Gender Work and Organization最新文献

The workplace is a key site through which sex and gender are organizationally produced and unequal gender relations take place. Technologies, which are embedded with and impacting gendered power relations, are also integral to work and workplaces worldwide. As nation-states promote technologies and rebrand themselves, how do technologies catalyze new forms of gendered embodiment and work—and how might this contribute to a nation-state's development plans and rebranding efforts? How do the intersections between states, labor, and technologies also reify inequalities, both in and beyond workplace settings? Based on 14 months of fieldwork and interviews with 62 participants, this article analyzes how Thai transgender women's work in the entertainment industry simultaneously advances technological growth and national rebranding efforts. In 2016, the Thai state launched “Thailand 4.0,” an economic plan centered on technological growth, alongside efforts to restore its reputation from a sex tourism destination. In this context, Thai transgender entertainers promote what I call “techno-professionalism,” or professionalism that is not only enhanced by technologies, but that also supports state development plans and rebranding efforts. The concept of techno-professionalism underscores how technologies figure centrally into new iterations of state development and nation-branding promoted in global workplaces, adding to our understanding of the linkages between gender, labor, and national development. By highlighting how state development plans intersect with technologies and norms of professionalism, this article reveals how the economy and professions are made up of intimate social relations, including gendered technologies and gendered social roles.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States government promoted the idea of care as infrastructure to justify government spending on nonphysical infrastructures. In this article, we demonstrate the usefulness of adopting an infrastructure framework for researching care and caring through an analysis of working mothers' communication on Reddit in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing infrastructural inversion as a heuristic, we conceptualize the childcare crisis experienced by working mothers in many Western societies as an infrastructural disruption in which the cascading failure of childcare infrastructures exposed the background work of care as well as its vulnerability and invisibility. We also argue that, against this backdrop, an alternate infrastructure of digital caring emerged. However, this informal infrastructure was inadequate to sustain the needs of working mothers, and its emergence, in itself, provides proof of the need to value care as infrastructure. Ultimately, we showcase how conceptualizing care as infrastructure can enrich feminist theorization of care, and that centering care as infrastructure redresses the bias toward physical infrastructure in the scholarly literature.

This paper argues that vulnerability as conceptualized by Judith Butler is a useful lens to study organizations. Judith Butler conceptualizes vulnerability as both universally shared human condition and individually experienced, thereby describes how vulnerability is both a bodily ontology (we are all vulnerable due to our human bodies being dependent on each other to support us), and an epistemic frame (through vulnerability we can know), resulting in an ethical response-ability (to not hurt one another). Vulnerability, though universally shared, is individually experienced and unequally distributed, because it depends on what Judith Butler calls “social infrastructures”. Organizations and their organizing practices constitute such social infrastructures and at the same time depend on them. Using a vulnerability lens makes it possible to study how organizations co-constitute vulnerability and the positionality that they inhabit toward vulnerability.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only highlighted preexisting inequalities in academia but has also exacerbated them while giving rise to novel forms of disparities. Drawing upon our experiences as women, parents, and early career academics (ECAs) in Switzerland and enriched by feminist theory on reproductive labor and carework, we examine the unequal impacts of the pandemic. First, our analysis reveals how the pandemic disproportionately impacted ECAs, a group already in a position of precarity within academia. Second, we identify the broad range of tasks brought about by the pandemic as “COVID labor”. This essential labor—undervalued, invisible, and often unpaid—had a particularly negative impact on ECAs. Third, looking at various intersections of difference, we emphasize that the experience of COVID labor was far from uniform among ECAs with institutional responses disregarding its extent and unequal distribution. In conclusion, we underscore the importance of acknowledging the long-term consequences of COVID labor on ECAs, particularly those belonging to underrepresented groups. Neglecting these issues may lead to the loss of a wide range of talented scholars for reasons that are not related to the quality of their academic performance.

This paper is an edited version of a conversation between Silvia Gherardi and Lynne Baxter at the Inaugural Distinguished Speaker Event of the Gender, Materialities, and Activism Network. We learn about the development of Professor Gherardi's interest in feminism, how it evolves and informs her wider work on organization studies and methodology, and how she supports community development while advancing her own work. Moreover, there is a perceptive reflection from Professor Gherardi uncovering what the article, as written text, loses compared to the multisensory verbal encounter taking place in virtual space.

This article draws on the work of Judith Butler, particularly the notion of vulnerability in/as resistance, to explore the gendered experiences of women in Australian academia. Through employing an arts-based research method, Draw, Write, and Reflect, with women academics in Australia, we explore the ways in which vulnerabilities are identified and navigated in the context of academia. Our study identified three key forms of vulnerabilities: the expectation paradox, the body, and age and experience. Such vulnerabilities appeared to be navigated through acts of othering, denying, and overcoming. We return to Butler's call for the creation of gender trouble in making sense of these findings but find that what is instead occurring is within-gender trouble. We then explain how this aspect is shaped by the masculine and highly individualized structures of academia. Our findings extend Butler's notions of vulnerability in/as resistance by offering insights that capture a fragmented and sometimes impermeable space between vulnerabilities and resistance.

Worker mothers still struggle to find a good balance between their care and work identities. Most research on motherhood at work focuses on how organizational structures can enable professional women to find a balance between caring and work identities neglecting their personal experiences and how they understand themselves in relation to both motherhood and work. We propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity tensions that professional women experience during their transition into motherhood and how they manage it. To explore this question, we conducted a qualitative study over 2 years with worker mothers in Latin and North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. The thematic and narrative analysis of 80 individual narrative interviews shows the emergence of two coexisting identity narratives. The first narrative understands motherhood as a linear process, where women experience liminality, uncertainty, and identity loss but eventually return to work after having aggregated their new worker mother identities during maternity leaves. The second coexisting narrative challenges this linear and finite view by highlighting the transition to motherhood as a continuous, liminoid, and never-ending process. The two narratives are contextualized and managed differently according to the different cultural, historical, and social contexts where they are developed; the overall results present motherhood as a ‘liminoid’ experience that requires constant identity work to navigate the tensions emerging between potentially new and customary identities and behaviors in work contexts.

In this paper, we investigate the process and the intertwined and entangled roles involved in sharing vulnerability in solidarity through collective autoethnographic exploration. We draw on the sharing process we engaged with in relation to the personal experience of one of us with long COVID-related vulnerability, in addition to and intensified by the gendered vulnerability of being a mother during lockdown in the context of academia. Together, we reflect on the roles of sharer and supporter we took on in the process of sharing vulnerability and bring light to the emotions that preceded the sharing, the reasons for ultimately sharing with others, the act of sharing, the reactions to and consequences of it, the feelings aroused by sharing and how sharing could be supported. Over time, sharing those vulnerabilities with each other, finding support, and sharing with the work environment became an empowering research and healing project. The insights obtained from our experience are discussed in the context of the existing literature on gendered vulnerability and feminist solidarity, contributing an embodied and relational perspective to the process and entangled roles involved in sharing vulnerability and feminist writing.