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This paper takes its departure from Rebecca Solnit's idea that there should be “hope in darkness” as we work towards a shared preferred future that resists gendered and racial inequities and oppressions. We put forward “actionable” hope which embodies hope as an everyday action, an activism enacted by “tempered radicals” (Meyerson & Scully, 1995). This thinking about the relationship between hope and activism emerged through our coming together and was bound by our learning and privileging of Indigenous knowledges and a strengths and hope perspective. The paper is presented in the form and style of polyphonic writing conveying the openness and generosity of spirit that the strengths and hope perspective carries for tempered radicals. Our “insider” and “outsider” positionings unfold as we engage in unsettling discussions of “privilege.” Our practices give recognition to being sensitive to issues of belonging, care, and collective hope, while working towards transformative social change that addresses systemic inequalities. Belonging is seen as essential for collective everyday activism which requires affective actional hope for realizing shared preferred futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This summary discusses the influential work of Judith Butler, particularly their book Gender Trouble, which has had a significant impact on feminist thinking. Butler's writings challenge traditional male-dominated theories in the field of work and organization studies, offering valuable insights into how organizations shape and exploit our desire for recognition. The article explores the opportunities and challenges of applying Butler's ideas to understand and transform organizational life, with a focus on vulnerability, resistance, and non-violence. It also highlights Butler's recent work on ethics, interdependence, and the need to sustain our social and natural environment. The article includes five substantive papers and an "In Conversation" event with Judith Butler, providing further insights and discussions on their upcoming book Who's Afraid of Gender. This text is a summary of a special issue of the journal Gender, Work and Organization that explores the impact of Judith Butler's ideas on the analysis of gender, work, and organization. The contributions in the issue evaluate the avenues that Butler's work has opened up and consider the unexplored questions and challenges it raises. The papers in the issue discuss topics such as the individualization of vulnerabilities in organizational contexts, the ethical potential of art in contesting unequal valuation of working bodies, the experiences of loss in times of planetary crisis, and the survival and overcoming of normative organizational violence. The summary concludes by expressing gratitude to the contributors and hopes that the papers will provide reference points for future work in the field. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the ethical value of artistic artifacts in challenging the unequal valuation of working bodies with a focus on the contemporary art exhibition 'Useless bodies?' by Danish artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. Drawing on Judith Butler's work and posthuman theory, particularly Braidotti's contributions, the paper argues that this exhibition exemplifies how art can foster an ethics of interdependency, one that both critiques dynamics of misrecognition and imagines alternative futures. Furthermore, the paper proposes that this affirmative and critical ethics provides theoretical and methodological foundations for work and organization studies, prompting new questions about the significance of embodiment, esthetics, and artifacts for conducting (ethical) research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how looming planetary crises become present in the lived experiences of future female workers, and how such experiences condition performances of viable subjectivity. Drawing on interview data from a longitudinal study of young women's education and career aspirations, the paper zooms in on moments where concerns about planetary crises were felt in informants' everyday lives. We augment Judith Butler's writings on loss with Karen Barad's concept of "intra‐action" to theorize these moments as experiences of loss in which constitutive dependencies and entanglements—otherwise repressed and invisible—touch young women's lives. Against this theoretical backdrop, we trace how such experiences interrupt performances of neoliberal work subjectivity and thereby create a potential for alternative agencies grounded in an ethics of entanglement. The paper thus contributes new insights into young women's complex performances of viable work subjectivity, showing how more sustainable and collective ways of performing the self emerge. As such, we offer researchers and professionals working with and around young women a nuanced understanding of how young women contest and exceed notions of neoliberal individualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores working class couples' experiences of female‐breadwinning during the Great Recession in Spain. It examines the extent to which couples' adaptations to these gender‐atypical work‐family arrangements have led to processes of (un)doing gender. The study is based on the analysis of 24 semi‐structured biographical interviews and life history calendars with men and women in 12 heterosexual couples who have gone through different breadwinning statuses during their trajectory. Findings show that men whose partners were primary breadwinners for a period make the greatest effort to preserve the male‐breadwinner illusion. In contrast, female breadwinners identify with a co‐breadwinner model and do not understate their own economic contribution. Men's insufficient participation in housework and child care is experienced by women with disapproval, which turns into open conflict when the women perform the bulk of such work. The paper concludes that adaptation to unconventional arrangements can constitute a catalyst for processes that undo gender, but more qualitative longitudinal research is needed to determine how economistic and normative factors interact dynamically across different countries and social groups in shaping these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that middle‐ and upper‐class, primarily white, women can relieve their workload and resolve family conflicts by relying on the labor of poor and/or racialized women or accessing services that facilitate their foodwork. However, the spreading of COVID‐19 and the necessity of social distancing have temporarily made the access of these facilitators difficult or impossible. Since women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic consequences on the sexual division of labor, this paper examines how the pandemic affects women's emotional experience with domestic foodwork in Brazil. Drawing from the 588 upper‐ and middle‐class women's responses to an online survey, we have identified six emotional experiences influenced by the pandemic: (1) obligation, (2) overload, (3) fear, (4) safety, (5) relaxation, and (6) family time appreciation. However, the changes caused by the sanitary crises do not explain alone the new emotions experienced with domestic foodwork. Class and gender can interfere or potentialize how women feel about it during the pandemic. Obligation, overload, and fear were enhanced when the participants could not access services that were used to relieve their foodwork burden, especially when faced with an unequal sexual division of labor. In turn, safety, relaxation, and family time appreciation were facilitated by a better dynamic of domestic tasks sharing alongside the certainty to access good quality food. By analyzing these factors, this paper enhances the theoretical understanding of contextual and situational domestic foodwork emotional experience because it observes the outcomes of critical reduction of networks that used to sustain this practice involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose that the reproduction of labor‐power, achieved through the expropriation of women's work at home and in the community, is acutely relevant to the analysis of the consequences of the COVID‐19 crisis. Capitalist structures of exploitation rely heavily on undervaluing women's and other marginalized peoples' work, specifically tasks related to social reproduction and care. In this paper, we assess the effects of COVID‐19 remedial state policies on the re‐organization of care and working lives during the pandemic within the UK, an example of a neoliberal regime with an individualist approach to responsibility for care. Drawing on data from the European H2020 project RESISTIRÉ (RESpondIng to outbreakS through co‐creaTIve inclusive equality stRatEgies), we first assess the policies brought in by the UK government in response to the pandemic from a gender perspective, with a particular focus on the extent to which the work–care nexus has been considered. We then draw on the personal narratives of women in the UK, who were differentially affected by the pandemic, to analyze the lived experiences of this policy context and the challenges faced in “reconciling” paid work and care. These experiences demonstrate that any attempt to effectively respond to and reverse structural inequalities needs to address the dynamic interrelationship of paid and unpaid work, and particularly unpaid care work that women undertake at home and beyond. This is crucial in our attempt to challenge neoliberal capitalist organizing, transform societies and build a fairer, more inclusive post‐pandemic future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the 2016 elections, several feminist groups emerged in the U.S. in response to the election of President Trump. This manuscript focuses on a feminist assembly located in marginal and conservative Appalachia. Grounded in reflexivity, we employ affective solidarity to better understand feminist organizing in a post‐Trump rural Appalachian town. Based on a collaborative ethnography, including the National Organization of Women's local chapter members, conducted between 2016 and 2022, we analyze how political engagement has been initiated by an affective response—vulnerability, misery, rage, passion, and hope. By organizing open houses, marches, and voter guides, this group's outreach strives to inform and engage community members in dialogs around women's rights to improve gender equality in West Virginia, a state historically characterized by a conservative, heteronormative, patriarchal, and anti‐abortion mentality. We show how the dissonance between Trump's glorification of these ideologies and our affective responses served as a mechanism for feminist solidarity. This paper uses Butlerian principles to explore how vulnerability and resistance shape a feminist social movement held together by affective solidarity. We argue that responses to threats prompted by the Trump Presidency have been critical to the resurgence of our feminist agency and political engagement where conservative and masculine ideologies impose control over vulnerable populations. This paper advances the knowledge of vulnerability and agency and contributes to the literature on assemblies for political resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what ways can we understand the productive tensions and complexities of digital feminist activism? This paper explores the increase of networked feminism, which focuses attention on digital activism and its relation to transformative social change. It suggests that we need a better understanding of how digital feminist activism might be changing the shape of transnational feminist resistance and praxis, and how feminist politics are created and enacted in digitally mediated environments. These result in new forms of feminist consciousness built on affective and embodied engagements. The paper explores the complex and ambivalent role of affective politics and embodied ethics to explore conditions of vulnerability. Using illustrative, global cases to show the nuances across digital activism, the paper contributes to understanding the complexities and differential effects of online environments, the mediation of feminist politics through digital knowledge cultures and the possibilities, challenges, and productive tensions that lie in the ever‐increasing use of digital environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances our understanding of foodwork as the organization of women's work and racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities in the provisioning, preparation, and consumption of food. Drawing on notions of the in/visibility of women's work, I conceptualize foodwork as the articulation of visible and invisible women's work in the social organization of everyday food practices. The analysis of three blogs, written by women with, or mothers of children with, food allergies, provides a glimpse into the everyday living with food allergy. The investigation of the actual practices of allergy foodwork shows that they are interactive and intersectional patterns of work and make everyday life possible. The paper maps directions for research to explore how foodwork could be organized differently starting from the transformative potential of everyday food practices, blogs, and food allergy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersection of race and gender discrimination has resulted in the pervasive under‐representation of women of color (WOC) in science careers, with research identifying that microaggressions are a key contributory factor to the imbalance. This study aims to compare individual experiences of microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations with institutional responses, thereby outlining the disconnects between the perspectives of minoritized scientists and those in positions of power. This paper draws on a constructivist paradigm to compare the experiences of women of color scientists with organizational representatives through 31 interviews conducted in science research organizations in the United Kingdom. The results find that organizational understandings of microaggressions differ substantially from those of WOC scientists. Furthermore, organizational responses favor policy‐based solutions that fail to address the slippery and deniable nature of microaggressions. The paper concludes that, contrary to the more prevalent popular diversity initiatives, a greater belief in the testimony of WOC scientists amplified by institutional responses that empower their identity as scientists would be more effective strategies to reduce the sense of shame and isolation caused by subtle forms of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the "Home Cooking" episode of Netflix series Ugly Delicious, and the "Toronto Truths with Foodies of Colour" episode of award‐winning Racist Sandwich podcast to uncover their mediation of a foodie and cosmopolitan person of color identity. By paying close attention to biographical details and the foregrounding of certain aspects of foodie and racialized identities, this paper addresses the question of performativity when it comes to food adventuring by using the mediated lens of the two chosen food shows. Are the hosts (and the semiotics of the programs) potentially challenging the archetype of the adventurous meat‐eating white male, or reinforcing the same by letting certain people into the fold? This analysis is necessary to understand if producers and consumers of color who are vested in exploring different food cultures through their practices do this any differently from dominant cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdwork platforms have been widely celebrated as challenging gendered labor market inequalities through new digitally mediated possibilities for reconciling work, home, and family. This paper interrogates those claims and explores the wider implications of digital labor platforms for an expansive work–family research agenda stubbornly rooted in formal modes of employment in the "analogue" economy. Based on ethnographic research with women platform workers in the UK (using PeoplePerHour, Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr, and Copify), the paper asks: what are women crowdworkers' lived experiences of integrating paid work and family relative to formal employment? And what coping tactics have women developed to reduce gendered work–family conflicts on digital labor platforms? In response to these research questions, the paper makes three contributions. First, it offers a critical review of recent commentary to theorize how disruptive innovations by digital labor platforms to recast long‐standing definitions of "work", "workers", "managers", and "employers" have served to position platforms and platform workers as somehow outside the analytical gaze of the expansive work–family research agenda. Second, it extends a growing alternative work–family analysis of platform work to examine the kinds of "work–life balance" (WLB) provision available to women crowdworkers in the absence of an employer; and how women's experiences of algorithmically mediated and contradictory work–family outcomes further challenge widespread claims of new platform work–life "flexibilities". Third, the paper points to exciting and urgent possibilities for advancing and recentering work–family research through new engagements with platforms, algorithmic management, and "independent" platform workers in support of feminist activism and campaigning around WLB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This polemical essay argues that Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and her novels North and South, and Mary Barton, portray her as an overlooked, early political economist. The objective of the paper is three‐fold: (1) to dismantle taken‐for‐granted truth claims that Alan Fox is the preeminent thinker on pluralistic forms of employee engagement (2) encourage further development and enlargement of the field and what constitutes its history, and (3) to argue for the recognition of Elizabeth Gaskell as an early political economist. Guiding this exploration is the question: How do we also make sense of Fox's privileged situatedness in scholarship and the absence of potential early theorists like Gaskell? The paper adopts a feminist reading and polemical writing to engage in feminist critical historiography. The author draws on audience theory to help readers reorient themselves to Gaskell and to help see her as an overlooked political economist. Feminism is conceptually presented as ontology, epistemology, method, and style of writing. Despite the ongoing credit Alan Fox receives as first theorizing the frames of reference and pluralistic forms of engagement starting in the 1960s, Elizabeth Gaskell was contemplating and critiquing the employment relationship starting in the 1850s. She not only provided a rich historical understanding of the inequalities of class and wealth, but her ideas and insights remain unacknowledged in industrial relations scholarship. The paper offers a unique feminist perspective on Elizabeth Gaskell and makes the case that she is neglected early political economist. Further, the paper makes a link between the world of Victorian era fiction as historical understanding of early capitalist society and demonstrates how ideas are taken up by the field in unconscious and unjust ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hegemonic femininity is a concept beginning to receive scholarly attention, and this paper illustrates how it has become a critical factor hindering women's leadership opportunities in Indonesia. This study aims to understand how women leaders adopt, modify, or reject forms of hegemonic femininity that interpellate their constructions of subjectivity. This paper employs a discourse analysis of interview texts with 36 women in leadership positions in a Muslim‐majority country, Indonesia. The finding shows how participants navigate hegemonic femininity by constructing their version of feminine subjectivity to negotiate their gender‐leadership roles in several ways. This paper expands the critical discursive understanding of women's leadership by (1) theorizing how hegemonic femininity challenges the acceptance of women's leadership and (2) delineating the way construction of femininity affects the way women do leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a practice theoretical conception of gender in entrepreneurship, emphasizing the potential of reflexivity and collective agency to reshape gendered norms. While the literature recognizes the fluidity of gender and its intersectional nature, it often overlooks how social phenomena are produced and relate to each other. The main aim of this is to show, not just how, gendered norms of entrepreneurial practice inhibit practice (which has been extensively covered) but how identity and the individualized practice of entrepreneurship, can shift gendered norms of entrepreneurial practice. Drawing upon the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Margaret Archer, this paper proposes a more integrative approach to identity and gendered norms, embedded within a social realist approach. The author highlights the need for structural renegotiation in entrepreneurship through reflexivity. Given how norms self‐naturalize, individual practice of diverse gendered practices in entrepreneurship is not enough to create long‐term sustainable change and support for diverse gendered practices. Instead, this paper proposes an integrative approach to identity and gendered norms, emphasizing the potential of individuals to shift structural norms, through collective action. This study suggests that a more balanced understanding of the interplay between context and identity can assist in the design of support for non‐traditional gendered practices and provide new insights into how gendered norms impact entrepreneurial activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a critical case study of a subsidiary of a multinational Professional Services Firm (PSF) in Kuwait to explore whether new organizational routines and ways of working in the pandemic created opportunities for gendered ideal worker norms to be challenged or modified. We revisited research findings from an in‐depth case study conducted in the pre‐Covid context where differentiated patterns of gendered ideal norms across Consulting, Audit and Tax professional specialisms were identified. We reveal how tenacious these ideal norms are by showing how early possibilities of rethinking ways of being "ideal" in the pandemic were superseded by a return to pre‐Covid ways of working. The primacy of the client‐ethos and being available remained intact, although the paper reveals the importance of situating changes in localized contexts and recognizing the uneven nature of change across professional specialisms and within organizational contexts. Specifically, shifts to more flexible working for the Audit specialism may have created opportunities for women to progress; but male dominance of the Tax specialism in Kuwait was entrenched further by a rigid return to normal. Significantly, the globalized nature of PSF professional identities appeared constant in the context of change, but their impact on gender equality in PSFs may still be shaped by the particular cultural and institutional context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings of a study undertaken amongst women attorneys in South Africa, to determine the impact motherhood has on their legal career. The argument is that motherhood is incompatible with the hyper‐competitive male dominant professional culture of the legal profession. The paper employs Edgar Schein's concept of organisational culture and Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and culture to understand how women continue to experience unequal outcome in their careers, despite the removal of formal barriers and the enactment of laws and policies. The concepts further illuminate how and why the male dominant culture of the profession embeds itself and remains one of the hardest elements to change. The study was furthermore underpinned by a feminist standpoint epistemology, interviewing 27 attorneys across three corporate law firms in South Africa. The key findings show that when becoming a mother, many women attorneys experience a disjuncture between their mothering and professional role, which is attributed to the hyper‐competitive culture of the profession. This leads to many women having less successful legal careers which is manifested in different ways. These findings demonstrate how women are perpetually marginalized in the profession and why we continue to see the lack of women in the senior ranks of the profession despite a robust legal and policy framework promoting equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how neoliberalism impedes the emergence of alternative organizations. Via a mix of (auto‐)ethnography and memory work, it explains how neoliberal values replacing more traditional ones eroded the collective capacity to bring solutions to scarcity problems in today's Lebanon. It points to the stigmatization of the role of mothers, who once were the "guardians" of organizing around commons, and the alternative values necessary for that. It shows how neoliberal values undermined relationships and decisions based on affect, and promoted individualization and market‐based expertise, thereby destroying the authority of traditional motherhood. Also, neoliberalism introduced the importance of branding and accumulation in a manner that made sharing very difficult. These changes in values prevented people who embraced neoliberal culture from benefiting from commoning practices in a context of scarcity. This happens at a time where scholars predict the end of the age of abundance and the importance of commoning as a social arrangement capable of ensuring overall well‐being. The paper concludes with a discussion of the necessity of de‐stigmatizing values that are not compatible with the neoliberal ideology for the sake of leaving open the possibility of organizing differently and adapting to a changing environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the narratives of Mental load (ML) within the realm of migration. The study captures the migration experiences of three Indian mother‐workers across their journey of migration. By examining the ML situated at the intersection of migration, motherhood, and paid work, our study bridges the theoretical gap at the micro level by understanding how skilled Indian mother‐workers manufacture subjectivities as they now spend their lives in Australia and Canada. We define ML in the context of migration and explore how these women navigate the newness of identity, cultural adaptation, and reframe mothering, all while juggling their ML accompanying the unfamiliarity of mobility. Further, we demonstrate how migrant mothers understand themselves diversely in relation to their careers in the new land. We find that ML ascends in the beginning of the journey. Further, the research unveils that the mother‐workers agentically modulate their ML with a clear and well‐defined migration objective as the guiding beacon in steering through the subsequent migration journey. Moreover, the absence of clarity in migration objectives substantially augments the ML. These results hold significance in the conceptualization of migration‐related ML of mother‐workers, hence offering a subjective lens to capture the everyday portrait of a migrant mother‐worker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of right‐wing political ideologies on the lives and experiences of university professors who teach about women and gender in their respective disciplines throughout Brazil. Drawing from qualitative interviews with professors in different regions of Brazil we argue that the embrace of anti‐gender ideologies by the Bolsonaro administration has had a negative impact on university educators by restricting resources, increased surveillance, threats, and attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One lakh eighty five thousand refugees from Ukraine have started working in Poland since the Russian war began. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts of capitals, misrecognition, habitus, and the field, the paper theorizes the subjective and objective terms of inclusion across intersectional interplay of motherhood, ethnicity, and refugee status. In particular, we explore how intersectional marginalized identities of individuals shape their negotiation power over terms of their labor market inclusion. Using qualitative interview data from 10 Ukrainian working mothers in Poland who became refugees following the Russian war in Ukraine in 2022, we demonstrate that misrecognition leads to uneven relations of power curtailing working refugee mothers' agency to negotiate the terms of their inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we adopt a Southern feminist epistemology to critically appraise the ways in which media discourse on gendered organizing during the Indian COVID‐19‐induced migrant crisis resists or reinforces hegemonic caste hierarchies. To contextualize this work, we briefly historicize scholarship on feminist organizing around land rights, hunger, and violence, while noting the politics of contagion and pollution narratives plaguing the pandemic discourse in India. After conducting a qualitative content analysis (QCA) followed by a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of media discourses across three tiers (international, national, and local), we found that international and national tiers of discourse largely deployed a savarna gaze that worked to 1) Reinforce brahminical and technocratic pandemic narratives and 2) Delegitimize Dalit marginal organizing feminist work and Dalit sensibilities through seven overlapping metrics of erasure. On the other hand, local tier of discourse confronted the savarna gaze, amplified voices of Dalit and Muslim women by centering their narratives of resistance, and tackled the exacerbation of casteist oppression under the pandemic in the service of emancipation. Local discourses also highlight how marginal organizing during the first pandemic lockdown involved provision of essential resources and services (food, medical care, security) for mostly Dalit and Muslim migrant workers, and women intersectionally facing domestic violence and savarna violence. Despite the brahmininal structural oppression, Dalit feminist praxis' emblematic resistance of oppressive structures, during and beyond times of crisis, constitutes what we call the work of deep care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue (SI) contributes to a growing body of work in management and organization studies focusing on the complex relationship between social reproduction and inequalities in paid work and organizations. In this introduction to the SI, we first identify three key areas of inquiry relevant to the study of social reproduction: challenging the boundaries of productive and reproductive labor; inequalities and exploitation; and alternative organizing. We then present the seven papers of the SI that draw on research from Australia, South America, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and the US to contribute to the aforementioned areas, foregrounding distinctive social reproduction dynamics manifesting in the household and alternative organizations (cooperatives), and facilitated by state policies. Based on these contributions, we propose an agenda for future research on social reproduction that aims to address the persistence and potential transformation of the existing gender, class, and race orders. We call for future studies exploring changing parenthood roles and how these affect the organization of re/production tasks; for research revealing and investigating underlying inequalities (re)produced by public policy; for analyses of existing and potential forms of feminist alternative organizing, and how these are sometimes hindered by heteropatriarchal structures; and for the study of social reproduction dynamics across cultural, socioeconomic, and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we challenge the meanings of work that marginalize academic activities associated with care and contribute to inequitable gender divisions of academic labor. We argue that the pandemic crisis and the revision of the meaning of "essential work" that accompanied it has served as a catalyst for such concerns to get a hearing. But while there has been significant attention paid to domestic care demands and their impact on academic labor, there is less focus on the caretaking work we do in the university even though the gender unequal distribution of teaching, mentoring and service work has also intensified in the pandemic. We argue that this is in part due to the institutional discourses and practices that continue to devalue many components of everyday academic labor. In order to challenge these limits, we extend ideas from Feminist political economy (FPE) to university settings in order to reframe academic labor and revalue care as an essential part of it. We offer two suggestions, connected to FPE methodologies, for gathering and reconceptualizing data on academic work to push the project forward. We conclude with the argument that this project of revaluing caring labor is essential for achieving goals of equity, faculty well‐being, and the sustainability of universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legacies of Chile's democratic crisis pose challenges for workplace gender equity. This paper brings together scholarly debates on gender regimes and factory regimes to examine the gendered labor practices in a high‐tech, transnational agricultural sector. Specifically, I ask how gender regimes and regulatory practices entrenched in Chile's authoritarian past shape labor dynamics in this industry today. I argue that we must look to the past to understand how firms benefit from unequal social relations embedded in institutions and for identifying mechanisms of change. I document how the neoliberal and authoritarian policies of the democratic crisis in Chile (1973–90) became the baseline conditions in democracy, leaving stark gender and labor inequalities that persist today. The resulting neoliberal pact continues to privilege elites and marginalize the working poor, especially women, contributing to the slow‐brewing inequality crisis that came to a head in 2019. Based on ethnographic observation and semi‐structured interviews in Arica, Chile, a major hub for corn seed development, I show how these legacies enable firms to benefit from Chile's unequal gender relations to develop high‐value products without paying the price associated with the skill needed to produce them. I find that conservative gender norms together with labor relations inherent in Chile's neoliberal model, rooted in a 17‐year dictatorship, create obstacles to efforts to address gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community health workers (CHWs) are central to the global health response to crises like the AIDS epidemic. Yet community health work remains undervalued and undercompensated worldwide owing in large part to the gendered and racialized contexts of care work. This paper investigates the possibility of occupational security for CHWs by comparing two cases from South Africa's response to AIDS. The first draws on ethnographic research (2007–2009) in rural KwaZulu‐Natal province and documents the fraught formation of a union representing CHWs. The second examines legal action in the Free State province for a group of CHWs known as the Bophelo House 94, who were arrested and criminally charged in June 2014 after protesting their sudden dismissal by the government. This case comparison finds that collective action has thus far had limited effects on CHWs' position as a nascent occupation. The South African Ministry of Health has obstructed CHW professionalization, and non‐state actors' involvement has been a mixture of benefit and impediment: some social justice agencies have facilitated CHW advocacy, while many AIDS service organizations have cooperated with the state and exacerbated the precarity of CHWs' working conditions. However, the consolidation of CHW work roles—owing to advances in AIDS prevention and treatment—holds promise for future CHW collective organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that ethnic minority women in employment negotiate more than one culture and grapple with beliefs that stem from a bi‐cultural experience. Research also contends that gender is at the center of social reproduction and the production of labor and social reproduction is invariably linked. However, how is social reproduction at work, and how gender beliefs influence social reproduction and work‐life choices amongst highly educated, employed, second‐generation ethnic minority women, deserves in‐depth attention. Contributing to the intersection of social reproduction and diversity research, the present paper offers two life stories of highly educated second‐generation British Pakistani women and examines in‐depth the role of two cultures on gender beliefs and the influence of those gender beliefs on social reproduction and work‐life choices. Drawing on Ridgeway and Correll's (2004) work on gender beliefs, we extend their work by focusing on two cultures (the host country and the country of ethnic origin). While the literature has generally focused on issues of social reproduction across generations, our study also takes into account the contours of social reproduction across cultures. Our findings reveal the mechanisms of social reproduction, the push and pull of two cultures in the creation of gender beliefs within one person, the fluidity and fixity of gender beliefs, and the ways these are negotiated while the individual contributes toward social reproduction and makes work‐life choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic, as an ongoing societal crisis, compounds pre‐existing intersectional inequalities. Since the start of this crisis, those on the margins—women, single parents, LGBTQ+, Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic peoples—and those living in precarity and poverty found themselves increasingly "othered." As a group of academics who encounter gendered reality in disparate ways, we unite through this paper to prioritize a collective ethic of care as a counter‐narrative to the "business as usual" rhetoric that endures as our oppressive reality. In responding to this special issue, a (dis)embodied alterethnographical text is offered, encompassing four evocative reflections on symbolic annihilation to "unmute" our individual voices. We present an inclusive discussion to connect our disconnected otherness, collectively resisting the dominant, patriarchal narratives, through non‐linear, "messy writing." Our contribution is threefold. First, we empirically contribute to dismantling heteronormative binarism by reclaiming our collective voices as a loud rebuttal to hegemony. Second, through collective conceptualizations of gendered crisis, we problematize theorizing gender from a unified conceptual lens to demonstrate the importance of an inclusive approach to feminism. Finally, a collective discussion of our cumulative experiences, contributes to the writing differently agenda, subverting the limitations of the encountered gender binaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates on gender and competition by drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism to explore how competition operates as gendered technologies of the self. Our findings are based on interviews and observations with women who work in a bank and a network marketing company. We unfold different modalities of competition that are in operation: competition has either an outward focus where women compete with other women or an inward focus where women compete with oneself. The study expands the theoretical understanding of gender and competition by exploring how different modalities of competition operate as gendered technologies of the self under neoliberalism. We conclude that while different modalities exist, they fulfill the same purpose in that they individualise women while making structural inequalities invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how mothers who are creative workers articulate their subjectivities and examines how their interdependent identities as both mothers and creatives lead to a constant and unresolved negotiation of subjectivity. This constitutes an additional cognitive work burden or a “subjectivity load” for mother‐creatives. The study is based on a small‐scale qualitative study of 40 mothers working in Creative Industries in Ireland. Venn's framework on subjectivity is used to explore the attitudes, values, expectations, and dispositions that respondents articulated when questioned about how they saw the self in relation to the identities of mother and worker. Key findings note that mother workers held ambivalent attitudes about the combination of mothering with work. In terms of their values, respondents internalized a negative and irresolute sense of self if they did not live up to social values on motherhood. With regard to expectations of themselves, mothers felt that they were always having to choose between conflicting demands and that there was an internalized expectation that motherhood should be prioritized over work. Finally, in terms of their disposition, respondents explained they felt that society refused to understand mothers as artists and so they could not easily achieve a settled subjectivity in light of the invisibility of mothers who were also creative workers. Consequently, mother‐creatives are always engaged in a process of negotiation across identity contradictions to form their own subjectivities. This ongoing ambivalence creates another cognitive or subjectivity load around the making and remaking of the internalized self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to Gender Work and Organization's Special Themed Section on Foodwork, by addressing the intersections of race, gender, and class in representations of labor, whiteness, and neoliberalism in popular and digital food cultures. The discussion responds to the journal's call for papers by examining the clean eating trend as a vehicle for the ideals of white femininity, and the techniques of femininity that are employed to convey messages of normalcy and exceptionalism in this contemporary popular food culture. In the analysis of an article in the high‐end home interiors magazine, Elle Decoration, the visual authoritativeness of clean eating advocates is considered to highlight the strategies and devices used to deploy ideals of white femininity and to create boundaries around a remodeled white female neoliberal self. The article aims to advance current debates regarding digital foodwork, by examining the esthetics of whiteness that are contained within the message of relatability communicated by social media food influencers. Thus, in keeping with the broader concerns of the journal, the article addresses developments in the fields of gender and digital labor, with respect to the overwhelming dominance of privileged white women in this sphere and the esthetics of their labor, which has thus far received limited attention within existing debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on feminist geographies of space, proposing a feminist critical spatial practice approach to study social movement organizing. Inspired by the work of Jane Rendell, a feminist theorist and architectural historian, we propose embodiment, materiality, affectivity, and alterity as co‐constitutive of feminist organizing. Specifically, we prioritize the intertwining of space and body in resisting extractivism to analyze visual artifacts produced by artists/activists who have joined the anti‐extractivist struggle against mining in Northern Greece, Chalkidiki area. In particular, we focus on how bodies transgress and reconstitute space by affecting its materiality during artistic performances. We argue that the protesting (moving and ensounded) body enacts affective solidarities and invites collective action against exploitative neoliberal regimes. Finally, the article brings together body‐land territory and territorial‐community feminism literature to enrich our understanding of spatial practices of resistance against neoliberal extractivist regimes while highlighting the role of emotions and affect as a means of mobilizing for action and maintaining momentum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how feminist social movements are organized and re‐generated across and through different media, both online and offline, using the example of zines. We critically examine the emergence and growth of an intersectional feminist zine community through a 6‐year in‐depth qualitative netnographic and ethnographic study. Theoretically, we build on work concerning feminist digital information and archival infrastructures, bringing it together with work on feminist digital activism. We make three key contributions: first to theorize zines and their communities as infrastructures, which cut across the social, digital, and material. Second in understanding the political potential of engagements in zine infrastructures in which the individual and collective are entangled, and third in revealing how the current generation of young feminists move across and work at the interfaces of formats to benefit from their synergistic, but also their agonistic, relations to form new affective solidarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal academia is marked by vertical and horizontal gender segregation, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a particularly concerning case. Women with PhDs are underrepresented, and when they do participate, they are more likely than men to be in teaching‐intensive roles. Beyond equality concerns, this is problematic because when women are interpreters rather than producers of disciplinary knowledge, the STEM enterprise remains gender‐biased. Using data from a 2‐year ethnography with physical science faculty in teaching‐intensive roles, this paper argues that gender inequity is reproduced through postfeminist discourses of work‐life balance. Participants who are mothers say they are flying under the radar at work. They self‐surveille as they engage in both paid labor as university educators and unpaid carework at home. Importantly, when participants challenge hegemonic gender norms, they attract the radar's attention and are sanctioned. This study contributes to a growing understanding of how and why women are marginalized in STEM careers. Women with science PhDs fulfill their university's teaching mission with minimal support for the implied compensation of work‐life balance, leaving the institutional structures which privilege men's participation in STEM research intact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We invite you to explore with us the enchanting affects that move us, through ordinary moments in writing for children. Enchantment shows how we are entangled with the world, that which surprises us and builds a sense of wonder. A wind in the trees, a gentle smile, a look of horror. The smell of fresh coffee and the final words of a manuscript. We explore enchantment as mundane but gendered experiences which entail a promise and a potentiality, one that is part of power relations, and where an ethical possibility to engage in the world differently emerges. This paper shows how enchantment is not a detachment from, but a connection to the world. Through interviews with children's writers, we ask how enchanting affect can help us to see work through a different ethical lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I present a reading of poetry on the silences that surround experiences of sexual violence. The reading took place at an academic conference in 2022 in a stream on the topic of vulnerability. I offer these poems, based on my personal experiences, in the spirit of connection and solidarity, and as a feminist strategy of reclamation and resistance. I posit that collective conversations about sexual violence as a social phenomenon are necessary to change the status quo and explore the difficulty to speak of/through pain in relation to my particular subjectivity as a grievable body. I also reflect on my experiences of doing the reading and the impossibilities of knowing how this kind of work will be received taking into consideration the different registers through which the experience can be communicated, discussed and taken forward: the affective, discursive, and action‐oriented registers. Grappling with the question how we can imagine an alternative future if we continue to be lost for words, I don't offer answers but an invitation for readers to engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore maternal shame and guilt as affective derivatives of social regulations of motherhood in Iceland, which is internationally perceived as a frontrunner in gender equality. We analyze 450 qualitative questionnaires completed by parents describing feelings of guilt and shame in connection to parenthood. We use 76 questionnaires completed by fathers to contrast and compare to answers from mothers to better understand the affective‐discursive workings of motherhood. The affective‐discursive analytical framework allows us to understand affective pulls, pushes, power dynamics and their social politics. The findings are contextualized in the Nordic welfare state, neoliberalism, the current ethos of intensive mothering. The recurrent thread running through the data is the idea of the ever‐present mother, and under this umbrella concept, we have developed two affective‐discursive themes: (i) the guilt of working (long hours) and having to arrange for childcare and (ii) failing to be 100% present for the child. We conclude that the emotions of guilt and shame are consistently present in mothers' lives, much more so than in fathers' lives, and that this gendered pattern is both caused by and serves to reinforce the age‐old cultural mandate that mothers are primarily responsible for child rearing. The marks of intensive mothering are evident in mothers' description of feeling guilty for everyday tasks such as working, cleaning, studying, arranging for daycare, sending their children to preschool, and attending to their own needs. This gendered pattern suggests that the gender equality cornerstone of the Nordic welfare state might be at risk as important institutions, such as preschools, are perceived as inferior to mothers' constant attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how becoming a mother—and navigating such a complicated life transition—while pursuing an academic career impacts the way female researchers perceive themselves as acting subjects. By analyzing in‐depth virtual interviews with Italian female early career researchers, this work explores the relationship between fertility decisions, motherhood hardships, self‐identity, and career‐related experiences in the interviewees' biographical trajectories. Despite their consideration of childbearing as a mental and practical obstacle to scientific production, many of the interviewees ascribe positive career outcomes to the arrival of their first child. The reflexivity set in motion by the interview process allows us to observe the collected interviews as double‐layered narratives. The postponement of fertility choices and the presence of work‐family conflict tend to be described as ordinary facets of a common career pattern, intrinsic to the female academic working experience. Meanwhile, the positive impacts of motherhood on self‐identity and work‐related skills are recounted on a more individual level, framed as a sort of paradox, a personal journey of self‐discovery or—to some extent ‐ a heroic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the qualitative research of Jewish ultraorthodox female fashion entrepreneurs (JUFFE) in Israel, we examine how women's body regulations are collectively negotiated, challenged, and resisted. Our paper shows that, through the disruption of religious clothing and hairstyling, JUFFEs have challenged the patriarchal expectations of women's ideal type in their authoritative society and triggered various changes that allowed for the construction of alternative forms of femininity. Our contributions are twofold: First, we advance the understanding of the body as a site of resistance by exposing the analytical constituents of embodied resistance, namely, the forms of femininity constructed through embodied resistance, which demands are challenged, which types of modesty are resisted, which bodily means are used in women's resistance acts, and the implications of the resistance. By deepening our understanding of the constitutive resources of embodied resistance, we offer a more nuanced and detailed analysis of the various embodied ways and means through which women of religious communities may prompt changes regarding women's visibility and economic status. Second, we broaden the conceptualization of resistance's outcomes in authoritarian regimes by demonstrating how alternative religious femininities are constructed through the collective power of fashion. We present two manifestations of femininity: femininity as a marker of diversity (individualized femininity) and femininity as a marker of economic status (affluent femininity)—both deviate from the one prescribed by their leadership and community. We demonstrate how entrepreneurs' subversive messages are diffused through their clientele's bodies as the carriers of their subversive messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the pandemic, the ideal of the self‐sacrificing health and social care worker became both more powerful and more unsustainable than ever. This article explores the manner and extent to which health and social care workers collectively challenged this ideal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, this paper discusses mobilizations organized within three occupations: doctors in training, nurses, and social care workers. The study finds that collective action partially rejected and partially reproduced the self‐sacrificing worker ideal. Moreover, it shows how inequality regimes, imposing this ideal through classist, gendered, ageist, and racist‐nationalist processes in a pattern specific to each occupation, fundamentally shape the ways in which the ideal is challenged, as does the political culture of the groups organizing the mobilizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I explore how the subject of inclusion is constituted as intersectional in the organizational discursive practices of a civil society organization promoting migrant and refugee inclusion. Drawing on Crenshaw's notion of political intersectionality and Fraser's politics of recognition and redistribution, I analyze the political dimension of an inclusion project by showing how intersectional categories are connected to differentiated struggles and strategies of inclusion. The ethnographic study illustrates how two subject positions are constituted as being underpinned by either the logic of recognition or redistribution. Moreover, the findings show how the two strategies interact, revealing the dynamics of privilege and disadvantage at play in the inclusion project. The paper contributes to critical studies on inclusion and intersectionality in organizational contexts by extending our understanding of power dynamics and tensions as integral parts of the intersectional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to belong to the "writing differently" turn in organization studies. We argue that writing poetry when doing field work is a way of disrupting and unsettling the objective scientific gaze, the scientific ideal of experiencing the world, and of opening for the Buberian world—the world as an encounter in itself. A tension framed by Buber as I‐It and I‐You. Rather than merely arguing that poetry can help us understand the world differently, we argue that poetry can help us encounter the world differently. Further, by telling two field work stories, we show that poetry can help the researcher to remain human in the field. Having hope in writing poetry when doing field work transcends the more politically and individually oriented engaged ethnography, realizing that field work as encounter—I and You—holds the possibility of not only companionship, trust, mercy, cooperation, forming of joint causes, dreams but also betrayal, plundering, exploitation, and force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender perspectives and feminism are rarely considered legitimate in business school education. Existing research tells us that those who teach in business schools do so in conditions where feminist theories and pedagogy evoke resistance and where their work is paved with discomfort caused by tensions between feminist and neoliberal idea(l)s. We argue that for those challenging the status quo in the business school through teaching, the impact of the threat of resistance can be as "real" as that of realized resistance. In this paper, we engage with collaborative autoethnography and elucidate how our anticipation of resistance shapes the way we teach, even when resistance does not materialize in the classroom. Building on reflections of our shared experiences, we theorize anticipated resistance as productive in and of itself, challenging the conventional view of resistance as brought into being through resisting practices at a specific time and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Touch mediates relations between self‐other, writers, and readers; it is material and affective. This paper is the outcome of writing touch as a collaborative activity between eight women writers across different times and locals. In sharing experiences of touch during and beyond the pandemic, we engage with collaborative writing articulated here as colligere, involving the assembling of writing in a holding space. The meanings and feelings of touch arise from our distinct writer positionalities as we think, work, and write in and about life, research, organizations, and organizing. We suggest that writing that reflects on/through touch presents epistemic vulnerability and openness to unknowing in the nexus of intercorporeal relationships. Writing touch contributes to writing and doing academia differently, particularly by offering sensorial encounters that reframe the ethico‐political conditions of academic knowledge creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a pregnancy ends in England and Wales, statutory time away from paid employment is limited to circumstances where there is a live birth or stillbirth. Forms of leave, such as Maternity Leave or Paternity Leave, depend on parental status derived from the civil registration of a new person or a post‐viability stillbirth. Other early pregnancy endings, such as miscarriage or abortion, do not provide specific time off work after pregnancy. This paper uses the concept of reproductive governance to analyze current and shifting biopolitical truth discourses, strategies of intervention, and modes of subjectification around post‐pregnancy leaves. It shows how different inclusions and exclusions are generated by the classificatory boundaries which act as political technologies in this field. Contributing to an area that is under‐researched in the literature, we provide a review of post‐pregnancy statutory employment leave entitlements in this context. We then consider proposals for change presented in the United Kingdom political system in relation to more inclusive leave benefits offered by some employers and different pregnancy ending leaves offered in other jurisdictions. We argue that current arrangements and proposals do not adequately reflect the complexity and diversity of pregnancy endings. We conclude with a call to policymakers in all contexts to carefully assess the consequences of new ideas around leaves for pregnancy endings and to formulate inclusive and fair proposals for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]