Gender Work and Organization最新文献

Many first-time mothers experience significant identity issues on work re-entry following maternity leave, an important individual and life-related event. Work re-entry prompts significant identity tensions leading to identity work challenges and potential career changes. We address this significant life event and develop a subjective identity informed conceptual framework explaining its key components and outcomes. We propose that for first-time mothers, re-entry following maternity leave triggers a cognitive and subjective assessment of identity threat and opportunity leading to the use of multiple identity work strategies to address personal, role, and collective identities. We analyze the impacts of these reworked identities and identity work for career decision making and outcomes. We theoretically underpin our framework using event systems, a subjective perspective on social identity and intersectional theories and in doing so, propose future research questions and highlight implications for national policy and organizational practices.

Trailing spouses who relocate to support their partners' careers abroad often experience a threat or challenge to their sense of identity. Prior studies have shown that because expatriation processes reinforce traditional gender roles, expatriate mothers are involved in intensive mothering practices and ideologies, often as a way of finding new meaning in their lives. The current study aimed to explore how motherhood and professional identity intersect in trailing wives, and specifically, whether expatriate-related developments in professional and mother identities reciprocally influence each other. In addition, the study explored whether these identity development processes may be intertwined with current sociocultural norms of motherhood. The study included in-depth interviews with 14 trailing mothers of children under the age of 12. Thematic analysis was used to identify patterns of meaning across the dataset. Three main themes emerged capturing participants' experiences of their identity processes: negotiating the model of intensive mothering, mutual influence of mother identity and work identity, and empowered mothering. Together, these themes demonstrate how, through the subjective construction of their work and mother identities, expatriate mothers deconstruct the oppressive mandates of motherhood, reclaiming their power and agency.

This paper proposes an alternative feminist understanding of maintenance by investigating the artistic practices and lived experiences of feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939). Our main theoretical and empirical focus lies on maintenance, and we show how art and motherhood as productive connection points proffer different ways of perceiving, understanding, and practicing maintenance. By contextualizing our case within the historical backdrop of New York between the late 1960s and 1980s, we demonstrate how Ukeles's maintenance art proposes novel ways of perceiving the value of maintenance, from the maintenance performed by mothers to considerations of the broader societal implications of maintenance. Such alternative political understanding aligns with critiques of postfeminist societal discourse. We contend that Ukeles's art inspires a political shift in our thinking about maintenance, where maintenance is valued not solely for its indispensable and utilitarian attributes but also it's relational, emotional, and embodied qualities. This nuanced understanding requests visibility for maintenance and foregrounds “more-than-I,” agency, and continuity of life, thereby acknowledging the inherent value of the political dimensions of maintenance.

This article will critically explore differing representations of sex work and motherhood linked to competing ideological perspectives on sex work from the perspective that frames it as the definitive transgression of gendered norms, to that which calls out the lack of necessary support and protections for sex workers. Central to this will be the foregrounding of evidence from sex workers' own management of subjective identities and their narratives of working and mothering, which resist stigma and shame.

Online retailing challenges the traditional male coding of warehousing. Based upon an ethnographic study at two Swedish online retail warehouses, this article seeks to understand why certain warehouses are numerically dominated by women. Employees express that men are less focused and more careless and easily bored than women, and hence not desirable for the goods-handling work. The warehouses extend to hard-working women driven by the shame of doing wrong, which reflect their orientation of bodies in the direction of enhancing production and profit. Workers attribute the positive social atmosphere at the warehouses to the numerical dominance of women and the small size of the workplaces. At the one hand, the constructed sameness of (women) workers through hard work and jargon contribute to a collective identity that strengthens them. At the other hand, the binary gendering of work and workers also contribute to making the ware houses into ‘straight spaces’ (Ahmed, 2006).

In this paper, we introduce Braidotti’s notion of transpositions as a methodology and strategy for ‘hopeful disruptions’ in the context of organizational inquiry. Transpositions consist of six interwoven practices―(1) embracing alternative ways of seeing and understanding the world, (2) assessing and critiquing imaginary forms, (3) preparing to make the ‘creative leap’, (4) accounting for locations and positioning, (5) storying the ‘in-between’ space, and (6) developing new frames of resonance for existing cultural formations, such as heroic leadership. Underpinned by feminist posthumanist thinking, transposition practices produce ‘generative cracks’ in hegemonic systems and in dominant social imaginaries, as well as bringing forth affirmative alternatives for thought and practice. As a feminist approach, it is also concerned with engaging gender differently and strategically to chart paths out of restrictive categories and reductive, individualist notions of being. Playing with the inherently subversive nature of this approach and tapping into our desire to disrupt the masculine ‘common sense’ of much social science research, we draw on the insights and writings of feminist speculative fiction authors to elaborate on the six practices and their implications for researchers. We further demonstrate the potential for transpositions in organizational studies through a discussion of radical empiricist approaches to inquiry and collaborative research projects.

Professionally mobile individuals tend to migrate for career purposes at the prime age of reproduction. This article focuses on highly skilled migrant mothers from different cultural backgrounds living and working in Geneva. The article argues that they inhabit and internalize their identities as―lead, tied, and/or equal―migrants and this impacts ways in which they come to develop their professional and maternal subjectivities. Highly skilled migrant mothers who identified with their tied migrant status developed a neoliberal professional and maternal subjectivity, whereas those who had internalized the lead or equal migrant ideal subjectivities developed liberal feminist professional and maternal selves. The typology of postfeminist/neoliberal versus liberal feminist migrant mothers' subjectivities helps us to better understand the feminist potentials for migration of highly skilled mothers.

Theories of precarity have emphasized workplace isolation, worker vulnerability and a lack of control over key features of work. Migration status has been viewed as an attribute that can exacerbate worker precarity, and sexual violence and bodily injury are viewed by feminist scholars including Violence Against Women scholars as sources of such precarity as well. Nevertheless, how the interaction of workplace conditions, migration status, gender and sexual violence impact migrants needs more attention. A new evidence base, the Migrant Worker Rights Database, explores workplace violations against migrants in 907 tribunal and court cases brought by migrants in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States over a 20-year period. The data collected for this project demonstrates that female migrants experience higher rates of sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual servitude, and sex trafficking when compared with men. Further, while such collectively termed “sexual violence” offenses comprise a small percentage of cases in the Database (1.3%), they are characterized qualitatively by key features that present a heightened form of sexual precarity when compared with citizens: misuse by employers of visa conditions, debt bondage, live-in arrangements, entrapment and slavery, and the combination of sexual violence with economic infringements such as wage theft and physical assault. Sexual precarity, this paper argues, should be viewed as an overlapping and reinforcing form of workplace precarity that has distinctly sexual and bodily dimensions.