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Purpose – Using sexual harassment in Japan as a case, this research illustrates how local gender culture, particularly sexual harassment consciousness, has changed since initial local legal reform.

Design/methodology/approach – The historical analysis draws on national newspaper reporting of a fairly new concept of sexual harassment into a local society.

Findings – My findings suggest that Japanese actively engaged in, rather than rejected, the new social issue; their active response gave rise to social consciousness toward sekuhara especially and sex discrimination more generally. Broader and more inclusive definitions of sexual harassment appeared in Japan than the original international legal definitions. Local–international interactions effectively shaped such outcomes.

Originality/value – This is the first qualitative and quantitative analysis of the media's portrayals of sexual harassment in Japan.

The identities of Muslim women tend to be essentialized into binaries of what she is and what she ought to be (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016). For far too long Muslim women’s voices in North America have been marginalized by hegemonic Orientalist (Said, 1978) and traditionalist (Clarke, 2003) Islamic discourses. When it comes to issues of agency, empowerment, and self-expression, it is either imposed by Western ideals or regulated by traditionalist politics of Islam (Zine, 2006). As such, Muslim women activists must engage and negotiate within the dual and narrow oppressions of Orientalist and traditionalist Islamic representations of her (Khan, 1998; Zine, 2006). Given the scarcity of space provided in print media (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016; Golnaraghi & Mills, 2013) for Muslim women to construct, appropriate, and remake their own identities, some have turned to social media to challenge these dichotomies through activism and resistance. Such a space is necessary in order to recover, resurface, and reauthorize the hybrid voices, experiences, and identities of the Muslim woman on their own terms in order to challenge hegemonic discourse. Highlighting the nuances of feminist activism, particularly that of Muslim postcolonial feminists that can make a difference to Critical Management Studies (CMS) as a community concerned with social justice and challenging marginalization and oppression. The “Somewhere in America #Mipsterz” (Muslim hipsters) video launched in 2013, the site for our critical discourse analysis, is one case where this resistance can be seen, showcasing fashionable veiled Muslim women artistically expressing themselves to the beats of Jay Z.

This paper focuses on the strategic role of elites in managing institutional and organizational change within English public services, framed by the wider ideological and political context of neo-liberalism and its pervasive impact on the social and economic order over recent decades. It also highlights the unintended consequences of this elite-driven programme of institutional reform as realized in the emergence of hybridized regimes of ‘polyarchic governance’ and the innovative discursive and organizational technologies on which they depend. Within the latter, ‘leaderism’ is identified as a hegemonic ‘discursive imaginary’ that has the potential to connect selected marketization and market control elements of new public management (NPM), network governance, and visionary and shared leadership practices that ‘make the hybrid happen’ in public services reform.

In England there are very strong pressures in schools to meet government targets for public examination results. Thus assessment is very ‘high stakes’ as principals and class teachers can lose their jobs if these targets aren’t met. In such a climate many teachers feel that innovation, such as inquiry-based learning involves taking a considerable risk. As a result teachers in England often enact a hybridised form of inquiry in order to manage the risk and this chapter explores three cases of schools in north east England in which hybridisation has occurred. We use Basil Bernstein’s concept of ‘framing’ to analyse the effect of inquiry-based learning on the relationship between the curriculum, teachers and students in these schools. Inquiry, acts as a disruption to the normal ‘convergent’ pedagogy with many positive outcomes for teachers and students but both feel the constraint of the demands of the examination system. Although the agency, or capacity for action, of teachers is increased through exploring inquiry approaches, we conclude that for inquiry to develop further there is a need for a stronger local ‘ecology’ to support teachers and schools in their efforts to innovate. We describe the contribution of Newcastle University to such an ecology.

This study reports on a four-month ethnographic project conducted among young Catholic women in Mumbai, India. Here, the author examines how the media consumption of participants is implicated in reconstituting Indian national identity. Because Hinduism is closely tied to conceptualizations of Indianness and because women continue to be marginalized in Indian society, Catholic women in India are viewed as second-class citizens or “not Indian enough” or “appropriately Indian” by virtue of their gender and religious affiliation. However, through media consumption that emphasizes hybridity, participants destabilize narrow definitions of Indian identity. Specifically, participants cultivate hybridity as central to an Indian identity that is viable in an increasingly global society. Within this formulation of hybridity, markers of their marginalization are reframed as markers of distinction. By centering hybridity in their media consumption, young, middle-class Catholic women (re)imagine their national identity in translocal cosmopolitan terms that subverts marginalization experienced by virtue of their religion and leverages privileges they enjoy by virtue of their middle-class status. Importantly, this version of Indian identity remains elitist in that it remains inaccessible to poor women, including poor women of minority groups.