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Organizations are increasingly emphasizing inclusive practices to leverage the valuable potential of their human resource. This study seeks to investigate the influence of organizational norms on the experiences of inclusion among women in manufacturing organizations. This study aims to comprehend how gendered perceptions of the ideal worker shape women’s sense of inclusion within the workplace.

The research adopted a qualitative approach to understand women’s experience of inclusion in the manufacturing workplace. Purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to conduct semistructured interviews with 52 professionals working in the four manufacturing organizations. These employees were working in different roles as functional managers, human resource managers, diversity officers and female employees. Interviews were analyzed following a three-step coding process. ATLAS.ti software was used to analyze the data. The study draws upon Acker’s theory of “gendered organizations” and West and Zimmerman’s concept of “doing gender” to understand workplace narratives, adapting these theories to the specific context of India.

This study highlights frequent experiences of exclusion experienced by women in the workplace. This is because of a prevalent culture that prioritizes the ideal worker image within workplace narratives, serving as a significant catalyst for these experiences of exclusion. Additionally, the study underscores how apparently supportive measures, initially appearing beneficial, can inadvertently heighten women’s vulnerability to workplace exclusion.

This study shows how broader national and industrial cultures, which are often male-dominated, can, further reinforce barriers to creating a gender-inclusive workplace. Overall, the study underscores the importance of addressing ideal worker narratives as pivotal steps toward fostering a workplace that is genuinely inclusive for women.

Sport organizations hold substantial ideological power to showcase and reinforce dominant cultural ideas about gender. The organization and portrayal of sporting events and spaces continue to promote and reinforce a hierarchical gender binary where heroic forms of masculinity are both desired and privileged. Such publicly visible gender hierarchies contribute to the doing of gender beyond sport itself, extending to influence gender power relations within sport and non-sport organizations. Yet, there has been a relative absence of scholarship on sport organizations within the organizational sociology field. In this paper, we review findings of studies that look at how formal and informal organizational dimensions influence the doing and undoing of gender in sport organizations. Subsequently, we call for scholars to pay more attention to sport itself as a source of gendered organizational practices within both sport and non-sport organizations. We end with suggestions for research that empirically explores this linkage by focusing on innovative theoretical perspectives that could provide new insights on gender inclusion in organizations.

The author aims to walk beside the singular privileged class of White women’s suffrage feminist origin story to (re)construct plausible feminist fragmented threads as antenarratives in the context of business management education. To accomplish this (re)assembling of threads, the author examined two North American business trade publications created and used within two business schools, Harvard University’s Harvard Business Review (HBR), established in 1922, and Western University’s The Quarterly Review of Commerce (The Quarterly), established in 1933.

The author carefully reviewed almost 4,000 articles from HBR and The Quarterly, focusing on 308 articles that addressed the experiences of complex women. With this subset of collected articles, the author highlighted overlooked details, accidents and errors, generating interest and curiosity about the emergence of these fragmented and paradoxical origins that align with Foucault's histories of errors. By grouping these narrative fragments into themes and conducting a critical discourse analysis that incorporated influences from the external environment, the author reconstructed plural feminist origins antenarratives.

The themes discovered, including women as consumers, explicit working women concerns, women as authors/coauthors, diversity and social justice initiatives, and women in higher education/training, are not merely descriptive observations. They are the building blocks for identifying and analyzing the power relations circulating among feminist origins antenarratives within management education circles. These antenarratives include shedding light on women working in capitalist contexts, the educational needs of business women, and men and naming (but not breaking) the “mythologies” of women at work. These findings are transformative to the understanding of plural feminist origins.

The uniqueness of this work lies in its threefold contributions: moving away from the notion of a singular feminist origin story and instead embracing the complexity of multiple, paradoxical and incomplete origins; shedding light on the spectrum of power relations – ranging from productive to oppressive – that shaped the experiences of women in two management educational circles during the first half of the 20th century; and introducing the concept of inflection points, which underscores the fluidity of knowledge.

This paper contributes to the broad aim of this special issue, reflecting on the relevance of the writing of Alan Fox to the contemporary industrial relations field. It offers an original reflection from a feminist perspective on Fox’s classic insights around frames of reference.

We concentrate on Beyond Contract, Work, Power and Trust Relations (1974a) and Man Mismanagement (1974b, 1985) as the texts setting out Fox’s influential frames of reference theory, before moving on to subsequent literature in the field making use of Fox’s frames. In undertaking this review from a feminist perspective, we specifically look at the extent to which work considers standpoint, gender relations and political engagement. We draw further on wider feminist scholarship within industrial relations, critical race theory and intersectionality perspectives.

Despite the concept of inequality forming the core of Fox’s analyses, there is a lack of attention to gender or to other diversity strands in his work and, notwithstanding the weight of feminist scholarship within the industrial relations field since, this neglect has been carried forward into subsequent use of Fox’s work. We argue there is space for the frames to be interpreted and used in ways that leave space for attention to feminist concerns and call on academics to approach their use of Fox from a more critically-informed perspective.

The paper’s argument has implications for the field of industrial relations in terms of conceptual understanding and methodological approaches. With space, it would have been useful to apply our revised understanding of Fox’s key concepts to empirical cases.

Greater clarity in what constitutes “unitary” and “pluralist” perspectives and categories will help employment relations actors.

We present a novel feminist re-framing of Fox’s work, providing new understandings of the strengths, weaknesses and applicability of the frames of reference within contemporary industrial relations research and practice. We advocate for methodological and scholarly approaches which advance theoretical and empirical justice in the field, moving beyond gender to draw on critical race theory and intersectionality frameworks.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

This study aims to explore academic women’s silence from the perspective of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986), by examining the triadic influences of the individual, environment and behaviour, which impacts their silence. The study examines how women use personal, proxy and collective agency (Bandura, 2018) to reduce silence.

Interviewing 22 academics (20 women, 2 men) at a leading Polish university, this study used the Gioia et al. (2013) method to analyse the interviews, creating first- and second-order codes and final aggregated concepts.

This study finds, from an environmental perspective, that societal-level gendering, which is underpinned by critical social factors and institutional logics that are part of Poland’s culture promoting gender stereotypes and family values influences women’s silence. There is clear evidence for the regression of women’s rights, which compounds women’s silence. These societal-level factors influence a hierarchical, bureaucratic organizational structure, alongside gender segregation. From an individual perspective, reasons for silence include socialization, fear, women’s lack of power, inequality and self-silencing to mitigate harassment or discrimination. Collective agency was a strongly mentioned theme to help reduce silence, which includes implementing training and development initiatives, creating a safe platform to voice concerns, structural transformation and cultural change.

This study contributes to literature regarding women’s silence by exploring reasons for silence through the lens of Bandura’s social cognitive theory and agentic perspective, which demonstrates how silence could be reduced through collective action, in the understudied context of Poland, which highlights how country context intersects with organizational context and individual experience, influencing women’s silence.

This chapter focuses on the concept of genderwashing in the context of higher education (HE) in the United States. Using intersectionality as a framework, the authors critically examine gender-based affinity groups, which are used in HE as a common strategy to support diversity and equity efforts. The authors discuss how such efforts often fall short in facilitating meaningful organizational or systemic change and provide questions and considerations for addressing genderwashing that are informed by an intersectional lens.

Drawing on a constructionist-poststructuralist feminist perspective, this paper aims to extend thinking on the evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems by exploring how gendered entrepreneurial ecosystems can become more inclusive.

The paper contends path dependency of entrepreneurial ecosystems, maintains embedded gender bias (and biases against disadvantaged or unconventional entrepreneur groups) and builds an argument for path creation to de-bias entrepreneurial ecosystems. A metaphorical descriptor of entrepreneurial ecosystems is probed as contributing to the gendered entrepreneurial ecosystem discourse. Three propositions, namely on path creation, transformative agency and appropriate metaphors, are derived from the extant literature and an illustrative example employed to interrogate these propositions.

We advance path creation via transformative agency as a means for moving towards inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems. We provide an alternative metaphor to springboard change to the gendered scholarly discourse on entrepreneurial ecosystems. Our illustrative example lends support to our propositions.

This paper helps lay a foundation for new thinking on change towards inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems. It provides a powerful argument for broadening the mainstream path dependence view of entrepreneurial ecosystems. It is unique in suggesting a constructionist-poststructuralist feminist standpoint to challenge the dominant discourse on entrepreneurial ecosystems.