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The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of availability, both empirically and theoretically, in the context of three Swedish organisations, and identifies the structural influences on availability patterns for work and family.

The article is based on quantitative case studies using employer records and an employee questionnaire in three organisations. Multivariate descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic regression are used to illustrate and analyse patterns of availability for work and family.

The descriptive data demonstrate the influence of the organisational context and type of production process, as well as gender, on availability patterns. Patterns of work availability appeared to differ across the organisations to a greater extent than patterns of family availability, which were highly gendered. The logistic regression results indicated that: occupation was a significant influence on both temporal and spatial availability patterns across the organisations; gender was the most significant influence on time spent on household work and part‐time working for parents with young children; age of employees and age of employees' children were the most significant factors influencing the use of time off work for family.

Analysis limited to case studies. More extensive quantitative research would be needed to make empirical generalisations. Qualitative research would be needed to establish whether and how employees are able to make use of different availability patterns to improve their work‐life balance.

The concept of availability is a new way of trying to capture and analyse tensions in people's everyday lives as they try to manage multiple demands.

The purpose of this paper is to, first, explore flexible working as an important but under‐researched dimension of equality and diversity (E&D) and, second, contribute to employment relations debates by exploring organisational perspectives on flexible working and how these connect with business strategies and the regulatory context.

In depth semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 12 E&D managers in ten public and private sector organisations. Interviews explored the role of E&D managers in the construction of flexible working arrangements (FWAs) and drivers underpinning them.

Flexible working was most evident as a significant field of E&D practice where E&D was linked into business strategy and was well resourced. The key roles of E&D managers in relation to FWAs were policy innovation and monitoring. Four organisational rationales for FWAs were identified from the data. These were FWA constructed as: an individual employee benefit; a means of improving operational effectiveness; an integral part of organisational strategy; and as a means of addressing structural social inequalities.

While the sample is small, the research is of value to both researchers and policy makers, offering insights on an under‐researched area of E&D policy and practice.

This paper outlines different rationales for flexible working and shows how some organisation are able to develop flexible working policies that are more equitable and effective than other organisations.

The originality lies in the use of E&D managers as informants of organisational approaches to FWAs, which to date has been under‐researched in terms of its connection with E&D policy and practice.

Evidence from a study in Middlesborough is presented in favour of the proposition that an adequate analysis of domestic labour in modern society depends on taking into account its content and distribution. In particular, the characteristics of the gender division of domestic labour suggest the need for an integrated theoretical approach which draws on the insights of both Marxists, concerning the development of the capitalist mode of production and feminists concerning the operation and impact of patriarchy.

All gender identity is socialized, but anything gendered feminine is marginalized. In the United States, we live in a patriarchal culture that is bounded by binary gender identity. Up to this point, work on gender and education leadership has remained within the bounds of patriarchy, and thus been confined to binary, hierarchical gender definitions. This study pushes past prior work to advance a more complex and messy understanding of how identity impacts aspiring leaders in their careers. Using Carol Gilligan and Snider (2018) Listening Guide Method, this study of 18 aspiring school leaders of different gender identities, sexual identities, and races focuses on how gender identity and gender performance impact school leaders' career trajectories. A key finding of this study is that women, regardless of race or sexual identity, have difficulty finding mentors while men, regardless of race or sexual identity, are tapped by schools leaders and offered mentoring opportunities. This chapter posits a new framework for mentoring that will lead to more liberatory pipeline structures.

This study examines and describes the experiences and perceptions of women and men associate professors from various academic disciplines as they chart and navigate their academic career trajectories.

Using a case study approach, we interviewed 11 purposively selected mid-career faculty members and five department heads.

Through the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), we identified issues of clarity, climate, self-efficacy, and gender disparity as major concerns for mid-career faculty.

This research is limited to a research-intensive university in the southeastern United States. The small study population and unique context limit the generalizability of the study.

Findings of the study provide a lens for university and college administrators, human resources professionals, and other institutional leaders to view professional development programs for mid-career faculty members at their own institutions. The findings also suggest a need for improvements to current family-friendly policies to reduce gender bias and retain women faculty members.

This paper offers practical recommendations to higher education administrators and human resources professionals on how to positively cultivate a better work climate and culture for mid-career faculty members. It also offers suggestions on how to be sensitive to and improve gender equity among mid-career faculty in higher education.

The purpose of this study is to incorporate aspects of existing research to develop a model of hospitality students’ willingness to work with older adults. It evaluates whether the addition of multi-age perspective (MAP), a concept adapted from multi-cultural literature which addresses perceptions of different age groups, and separating attitudes into favorable and unfavorable constructs provide better predictive power than previous models.

A survey combining various measures suggested from the literature was conducted electronically with hospitality students from five US universities.

Factor analysis and structural equation modeling resulted in a model of the relationships between six latent constructs: contact quality, aging anxiety, MAP, unfavorable attitude, favorable attitude and willingness to work with older adults. While MAP and contact quality significantly influenced the respondents’ unfavorable and favorable attitudes, aging anxiety only affected their unfavorable attitude. Respondents’ MAP was the strongest antecedent for willingness to work with older adults, followed by favorable attitude and unfavorable attitude.

The research investigated the beliefs of hospitality students studying in the USA and may not be representative of all younger hospitality workers and those in other countries.

Incorporating MAP into both educational and business contexts through methods such as intergenerational service learning, leadership commitment to age-diversity and reverse mentoring will facilitate cooperation and improved relations among younger and older hospitality workers.

This study is the first to apply the construct of MAP to hospitality and to separate the constructs of the influence of unfavorable attitudes from that of favorable attitudes.

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This paper hypothesizes that contemporary Gulf cities are not an evolution of traditional settlements but rather forms of modern cities that emerged during the second half of the 20th century after the discovery of oil, the economic boom following the mid 1970s oil crisis and finally political, economic, technological and communication globalization that swept this region since the beginning of the 21st century. While focusing on the case of Kuwait city, the paper reflects on several examples from the Gulf region cities to discuss their development as hybrid forms of modern cities. The paper adopts the theoretical framework proposed by Appadurai in 1996 to understand the flow of modernity through the Gulf cities' scapes. This theoretical framework provides an adequate understanding of Gulf cities evolution and modifications required to make them more adequate to the Gulf region conditions.

Since Karl Marx fashioned his theory of capitalism in the nineteenth century, scholars have continually updated Marxian theory to capture the pervasiveness of commodity relations in modern society. Influenced by Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, the members of the French avant-guard group, the Situationist International (1957–1972), developed an intransigent critique of consumer capitalism based on the concept of the spectacle. In the spectacle, media and consumer society replace lived experience, the passive gaze of images supplants active social participation, and new forms of alienation induce social atomization at a more abstract level than in previous societies. We endeavor to make two theoretical contributions: First, we highlight the contributions of the Situationist International, pointing out how they revised the Marxian categories of alienation, commodification, and reification in order to analyze the dynamics of twentieth century capitalism and to give these concepts new explanatory power. Second, we build a critical theory of consumer capitalism that incorporates the theoretical assumptions and arguments of the Situationists and the Frankfurt School. Today, critical theory can make an important contribution to sociology by critically examining the plurality of spectacles and their reifying manifestations. In addition, critical theorists can explore how different spectacles connect to one another, how they connect to different social institutions, and how spectacles express contradictions and conflicting meanings. A critical theory of spectacle and consumption can disclose both novelties and discontinuities in the current period, as well as continuities in the development of globalized consumer capitalism.