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This paper aims to bring to the fore the importance of feminist epistemologies in the history of the organization of management studies since the 1980s by following various intellectual moves in the development of feminist theorizing as they cross over to organization studies, including their analytical possibilities for reclaiming historically the voices of major women scholars, especially in doctoral seminars. The paper narrates these epistemological activities by mobilizing and reconsidering from the past to the present, the notions of “unmuting,” “mutating” and “mutiny.” It ends in a reflection addressing the state of business schools at present and why the field of organization and management studies needs “mutiny” now.

The paper adopts a narrative approach in which the voices of its authors appear to be central as they consider and reconsider over time their understanding of “unmuting,” “mutation” and “mutiny” as notions with analytical potential. This approach is influenced by Foucault’s “history of the present” but with contingencies brought about by feminist interpretations. The application of these notions is demonstrated by reclaiming and clarifying the epistemological underpinning in the works of three major women scholars as included in a doctoral seminar: Mary Parker Follett, Edith Penrose and Rosabeth Moss Kanter. These notions are further redeployed for their potential in institutional applications.

At present, the findings are discursive – if they can be called so, but the main motivation behind this writing is to go beyond discourse in the written sense, and to mobilize other activities, still in the realm of epistemological and scholarly work. These activities would legitimize actual interventions for changing business schools from their current situation as neoliberal entities, which mute understanding of major problems in the world, as well as the voices of most humans and non-humans paying for the foibles of neoliberalism.

The paper demonstrates the necessity of developing approaches for interventions in knowledge producing institutions increasingly limited by neoliberal premises in what can be said and done as legitimate knowledge. In doing this, the paper articulates the importance of keeping history alive to avoid the increasing “forgetfulness” neoliberalization brings about. The paper, in its present form, represents an active act of “remembering”.

–The paper originated in challenges trying to theorize and research practices and processes of actors engaged in transnational activities for business and everyday life. Key concern was the assumption that actors’ identities remain the same regardless of time/space. While intersectional analysis once seemed a reasonable analytical approach the authors wondered about starting from identity-based categorical schemes in a world where mobility may be ever more the ontological status of everyday experiences and social structuring. Thus, the paper addresses limitations of intersectional analysis in such situations and advances its recasting via mobile conceptualizations, redressing its analytical purchase for contemporary subject formation.

Discusses emergence of intersectionality at a particular point in time, its success and proliferation, and more recent critiques of these ideas. Develops alternative conceptualization – mobile subjectivities – via literatures on mobilities in the context of globalization. Illustrates the value of these arguments with ethnographic examples from a multi-sited ethnographic project and analyses. Concludes by examining implications for new feminist theorizations under neoliberalism and globalization.

Observing the constitution of a “mobile selfhood” in actual transnational business activities is a step toward making sense of complex processes in contemporary subject formation under globalized market neoliberalism.

“Mobile subjectivities” suggest that analyses of oppression and subordination must be ongoing, no matter which “new subjectivities” may appear under “the latest regime.”

Theoretical and empirical analyses facilitated a reconceptualization of intersectionality as a mobile, precarious, and transitory accomplishment of selfhood temporarily fixed by the neoliberal rhetoric of “choice” and “self-empowerment.” This is of particular value for understanding transnational practices and processes of contemporary organizational actors.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the Gender and Diversity Stream, Standing Working Group (SWG) at the recent European Group of Organisational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium, which was hosted in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The paper provides an overview of the SWG before turning to the scope of the papers and a brief synopsis of three of the best papers within the context of the stream.

Approach is report style following submission of a paper and participation in the three-day colloquium.

Evidently, the Gender and Diversity Stream has secured its position within the EGOS colloquium. The stream provides an environment forum in which to present works where participants engage in critical reviews of participant’s work. The success of this growing stream is found not only in the scholarly and practical importance of the subject terrain but also in the organisation of the stream which is thematically organised to ensure participants were engaged and actively took part in the discussion.

This paper presents insights on the EGOS SWG on “Gender and Diversity” and traces the topic of “critical approaches to organising and managing diversity” which was the SWG’s main theme of the stream at the EGOS Colloquium in Rotterdam 2014.

Revisiting the critical hermeneutics analysis of Wu Zetian’s case in Peng et al.’s (2015) paper, the purpose of this paper is to explore the complexity and paradox of Wu Zetian as a historical figure, and to demonstrate the potential of critical hermeneutics as an innovative methodology to study gender, diversity and history. Moreover, the authors attempt to examine some of the potential challenges and limitations of this methodology and to provide an in-depth account of the socio-politics involved in the research process.

This is a reflexive critique based on a framework of four central concepts of critical hermeneutics (Prasad, 2005): questions of author intentionality, layers of texts, hermeneutic circle and relating to texts.

Critical hermeneutics has great potential as well as considerable challenges and limitations in the research areas of gender, diversity and history.

This paper offers a lucid exposition of what critical hermeneutics is about, how it might be applied to a particular case and potential challenges and limitations of this methodology. The study is intensely reflexive and context oriented, illustrating how a deepened understanding of critical hermeneutics leads to a more informed discussion of the possibilities and limitations of the methodology, and how researchers, editors and reviewers can be influenced by the context in which the study is conducted.

This paper attempts to capture how self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) produce and reconstruct “self” and “place” through their own processes of expatriation and career development as mobility becomes a norm under present conditions of globalization. In so doing, the paper reexamines assumptions of previous expatriate adjustment scholarship by using phenomenon-driven problematization to critically reflect on underlying theoretical assumptions in the extant literature. Empirically, the paper is an exploratory attempt to understanding and offering fresh insights on the notion of expatriation itself under these present conditions.

Bougon's (1983) Self-Q technique was used to develop interview protocols uncovering cognitive maps of SIEs' “enacted environments” as an abstraction of their experiences, while also mapping their “enacted selves”. Analyzing social action with a cognitive map approach reveals the meanings of specific social territories, i.e. the enactment of SIEs' mobility environments (place) and their subjectivities (self).

The authors’ findings suggest that SIEs seem to be constituting and reconstituting their subjectivities and their sense of “place” by displacing the notion of “home”. This notion transforms and recedes as SIEs go about their lives abroad, allowing for the emergence of plural subjectivities, never fully formed but formulated and reformulated in social encounters.

This study contributes to the expatriation literature by focusing on processes through which SIEs construct their world through their mobility and overseas experiences. Observing expatriation processes as continuous cycles of creating and recreating “self” and “place” may reflect better how contemporary business practitioners engage in transnational activities. Management scholars should attend to how these processes enact social territories for a better understanding of expatriation as a global phenomenon.

This paper aims to utilize a mixed-embeddedness approach to examine how state welfare policies, employment conditions and gender norms shape orientations to divisions of business and domestic labor among Czech copreneurs, i.e. romantic couples involved in businesses together.

Twelve copreneur couples were interviewed; male and female partners were interviewed separately. Women’s narratives are centered in analyzing motivations for business, divisions of labor, orientation to business/family and state policies. After detailing women’s orientations, correspondence with male partner orientations is considered.

Analysis reveals how state policies, employment conditions and gender norms inform copreneur narratives about business and family life in the Czech Republic. Female respondents expressed three orientations: business as opportunity, business for family and business/home as teamwork. Women tended both business and family, whereas most male partners focused exclusively on business.

Although the small, purposive sample was not representative of all Czech copreneurs, findings detail how social context frames business/family dynamics.

This mixed-embeddedness perspective demonstrates how gender norms, state taxation and welfare shape the organization of Czech copreneurships and can support or discourage women’s entrepreneurship.

Mechanisms producing gender inequality in copreneur businesses are revealed.

Findings identify connections between female copreneur business/family orientations and the context of gender regimes, state policy and employment practices in a post-socialist country. Also revealed are changing orientations across family and business stages.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and reflect on mutual relationships between the researcher’s life experiences, encounters and personal learning, and how they can influence the research process of designing and writing research publications as well as their dialectical influences on the emergence and evolution of researcher identities in these processes.

This research is inspired by auto-ethnography. While the descriptions and analyses of the selected moments from the pre-research period are based on retrospective reflection and memory, the descriptions and analyses of the moments from the research period are in addition to the memories, based on notes and diary entries about my encounters with various people, documents, events and literature.

The paper shows that researchers’ attempts to understand the Other through studies of certain phenomena are a production between them and their past, their experiences and people encountered, as well as between them and the research literature they use. In these encounters and processes, the researcher’s multiple identities emerge and evolve with significance for how the research is socially produced.

The paper takes a broader perspective than usually seen in studies of researcher identities and is based on a researcher’s life history rather than only on a specific field-situation. As such, it has a longitudinal character, and it implies a broader, multilevel area of reflection, emphasizing dialectical relationships between the researcher, the context(s) and people involved in these, as well as the subject(s) of research, which are characterized by mutuality and continuality.

To date, comparisons of performance in male and female businesses show contradictory results, although the majority of evidence is drawn from Anglo‐Saxon countries. This study aims to explore the effects of gender on business performance in a sample of Spanish firms.

This paper extends previous work with a quantitative analysis of effects of gender on performance. In‐depth interviews yield insights on how gender impacts performance.

The quantitative analysis shows that gender has a simple effect on performance, but it is less robust when other factors are included in the model. Furthermore, this relationship is more complex, since gender has an indirect and moderating effect on performance. The results indicate possible sources of gender differences and suggest factors that require further investigation with a qualitative approach. This analysis expands our understanding in two ways: first, by suggesting that we have to make sense of businesses through another lens, and second, by implying that we have to be aware that we can find heterogeneity among women.

Performance differences are due to differences in women's assessment of performance and/or their socio‐economic positioning. The premises of mainstream theories should be questioned in order to develop gender research.

The study answers the call of using mixed methods to gain insights that lead to a cumulative knowledge in this area.

This paper seeks to point out the relationship between women leadership and their role in the transformation of university organizations, on the basis of eight case studies analysed in the framework of a broader research on women who occupy high‐managerial posts in Spanish universities.

Two of the eight cases studied are more deeply described and discussed in terms of the relationship among the organizational context in which these women leaders perform their managerial functions, the leadership styles that they deploy, as well as the transformations they promoted in critical moments of the organizations that they head.

Even though the differences in all these aspects between the two cases studied do not allow a single and homogeneous “feminine style” of management to be identified, a flexible and adaptive common orientation in terms of leadership was found, which leads one to suggest that leadership style is not a relevant issue when managing loosely coupled organizations. Furthermore, some conclusions were established about the ability of these woman managers both to read organizational culture and to drive such changes, preserving social cohesiveness and the workplace climate. To achieve this, they adopted a flexible leadership style on the basis of a wide range of power sources.

The findings support the idea that the loosely coupled structures characteristic of a higher education organization need “soft” ways of power management, oriented more towards informal social networks than formal issues. This allows one to discuss the innovative role that women potentially and actually play in higher education organizations.