This article advances feminist organizational theorizing about embodiment and subjectivity by investigating menopause at work as a temporally constituted phenomenon. We ask how time matters in ...women’s embodied and subjective experiences of menopause at work. Theoretically, we draw on feminist writers McNay and Grosz to explore the relationship between gendered agency and time in a corpus of 48 qualitative interviews conducted with women employed at two Australian universities about their experiences of menopause. Our empirical analysis identifies three temporal modalities – episodic, helical and relational – that show how gendered organizational subjectivities are not simply temporally situated, but created in and through distinct temporal forces. We offer two contributions to feminist organizational theory: first, by illuminating the ontological role played by time in gendered agency; and second, by fleshing out the notion of a ‘body politics of surprise’ with implications for feminist studies of organizational embodiment, politics and ethics.
This paper employs an intersectional lens to explore menopausal experiences of women working in the higher education and healthcare sectors in Australia. Open-text responses from surveys across three ...universities and three healthcare settings were subject to a multistage qualitative data analysis. The findings explore three aspects of menopause experience that required women to contend with a constellation of aged, gendered and ableist dynamics and normative parameters of labor market participation. Reflecting on the findings, the paper articulates the challenges of menopause as issues of workplace inequality that are rendered visible through an intersectional lens. The paper holds a range of implications for how to best support women going through menopause at work. It emphasizes the need for approaches to tackle embedded and more complex modes of inequality that impact working women’s menopause, and ensure that workforce policy both protects and supports menopausal women experiencing intersectional disadvantage.
This study addresses freedom, work and organisation by problematising Amartya Sen’s pluralistic notion of (development as) freedom through a fieldwork study of a Filipino non-governmental ...organisation that promotes sustainable agriculture. In this context, peasant farmers face increasing threat from intersecting agrarian and climate crises, exacerbated by mainstream economic paradigms for agricultural development. For Sen, development encompasses the process of expanding the ‘substantive freedoms’ of people (freedom to), and removing sources of ‘unfreedom’ (freedom from). However, it is not clear in Sen’s work how such freedoms are relationally constituted and thus the manner of the ‘labour of agential becoming’ at the core of Sen’s thought. We therefore ask: how do agroecological work and organisational practices of grassroots development promote freedom for small-scale farmers under climate threat in the Global South? Our analysis identifies a novel form of freedom – labelled ‘freedom with’ – defined as a set of relational, multi-actor capabilities and organising practices that constitute alternative, future-oriented ways of doing and being. ‘Freedom with’ enables us to better understand how and why the labour of agential becoming works, offering a theoretical extension of Sen’s notion of freedom with implications for debates in our field on sustainability and beyond-capitalist organising.
This article presents a methodology that organizational scholars can use to analyze, explain, and critically interpret the role of visual rhetoric in organizational communications. Corporations ...invest heavily in the visual design of organizational communications, including corporate reports, recognizing the distinctive role and benefits of visual imagery, as well as the rhetorical function of these documents. Current analytical approaches to visual rhetoric are either predominantly theoretical (with little structured guidance) or procedural (with little acknowledgment of important epistemic questions). This leaves a need for a methodology that combines a clear theoretical framework with explicit guidance on how to analyze visual rhetoric. This article bridges this analytic gap by offering a methodology that integrates a theoretical foundation of a priori analytical categories informed by selected writings of the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes with three abductively derived phases (categorical analysis, content analysis, rhetorical analysis) for analysis of visual design of corporate reports. We apply this methodology in an examination of a Qantas Annual Review and articulate our contributions to the field of organizational research methods.
Summary
Thriving at work is a notable construct given its role in individual health and developmental outcomes. According to the Socially Embedded Model of Thriving (SEMT), individuals thrive at work ...when embedded in environments that support agentic behaviors and can self‐sustain this state through positive spirals of agentic behaviors, resources, and thriving. The SEMT is inherently multilevel, yet there are two unarticulated but critical multilevel issues in existing scholarship: a paucity of research reflecting these multilevel features of the SEMT and an incipient multilevel conceptualization of thriving that has little theoretical justification. As a catalyst for progress, we present an integrative review drawing from the SEMT and other supplementary theoretical perspectives to define a multilevel conceptualization of thriving at work. Through this lens, we organize, synthesize, and evaluate the body of evidence, integrating the multilevel view of thriving within established scholarship. To substantiate our framework theoretically, we articulate how lower level processes unfold to develop higher level collective manifestations of thriving at work. We identify opportunities for theoretical and empirical advancement, coupled with specific, actionable recommendations, to deepen a multilevel conceptualization of thriving. Altogether, we advance thriving at work as a multilevel construct meaningful at three levels—individuals, dyads, and collectives.
This paper investigates the benefits of overseas tertiary education for international postgraduate students enrolled at a research-intensive university in Malaysia, an emerging yet under-researched ...Asian education hub. The study is based on 55 semi-structured qualitative interviews with international students and academic and professional support staff. Our analysis identified three sets of benefits linked to specific economic, educational, social and cultural pull factors: academic success, building knowledge and skills, and contributing to home country on return. Our analysis illustrates the interplay between macro and meso-level actors and policies in shaping the micro-level experiences of international students. The paper contributes new insights into vital nuances in the nature and lived experience of the key benefits of international education relating to academic success and time, language learning and friendship, and employability and 'giving back'. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).
This paper addresses climate change through collaborative work with social movement organisations in the Philippines. We contend that the tendency of work on climate change, social resilience and ...climate justice to ignore epistemological questions and proceed through technocentric dominant frames can lead to partial responses that support the status quo, contribute to slow (or fast) violence, and enhance ongoing processes of marginalisation. Instead, we argue, there is a need to co-develop analyses with those most affected. The experiences shared in this paper speak to complex knowings of climate and the intimate hurts of disaster, and provide rich scope for resistance and change. We find knowledges to be affective, emotional and relational, and deeply imbued with power relations. These insights lead us to theorise a topological angle on the knowings and beings of climate: to turn to emotional topologies. In seeking to elaborate on emotional topologies of climate, we draw on the concept of knowledge spaces to better understand meanings and practices of climate as emergent motleys of linked people, sites, affective process, activities and technologies. In the emergent nature of these spaces, there is scope for disruption, re-ordering and resistance.
This special issue (SI) editorial contributes to ongoing efforts worldwide to decolonise management and organisational knowledge (MOK). A robust pluriversal discussion on the how and why of ...decolonisation is vital. Yet to date, most business and management schools are on the periphery of debates about decolonising higher education, even as Business Schools in diverse locations function as contested sites of neocolonialism and expansion of Western neoliberal perspectives. This editorial and special issue is the outcome of a unique set of relationships and processes that saw Organization host its first paper development workshop in Africa in 2019. This editorial speaks to a radical ontological plurality that up-ends the classical division between theory and praxis. It advocates praxistical theorising that moves beyond this binary and embraces decolonising knowledge by moving into the realm of affect and embodied, other-oriented reflexive, communicative praxis. It underscores the simultaneous, contested and unfinished decolonising-recolonising doubleness of praxis and the potential of borderlands locations to work with these dynamics. This special issue brings together a set of papers which advance different decolonising projects and grapple with the nuances of what it means to ‘do’ decolonising in a diversity of empirical and epistemic settings.
This book looks at how it is we do tourism and learn to be tourists when we are on holiday. Tourism is a dynamic way of being that may facilitate or hinder intercultural exchange. It draws on ...empirical work and a range of theoretical frameworks, arguing that tourism matters precisely because of the lessons it can teach us about everyday life.
The concept of the gaze plays an important role in (post)colonial organizational analysis. It addresses dynamics of looking and being seen, particularly as they pertain to knowledge and identity. ...Drawing on Derrida's writing on spectrality as it intersects with text and aesthetics, we chart a theoretical framework with which we broaden and deepen extant approaches to the gaze. We illustrate its organizational dynamics across two vignettes that examine writing on the Sphinx by Hegel and Mark Twain. Our work broadens the literature on the gaze with a new view on the (re)production of presence and absence. It also deepens reflection by outlining how the occupation of concern is shaped by interested blindness and unease at a gaze from a specter. These insights invite reconsideration of extant views on knowledge and identity within (post)colonial organizational analysis and inspire reflection on how scholars can participate in tracing the organization of geographies of concern.
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