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Globalisation has dramatically accelerated flows of human capital for both long-term migrants and short-term expatriates around the world, making workplaces more culturally diverse than ever before. This poses new challenges regarding cultural differences in workplace communication and organisational values, including differences in practices surrounding gender roles. These challenges are particularly significant given the rise of Asian economies and the increasing presence of Chinese workers and business in places like Australia. This thesis, employing a qualitative approach, explores the experiences of Chinese female expatriates in Australian workplaces to see how these experiences have reshaped their perceptions about work, career, and their personal and professional identities.

This thesis examines three cases of activism around gender and work inequality in contemporary Australia. Gendered economic inequality remains ubiquitous, despite decades of work from feminists and leftists to address it. This thesis suggests that while feminist theorists have successfully deconstructed gender and sex, when these same feminists look for a transformative politics of economy, they have little to offer beyond a discredited model of socialism. A transformative politics of gender and economy is deeply needed and we can look to fruitful practices and identifications in already existing feminist work activism for leads. In this thesis I draw together two previously separate areas of feminist theory - Nancy Fraser’s political theory and J.K. Gibson-Graham’s economic theory. I reinvigorate Fraser’s conception of left movements for redistribution and recognition, and join her in her call for a transformative politics of gender and economy rather than action that affirms gender roles and welfare state responses to inequality. I argue for a genuinely deconstructed and transformed notion of diverse economies, as a way forward to transform gender and economic inequality. Gibson-Graham’s reading of economies as diverse opens up multiple possibilities for reperforming the kinds of economies – labour, transactions and enterprises - that facilitate surviving well, and helps move away from an unwitting capitalocentrism in left feminist activism. This argument is developed through analysis of three cases of economic activism in which I undertook participant observation: the Australian Services Union equal pay campaign for community workers, Asian Women at Work, a community organisation in the multicultural, low socio-economic area of Western Sydney, and Fitted for Work, an organisation seeking to fund its support of unemployed women through social enterprise. I show how activists in these cases of feminist work activism understand economy and economic inequality, and how they view their economic identities, practices and activism. My observations, interviews, and discourse analysis show that the attachment to worker and other politicised identities often prevents exploration of fertile opportunities for economic change, and may even assist to maintain capitalist dominance, but that there are other practices and non-capitalist identifications already existing in feminist work activism in Sydney that could be built upon. This thesis argues for an everyday language of economic wellbeing that is largely missing from the left feminist movements looked at in this research. It opens up important opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of feminist activism and critiques of work that address themselves to the deeply entrenched problems of gender and economic inequality.

Women in executive positions in the Australian corporate organisation appear to be a novelty. There is however a small number of women, who, against the odds, do take up the challenge to lead and hold executive positions in corporate organisations. What can be learned from these women? This reflective inquiry begins by exploring an indicative and eclectic array of historical events, and critically reviews the pertinent literature, to see what significant influences have contributed to and shaped the overall emergence of women’s participation and taking of executive positions. The inquiry contributes by bringing together a diverse range of theoretical perspectives on women’s involvement in organisations with empirically rich examples, drawn from a Complexity informed qualitative interpretative project gathering women’s own stories, women who hold and have held executive positions within the financial services industry. My experiential reflection permeates and directs the overall approach as well as the way in which I made sense of and interpreted the inquiry. The result is the construction of a rich picture that informs current practice and experience while illuminating emergent implications for the broader corporate system. Focusing on the organisation and the factors that shape women’s career development I determine that institutional changes aimed at improving women’s representation in executive positions have not led to significant change and suggest that Complexity provides a new understanding that goes beyond the prevailing views of stereotypical and cultural barriers obstructing women’s career advancement. In the empirical work, I present a Complexity informed inquiry with Complexity providing the overarching logic, methodological approach, technique, and primary metaphors through which the findings are articulated and elaborated. Coherent conversations exploring how twelve women in executive positions make sense of and construct their every day experience in corporate organisations were used to generate narratives that were analysed and synthesised (through fractal and attractor analysis) to identify patterns of similarity. I have identified major themes and four attractor sets from which I make inference about what has guided and shaped these women’s behaviours and attitudes towards their corporate career and experience within the corporate organisation. The inquiry provides a new analysis represented by key themes, which are shown to have driven the actions of the women as they self-organised their corporate careers. Firstly, initial conditions influenced and shaped how these women constructed and thought about their career. Secondly, it was found that their career narratives were strongly entwined with other contexts (society, family and the personal domain). Thirdly, the findings indicate that as these women shift seamlessly from one role to another they constructed temporary identities (professional, mother, wife) as they followed their life cycle passions. Fourthly the career journeys of the women were shown to be non-linear and characterised as unpredictable and almost serendipitous as they changed course to make what I have termed ‘passion leaps’, at various times in their career. These leaps required risk-taking and foresight and an unbridled enthusiasm for an uncertain future and a not-so-certain landing. What emerged were women who were passionate about their positions and comfortable with leadership and taking executive positions: they just did it differently to men. I propose that the underrepresentation of women in leadership will only change when women’s difference is fully supported and the corporate career model changes in a way that supports a critical mass of women to take executive positions within the organisation.

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are a much-discussed and debated construct in the literature. When examining behaviors not explicitly detailed in job descriptions, ambiguity and subjective expectations about who and how these actions should be carried out naturally occur. Gender role expectations may also create a more complex situation in which workers are evaluated differentially due to gender stereotypes and expectations. This research examined the interplay of gender role expectations for the engagement in organizational citizenship behaviors in a university teaching setting. Two studies examined how gender stereotypes impact student evaluations. Study 1 was an experimental design, which used a university student sample to examine the affects of three factors (i.e., gender of evaluated professor, high vs. low levels of male-typed OCBs, and high vs. low levels of female-typed OCBs) on student evaluations of teaching. Study 2 employed a university faculty survey to examine levels of OCBs reported by male and female faculty, how much faculty believed these behaviors were related to student evaluations of their teaching, and the relationships between behaviors, beliefs and work-related attitudes. Overall results indicated that professor gender in either study had little affect, and the gender type of OCBs and workplace attitudes were important when examining the relationships between OCB performance and evaluations.

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are a much-discussed and debated construct in the literature. When examining behaviors not explicitly detailed in job descriptions, ambiguity and subjective expectations about who and how these actions should be carried out naturally occur. Gender role expectations may also create a more complex situation in which workers are evaluated differentially due to gender stereotypes and expectations. This research examined the interplay of gender role expectations for the engagement in organizational citizenship behaviors in a university teaching setting. Two studies examined how gender stereotypes impact student evaluations. Study 1 was an experimental design, which used a university student sample to examine the affects of three factors (i.e., gender of evaluated professor, high vs. low levels of male-typed OCBs, and high vs. low levels of female-typed OCBs) on student evaluations of teaching. Study 2 employed a university faculty survey to examine levels of OCBs reported by male and female faculty, how much faculty believed these behaviors were related to student evaluations of their teaching, and the relationships between behaviors, beliefs and work-related attitudes. Overall results indicated that professor gender in either study had little affect, and the gender type of OCBs and workplace attitudes were important when examining the relationships between OCB performance and evaluations.