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How do women reject the feminine in postfeminist working life, and to what effects? Organisational scholars have long argued that the feminine is discouraged or reconfigured in neoliberal, postfeminist organisations that value masculine-oriented traits. But what the feminine encompasses, how it is rejected and to what effects is less clear. In this article, we draw on feminist post-Jungian theory, which understands the feminine as archetypal, emerging over thousands of years of human history and characterised by paradox, circularity, being and descent. Feminist Jungian thinkers agree that the archetypal feminine is neglected, if not denigrated, in neoliberal, capitalist cultures, much to our detriment. Reflecting on data from a qualitative, longitudinal study on early career formation and work experiences with 15 young women, we reflexively discuss how in postfeminist working life, disavowing the archetypal feminine manifests by: adhering to ascensionist ideals to the detriment of slowness and inactivity; engaging linear thinking to the detriment of cyclical, paradoxical being; and avowing rational objectivity to the detriment of embodied instinct. This engenders both collusion with postfeminist power structures and psychic effects such as dis-ease and anxiety, which we argue can be ameliorated by recognising and embracing the archetypal feminine within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to develop a theoretical vocabulary that allows us to better understand not only the visible effects of digitalization on organizations but also the invisible work that arises in and around the digitalized organization to prepare, maintain and repair its key features. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies and their classic concept of invisible work, we challenge some of the dominant spatial root metaphor assumptions in current research and develop an alternative metaphoric of digital work and the digitalized organization. We develop the theoretical concept of invisible digi-work as a corollary to the already established concept of digital work and flesh out three types of work that we conceptualize as invisible connecting, compensating and cleaning work. This analytical framework captures aspects of work that tend be out of sight and devalued in dominant accounts. As such, it represents a theoretical alternative to imageries of digital spaces that lead to an overemphasis on the affordances of new digital technologies, establishing an alternative ground for interrogating work at margins, which is essential to the constitution of digitalized organizations. Theorizing invisible digi-work is in line with recent calls in organization studies to go beyond the visual and investigate the indirect and less visible implications of digitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper examines how emotion rules are socially constructed and how and why they are enacted and challenged through specific modes of embodiment in face-to-face interactions. The paper broadens the understanding of emotion rules by connecting them to aesthetics to explore face-to-face interactions. This paper is based on ethnographic data gathered from a two-year study of a micro-sized service company. It explores the structure, function, and meaning of three emotion rules: (1) the emotionality rule, (2) the enthusiasm rule, and (3) the nice way rule as enacted by the company's chief executive officer (CEO) and employees. This paper enhances the understanding of the role of emotion rules in establishing an innovative and democratic organisation. It offers insight into how emotion rules were enacted, challenged, and broken in an unexpected situation when the CEO announces her non-consultative decision that affected the company's employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Could the everyday affective relationships that we share with our animal companions inspire us to think, write and even care 'differently' in the field of organisation studies? In this paper, I suggest that organisational scholars have plenty to learn from post-qualitative writing and the posthumanist practice of feminist dog-writing. Drawing from literature on posthumanism, humanimal relations and post-qualitative methodology, I first frame feminist dog-writing as a practice that relies on post-qualitative writing and discuss what this framing potentially involves, in concrete terms. Second, I experiment with 'writing with the bitches' to illustrate how this kind of writing 'differently' – in ways in which the entangled co-becoming of the humanimal is highlighted in its multiplicity – could contribute to discussions of humanimal relations in the field of organisation studies and more disruptive, post-qualitative forms of writing in our scholarly field. Despite the many challenges of anthropocentric language and representation, I argue that feminist dog-writing has the capability to creatively confuse, disrupt, and transform more 'conventional', mechanical, and hu man -centred forms of academic writing. Finally, I suggest that feminist dog-writing invites human animals to engage differently with the sensate, more-than-human life-worlds that human-centred accounts of organisational life have typically sentimentalised, trivialised, or overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider how genre and gender are implicated in academic writing about work organizations, noting that masterful, rational and penetrating masculine forms have long been dominant. The result is the privileging of a masculine style of writing that has come to be seen both as gender neutral and mandatory. This has served both to marginalize women's writing and to disable men's femininity. To subvert and undermine this, we consider the possibilities of a feminine writing of organization that defies rational categorization so as to enable a multitude of affectual voices and texts to cross over from exclusion. This creates a space where feminine writing can be encouraged and published and where issues surrounding the feminine can flourish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematises the ways women's leadership has been understood in relation to male leadership rather than on its own terms. Focusing specifically on ethical leadership, we challenge and politicise the symbolic status of women in leadership by considering the practice of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. In so doing, we demonstrate how leadership ethics based on feminised ideals such as care and empathy are problematic in their typecasting of women as being simply the other to men. We apply different strategies of mimesis for developing feminist leadership ethics that does not derive from the masculine. This offers a radical vision for leadership that liberates the feminine and women's subjectivities from the masculine order. It also offers a practical project for changing women's working lives through relationality, intercorporeality, collective agency and ethical openness with the desire for fundamental political transformation in the ways in which women can lead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we surface the problems of representation mainstream organizational theory encounters in documenting and telling accounts of subaltern actors and social transformation. We explore how writing practices that draw on feminist postcolonial literary traditions can transform organizational studies of social change. Drawing on three literary texts—Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi, Urmila Pawar's The Weave of My Life, and Arundhati Roy's Ministry of Utmost Happiness—we reflect on how we may represent the lives of others. Inspired by these three writers, we suggest solidaristic transgression, unsettled habitation, and counter‐discursive memory work as three modes of engagement that challenge us as academics writing for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using two contemporary cases of the global #MeToo movement and UK-based collective Sisters Uncut, this paper argues that a more in-depth and critical concern with gendered difference is necessary for understanding radical democratic ethics, one that advances and develops current understandings of business ethics. It draws on practices of social activism and dissent through the context of Irigaray's later writing on democratic politics and Ziarek's analysis of dissensus and democracy that proceeds from an emphasis on alterity as the capacity to transform nonappropriative self-other relations. Therefore, the aims of the paper are: (i) to develop a deeper understanding of a culture of difference and to consider sexual difference as central to the development of a practical democratic ethics and politics of organizations; (ii) to explore two key cases of contemporary feminist social movements that demonstrate connected yet contrasting examples of how feminist politics develops through an appreciation of embodied, intercorporeal differences; and (iii) to extend insights from Irigaray and Ziarek to examine ways in which a practical democratic politics proceeding from an embodied ethics of difference forms an important advancement to theorising the connection between ethics, dissent and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminism is a long established, often neglected empirical and theoretical presence in the study of organizations and social relations at work. This special issue provides a space for research that focuses on contemporary feminist practice and theory. We suggest that now is a new time for feminism, noting very recent examples of sexist oppression in social relations to illustrate why this rejuvenation is happening now. We then reflect on the process of knowledge production involved in guest editorial work for an organization studies journal like Human Relations, to address the issue of why feminism is so poorly represented in the journals that our academic community constructs as prestigious. We suggest that feminism provides opportunities for distinctive practices of knowledge production that challenge the patriarchal social formations which characterize academic work. We conclude with speculations about the future of feminism in organization studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do early-career academic mothers balance the demands of contemporary motherhood and academia? More generally, how do working mothers develop their embodied selves in today's highly competitive working life? This article responds to a recent call to voice maternal experiences in the field of organization studies. Inspired by matricentric feminism and building on our intimate autoethnographic diary notes, we provide a fine-grained understanding of the changing demands that constitute the ongoing negotiation of 'new' motherhood within the 'new' academia. By highlighting the complexity of embodied experience, we show how motherhood is not an entirely negative experience in the workplace. Despite academia's neoliberal tendencies, the social privilege of whiteness, heterosexuality and the middle class enables – at times – simultaneous satisfaction with both motherhood and an academic career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a feminist analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a male-dominated industry within a developing country context. It seeks to raise awareness of the silencing of women’s voices in CSR reports produced by mining companies in Tanzania. Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in Africa, and women are often marginalised in employment and social policy considerations. Drawing on work by Hélène Cixous, a post-structuralist/radical feminist scholar, the paper challenges the masculinity of CSR discourses that have repeatedly masked the voices and concerns of ‘other’ marginalised social groups, notably women. Using interpretative ethnographic case studies, the paper provides much-needed empirical evidence to show how gender imbalances remain prevalent in the Tanzanian mining sector. This evidence draws attention to the dynamics faced by many women working in or living around mining areas in Tanzania. The paper argues that CSR, a discourse enmeshed with the patriarchal logic of the contemporary capitalist system, is entangled with tensions, class conflicts and struggles which need to be unpacked and acknowledged. The paper considers the possibility of policy reforms in order to promote gender balance in the Tanzanian mining sector and create a platform for women’s concerns to be voiced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police department policies often require women to engage in identificatory displays inconsistent with sex category expectations. Compliance, while potentially increasing acceptance within policing, may reflect a loss of agency in aesthetic choices that limits their ability to construct gender in both the professional and personal spheres. Some women may comply without experiencing negative consequences, while others may exhibit tacit or resistant compliance reflecting their loss of agency. Women's differential reactions in response to these policies may help explain how some women become the embodiment of mythic visions associated with the profession. Through greater acceptance related to this adaptation, these women may reinforce the hostile environment experienced by other women within policing thereby propagating the status quo. In‐depth interviews with female officers and background investigators illustrate the impact of one such policy, a restrictive haircut requirement for female recruits. The results reveal that women are split in their reactions to the policy; some women comply willingly and choose to become the embodiment of the symbolic vision of policing. Others struggle with compliance as the loss of agency impacts their embodied selves through silencing their bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Woman. Active. Passive. Erased, In writing and thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the concept of ‘organizational readiness’: socio-cultural expectations about working selves that prepare young people (albeit indirectly and in complex and multi-faceted ways) for their future life in organizations. This concept emerges from an analysis of Disney animations and how they constitute expectations about working life that may influence children through their representations of work and gendered workplace roles. The paper’s exploration of Disney’s earlier animations suggests they circulated norms of gender that girls should be weak and avoid work. In contrast, its contemporary productions circulate gender norms that suggest girls should be strong and engage in paid work. In this reading, the continued circulation of earlier alongside contemporary animations may convey to young viewers a paradox: girls must and must not work; they must be both weak and strong. We thus offer new insights into the puzzle of the continued relegation of women to the sidelines in organizations; more optimistically, we also point to ways in which future generations of employees may forge ways of constituting forms of gendered selves as yet hardly imaginable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminine writing and organizational aesthetics are brought together in this paper to sketch a different form of academic production in organizational research that involves arts-based methods ('feminine creation'). Feminine creation relates to écriture féminine (Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva) and also to peinture féminine (Nancy Spero) and modern choreography (Trisha Brown). Feminine creation responds to the feminist and the aesthetic critique of conventional academic writing and has the potential to challenge its masculine stereotypes of rationality, rigorous method and explicit knowledge production. The paper discusses the practices of poetic writing, painting and dance that are used to present academic research. It includes its own series of 'peinture feminine', some of which are contributions by the artist and organizational scholar Schrat. They illustrate my argument in a synedochic aesthetic format and encourage a different, aesthetic way of perceiving academic research and of re-imagining gendered bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a queer approach to feminine writing is related to the development of new female subject positions through conceiving of other understandings of time. To conceptualize this relationship, the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham is analysed and interpreted as a queer story of how women - writing, reading and enacting a novel - acquire an opening to a life that breaks with the heteronormative conception of time. This one-day novel that interweaves the lives of three women in a multiple assemblage offers the 'formula' of the triptych, which can be considered a primary form of life as multiplicity. Interconnecting the writings of Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the cartographic analysis zooms in on three aspects of time by addressing respectively the motifs of the party, the kiss and the day: time as pause, time as exquisite moment and time as affect. By re-establishing the relationship between writing, time and the becoming-woman of life, the paper aims to indicate that queer writing can help to re-imagine new possibilities for (work) life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with what it means to write love and poses the question: what does love do for feminine writing? I move beyond the concept of love as an ideology or condition of work (such as 'for the love of the job') and draw on a feminine poetics of organization that highlights its disruptive potential. Love, in this sense, breaks the rationality and order of the 'masterful' text and alters gendered academic writing. The power of writing with love and effecting change in organizations is developed through a discussion of three feminist writers. The paper explores three significant texts, Kristeva's Tales of Love; Irigaray's The Way of Love; and hooks' All About Love, in order to examine the problematic representation of love and to advocate a turn to an ethics of love as a basis for self-other relations that points us to defiant, activist and transformative forms of feminine writing. These writers bring to bear practical politics and possibilities through political interruption - namely through three modes: reconstruction, reclamation and activation, and I discuss the implications of these modes for work and organization, notably that writing and thinking the wisdom of love offers insight into how we creatively imagine socially just organizations of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents an attempt to theorize the feminine writing of organization through the Lacanian logic of sexuation. It also represents an attempt by a man to practise the feminine writing of organization. Using autoethnographic methods, I attempt to reformulate the 'female' problem of weight anxiety through the eyes of a weight anxious man and thus to provide a radical (re)thinking of gender. By linking a man's experience of weight anxiety to Lacan's hysteric's discourse, I demonstrate how men can experience the Other's jouissance and find themselves 'on the feminine side'. I then use this logic to argue that the feminine writing of organization is an attempt to harness the Other's jouissance, as author to place oneself as the object of the Other's desire, in other words to become hysterical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Hélène Cixous introduced it in 1975, the notion of a specifically feminine writing-écriture féminine-has been discussed as a provocative and potentially disruptive form of representation that breaks with masculine and authoritarian modes thereof. However, in this paper we will discuss how the notion of écriture féminine may itself be at risk of getting trapped within the gender binary its progenitors tried to break free from. As a commentary on this, we suggest looking at the gendered nature of the research text from the perspective of the technologies with which they are produced, as the writer - when writing/publishing - is always already embedded in the technologies of the publishing machine, turning (academic) writing into something akin to cyborg writing. We further suggest that an understanding of the cyborg nature of writing can introduce a parallel mode of inquiry, which holds the potential to enrich écriture féminine and stand as a critique of too simplistic readings of the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Hélène Cixous's 'The laugh of the Medusa', this paper revisits a public uproar over menstruation in the workplace triggered by a statement from the CEO of New Zealand's largest body of private sector employers, that periods make women take more sick leave than men. The utterance triggered an astonishing outpouring of public discussion and writing about working while menstruating, as well as about productivity and equal pay. We discuss how a comment about women's periods ruptured the status quo of menstrual repression by using selected online posts rendered as poems. Then, drawing on Cixous and the idea of poetic rapture, we discuss women's online writing in tandem with feminist writing on menstruation. In our theoretical reflections we consider how poetry, menstruation and social media can 'make trouble' for regimes of power. We argue that menstruation should be a required topic for organizational studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on reflexivity in organization and management studies by scrutinizing the possibilities of self-reflexivity. Design/methodology/approach – By means of auto-ethnography, the authors analyze their own experiences as (pro-)feminist men in the field of gender studies. Findings – The authors argue that self-reflexivity is partial, fragmentary and transient: it surfaces in situations where the authors' activities and identities as researchers are challenged by others and they become aware of their precarious position. Originality/value – The paper's perspective complements more instrumental understandings of self-reflexivity, and stimulates further debate on its limits as well as potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The paper aims to clarify how a gendered analysis of entrepreneurial networks may benefit by the use of a constructionist (post-structuralist) perspective. Design/methodology/approach – The paper makes use of a discourse analysis: first, the paper reviews a selection of empirical research articles from 1980 to 2008 on gender and networks in entrepreneurship research in order to convey the main research question, the hypotheses, the methodology and the main findings. Second, the paper identifies in a broader literature the hegemonic statements that characterize the discourse of gender and networks. Findings – The main findings of the studies reviewed is that there are no major differences in the networks of female and male entrepreneurs. Research on the significance of gender for entrepreneurial success indicates that there is probably more variation within than between sex categories with regard to network activities. This may be an indication that empiricist feminism and standpoint feminism have outplayed their role as approaches to the study of gender and networks in entrepreneurial settings. The discourse analysis reveals five hegemonic statements: entrepreneurs use social networks strategically, women are disadvantaged compared to men and therefore cannot network effectively, weak ties are the source of men's success; strong ties are women's drawback and, finally, women are inherently relational. Research limitations/implications – Methodologically, the current status of research on networks, gender and entrepreneurship demonstrates that most of the knowledge is gained through cross-sectional surveys. Typically, the majority of studies on entrepreneurship, due to the methods chosen, does not allow for first-hand, real and authentic experiences of entrepreneurial lives. Acknowledging the presence of the speaker can be done in various ways. Entrepreneurs may reveal their thoughts, their experience and reflections only if the relationship between the researcher and the researched is symmetrical. Narrative approaches are suggested in order to "tap" the voice – and thus the stories – of the acting entrepreneurs. Practical implications – Theoretically, the discourse is limited by the lack of an explicit "gendered" perspective. The analysis of the texts reveals an implicit empiricist feminist approach, resulting in networks and entrepreneurship as well as gender and networks being portrayed in a very special and limited way. Originality/value – The findings of the discursive approach to research texts on gender and entrepreneurial networks, is that the discourse is limited with regard to both theory and method. This paper has shown that the discourse in the research field is limited, and that the field needs to be challenged by other disciplinary procedures regulating what counts as knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the problems inherent in taking a reflexively gendered position in writing research accounts. Such socially constructed accounts typically require researchers to do one of two things: to suppress the feminine and write implicitly as male, or to adopt a textual position as ‘woman’ that fails to do justice to the complex and unstable multiplicity that underpins the research self. It is argued that this shifting multiplicity is stabilized by the relationship between self and research text being corporeally grounded and gendered in practice. Three possible approaches to gender are considered: the discursive/textual approach (as developed by Foucault); the performance/social practice approach (as developed by Judith Butler) and the corporeal multiplicity approach (as developed by Elizabeth Grosz and Dorothea Olkowski). The article concludes by suggesting a tripartite approach to writing self-multiplicity in research to extend the possibilities opened up by the social practice approach: re-citing (redeploying discursive resources in intertextuality); re-siting (changing the positioning of the self in power relations by reinscribing) and re-sighting (opening up new, virtual visions of possibility). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper uses ethnographic data from an Australian university to explore constructs of "otherness" focusing on women in lower-level university work. The work of these women, who hold both academic and non-academic staffpositions, takes place in the spatial and symbolic locale we call the "ivory basement" Poststructural feminism provides the basis for an examination of the contradictions and subtle&s of their identity work as they respond to the pressures of restructuring and managerialism. Faced with a request from these women for certain aspects of their relational work to remain unseen, unrecognised and unspoken, this study assents to that request and focuses instead on options for how poststructural feminism might elaborate their identity work stories. The paper is concerned with the tensions between women's own struggle with being positioned as "other" and poststructural feminist theorizing of the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]