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Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2001) concept of symbolic violence in his work on Masculine Domination, the purpose of this paper is to examine how perceptions of legitimacy surrounding the presence of female directors are constructed in the boardroom, and the role of symbolic violence in the process.

The authors carried out the investigation through a series of 32 interviews, mostly with board members in government-owned, commercially focussed companies in Québec. The study was conducted in the aftermath of the adoption of a legislative measure aiming to institute parity in the boardroom of government-owned companies.

The analysis suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are predicated on two main discourses, as conveyed through board members when interpreting the presence of female directors. In the first discursive representation, feminine gender is naturalized and mobilized by participants to support (quite oftentimes in a rather apparent positive way) the distinctive contributions that femininity can make, or cannot make, to the functioning of boards. In the second discourse (degenderizing), the question of gender disappears from the sense-making process. Women’s presence is then justified and normalized, not because of their feminine qualities, but rather and uniquely for their competencies.

While, from a first level of analysis, the main discourses the authors unveiled may be considered as potentially enhancing women’s role and legitimacy within boards, from a deeper perspective such discourses may also be viewed as channels for symbolic violence to operate discreetly, promoting certain forms of misrecognition that continue to marginalize certain individuals or groups of people. For example, the degenderizing discourse misrecognizes that a focus on individual competency contests overlooks the social conditions under which the contesters developed their competencies.

Provides awareness and a basis for directors to understand and how symbolic power covertly operates in apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance and challenge assumptions.

Implications in terms of policy making to promote board diversity are discussed. This is particularly relevant since many countries around the world are considering affirmative-action-type regulation to accelerate an otherwise dawdling trend in the nomination of women on boards.

The research is the first to empirically address the notion of gendering in the boardroom, focussing on the construction of meanings surrounding the “legitimate” female director. The study is also one of few giving access to a field where a critical mass is attained, allowing the authors to investigate perceptions regarding the extent to which the order of things is altered in the boardroom once formal parity is established. Finally, the study sensitizes the authors further to the pertinence of investigating how symbolic power covertly operates in today’s society, including within apparently rationalized structures of corporate governance.

The paper aims to explore the relationship between accounting and racial violence through an investigation of sharecropping in the postbellum American South.

A range of primary sources including peonage case files of the US Department of Justice and the archives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are utilised. Data are analysed by reference to Randall Collins' theory of violence. Consistent with this theory, a micro-sociological approach to examining violent encounters is employed.

It is demonstrated that the production of alternative or competing accounts, accounting manipulation and failure to account generated interactions where confrontational tension culminated in bluster, physical attacks and lynching. Such violence took place in the context of potent racial ideologies and institutions.

The paper is distinctive in its focus on the interface between accounting and “actual” (as opposed to symbolic) violence. It reveals how accounting processes and traces featured in the highly charged emotional fields from which physical violence could erupt. The study advances knowledge of the role of accounting in race relations from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, a largely unexplored period in the accounting history literature. It also seeks to extend the research agenda on accounting and slavery (which has hitherto emphasised chattel slavery) to encompass the practice of debt peonage.

Current responses to women's violence are rooted in stereotypical views that delink women's violence from the context of gendered inequality and social marginalisation that mediates it. In this chapter, we draw from feminist scholarship on women's violence, including violence by female sex workers (FSWs), and qualitative data to examine different forms of FSWs' violence against their male clients and the contexts that shape their use of violence. Twenty-seven in-depth interviews were conducted with FSWs recruited through snowball sampling in Uyo, Nigeria. Thematic analysis revealed three forms of violence: ‘situational violence’ – an individual-centred, self-defensive and spontaneous response to conflict situations; ‘collective violence’ – pre-meditated violence used by a group of FSWs to revenge the victimisation of its member, and ‘symbolic violence’ – the un-planned outcome of FSWs' violence that has the effect of deterring client violence and inducing cooperative behaviour. FSWs use violence to deter or counter threatened or enacted client violence and to exact revenge for past victimisation. They also use violence to enforce rules, extract payments and establish solidarity. FSWs' violence is contextualised within the everyday experience of client violence. This violence is not only reactionary; it is a pragmatic attempt to negotiate structural and gender dynamics that shape risks in sex work.

More than half of those who are incarcerated have cited a history of drug abuse before or during arrest. Although social science literature has noted the disparate effects of criminal sentencing for drug possession, little research has explored the punitive measures enacted and enforced by the correctional facilities in which prisoners reside.

Using data from the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, this study estimates a series of logistic regressions to examine the predictors of receiving disciplinary action. Men and women are examined separately to investigate whether these patterns vary across men’s and women’s correctional facilities. The notions of both symbolic and structural violence are used to gain a better understanding of the experiences of drug addicts who are incarcerated.

Findings indicate that net of the effect of demographic characteristics and previous contact with the criminal legal system, men who are punished for rule violations involving drugs in prisons are approximately twice as likely to receive disciplinary action than inmates who are disciplined for all infractions, other than assaulting other inmates. Moreover, black inmates are significantly more likely to receive disciplinary actions or sanctions than whites.

The findings suggest that disciplinary action is more frequently experienced by those who are drug dependent or use drugs within prison with an even greater penalty for black prisoners in men’s facilities.

In this article, we develop an understanding of racism based on a style of social control that recent writers have referred to as “symbolic violence”. Symbolic violence is novel in that agents are oppressed through their own complicity as they accept and reproduce a “reality” that is made to appear unavoidable and even beneficial. Although many sociological discussions of racism have contributed to the sort of reification that leads to symbolic violence by understanding racial identities as essential, cultural ideals as ahistorical, and market dynamics as autonomous, we make the point that symbolic violence survives even as oppressed members are understood as active agents. We discuss how symbolic violence differs from other variants of racism and address the sort of theoretical maneuver that needs to be made if a more equitable order is to be fostered. Specifically, only by restoring the praxiology of language can race cease from being an immutable social fact that normalizes racial inequalities.

Appearance has two meanings. On the one hand, appearance is about the physical qualities of a person being of certain height, weight, complexion and having a particular hair, eye and skin colour as well as choice and style of dress and attire. On the other hand, appearance has a social dimension, as those physical qualities of a person are interpreted, rated and judged, and attributed varied meanings and values across different settings. Appearances can influence the experiences of individuals in the workplace in both positive and negative ways: Positive, when they are mobilised as a resource that increases the influence and advantage of individuals on others; and negative, when individuals are discriminated or disadvantaged on the basis of their appearance. Drawing on a Bourdieusian conceptual repertoire, this chapter delves into this duality of appearance and frames appearance both as a resource (a form of carnal capital) and a source of symbolic violence. As appearance is an aspect of an individual's self-identity in the workplace, this chapter explores appearance and intersectionality across gender, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation at work. Appearance is examined as a cross cutting category of diversity as both privilege (carnal capital) and disadvantage (symbolic violence).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of recruitment and retention practices in the criminal family firm and to provide theoretical explanation for the coercive nature of such practices.

The case study methodology uses 18 semi-structured interviews, court transcripts and press reports to investigate a landmark case of modern slavery in the UK.

The findings tentatively suggest that the trusting relationships typical of the legitimate family firm employers are replicated in a criminal business.

The theoretical implications of the paper are that Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic violence and misrecognition can be used to explain the process of worker exploitation in the family firm. Such psychological tools of domination maintain power in a situation of forced labour and blur the boundaries between employer/offender and worker/victim. From the perspective of understanding forced labour, Bourdieu's concept of misrecognition provides a theoretical framework for understanding the “stickiness” of exploitative workplace practices.

The article suggests a non-economic explanation of why individuals choose to remain in poorly paid and exploitative labour, which will be of use to regulatory and enforcement bodies, seeking to understand the psychological and structural drivers of forced labour.

Despite press interest in modern slavery in family firms, such cases have been rarely analysed in family firm literature. The paper contributes to the limited explorations of criminality in family firm businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the management control systems developed by universities and groups within them, to manage research within UK University Business and Management Schools. Specifically, the paper analyses how universities develop their internal management control systems in response to an externally imposed regulatory system. It also provides an agenda for future research.

The paper uses a middle range approach to consider the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the previous Research Assessment Exercises. It uses the language provided by a number of conceptual frames to analyse insights from the lived experience, and builds on previous literature that has recognised the perverse outcomes of such performance measurement systems.

The study finds that the internal management control systems developed by academics themselves amplify the controls imposed by the REF. These internal control systems are accepted by some academics although they encourage a movement away from previously held academic values.

This study contributes to debates about the dysfunctional impacts of the use of performance measures to manage research. Its originality lies in explaining that the management control systems developed to resist the imposition of external performance measurement systems may lead to symbolic violence where participants become involved with their own subjugation.

Purpose – This chapter aims to explore and discuss how women paid and unpaid labor in weaving is positioned in the flexible production chain in the context of local development.

Methodology/approach – It is based on a research11Report on Effects and Results of the Relationships between Manufacturers and Local Weavers on the Local Social Structure: Cases of Mugla/Yesilyurt, Istanbul/Sile and Kastamonu in collaboration with Asuman Turkun-Erendil and supported by Mugla University Research Projects Unit, 2006 (unpublished project report). study, using mainly oral history methods, of three weaving centers in Anatolia in their attempts to achieve local development through the restructuring of their traditional craft.

Findings – This study shows how a flexible production process is organized in ways in which women's labor is almost always positioned as cheap and insecure. In this process, through production of hegemonic discourses, symbolic capital of secure women's work is drastically decreased and that of the production activity itself (weaving) is increased. It also discusses how the state as the main carrier of symbolic violence, plays an important role in expansion of flexible production and informality directly (with its policies applied in its own enterprises) or indirectly (with its policies in general).

Originality/value of paper – By focusing on the mechanisms through women's labor is kept cheap or unpaid in the organization of the entire production process and also on the relationships between women's labor and the state in local development context, critical points for future discussion and policy-making are raised.

Criminological, historical, and sociological research has continually underestimated women’s violent potential in the German Neo-Nazism movement. Contemplating this leads to questions about female agency in the Third Reich, a link that has not been established yet. This chapter seeks to expose this link, arguing that regardless of social environment, changing gender roles or political situation, Neo-Nazi women and women, in general, have a potential for violence in the public sphere.

The chapter looks at female perpetrators in both the Third Reich and the contemporary Neo-Nazi period and examines their involvement from the overarching theoretical viewpoint that women are not any less capable of violent crimes than men.

The scope of Neo-Nazi women’s aggression and violence is not a modern phenomenon or an exception. Their invisibility is not a result of their suggested passive involvement; it stems from the public’s and institutions’ inability to perceive them as agents of violence. Bourdieu developed the concept of symbolic violence to characterize the violence experienced by victims who accept their societal subordination. It is shown that because researchers, officials, and the public reified the concept; they overlooked the reality that women can exercise their agency beyond the limits of their roles as wife and mother and commit violent acts.

Reliable data are not available on the number of violent female Neo-Nazis. It is likely, however, that the numbers given are an underestimation.

Law enforcement agencies have long overlooked women as potential offenders. A basic change in perspective is needed to better identify female perpetrators.

The chapter is based on the murders of ten immigrants between 2000 and 2006, which puzzled investigators over a decade. Nobody suspected a woman was a key member of the group thought to be responsible for these murders.