Search results

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 chapter asks: ‘How often do we as social scientists question the validity of our theories and our findings? How often do we reflexively examine the distortions in the lenses we use to analyse organizations? ‘It proceeds to answer these questions by defining reflexivity and presenting six perspectives on reflexive analysis that build on and extend previous analytical treatments of reflexivity, especially that by Alvesson, Hardy, and Harley (2008). Illustrations of the six are drawn from my own experiences as well as those of other scholars. The intention is to stimulate greater interest in reflexivity and provoke other scholars to look more reflexively at their own work.

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.

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.

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.