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Anyone who has recently watched television or movies can tell you that transgender, gender nonbinary or gender expansive people are becoming more visible in these media. This trend reflects the reality that younger generations are increasingly identifying with more fluid and nonbinary gender and sexual identities and are progressively expressing those identities in a more flexible and changing manner (Herman et al., 2022; Wilson & Meyer, 2021). Unsurprisingly then, those individuals are also more visible at work, including in workplaces with employer-mandated dress codes. Indeed, in 2020 the US Supreme Court decided a case involving a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, who was fired because her employer, a funeral home, required her to conform to its gender-binary dress policy and wear clothing mandatory for people assigned male at birth, rather than appropriate for her female gender identity ( Bostock v. Clayton County, 2020).

However, as the description of Aimee Stephens's own experience illustrates, often these employer appearance codes are based on a binary and fixed conception of gender and gender identity and expression at odds with the increasing number of workers who do not identify within those rigid parameters. Moreover, even when an employee, like Aimee Stephens herself, could have fit within her employer's dress code, the improper application of that policy to her, or employer concerns about customer or co-worker discomfort with an employee's appearance under the policy may mean that a worker's identity and expression may still conflict with a workplace appearance code. For gender nonbinary or nonconforming individuals, these complications are magnified.

This chapter explores the practical problems and barriers that employer dress codes have on employees whose gender identity and/or presentation move beyond the traditional male/female binary. Using insights from queer theory, gender expansive employees serve to interrogate fundamental assumptions behind workplace dress policies and the formal and informal ways in which these policies are policed. The chapter will explore that discordance, examine possible employer resolutions, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of those responses.

Individual, interpersonal, and societal transformation will require continually working through the past. In this chapter, I process how inequalities contextualized my identity formation in the Southeastern United States. Racism, colonization, environmental degradation, misogyny, and homophobia shaped the institutions central to my Appalachian socialization – namely family, education, and law. Then, when the criminal punishment system interfered with one of my earliest intimate relationships, it sparked my interest and commitment to prison abolition. Ultimately, I find creativity and accountability, both personally and structurally, essential for potential transformation.

I build on a strong foundation of prior studies about expatriate compensation in general to provide an overview of changes in expatriate compensation, from home- to host-based approaches, during the past 10 years.

Underpinned by findings from academic and practitioner literature, I review and integrate studies of expatriate compensation and global talent management to outline the challenges and opportunities home- and host-based compensation approaches present to MNEs.

Home-based compensation is becoming an outdated and overly expensive model that is often ineffective in moving MNEs’ global competitive advantage to where it needs to be, leaving host-based approaches as the only alternative. But the use of host-based “cheaper” compensation approaches can also lead to unintended outcomes for MNEs in terms of unforeseen opportunity costs (such as the loss of critical talent) arising from shortsighted compensation decisions.

I argue that expatriate compensation works best when it is not based on an employees’ home-country status but instead on the role that he or she performs locally. I suggest a host-based compensation approach — global compensation — that is based on the worth of the position rather than where the individual has come from. Such an approach is more equitable because it is performance-based thereby eliminating overpaying and perceived unfairness. It is much simpler to administer than home-based compensation because it represents an extension of most MNEs already existing domestic (home country) pay-for-performance model.

Despite more than 10 years of new compensation practices being implemented and reported by global mobility practitioners, very little has been studied or written by scholars about some of the recent changes in expatriate compensation over the past decade. The chapter addresses this gap in academic literature.

This paper examines how young people develop meaningful self-concepts in the postmodern social world. Drawing from an ethnographic investigation of punk subculture, I explore how identity work is performed when young people are saturated with competing self-definitions and encouraged to engage in reflexive self-doubt. Focusing on the ecstatic qualities of concerts, I describe a complex process of identity formation wherein youth emotionally experience their identities through ritual performance rather than constructing them through institutional affiliation or narrative. My analysis draws heavily from Bourdieu’s practice theory and the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, emphasizing the centrality of embodiment and performativity to postmodern identity. I conclude with a discussion of how postmodern theories of the nonself exaggerate the insecurity of contemporary identity, and I outline a new theoretical framework regarding identity formation that bridges the literatures on subjectivity and embodiment with classical work in symbolic interactionism.