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The aim of this paper is to explore the nature and power of the academic boys club. In many organisations, the political significance of the boys club goes largely unremarked and unacknowledged. Yet, the way that male colleagues intimately relate to each other, sometimes called homosocial desire, is crucial to their success at gaining and retaining power at work.

Feminist, poststructuralist, ethnographic, qualitative, and longitudinal data were collected over a five-year period from male and female academics in a British university.

The boys club is still a powerful feature of British universities. Their apparent invisibility shrouds the manner in which they can and do promote and maintain male interests in a myriad of ways, including selection and promotion. These findings have resonances for all organisations.

Researching the intimacies between male colleagues requires time-intensive field work and insider access to men interacting with each other.

Meaningful gender equality will not be achieved unless and until the more sophisticated forms of female exclusion are revealed and deconstructed.

This research makes an unusual and crucial contribution to the study of gender, men and masculinities by providing longitudinal, rich, detailed data, observing men at the closest of quarters and then analysed by a feminist and poststructuralist gaze.

As in many other countries, women are poorly represented at the highest levels of New Zealand organisations. This article discusses salient factors that emerged from a study of the decision‐making processes practised in the selection of chief executive officers (CEOs) in eight companies. The overall findings demonstrated informality, a lack of objective selection practices, and a reliance on networks for executive search. Specific additional factors impacting on women’s lack of advancement included: stereotyped views of CEOs based on masculine senior management cultures, homosocial reproduction and assessment based on traditional career models. Implied strategies for change include spotlighting any institutional sexism in selection by reviewing assessment practices. The article concludes by suggesting that working for “small wins” is likely to afford greater gains for women than attempting large‐scale change.

The “upper echelon” literature has mainly produced static empirical studies on the impact of top management team composition on organizational outcomes, ignoring the dynamics of industrial demography. Organizational ecology explicitly studied the dynamics of organizational diversity at the population level, however largely ignoring how the entry and exit of executives shapes organizational diversity over time. In this paper, we try to integrate both streams of demography research and develop a multi-level behavioral theory of organizational diversity, linking selection processes at both levels of analysis. The behavioral mechanism connecting the two levels of analysis is the stylized empirical fact that small groups, including top management teams, routinely reproduce their demographic characteristics over time. We argue that, under certain conditions, the potent forces of team homogenization coevolve with those of population-level selection to sustain between-firm diversity.

This paper aims to discuss the concept of human capital pipelines and explain how pipelines originate and the consequences of pipeline-based hiring in terms of labor market uncertainty, job embeddedness, social ties, homosocial reproduction, employee referrals and turnover intent.

The author provides a viewpoint grounded on a review of recent research regarding human capital pipelines.

This paper aims at further developing our understanding of human capital pipelines and the implications of such practices. The author points out both the positive and negative aspects of pipeline-based hiring, with the hope that human resource practitioners and mangers will adopt such practices based on the organization’s strategic needs.

To date, very little conceptual and/or empirical work has been carried out on pipeline-based hiring. In organizations, it is important to understand how repeated hiring from labor sources can reduce labor market uncertainty regarding a job seeker’s quality and potential productivity. However, it is also crucial to appreciate that such practices may have important pre and posthire implications for organizations and employees alike.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between perceived organizational politics and three levels of antecedents (i.e. organizational, work environment and individual levels) and its consequents. It further aims to examine the relative importance of the three levels of antecedents in influencing employees’ POP. The study has been conducted at a central university in India.

A conceptual framework and a set of hypotheses were first developed on the basis of a review of previous studies of organizational politics (OP). A questionnaire was then developed, carrying 55 items related to eight constructs and the demographic characteristics of its respondents. Judgmental sampling was used to choose the university. The respondents were selected on the basis of convenience. Primary data were collected via a structured questionnaire from 45 faculty members at the university. The sample was made up of professors, associate professors and assistant professors from its various departments. To test the hypotheses, data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equations modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results have indicated that all the three levels of antecedents have significant impacts on POP. The antecedents of workforce diversity (the organizational level), relationship conflict (the work environment level) and a need for power (the individual level) have a significant positive impact on POP. No relationship was found between role conflict and POP. Of the three levels of antecedents, it was observed that the organizational level contributed most significantly to POP. Of the three consequences, the intention to turnover and job anxiety were found to be positively related to POP, while organizational commitment was negatively related to it.

The study provides managerial insights for both organizations and managers. Workforce diversity is a primary driver of POP and it is under the purview of organizations. Thus, to control the unfavorable consequences of POP, organizations must design effective policies to manage workforce diversity. Specifically, human resource processes must be formalized. Since human managers often make decisions in favor of those who are relatively homogeneous to them (homosocial reproduction), the distribution of resources and benefits is restricted to a few people only. Those who do not get their share of organizational resources perceive such acts of homosocial reproduction to be political. If policies are formalized, people have to take decisions within the boundaries of well-defined sets of rules and procedures. Those who are not homogeneous with decision-makers (the outgroup) should get a fair share of organizational resources in such a formalized environment. They neither need to play political games to gain power, nor will they perceive the organizational processes and environment to be political. It is also suggested that managers design effective development programs for enhancing the political skills of “outgroups” and minorities. This would help them to understand how to deal with political situations. Thus, the detrimental effects of employees’ political perceptions on work-related outcomes would be reduced.

Although a large number of studies on the antecedents and consequents of POP have been reported, the antecedents and consequences mentioned herein have never been examined previously by a single study. Four antecedents are introduced at three levels. Furthermore, in previous research, the relationships examined have treated OP either as a dependent variable or an independent variable. However, for this paper, the authors have provided a PLS-SEM-based model, which allows for simultaneous treatment of organizational politics as an independent variable in some relationships, and as a dependent variable in other relationships.

Popular representations of the workplace have tended to construct women as unsuited to management and leadership roles. In their reflective capacity these popular fictional texts illustrate the workplace. In their capacity to construct popular perceptions of “reality”, the texts offer an important insight into women’s and men’s understandings and expectations of their workplace relationships. In this article we reflect on how popular films, plays and television shows can make visible some manifestations of the kinds of resistance women continue to experience in non‐traditional domains such as management. While these kinds of texts have not been central to the analysis of workplace relations within the management literature, we argue that as social documents they have much to contribute to an understanding of the limited advancement of women.

While there has been much discussion about pension regulation and decision making in relation to pension trusteeship, there appears to be little research on women and men who take up opportunities to become pension trustees. Thus the focus of this research is to explore what it means to be a female or male pension trustee in “a man's world”.

Acker's influential model for the gendering of organisational processes and its subsequent development to acknowledge the intersection of multiple inequalities such as gender and class is used as a tool to provide a micro‐analysis of men's and women's interpretation of being a pension trustee.

The persistence of homosocial reproduction around managerial competences in pension board activity helps explain men's and women's differing experiences within male‐dominated pension boardrooms.

The paper focuses on a small but diverse sample of pension trustees and further research is needed to explore further why pension trustees take on this challenging and complex role.

UK legislation about member representation on pension boards has the potential to bring new female candidates to the board. This paper gives an insight into what this means for a diverse group of pension trustees.

There is growing interest in diversity in the environmental field. The issue has become more pertinent as country undergoes noticeable demographic changes. Researchers have been interested in diversity for sometime too. This chapter traces the evolution of research on diversity and the environment. It discusses the results of new studies examining students' attitudes toward their work in environmental organizations as well as their salary expectations. The chapter also analyzes the demographic characteristics of the leadership of environmental institutions as well as their hiring and recruiting practices.

This study aims to analyze the connection between institutional isomorphic pressures and both women serving on boards and women’s influence on boards within large American firms.

This study examines a longitudinal panel data set of all Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 500 organizations across a seven-year period from 2009 to 2015.

The analyses affirm that institutional isomorphic pressures impact the prevalence and influence of women on boards. Evidence suggests that coercive and normative pressures strongly impact the number of women serving as corporate directors, whereas the power of women directors is linked only to mimetic pressures.

The research suggests that to increase the number of women serving as directors, the industry must first increase the overall number of women serving in senior management roles. Once women directors gain a critical mass of three women on the board, the association with the total number of women directors, the number of boards upon which they concurrently serve, the power of women directors being selected to board leadership and the influence of women directors increase.

This paper extends existing board diversity work by examining institutional pressures at the international, national and firm levels. By examining the relationship between coercive, normative and mimetic pressures on both the prevalence of women on boards and the influence of women on boards, the authors illuminate certain mechanisms that shape the likelihood of board appointment and placement in more powerful positions.