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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.

This paper is the actualization of a researcher’s attempt to engage, both conceptually and methodologically, with the dynamic and ever-creative connections and forces associated with the schooling experiences of immigrant students. The research reported that in this paper comprises part of a three-year research project funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and focuses on the interrelationships between immigration, technology and pop culture in a Canadian French-language secondary school. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Drawing from new materialist thought, the experience of one immigrant student is put to work with(in) the Deleuzo–Guattarian concepts of agencement, machines, language and power (pouvoir, puissance) with(in) the rhizoanalysis of a short video clip provided by the student.

With(in) the rhizoanalysis, the publication machine emerges as a force that could potentially affect the expression of one’s becoming citizen, and hacking emerges as a force that could contribute to the destabilization of the publication machine’s power (pouvoir).

The originality of this paper is that readers are also invited to contribute to this experimentation in contact with the real.

Policy mobility scholarship concerning anti-money laundering (AML) has typically favoured the study of power structures and interests to the neglect of the constructivist perspective and the local cultural–symbolic driving forces of policy adoption. This study aims to redress this, by analysing the shifting ideational drivers of AML policy in Singapore over the past 31 years through a thematic analysis of Singapore’s parliamentary debates (Hansard).

Through a thematic analysis of Singapore's Hansard over the past 31 years, this study seeks to present a social constructivist perspective of AML policy adoption in Singapore.

The thematic analysis reveals how the internal driving forces of AML policy in Singapore have shifted, from the idea of “crime prevention” in the early 1990s, to the symbolic value of “international norm compliance” by the 2010s.

This constructivist perspective of AML policy adoption is particularly useful in complementing the existing materialist theories of AML policy diffusion and allows us to better appreciate the historical nuances of AML policy transfer across the globe.

This research will provide a useful comparative case study for other policy mobility scholars interested in presenting a constructivist account of AML policy adoption in different jurisdictions.

There is no literature in the field of policy mobility, explaining the diffusion/transfer of AML policy from a social constructivist perspective.

This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, which reconceptualizes how objects are examined, and knowledge created in scientific activities. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror pre-existing phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. This means the researchers must give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. The study suggests performative voice as an alternative. The performative narrator is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (Barad, 2007, p. 359). So objectivity does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing. Objectivity, instead, is embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography.

The purpose of this article, which is based in the tradition of critical theory, is to present a number of reasons for preserving a strong production economy given that the aim of the nation state is to work for improved competitive advantage.

The critical theory approach is used in this paper.

The paper is also an attempt to show why a majority of Western countries have defended the transformation from a predominant production economy to a service economy by explaining the shift as a result of class interests, using new class theory. It argues for why a materialist perspective in economic theory is relevant today.

The Western world should focus more on the production economy and less on the service economy.

To the author's knowledge, no other paper has gathered as many arguments on the issue before.

Gender concerns have been almost totally ignored within organizational analysis. This chapter attempts to redress that ignorance. It has four related tasks: (1) to illustrate examples of gender-blind approaches to the study of organizations; (2) by way of a selective review of the organizations and culture debate, to argue for the utility of an organizational culture focus for an understanding of gender; (3) to root an organizational culture focus, along with gender concerns, within a feminist materialist method of analysis; (4) to explore, by way of a strategic application of Clegg’s (1981) “rule” focus, the potential of a feminist materialist analysis for understanding the relationship between gender and organizational culture.

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.

Since the beginning of the 20th century environmental health researchers have known about the association between toxicant exposure and disease. However, that knoweldge has not been well integrated into mainstream medicine. Shedding light on why is the focus of this chapter.

To shed light on this issue I analyze the 2011 American Academy of Pediatrics’ clinical practice guidelines for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), focusing specifically on the omission of environmental health research pertaining to ADHD symptoms and exposures, such as lead and mercury.

I found that while environmental researchers have been documenting the link between lead and ADHD for over forty years, the American Academy of Pediatrics has completely omitted this research from its 2012 clinical practice guidelines. Moreover, I argue this omission can be traced to competitive pressures to protect medical jurisdiction, and a reductionist worldview that emphasizes treatment over prevention.

This is the first attempt to analyze the way clinical practice guidelines help reinforce and perpetuate dominant medical perspectives. Moreover, to shed explanatory light, this chapter offers a synthetic explanation that combines materialist and ideological factors.

Beyond the specific case of ADHD, this chapter has implications for understanding how and why environmental health research is omitted from other materials produced by mainstream medicine, such as materials found in the medical school curriculum, continuing medical education, medical journals, and on the medical association web sites.

In this chapter, post-qualitative educational researcher Maggie MacLure discusses intimate scholarship and qualitative research within the new materialist turn, which has at its core a fundamental challenge to the humanist notion of the “self.” She suggests that, through new materialisms, we are much more intimately connected with human and non-human entities, which in turn requires us to continually push at the ways conventional research constructs researchers as sovereign subjects. At the same time, we must inquire into what these posthuman intimate connections might entail, reimagine the body outside the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and perhaps rethinking the notion of intimacy itself. She suggests that we might do so by explicitly attending to flesh and materiality in our research; focusing on affective intensities – the “hot spots” that continue to haunt us in our data; and aiming for difference, rather than sameness in our analyses, “dwelling with the data,” rather than trying to rise above it. Further, she contends that, rather than thinking of the data as something one dominates, we consider each instance with the data as alive, as an encounter.

A number of theoretical paradigms provide a networking space for the trio and complementary fields of comparative, international, and development educational (CIDE) research. Critics periodically attribute the field's lack of a sound theoretical base or commitment to one area of scientific research or another as a primary weakness in the field.¹ Espoused theoretical paradigms often provide the knowledge debate arena in which academic fields interact and build together. In an alternative perspective from this criticism, we argue that the strength of the CIDE field resides in its ability to combine multiple theoretical perspectives that offer researchers a variety of potentially fruitful metatheoretical analyses. Thus, we do not view this lack of theoretical specification as a weakness; it is the very fabric that enables CIDE educationists to study and represent increasingly complex global and local education systems.