Gendered Cultures and Performance Appraisal: The Experience of Women Academics

This paper examines women academics’ experiences of appraisal within one English university. Adopting the Foucauldian concepts of discourse and disciplinary power, the paper illustrates how appraisal functions as a disciplinary technology within the organization. Semi-structured interviews, carried out on women academics, reveal how the power relations operating in appraisal work to ‘normalize’ the academic role as a highly competitive, productive unit focused on identifiable, quantitative outputs. The case illustrates the difficulties which women face in trying to put forward alternative discourses which accommodate domestic commitments or different career structures. The research concludes that women academics have only gained limited visibility and voice in the gendered academy through opting in to the new competitive and highly gendered macho culture. The possibilities for women in offering alternative discourses have not materialized, emphasizing the difficultues in changing gendered cultures and challenging the ubiquity of male power.     

Disabled academics: a case study in Canadian universities

Though Canadian universities are legally required to accommodate disabled employees, disabled faculty still experience difficulties navigating neoliberal performance standards and medicalized conceptualizations of disability. Drawing on data from a qualitative study with Canadian university faculty, this paper explores the experiences of five disabled academics. Our analysis draws on post-structural understandings of neoliberalism, discourse, disciplinary power, and governmentality, as well as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concepts of the fit and misfit. Though the sample is small, this analysis suggests universities pose disabling contexts for academics. Disability is cast as individual responsibility, leaving disabled academics navigating accommodations without institutional support. The normative academic constructed through a discourse of efficiency and productivity is the measure against which disabled academics are evaluated, requiring self-governance to produce themselves as ‘good enough’ academics. Although higher education environments are increasingly diverse, disabled academics are still having to prove their right to exist in academia, hindering their abilities to participate fully.     

The Thin End of the Wedge: Foreign Women Professors as Double Strangers in Academia

The impetus for this study was an observation that many of the first women to obtain chairs at European universities were foreigners. Our initial attempt to provide a statistical picture of this proved impossible, because there were numerous problems deciding the contents of such concepts as ‘first’, ‘university professor’ and ‘foreigner’. We have therefore focused on four life stories. It turns out that being a ‘double stranger’— a woman in a masculine profession and a foreigner — is not, as one might think, a cumulative disadvantage. Rather, it seems that these two types of strangeness might cancel out one another, permitting these women a greater degree of success than was allowed their native sisters. This situation however, provides little psychological comfort, hence the metaphor of the wedge: opening the doors but suffering from double pressure.     

Caring during COVID‐19: A gendered analysis of Australian university responses to managing remote working and caring responsibilities

COVID‐19 is dramatically reconfiguring paid work and care. Emerging evidence in the global media suggests that academic women with caring responsibilities are being disproportionately impacted. This article fills a key knowledge gap by examining how Australian universities are supporting academics to manage remote work and caring during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We conducted a desktop analysis of public information about remote working and care from 41 Australian universities and compared them to the world’s top ten ranked universities. Findings suggest that during the pandemic, the Australian higher education sector positions decisions about caring leave and participation in the paid labour force as ‘private’ matters in which employees (mainly women) design their own ‘solutions’ when compared with international institutional counterparts. We argue that COVID‐19 provides another context in which universities have evaded their responsibility to ensure women’s full participation in the labour force.     

The gendered contours of North Korean Migration: sexualized bodies and the violence of phenotypical normalization in South Korea

This article examines the gendered and sexualized contours of North Korean experiences in South Korea at a time when nearly 70% of the North Korean emigrants are women. South Korean television shows – e.g. reality programs – and marriage matchmaking organizations seek to portray North Korean women in a ‘positive’ way to the South Korean public, although, as this article will illustrate, these representations are of a very particular, sexualized kind. These representations are sometimes negative, and there is stigma attached to North Korean women, in which South Koreans assume, for example, that they are victims of human trafficking or that they have had relations with Chinese men during their migration. Furthermore, poor nutrition and other forms of structural violence in North Korea have molded North Korean bodies; there are often physical disparities between North and South Koreans. In South Korean society where short height is viewed as undesirable and where idealized, surgical notions of beauty dominate, the violence of gendered phenotypical normalization mark North Korean bodies as smaller, foreign, and strange. Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article argues that these gendered contours of North Korean migration amount to a different sort of structural violence in South Korea.     

News from the Coalface

There is much theoretical and strategic discussion of the State as a player in gender reform, but there is still a need to understand how gender reform processes work within public sector agencies. Evidence on this question is drawn from a field study of NSW (Australia) government agencies. Knowledge of gender equity measures is widespread among public sector workers but it is very uneven in depth. Participation in programmes is also very uneven, though more common among women. Programmes that appear ‘family-friendly’ are more widely accepted than ‘enhancement’ programmes directed to women, which are often thought unfair to men. Men are more likely to be cool towards gender equity measures though significant numbers now support gender equality, and overt ‘backlash’ attitudes are uncommon. Opinions about feminism as a movement are strongly divided. Feminist programmes are becoming routinized, a key process in large-scale change. Consequences of these patterns for gender equity strategy can be identified. Proposals are offered for making routinized programmes more effective, and for ‘re-gendering’ gender equity strategy.     

Transnationalism and Relationships with ‘Home’ among Women in the East Timorese Community in Melbourne

This article focuses on transnationalism and long distance nationalism among East Timorese women in Melbourne, Australia, in the post independence period. It explores the relationships these women have with East Timor and how they engage in transnational practices. It examines the community's self-perception as East Timorese in Australia and their engagement with East Timor, particularly during the 2006 unrest there. Despite being in a liminal position living between two cultures, their country of origin and the country they reside in, most women (even those who rarely visit East Timor) still identify as ‘East Timorese’. I discuss the challenges with returning ‘home’, and how this affects the community's ‘imaginings’ of East Timor. The community retains a predominantly idealistic view of East Timor, but this is increasingly complemented by a nuanced understanding of the challenges faced by their presence ‘at home’.     

Regulating the Medical Profession: From Club Governance to Stakeholder Regulation

The 2008 Health and Social Care Act introduced reforms in the regulation of the medical profession in the United Kingdom which have arguably challenged medical autonomy in the form of the principle of medical self-regulation through introducing performance surveillance and appraisal mechanisms designed to ensure medical practitioners are ‘fit to practice’ in their chosen speciality. This paper outlines these developments, arguing as it does so that there has been a shift in the governance of medical work from the traditional ‘club governance’ model toward one based upon ‘stakeholder regulation’. The consequences of this state of affairs are discussed and possible research avenues highlighted in light of the proposed introduction in 2011 of the performance appraisal process known as revalidation.     

Being a teacher with a so-called ‘immigrant background’: challenges of dealing with social boundaries

ABSTRACT

There have been calls in many European countries to diversify the teaching staff as a response to increasing diversity within student populations. These calls are often based on underlying assumptions that teachers with a migration history are well placed to act as ‘intercultural mediators’ and ‘role models’ for successful integration. However, these assumptions often lack differentiation. The presented study addresses this lack of differentiation for the case of the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Based on social constructivist theory (Barth; Wimmer) and pursuing a qualitative-hermeneutical approach (Schütze; Rosenthal), the study shows four ideal types of dealing with social boundary dynamics among teachers who have been categorised or labelled in terms of a ‘second immigrant generation’. Additionally, the study provides insight that (a) the category of ‘labour migration’ is experienced as a particularly significant category of boundary making and (b) that schools in urban-immigrant neighbourhoods – in contrast to those in rural-non-immigrant neighbourhoods – are experienced as places with an increased chance of recognition for a teacher ‘with an immigrant background’, although even there, these teachers find themselves in constant engagement to defend their belonging and to justify their sensitivity in dealing with migration-related diversity.     

Perception of quality of life in an elderly Angolan sample / Percepción de calidad de vida en una muestra de ancianos angoleños

Increased life expectancy and the ageing of the population have made it particularly important to distinguish between the old (usually 60–79 years, or the ‘young old’) and the oldest old (80 years or more, or the ‘fourth age’). This study explores the effects of age, gender and institutionalization on perceived health and life satisfaction in 1003 elderly people from Luanda, Angola. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was estimated to test for these effects. Results provide evidence of lower scores on life satisfaction and perceived health for the oldest old and the institutionalized. However, the higher life satisfaction among the non-institutionalized disappeared when they reach the fourth age. No differences were found by gender, although there was a slight drop in the life satisfaction of women over the age of 80.     

‘Belonging’ and ‘Otherness’: Sex Equality in Banking in Turkey and Britain

The struggle for sex equality at work has largely been achieved in the developed world, it is claimed. The number of well‐qualified young women entering white‐collar employment and achieving promotion to first‐line and middle management positions now matches or exceeds their male peers. Many young women have high career aspirations and argue that sex discrimination no longer exists. However, this perception is over‐optimistic. Major sex inequalities persist at senior management level in the salaries and benefits offered to female and male staff and in access to certain favoured occupations and sectors of employment. Questionnaires, interviews and documentary evidence from three Turkish and six British banks and high street financial organizations showed that their claimed commitment to equal opportunities by sex was not matched by their practices. Members of managerial elites (who were almost exclusively male) held firm views about the characteristics of ‘the ideal worker’, which informed organizational ideologies, including human resource policies and practices concerning recruitment and promotion. They also permeated organizational cultures, which affected employees’ working practices and experiences. The outcome of these internal negotiation processes was to differentiate between a favoured group of staff seen as fully committed to the companies’ values, who were promoted and rewarded, and an ‘out’ group, whose members were denied these privileges. This distinction between ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ is gendered not only along the traditional lines of class, age, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability, but also along the new dimensions of marriage, networking, safety, mobility and space. Despite local and cross‐cultural differences in the significance of these factors, the cumulative disadvantage suffered by women staff seeking career development in the industry was remarkably similar.     

Performance Management and the Stifling of Academic Freedom and Knowledge Production

In an era of neoliberal reforms, academics in UK universities have become increasingly enmeshed in audit, particularly of research ‘outputs’. Using the data of performance management and training documents, this paper analyses the role of discourse in redefining the meaning of research, and in colonizing a new kind of entrepreneurial, corporate academic. The new regime in universities is characterized by slippage between the audit and disciplinary functions of performance management. We conclude that academic freedom is unlikely to emerge from a system which demands compliance with a regime of unattainable targets and constant surveillance.     

Truly embodied sociology: marrying the social and the biological?

This paper explores the relation between sociology and biology through an examination of issues relating to the sociology of the body, emotion and health. Arguments for a ‘biological’, and yet social, body are considered before developing a critique of work on the sociology of the biological body. It is argued that there are a number of difficulties with this latter project. Writers working in this area can be seen to have used rather emotional ploys to advance their promotion of a more ‘biologised’, or ‘material‐corporeal’, account of the body, emotion and health. In addition though these writers eschew reductionist, naturalist, and dualist arguments, they nevertheless draw on studies that have some or all of these characteristics. Finally a variety of epistemological and methodological difficulties inherent in physiological analysis and in ‘interviewing’ the body are explored. It is concluded that we still remain near the ‘starting point’ of a sociology of the body that interrelates biology and sociology.     

Starting somewhere different: methodological cosmopolitanism and the study of world politics

In this article, I contribute to the debate on Ulrich Beck's idea of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ from a political science perspective. How fruitful is Beck's idea for the study of world politics? How can a political science perspective turn ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ into a more transdisciplinary subject of debate? Guided by these questions, I speak to two audiences. First, I offer political scientists a distinct strategy for empirical ‘cosmopolitan political science’ research. At the heart of this strategy is a novel object of research, the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, understood as a discourse that breaks with the ‘national outlook’ to open possibilities for a world beyond ‘reflexive modernization’. With that, I shift the perspective from structure to discourse and broaden the normative grounds on which to assess cosmopolitan reality. Rather than just considering the emergence of normative cosmopolitan ideals, I build into cosmopolitan research the normative, empirical question of whether we see an emergence of a world beyond reflexive modernization. Second, I address scholars outside the field of political science who are interested in methodological cosmopolitanism by offering the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ as a novel object of study that could also be explored from other disciplinary perspectives and by proposing they put the question of the purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism centre stage. This question can, I argue, constitute grounds for substantial debates on methodological cosmopolitanism not already precluded through disciplinary premises and concerns. Contributing to such a transdisciplinary debate, I distinguish between the long‐term and immediate purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism, the former being about the development of a cosmopolitan language and grammar and the latter about empirical explorations of the reality of the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, eventually and in a collective and transdisciplinary endeavour building up to contribute to the former.     

Global Studies—The Handmaiden of Neoliberalism?

Abstract

The field of global studies has gained momentum over the past 20 years and today occupies a significant presence within many universities. As a result, there is now a burgeoning array of institutional support for global studies scholarship. Perhaps not surprisingly, concurrent to such institution-building there has been a spate of essays engaged with the question ‘what is global studies?’ that have promoted lively debate and commentary. In this essay, I ask a rather different question which is ‘who gets to define global studies, and what is at stake in these kinds of delineating efforts?’ I argue that debate about global studies demands the inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives from around the world. I conclude by urging global studies scholars to be deliberately conscious of their taken-for-granted assumptions with respect to power and the related capacity to speak for others from the global south and east who are largely still absent in defining this new field of inquiry.     

Good girls don't comment on politics? Gendered character of online political participation in the Czech Republic

The article aims to contribute to the still relatively unexplored area of the relationship between gender and online political participation. Using two complementary methods – a representative, post-election survey of the adult Czech population and a content analysis of communication on the selected Czech political parties’ Facebook profiles during the campaign for the 2013 Parliamentary Elections – we attempt to challenge some established assumptions regarding the allegedly equalizing effect of the Internet and social media on participatory behaviour of men and women. While survey data discovered subtle yet statistically significant differences between men and women in some online expressive activities on Facebook, mainly commenting on other users’ statuses, content analysis further revealed that there are not only notable gender gaps among the Facebook users who commented on the campaign, but also differences in the tone of communication produced by the respective gender groups, with men posting more negative comments addressed to parties as well as to other Facebook users. We suggest that these results question the prevailing perception about the narrowing of the ‘gender gap’ in the online environment and call for a more nuanced methodological approach to different forms of online political expression.