeyance in accounting for women's movement processes in non‐social movement organisations in periods characterised by quiescence rather than insurgence.
Design/methodology/approach
The article is primarily conceptual.
Findings
By extending the political process school of social movement theory, which relies heavily on visible activism to explain movement success, to include the new social movement approach, it is contended that underlying processes of change, associated with the values and affiliations of those involved in non‐social movement organisations, become clearer. Less visible processes are identified through the variable rhythms and multiple, discontinuous experiences of women's movement supporters characterised as concealed adherents, informal networkers, and fellow travellers who can include male supporters.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations: as the paper is primarily conceptual, there is a need to develop the practical implications beyond those mentioned below. Implications: there is a need to reorient research into organisational change to take fuller account of social movement processes.
Practical implications
It is recognised that the literature on organisational and managerial change in non‐social movement organisations needs to take account of the differing experiences and potential strategies of those likely to be affected.
Originality/value
Originality of the paper lies in the use of insights drawn from the field of political sociology to enrich understanding of gender and organisational change.
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The purpose of this paper is to outline the challenges and complexities in conducting research faced by scholars utilizing postcolonial feminist frameworks. The paper discusses…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to outline the challenges and complexities in conducting research faced by scholars utilizing postcolonial feminist frameworks. The paper discusses postcolonial feminist key concepts, namely representation, subalternity, and reflexivity and the challenges scholars face when deploying these concepts in fieldwork settings. The paper then outlines the implications of these concepts for feminist praxis related to international management theory, research, and writing as well as entrepreneurship programs.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper discusses the experiences of the author in conducting fieldwork on Turkish high‐technology entrepreneurs in the USA and Turkey by focusing explicitly on the challenges and complexities postcolonial feminist frameworks bring to ethnography and auto‐ethnography.
Findings
The paper suggests that conducting fieldwork guided by postcolonial feminist frameworks faces challenges related to representation inclusive of the author and the participants in the study. It offers subalternity as a relational understanding of subjects in contrast to comparative approaches to the study of business people. The paper also discusses how positionality impacts reflexivity through gender, ethnicity, and class relations.
Originality/value
This paper offers a critical perspective on conducting research related to non‐Western subjects by addressing issues arising from feminist and postcolonial intersections. It is a valuable contribution to those researchers who are interested in conducting feminist research particularly with non‐Western people and cultures.
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The US feminist art movement of the 1970s is examined through selected works written by artists, critics, and historians during the 1990s. Books, exhibition catalogues…
Abstract
The US feminist art movement of the 1970s is examined through selected works written by artists, critics, and historians during the 1990s. Books, exhibition catalogues, dissertations, and articles place the movement within the broader contexts of art history and criticism, women’s history, and cultural studies. The art includes painting, drawing, collage, mixed‐media, graphics, installations, video, and performance. An increasing historical perspective allows scholars to examine the movement’s institutions and unresolved issues surrounding class, race, and sexual preference. Background is provided by an introductory essay, which summarizes the movement’s facets of protest, pedagogy, networks and professional associations, and art making while noting examples of publications and institutions that form part of the record of the movement. This article will be useful to librarians and scholars in art, women’s studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of dilemmas that emerge at the theoretical and practical interfaces of ethnographic fieldwork and feminist advocacy. This is…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of dilemmas that emerge at the theoretical and practical interfaces of ethnographic fieldwork and feminist advocacy. This is done by examining the researcher’s role in the field and the complex relationships between the researcher and the researched.
Design/methodology/approach
Critical self-reflections and autoethnographic analyses of fieldwork experiences in the author’s home country in South Asia are used to explore these dilemmas.
Findings
Using situated examples from a typical organisational setting involving both the oppressive and the oppressed, the researcher’s participant observation is found to be conflicted between critical participation and critical observation. Conscious and/or unconscious critical participation through enactment of feminist ethics by combining researcher and advocacy roles allows a route to assuage these conflicts. Practical strategies used to accomplish this are also discussed.
Research limitations/implications
Although the practical strategies discussed in this paper are culturally and organisationally specific and hence limited by them, it is hoped that suitable variants will emerge for readers from their discussion. Further research is needed to investigate the variety of ways in which the researcher-advocate positionality proposed in this paper can be strategically adopted conditional on cultural and organisational contexts, feminist research questions, and researchers’ abilities and constraints.
Practical implications
This paper seeks to shed light on the dilemmas of feminist ethics faced by critical feminist researchers conducting ethnographic fieldwork. It also discusses ways to enable researchers to circumvent these dilemmas in both epistemologically productive ways by collecting rich data and in ontologically enriching ways by allowing some enactment of feminist ethics. To this end, a positionality of the feminist researcher-advocate is conceptualised that does not enforce constraints of extreme positionalities of either a conventional ethnographer or an action researcher.
Social implications
Besides illustrating the need to stretch beyond traditional boundaries of participant observation, the researcher-advocate positionality also allows feminist researchers to make small, but directly tangible impact towards gender equality in their field setting. Implications for researchers’ emotional, and cognitive safety are also discussed especially when they identify with one or more minority identities.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to discussions on the theory of methods by highlighting the benefits of enacting feminist ethics as a way of critical participation in research settings.
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Susan V. Iverson, Brenda L. McKenzie and Malina Halman
Givensocietalcallsfortransformationalleadershipthatwillliftpeopletohigherlevelsof motivation and critical consciousness, this paper critiques existing student leadership education…
Abstract
Givensocietalcallsfortransformationalleadershipthatwillliftpeopletohigherlevelsof motivation and critical consciousness, this paper critiques existing student leadership education efforts and proposes that leadership educators adopt core tenets of feminism in order to prepare students to be engaged, change-oriented leaders in their communities. Today’s literature on student leadership development places an over-emphasis on positional leadership, technical problems, and leadership competencies. Feminism can serve as a theoretical strategy for addressingtheseproblemsbyconsideringthecomplexitiesofidentity,re-conceptualizingpower, amplifying student voice, and encouraging activism. In particular, we argue that consciousness- raising is essential for leadership development and offer ways in which it can be employed within leadership curriculum, among student leaders, and among leadership educators.
This paper aims to explore the methodological and epistemological assumptions that have foregrounded the author's research into discursive activism in Australian feminist blogs…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the methodological and epistemological assumptions that have foregrounded the author's research into discursive activism in Australian feminist blogs, and a discussion of her research methods and why they were appropriate to this study. In particular, it seeks to discuss internet research methods and approaches toward the study of a feminist network online in order to make a case for methodological approaches that are feminist in themselves and aimed toward discursive change. The author recognises the political and personally affective nature of research.
Design/methodology/approach
The project design and methodology of the study draws on traditions of feminist online ethnography and feminist standpoint methodology, using a combination of face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews, modified grounded theory, network analysis, and participant observation.
Findings
The author used a community‐curated online “carnival” to minimise problems of researcher navigation, and explore the pitfalls of insider research, and she discusses the success of looking for contradiction as a method of privileging disagreement in research.
Originality/value
The original contribution of this paper is toward the uses of disagreement, contradiction, discursive rupture, and dislocation in modified grounded theory analysis. The theoretical perspectives discussed in this paper are compatible with a view of subjectivity that allows for discursive political agency, and also encourage an ethics of listening and respect for difference that includes considerations of affect, inequality and power relations in the study of online communities.
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The purpose of this paper is to use a case study of an online parenting forum to theorise how mothers’ everyday environmental and caring labour is a form of environmental and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to use a case study of an online parenting forum to theorise how mothers’ everyday environmental and caring labour is a form of environmental and social activism in the home, that while not organised as such, is still collectivised in a “hybrid activist collective”.
Design/methodology/approach
Using ethnographic data and content analysis from an online parenting forum for the nappy-free infant hygiene practice known as “elimination communication”, the author compares the matters of key concern arising for this group of mothers with economic activist concerns as identified by Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) in their community economies work.
Findings
The paper finds a high degree of resonance between the key concerns of the elimination communication forum members with the key concerns of community economies. Furthermore, the author identifies the components of what might comprise a “hybrid activist collective” of mothers and others undertaking direct action for environmental and social change.
Social implications
Mothers and others acting for social and environmental change through domestic practices should be recognised for their important environmental and caring labour.
Originality/value
The paper proposes the “hybrid activist collective” as a way of understanding the human and non-human elements that gather together to act for environmental and social change in a collectivised, but not formally organised manner.
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Laura L. Bierema, Eunbi Sim, Weixin He and Alexandra B. Cox
The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the “double-jeopardy” in widely adopted women’s leadership development interventions aimed at “fixing” women, explore critical feminist…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the “double-jeopardy” in widely adopted women’s leadership development interventions aimed at “fixing” women, explore critical feminist coaching (CFC) perspectives and practices and offer more equitable and just alternatives for developing women leaders.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper includes a literature review of post-feminist and critical feminist perspectives and a critical examination of coaching for women leaders from each perspective.
Findings
Postfeminist approaches in organizations are little scrutinized because of the dominant postfeminist discourse that women's subordination and oppression have been “resolved” through neoliberal, individualistic interventions, such as postfeminist coaching programs. Infusing the message of “fixing women” through emphasizing “4 C’s” – confidence, control, courage and competition – postfeminist coaching programs have been submitting women leaders to “double jeopardy.” The authors critique this postfeminist coaching paradox from a critical feminist perspective foregrounding “4 R’s” – reflecting, reforming, raising and rebuilding – promising more equitable, just development.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to describe CFC and presentation of a conceptual and practical model of the process. The authors define postfeminist coaching as the disavowal of feminist values and failure to challenge gender hegemony in the coaching process. The authors propose a model of CFC defined as the explicit embrace of feminist values and challenge of gender hegemony in the coaching process. The authors offer alternatives for developing women leaders amid paradoxical, complex, capitalist systems, with a critical lens challenging postfeminism.
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