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This paper explores intergenerational perceptions of kindness in the context of Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the COVID-19 global pandemic. The purpose of this exploratory study is to investigate perceptions of kindness in the context of traumatic events and its potential value in authentic allyship in organizational environments.

Authors interviewed 65 individuals (31 self-identifying as non-racialized and 34 self-identifying as Black, Indigenous and People of Colour aka BIPOC). Participants included Generation Z (Gen Z; born between 1997–2012/5) and Generation Y (Gen Y; also referred to as Millennials, born between 1981 and 1994/6) across North American, Europe and Africa. Millennials currently represent the largest generation in the workplace and are taking on leadership roles, whereas Gen Z are emerging entrants into the workplace and new organizational actors.

The paper offers insights into how to talk about BLM in organizations, how to engage in authentic vs performative allyship and how to support BIPOC in the workplace. The study also reveals the durability of systemic racism in generations that may be otherwise considered more enlightened and progressive.

The authors expand on kindness literature and contribute theoretically and methodologically to critical race theory and intertextual analysis in race scholarship.

The study contributes to the understanding of how pro-social behaviours like kindness (with intention) can contribute to a more inclusive discourse on racism and authentic allyship.

Authors reveal the potential for kindness as a pro-social behaviour in organizational environments to inform authentic allyship praxis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.

Using a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.

The paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.

The paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

In this chapter, authors take a narrative/interpretive approach by sharing insights from millennials and Generation Z as to the definition of kindness as a behaviour and action. Sixty-six individuals living in North America, Africa and Europe were interviewed during the pandemic (October 2020). They were asked to describe an incident in which they expressed kindness and/or in which it was expressed to them. Authors identified five themes (metapatterns) which denote different ways kindness is described through narrative. These kindness behaviours include: (1) kindness as a small act, (2) kindness as an event, (3) kindness as intervention and (4) kindness as consideration. The fifth form of kindness operates with more performative qualities, and the authors' have dubbed it as ‘kindness [that] makes me feel good’. Authors attempt not to constrain or essentialize what kindness behaviour is, but rather to reveal patterns while also leaving room for possibilities.

In this chapter the author examines intergenerational transmissions of kindness through four generations of women in her family. Employing an autoethnographic approach (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), the author shares her journey of understanding the importance of studying kindness in academia by acting as the connective tissue between the stories and how the author finds the meaning of kindness through her own experiences and interpretations. Using a research methodology called sensebreaking (Pratt, 2000), the author reveals how kindness acts as a catalyst to help recover from challenges by nurturing self-worth. Sensebreaking undoes meaning-making by disrupting the sensemaking process when contradictory evidence causes individuals to question their interpretation (Mirbabaie & Marx, 2020). The author demonstrates how these women struggle with the deep-rooted need for independence and dignity when facing a challenge and define random acts of kindness from others. Across the four generations, a theme of generativity is revealed, showing a need to nurture and guide younger people and contribute to the next generation.

Sexual harassment and discrimination are continuing and chronic workplace problems (Quick & McFadyen, 2017) that affect the health, well-being and socio-economic future of victim/survivors (Blau & Winkler, 2018). Despite this, management and leadership education have been primarily addressing this workplace issue from a legal responsibility perspective and using preventative strategies such as promoting the value of equity, diversity, inclusion and belongingness and explaining the importance of safe, healthy and respectful workplaces. While the establishment of policies, human rights training and disciplinary procedures are undeniably important, rarely do business educators prepare future managers to engage with employees in trauma-informed, compassionate and respectful ways. The co-authors have used a collective restorying process to engage in co-designing a workshop for early career managers and students of management and leadership. The workshop includes iterative exploration of the language and authentic performativity of unbiased compassion while engaging in collective reflexivity. The basis of the workshop centres the research proposition that to support a claimant the manager must performatively lead with authentic compassion while using unbiased language in order to assure procedural justice while mitigating procedural trauma. Early career managers, and hence their organizations, are ill-equipped to deal with workplace investigations of sexual harassment and discrimination. By collectively exploring and practicing unbiased compassion, managers will not only be more prepared to respond to a claim of sexual harassment or discrimination, but they will also reduce employee's felt sense of procedural trauma and increase the organization's likelihood of due diligence.

This chapter shares the stories of a Mi'kmaq grandmother's reflections of stories from Elders of the Mi'kmaq Nation to share with Masie, born at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in Mi'kma'ki. These stories form a story-net of teachings and reflections to help guide Masie on her journey as a Mi'kmaq girl growing up in a kind and sometimes unkind world. These stories represent a gift in a written form from a grandmother to a beautiful soul who will need help to navigate a world of uncertainty, but a world with tremendous beauty when seen through a Mi'kmaq historical perspective.

The aim of this paper is to explore the evolving nature of the work of cabin crew in a Scandinavian carrier in three eras, drawing on theories of gender and emotional labour.

The paper draws on ethnographic data from fieldwork, interviews and documents.

From being a feminized and temporary occupation for young, upper- and middle-class women in the 1970s, the occupation became a full-time job and with greater diversity of cabin crew. Today there are signs of the job becoming a precarious and temporary one of demanding and devalorized work in a polarized and class-divided labour market. Changing circumstances impact on the emotional labour requirement and terms and conditions at work.

A limitation is that the research design was not initially longitudinal in the sense that the author does not have exactly the same kind of data from each era. The author has, however, been involved in this field for two decades, used multiple methods and interacted with different stakeholders and drew on a unique data material.

The development in aviation is contributing to new discriminatory practices, driving employee conditions downwards and changing the job demands. This development will have practical consequences for the lives and families of cabin crew.

The analysis illustrates how work ‘constructs' workers and contributes in creating jobs that are not sustainable for the employees. Intensification of work, insecurity and tougher working conditions also challenge key features in the Nordic model such as proper pay, decent work and a life-long employment. Much indicates that the profession is again becoming a temporary one of demanding work with poor working conditions in a polarized and class-divided labour market.

The research contributes to the literature on emotional labour, gender and the evolving nature of the work of cabin crew. The unique data material, the longitudinal aspect of the research and the focus on a single network carrier are good in charting changes over time.