Search results

This paper aims to examine the work experiences of female executives and the challenges of their visible and invisible work activities, considering the operating modes they develop to carry out their work activities.

This study relies on a materialist feminist perspective and a critical experientialist work theory, which considers both the visible and invisible dimensions of the work performed by female executives. The methodology is based on a qualitative research design involving individual and group interviews with 51 Canadian female executives.

The results reveal the hyper-efficiency operating mode mobilized by female executives, which combines strategies to take over and delegate work activities from the domestic sphere to reconcile the managerial work with their different life spheres.

A key finding emerging from these results relates to the invisible but omnipresent part of the work activities from the domestic sphere throughout the lives of female executives.

This photovoice study aims to explore how cleaners experience dirty and invisible work in the workplace.

This research is twofold. The authors first used the photovoice technique, which is one of the visual data collection techniques, to elaborate on the phenomena. The data were obtained with the participation of seven people (four women and three men) from building cleaners working at two public universities in Turkey. Three photographs were requested from each participant and selected nine photographs were described and analyzed among the collected 21 photographs. In addition to photovoice research, five interviews gave insight into the cleaners’ experiences in the second stage of the study.

This research revealed that participating cleaners experienced invisible dirty work and they felt undervalued, despised, treated as “second class/low-level people” and stigmatized.

This study recommends that university administrations defend the rights and dignity of cleaners at work, provide services to support their inclusion and increase staff awareness.

This study sheds light into an understudied area which is the building cleaners’ invisible and dirty work experiences and how that impacts their lives via a photovoice research.

This paper aims to examine the experience of women entrepreneurs and the challenges and issues they face in reconciling the work activities of the family sphere with those of the entrepreneurial sphere.

This study is based on a materialist feminist perspective and a theory of living work that take into account the visible and invisible dimensions of the real work performed by women entrepreneurs. The methodology is based on a qualitative research design involving individual and group interviews conducted with 70 women entrepreneurs.

The results show the various individual and collective strategies deployed by women entrepreneurs to reconcile the work activities of the family and entrepreneurial spheres.

One of the major findings emerging from the results of this study relates to the re-appropriation of the world of work and organization of work by women entrepreneurs and its emancipatory potential for the division of labour. Through the authority and autonomy they possessed as business owners, and with their employees’ cooperation, they integrated and internalized tasks related to the work activities of the family sphere into the organization of work itself. Thus, not only new forms of work organization and cooperation at work but also new ways of conceiving of entrepreneurship as serving women’s life choices and emancipation could be seen to be emerging.

Invisibility and inequality in the subjective experiences of Albanian migrant women in the Greek labor market have not been sufficiently studied. In times of crisis, mechanisms and social processes of marginalization are being strengthened and push women to new roles, expectations, and social positions. This chapter investigates how migrant women understand invisibility within their occupation, to what extent they feel relative deprivation and injustice when comparing their situation with others, and what this means for the reproduction of inequalities and the boundaries of social stratification. Qualitative research is conducted through a case study and 10 work history biographical interviews with Albanian migrant women, living and working in the Artemis community. Findings are analyzed in light of the socio-historical context of invisibility of migrant women workers in Greece, while the statistical analysis of changes in the occupational distribution provides a picture of the social landscape. Findings show evidence of the ethnic and gender segregation of the Greek labor market and a significant increase of informal and temporary work in low-status jobs in services. Invisibility is mainly experienced through the degradation of working conditions, flexibility, insecurity, and the concealed process of alienation. The economic crisis increases the dependencies; meanings and perceptions change towards reduced expectations. Comparisons with reference groups show increasing inequalities within the same social group, but feelings of injustice are felt more due to administrative barriers and discrimination. The chapter offers insights on the process of invisibility of migrant women and its significance for social stratification.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a closer consideration of the notion of work and, more specifically, information work as a sensitizing concept in Library and Information Science (LIS) can offer a helpful way to differently consider how people interact and engage with information and can complement a parallel focus on practices, behaviours and activities.

Starting with the advent of the concept of information work in Corbin and Strauss’ work, the paper then summarizes how information work has evolved and taken shape in LIS research and discourse, both within and outside of health-related information contexts.

The paper argues that information work affords a lens that can acknowledge the multiple levels of effort and multiple processes (cognitive, physical or social-behavioural) related to information activities. This paper outlines six affordances that the use of information work within LIS scholarship imparts: acknowledges the conceptual, mental and affective; brings attention to the invisibility of particular information activities and their constituents; opens up and distinguishes the many different lines of work; destabilizes hierarchies between professionals and non-professionals; emphasizes goals relating to information activities and their underlying pursuits; and questions work/non-work dichotomies established in existing LIS models.

This paper is a first in bringing together the many iterations of information work research in LIS. In doing so, this paper serves as a prompt for other LIS scholars to take up, challenge the existing borders of, and thus advance the concept of information work.

Productive friction (Ward et al., 2011) can exist as pracademics cross between boundaries of their different identities. Through an exploration of the self-perception of two collaborating pracademics, this paper will consider that organisational and occupational (Evetts, 2009) elements exist that generate professional friction for pracademics.

Using two consecutive Lesson Study cycles as a boundary object, the authors will consider their pracademic identity through a spatial approach. Their perceptions are expressed through semi-structured qualitative interviews and subsequent thematic analysis. This analysis is then explored through Engeström's (2001) learning stages to consider how pracademics interact within the contradictions of their identities and within their context and their work.

Time, purpose, integration and collaboration are all elements that impact on pracademic identities. For each one of these themes, pracademics both experience friction and find resolutions. As these themes vary, there are also moments of unresolved friction, where the pracademics maintain their work based on their enthusiasm alone. Constraints on time and the visibility of pracademic emerge. Exploring these pressure points and their resolutions is key to understanding how pracademics can be further supported by other professionals.

While it is not possible to draw large conclusions from the experiences and perceptions of two primary-school-based pracademics, their experiences and understanding of contextual pressure points may facilitate the support of other pracademics and resonant with their experiences, particularly if they are using Lesson Study.

Telecare promises to deliver healthcare services more efficiently while, at the same time, improving the quality of care. The purpose of this paper is to challenge these promises by analysing the implications of introducing telecare in the rehabilitation of patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Empirically, the paper is based on interviews with and observations of rehabilitation therapists and patients taking part in a Danish telerehabilitation programme. Theoretically, the paper draws on Science and Technology Studies.

The introduction of telecare alters rehabilitation practices in multiple ways. First, several new time-consuming work routines, carried out in collaboration between therapists, patients and technical professions, emerge. Although crucial in establishing and maintaining telerehabilitation infrastructures, this work remains invisible in evaluations of the programme. Second, rather than simply increasing patient agency, responsibilities are redistributed and negotiated in subtle and non-uniform ways. These negotiations make it less transparent where one responsibility begins and where another potentially conflicting one ends.

Evaluations of telecare technologies should pay more attention to work- and responsibility-related effects of introducing telecare in order better to account for predicted and unpredicted as well as desirable and undesirable socio-technical changes.

Using an ethnographic approach, the paper points to the discrepancy between simplistic political promises that telecare technologies can serve as tools for improvement, on the one hand, and the substantial changes in the organisation and management of healthcare observed in practice, on the other. Rather than regarding telecare as technologies of improvement, it is more productive to regard them as technologies of change.

Manual trades and information technology (IT) are male‐dominated occupations and as such cultivate unique forms of hegemonic masculinity. Women entering these occupations represent a kind of crisis to this gender order in the workplace, making the experiences of these women a useful way of studying how gender regimes are maintained and may be challenged at work. The aim of this paper is to examine how women found doing gender in the male dominated workplaces became a kind of work in itself.

A life history framework was used for this research, in which 15 women from manual trades and 15 women from IT occupations were interviewed. The in‐depth qualitative method allowed the participants the time and space to communicate the contradictions they experienced doing their gender and doing their gender at work.

The effort expended because the participants were women and because they were a minority was experienced both as an intense pressure and as significant to their success in their occupations. This indicates that gendered work outside of the formal duties of a job makes the work of those in a gender minority particularly strenuous. This understanding of gender at work as work is important to understanding how efforts to address gender equity in workplaces must work beyond quotas and policy and also address embodied gendered cultures.

While women working in male dominated cultures are often studied in terms of the challenges they face, from this research these challenges are framed as a kind of gendered work in itself. This work is often invisible, usually emotion work and mostly unrecognised. Highlighting the nature of this gendered labour and the pressures it places on women in male dominated work reframes what it means to work and the importance of these invisible forms of labour to maintaining successful production relations.

This paper aims to analyze the implications of technology change on management control. Specifically, the paper seeks to examine the deployment of an enterprise resource planning system (ERP), and to apply a temporal perspective of practice as a theoretical tool to discuss the effects of the ERP on the organization's management control systems.

The research is based on a longitudinal case study of a North American Financial. Data were collected during the deployment of a new management control system. The paper introduces the temporal view of agency as a means of examining the practices involved in control system.

The observations suggest that ERP can create an illusion of control, and may jeopardize the systems they are meant to augment through the presence of practices meant to by‐pass the control system and invisible work (work‐arounds).

The paper seeks to augment existing studies of technology mitigated change through framing the analysis in a temporal practice perspective to offer insight into the paths of action individuals adopt: the how and why.

In the nineteenth century, the comparative method was seen as essential, if not fundamental, to growth and production of knowledge in the human sciences. However, over time the categories that formed the basis of nineteenth century comparative research (civilized: savage for example) were discredited. And so, in time, was the comparative method itself.