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Building on divergent cross-disciplinary findings, this session will highlight new directions in research on organizational responses to gendered norms and practices, examining a range of gendered emotions, behaviors, and practices across a variety of settings. The presentations will illustrate assorted organizational perspectives regarding attributes that are frequently associated with women and how these perspectives have led to varying individual, organizational, and occupational-level outcomes. This collection of work will raise important questions regarding best practices for infusing organizations with characteristics that are traditionally cast as feminine that are commonly overlooked and undervalued. Organizations marked by these characteristics are well positioned to enact the focus of this year's AOM meeting - to improve lives - as well as to develop a competitive advantage in light of today's increasingly gender-balanced workforce. How maternalism among religious educators in 19th century England enlightens current understanding Presenter: Beth Kroner Humberd; U. of Massachusetts, Lowell Presenter: Judith A Clair; Boston College Presenter: Jean M. Bartunek; Boston College The iron cage of masculinity in police work Presenter: Kimberly Ramsdell; Boston U. Knowing her place: Positioning women in science and exploring gendered practice Presenter: Caroline Jane Gatrell; Liverpool U. Presenter: Valerie Bevan; Lancaster U. From Savoir-Faire to Savoir-être: The gendered construction of skills in professional services firm Presenter: Camilla Quental; Audencia Business School Presenter: Elisabeth K. Kelan; Cranfield School of Management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TThe global explosion of computerization and communication capabilities is creating an overwhelming ripple effect on the nature of markets, the nature of work, and the nature of organizational structures. Organizations have become more dispersed across industries and across geographical borders and have discovered the value of collaborative work and the advantages of diversity. All these changes in organizations have changed the ways in which their teams are formed and operate. Drawing on a rich grounded theory case study, this paper is centred in the launch of Volvo's first Medium-sized heavy-duty truck in Brazil with the collaboration of Swedish and French cultures. Analysing the interplay between organizational and national culture, the results indicate the possibility to use the national culture as a management tool to improve the performance in teams. As contribution, we present a proposal of conceptual framework to creative process in globally distributed teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars who adopt a narrative view of identity construction have studied how people conduct "identity work" to author self-narratives that enable them to secure their identity positions during specific career episodes. However, we still have very few empirical accounts of how organizational participants conduct their identity work over the length of their whole careers. Accordingly, our goal is to document how organizational participants conduct identity work to narrate the evolution of their selves over their careers. Specifically, we focus on how 35 partners working in global consulting firms reflect on the evolution of their identity positions vis-à-vis key stakeholders throughout their career. Our results show that research participants use four identity stratagems to make sense of the evolution of their identity positions, namely "perpetuation", "intensification/attenuation", "enrichment" and "opposition". Specifically, we demonstrate that they use these stratagems to construct consistent narratives of perpetual progress based on the improvement of their capacities in relation to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research on the gendered construction of skills has produced many insightful studies, few studies explore the construction of skills in the context of a professional services firm. This article draws on 50 semi-structured interviews with partners and non-partners from six large professional services firms in France and the United States and argues that in the promotion to partner process the required skills change from savoir-faire to savoir-être. Savoir-faire refers to technical competence whereas savoir-être denotes the ability to create intimacy with the client and to cultivate an expert image. The article highlights how savoir-être is differently evaluated in men and women, which has important consequences for women's potential to become partners. The article thereby adds to the understanding of the gendered construction of skills in the promotion to partner process in professional services firms, and contributes to broadening the scope of the skills considered in this construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We adopt an interpretive perspective in order to explore how consultants who have reached partnership retrospectively make sense of themselves at the different stages of their careers. To do so, we use a life story method for interviewing 35 partners from 6 global management consulting firms and trace the evolution of the salient common features through which they picture "who they were" and "how they behaved" (Alvesson, 2000) at the different stages of their careers. First, we contribute to the literature about professional service firms and notably the one about consultants. Indeed, by exploring how consultants who have climbed all hierarchical ladders retrospectively picture themselves, we are able to identify the ways of be(hav)ing that are successful at the different stages of a consultant's career. Second, we also contribute to the interpretive literature about identity. On the one hand, we find that partners add new "identity layers" when they picture the evolution of their selves from one hierarchical level to another. On the other hand, we highlight that partners build a self-continuity between how they picture who they were at the different stages of their careers by using three "identity stratagems" (Jenkins, 1996) that we label :"(dis)intensification", "oscillation" and "opposition." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]