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PurposeDespite the need for such, little scholarly attention has been paid to transdisciplinary enquiry into gender inequities in workplaces. The authors provide a pragmatic evaluation of the transdisciplinary research (TDR) model by Hallet al.(2012) for framing the study of this societal issue, shedding light on the challenges, principles and values that could usefully inform subsequent TDR in organisational settings.Design/methodology/approachThis paper evaluates the model in relation to TDR on gender inequities in New Zealand's public service by Hallet al.(2012) Content analysis on our reflective narratives from research team meetings, email exchanges, informal discussions and a workshop reveals TDR study insights. Findings show support for the model and its four broad phases and surface principles and values for applied TDR enquiry that addresses societal challenges in the organisational context.FindingsThe adoption of a TDR model to examine a study of equity in the public service revealed practical and conceptual challenges, encouraging ongoing reflection and adaptive behaviour on the researchers' part. The pragmatic evaluation also highlighted environmental constraints on undertaking TDR, with implications for the ambition of future studies.Research limitations/implicationsThis evaluative enquiry encourages similar research in other organisational and national settings to validate the use of TDR to gain insightful, contextualised understandings of social challenges centred in the organisational setting.Practical implicationsThis pragmatic evaluation of a TDR model's capacity to approximate the approach and phases of our applied enquiry lays the groundwork to refining TDR approaches used in subsequent studies aimed at addressing societal issues in the organisational setting.Social implicationsThis paper can potentially promote greater collaboration between research scholars and other stakeholders wanting to develop TDR paradigms and applied enquiry that can meaningfully inform workplace and societal impacts.Originality/valueThis pragmatic evaluation of a TDR approach involves its initial application to the study of equity at work and develops principles and values that could inform TDR paradigms and methodologies of subsequent enquiries in the field.

Posthuman affirmative ethics relies upon a fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject who develops affective, material and immaterial connections to multiple others. Our purpose in this paper is to consider what posthuman affirmative business ethics would look like, and to reflect on the shift in thinking and practice this would involve. The need for a revised understanding of human–animal relations in business ethics is amplified by crises such as climate change and pandemics that are related to ecologically destructive business practices such as factory farming. In this analysis, we use feminist speculative fiction as a resource for reimagination and posthuman ethical thinking. By focusing on three ethical movements experienced by a central character named Toby in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, we show how she is continually becoming through affective, embodied encounters with human and nonhuman others. In the discussion, we consider the vulnerability that arises from openness to affect which engenders heightened response-ability to and with, rather than for, multiple others. This expanded concept of subjectivity enables a more relational understanding of equality that is urgently needed in order to respond affirmatively to posthuman futures.

Editorial

This paper analyses a photographic essay of older adults and workers in a nursing home environment, as a day-in-the-life documentary photographic essay Who cares published in Kai Tiaki, Nursing New Zealand in 2006. We discuss the essay, which intended to make eldercare work more visible and valued. The purpose of this paper is to ask, 'Why were these photographs so uncomfortable to view, and why did they elicit such strong polysemous reactions from viewers?' We argue that in order to address this question, sites of eldercare may be understood as heterotopias, or places of exclusion from social norms. While the photographs were meant to make it possible for viewers to look into the daily reality of eldercare work, we suggest the visual essay instead acted as a heterotopic hall of mirrors, revealing tensions that obscured the labour value to viewers. As observers looked into the mirror of their own lives, the utopian discourse of a residential care 'home' was disrupted, as the idealised version of eldercare work we have become attuned to in the media was punctured by the powerful heterotopia of the photographic essay. This article illustrates the way in which eldercare work is made invisible through complex social processes involving sight and site related to contemporary visual and spatial practices of aging and eldercare.

We contribute to management and leadership education research by arguing that women’s literary fiction has been largely ignored in both scholarship and practice. We provide a systematic approach to...

BACKGROUND Montagnard refugees, an indigenous multilingual tribal people from Vietnam, experience lifestyle changes and post-resettlement challenges in the United States that contribute to chronic health conditions. Foundational research and health data are lacking. OBJECTIVES We describe the Montagnard Hypertension Study, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project documenting chronic disease risk. METHODS We developed a Montagnard dictionary of hypertension-specific terminology and conducted two focus group discussions (FGD), 131 biological assessments (blood pressure, height, weight, waist circumference, scalp hair and saliva sample collection), and 127 behavioral surveys. We implemented two health fairs that offered services to the community. LESSONS LEARNED This is the first study to examine chronic disease using a CBPR framework for Montagnard health. We highlight lessons learned specific to constituents and their capacities, historical and current conflicts, and the iterative processes in CBPR design. CONCLUSIONS CBPR is a practically achievable approach to studying chronic disease risk within indigenous, tribal communities, with implications for future research with Asian American subgroups and other minority populations.

This special issue of Culture and Organization is a Gedenkschrift – a commemorative publication – for our beloved friend and colleague Heather Hopfl, who died on 3 September 2014. Heather was Chair...

How can organisational studies theory respond to the call of nonhuman animals? This article argues there is ‘too much humanism’ in organisational studies and defines the problem as originating in language practices. The example of factory-farmed pigs is used to illustrate the argument. Derrida’s term carnophallogocentrism is used to suggest that ethical thinking about the animal be moved from face-to-face encounters through the eyes to the mouth and that by adopting methods used in literature and ‘feminist dog-writing’ ways can be found to co-constitute human and nonhuman species in academic writing practices. The term meat-writing is offered as a practice of challenging carnophallogocentrism.

This article introduces a Special Collection of four articles that highlight responses by working women collectively and individually to forces accelerated by the recent global crises. It draws out common themes from accounts of African women’s responses to harassment at work, of the links between union representation and pay equity in Brazil and South Africa and of Australian women’s quest for flexible and fair work/family arrangements. From these perspectives, the article sets out a five-point research agenda to help empower women’s collective and individual agency in response to working conditions shaped by global economic and social forces.

The article extends previous research on the storying practices of service workers, workplace humour as resistance, and workers’ autonomous use of social media. Discussion strings from two hairstylist forum storylines, exemplifying comic and tragic story‐sharing about difficult customers, were analysed using Gabriel's notion of story‐work. Processes of coping, entertainment, identity‐construction and learning are clearly evident in the discussion strings and social media is confirmed as a ‘new’ terrain for the enactment of employee agency. Findings emphasize that service workers are engaged in contradictory and ambiguous relations of resistance and accommodation as they learn how to deal with difficult customers. The article's contribution is to show how service workers share their fears and anxieties about difficult customers through storying and humour in generative dialogical poietic processes in social media. Further research is suggested.

Social media have become an important avenue through which citizens agitate and advocate for social change. The impetus for protest activity is usually the perception of injustice leading to public anger shared online and which may mobilise people to take further action (e.g. join a protest demonstration or sign a petition). Research on activism using social media is still nascent, and there are as yet no studies examining the gendered dimensions of social activism on the Internet vis-a-vis the world of work. This article discusses two recent social media incidents involving aspects of women’s embodiment – menstruation and sexual attractiveness – in which action through social media arguably influenced organisations to change some aspect of their practice. Our analysis is grounded in feminist theories of embodiment to theorise the expression of anger in Internet social activism. The implications of this article include a deepened appreciation of the potential of social media for women’s collective action ...

Inspired by Helene 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.

We read Blake's poem ‘London’ aimed at sensitising readers to the early nineteenth century plight of London's most vulnerable citizens. Our reading surfaces several issues relevant to organisational theorising: the role of ‘diabolical reading’ strategies in creating mental flux through textual flux; the use of visual and poetic symbolism to contest the language systems implicated in the psychic effects of institutional domination; and Blake's narrative voice as wandering Bard, which places the poetic body at the centre of responding to spatial practices of the city. We argue Blake's art still inspires because it haunts the reader as it continually renews itself in re-reading and so both inscribes and incorporates, making the word, flesh. Blake's philosophy also highlights the creative poetic subject ‘placed’ in their city-landscape and so provides a pathway through inscription and incorporation. Implications for organisational theory are explained.

The management of “wisdom” has been mooted in knowledge management (KM) theory mostly in relation to what is known as the “knowledge hierarchy”. We argue that there are unquestioned assumptions inherent in KM leading to wisdom being included in KM theory because of rhetorical “urges” more than theoretical ones. These rhetorical urges impel a drive towards perfection that excludes more than is included. Our interrogation of the KM literature uncovers some of the questionable implications in understanding knowledge as a resource and an asset and of understanding wisdom as a pinnacle to a knowledge hierarchy. We urge caution regarding theorising of wisdom at the top of a hierarchy, as it should not be mooted as a perfect final solution to Knowledge Management. We suggest the theorising of wisdom be opened out to its fullest “poetic possibilities”, and that attempts to close off its meaning be resisted.

This paper discusses the significance of HBB to metropolitan areas by drawing on recent developments in economic and human geography concerned with relationships between people, place and cyberspace in cities, and previous research examining HBB in Auckland, New Zealand. This paper argues that although urban HBB have distinct characteristics, they should be conceptualised relationally to other places of business conduct, including the Internet, third places such as cafes, and business precincts. HBB types and owner characteristics are highly differentiated in cities and so HBB ‘pathways’ is suggested as a useful concept to frame further research and policy development.

In this article we present and discuss a novel approach to research using photographic juxtaposition. This method uses dual images of subjects (at work and at home), and subject involvement in the process of self-presentation, to create a 'doubting frame' for research. We discuss the issue of doubt in research and suggest researchers take doubt more seriously, and deliberately construct research to allow and encourage re-description by research's final arbiters - its readers and its subjects. We illustrate our argument with some photographic sets, and describe the project, which was a collaborative effort between management researchers and an artist. We show how the simple architecture (or research design) of this project was built from doubt and encourages doubt, and we discuss why this should be viewed as a positive rather than a negative feature of research.

Artists derive inspiration from daily life. According to John Dewey (1934), common experiences are transformed into works of art through a process of compression and expression. Our paper adopts Dewey's frame to demonstrate that experience in the artful classroom plays a valuable role in management education. We asked students to reflect on their work experience and then to provide an artful expression of their reflections. For this exercise we defined artfulness as a process which relies on the discursive practices of satire, and in particular irony and parody. Offering a service management class as an exemplar we demonstrate the use of these rhetorical techniques as reflective learning tools. A class of students were first prompted to consider their common experiences as both customers and service providers, and were then asked to create an ironic artefact. Our paper, which analyses a cartoon sequence produced by students in response to this assignment and in which they parody the fast-food service experience, illustrates how a business studies classroom can be transformed into an artful space.

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to argue that an enriched understanding of texts would enable more informed and responsible management practice. The authors present an approach to the analysis of management texts that enjoys, rather than contests, multivocality with the aim of making our approach to defamiliarising texts an accessible change management tool.Design/methodology/approachWorking with a reader‐response methodology we provide comment on, and analysis of, a popular management book, Kevin Roberts' Lovemarks. The authors context a response to this text in a discussion of commodity fetishism and deconstructed management theory texts. The interpretation of the subject text highlights its rhetorical suasion and pulls buried meaning into view.FindingsThe authors demonstrate that rhetorical analysis and satirical play, a mode of defamiliarisation that is employed in their own reading and incorporated into their classroom praxis, enables managers to better understand and control their own sense‐making. The authors argue that where their enriched understandings challenge embedded assumptions, changed management practices are enabled.Originality/valueThe authors offer their own construction of a Lovemark text, a satirical echo of the Roberts original, as an example of the distancing effect of humorous textual play.

In a narrative built around our experience of art placed in the lobby of a corporate edifice, we argue that a city bureaucracy is actively participating in the legitimised abduction of community resources by urban developers: that however well‐intentioned, subscription to the notion that social, environmental, and aesthetic responsibilities can be expected of, and accounted for, by corporate business, is naive. Our intention is to signal the outcome—corporate control of our aesthetic environment—that our discussion foreshadows.

Explores the theme of nothingness in the lives and work of two women writers, Simone Weil and Marion Milner. Ways in which Milner and Weil were able to make a contribution to philosophy and psychoanalysis by embracing nothingness; Paradox of how the writers' influence continues to grow while that of more apparently successful theorists declines.

This paper shows how banter helps forge organizational culture by facilitating socialization of work group members and presents original research conducted in three IT companies. Informants identified their style of humor as “taking the piss,” a colloquial term meaning to use jocular abuse to deflate someone else's ego to bring them to the same level as others. The IT organizations studied were young, creative and energetic and the banter was lively and almost always enjoyed. Six main functions of banter were identified: making a point, boredom busting, socialization, celebrating differences, displaying the culture, and highlighting and defining status. Banter occurred more readily when it involved popular and well-liked colleagues that were fully socialized into the organizational culture. Personal characteristics and traits—such as ethnicity, gender, age, height or dress style—were the target of much banter. Much of the literature discussing banter has focused on the negative effects of jocular abuse at work. This paper emphasises how banter helped facilitate functioning cultural systems in the organizations studied. However, for those not socialized through the banter into the in-group, banter was often experienced as painful, exclusionary and even insulting.

Examines the problematic and divisive attitudes which bourgeois and socialist feminists take to the question of the links between patriarchy and capitalism and the importance of class conflict as a major cause of women's subordination.