Access to Networks in Genderized Contexts: The Construction of Hierarchical Networks and Inequalities in Feminized,Caring and Masculinized,Technical Occupations

This article aims to contribute knowledge on how access to hierarchical networks of communication is constructed through organizational contexts associated with the gendered nature of feminized, caring work and masculinized, technical work, respectively. The article is based on interviews with 43 middle managers. Both men and women in male‐dominated technical occupations and female‐dominated caring occupations were interviewed. Eight interviews with politicians and strategic managers were also carried out. The results show that middle managers' access to hierarchical networks differs between feminized and masculinized contexts; hierarchical networks between organizational levels are common in male‐dominated technical jobs, while such networks are almost non‐existent in female‐dominated caring occupations. The results illustrate how organizational conditions follow the gender segregation in organizations and the labour market and, further, how these contexts shape men's and women's access to hierarchical networks. The results also illustrate how the patterns of networks create and reproduce inequalities in sex‐segregated organizations.     

Networks of international public relations production: The case of Latin American organizations’ connections to U.S. agents

Traditionally, international public relations studies have assumed that a foreign organization, namely a foreign government, is the primary influence on how its home country is portrayed to audiences abroad. This study challenges such assumption of independence by revealing how foreign organizations are connected in ways previous works have not considered. Using Foreign Agents Registration Act data, we reveal the direct and indirect connections that form when foreign organizations hire U.S. agencies to produce their international public relations work. Our network analysis of foreign organizations from Latin American and their U.S. agents documents the network structures that emerge for each country and identifies the types of organizations that are positioned advantageously in the networks. We use these findings to theorize how foreign organizations’ connections and their key positions in networks may influence the production of international public relations efforts for their home country. We at a macro-level, public relations effects depend on the structure of the networks, the overlapping sites where communication content is produced, and who is positioned as key players in the production networks.     

Structures and processes in intermediary nongovernmental organizations: Research evidence from Northern Ireland

This article reports the results of an exploratory study of the organizational characteristics, functions, and roles of intermediary nonprofit organizations selected by the European Union to deliver global grant funding in relation to its Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. The results show that the main factor for determining organizational processes is the need to respond to conflicting pressures from two directions: upward to funding agencies and downward to community groups. This produces contradictory demands that are imported into the organizations as a set of internal tensions. The different structures and capabilities developed by the organizations to maintain unity and integrity in response to these tensions are explored and related to differences in the perceived role of the organizations.     

Brown Suits Need Not Apply: The Intersection of Race,Gender, and Class in Institutional Network Building1

Using ethnographic data, this study investigates network building and the transition from school to work in a career center at a nonprestigious university. Now that disadvantaged students have increased their participation in higher education, it is important to investigate the role of the university in these students’ transition from school to work. I found competing forces of stratification at work in the college career center and while the center mitigated inequality for some, it reproduced inequality for others. The Career Center staff faced pressures to recruit corporations to build job networks, but disinterest from the hiring organizations. Through their interactions with recruiters, the staff saw that African Americans and Latinos were not the standard for the labor market. Although network building ruled the overarching organizational goals, intersections of race, gender, and nationality became the defining logic of the hiring process. Staff members turned away both qualified and unqualified African‐American and Latino men and women, while increasing access for white women and international male students, regardless of their qualifications.     

Confidentiality,power relations and evaluation of potential harm in the study of the personal and organizational networks of travel agents in Moscow

Network research in organizational contexts faces ethical challenges related to revealing the identity of participants, managing power relations, and managing the interests and potential harms of the different stakeholders. In this article, we review the ethical issues associated with the investigation of the personal and organizational networks of travel agents in Moscow. In our case study, we interviewed 32 tourism agents from Moscow and its region, obtaining information on 45 people with whom they have regular relation as part of their work; and relational data, with a 2-mode matrix, on 15 organizations with which the agency could be linked in the Russian-Andalusian tourism market. Our results highlight the utility of presenting the information of personal networks in an aggregate manner. It also demonstrates the value of cultural adaptation strategies and adjustment to the characteristics of the community. Moreover, the central role of power relations in organizations, within a cultural context with a greater distance to authority was also found.     

Doing gender in public services: Affective labour of employment agents

The restructuring of state bureaucracies into service organizations and the new welfare state paradigm of activation have changed the work requirements of front‐line workers in public employment agencies across Europe. Public employment agents are less engaged in bureaucratic labour, but have to perform service work. They use affective means to motivate and to monitor and sanction jobseekers. This article provides evidence that these transformations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland did not suspend the gendering of public service work. We discovered four typical modes of affectively enacting the state: both male and female employment agents follow feminized service work patterns or masculinized entrepreneurial norms. To prevent a possible loss of their professional status, some employment agents reinterpret affective labour as professional service work that demands high expertise. Others resist the activation paradigm by performing traditionally feminized care work or by still adhering to affect‐neutral male bureaucratic work.     

Sex Composition,Masculinity Stereotype Dissimilarity and the Quality of Men's Workplace Social Relations

Previous research suggests that the quality of men's work group social relations varies depending on the sex composition of the work unit. Previous studies also suggest that men derive different benefits from working with other men than with women and that the higher status associated with men and masculinity advantages men in their relations with women workers. Previous sex composition studies tell us little, however, about the extent to which the quality of men's work group social relations with women and other men depends on how well a man fits dominant masculinity stereotypes. Drawing on sex composition and gender constructionist approaches to gender and work I investigate in this study the effects of men's individual similarity to masculinity stereotypes on the affective quality of their social relations with coworkers, given the sex composition of their work groups. The data for this study consist of male, mostly white, non‐faculty employees of a public university in the northwest United States. I discuss my results in terms of both individual outcomes and implications for understanding sex and gender inequalities in work organizations.     

Cranky Old Women? Irritation,Resistance and Gendering Practices in Work Organizations

This article discusses midlife women's irritation and resistance in waged work. Old age is stereotypically conceptualized as a time of tranquility and wisdom, but whether women are included in this stereotype is a matter of question. This article concentrates on instances in which women are regarded instead as cranky and difficult when they age. The article is based on interviews of 56 to 64‐year‐old women and men employees, personnel managers, and trade union representatives employed in 10 work organizations. Of these, the gendering practices of three organizations, a hospital, and food and metal industry organizations, are analyzed in detail. The article asks what irritates midlife women, and suggests that gendering practices in the organizations can be seen to produce that which is perceived as ‘cranky old women’.     

Asian Girls are Prettier: Gendered Presentations as Stigma Management among Gay Asian Men

Despite the well‐documented cases of racism toward gay Asian men in the gay community, there is currently little research on how gay Asian men manage racial stigma. In this article, I examine the racial stigma management strategies of gay Asian men. I examine the nature of gay racial stigma toward gay Asian men and find that they use gendered presentations to counter the stereotype that they are more feminine than gay white men. While some gay Asian men engender a hypermasculine presentation, others use a hyperfeminine presentation to trade a more‐stigmatized status for one that is less stigmatizing. More important, these men actively embrace stereotypes to successfully make these transitions. This article demonstrates that stigmatized groups can manage stigma by highlighting their spoiled identities rather than attempting to minimize them.     

Boundaried Caring and Gendered Emotion Management in Hospice Work

Caring work, which is premised on caring for and caring about recipients, involves a great deal of emotion management. Feeling rules shape expectations about emotion management and are informally shared through workers’ narratives about quality work. Using qualitative data from hospice workers in the southwestern US, I find that narratives of quality within hospice include emotion‐management skills such as listening, truly caring, keeping calm and maintaining boundaries. Through an analysis of how workers discuss and map skills onto individual women and men co‐workers, this article highlights two gendered patterns. First, even when women and men are thought to share high‐quality skills, the ways these skills are described reinforce naturalistic understandings of gender. Second, men are seen to hold a broad range of emotion‐management skills, but women are not described as holding the most important emotion‐management skill: keeping boundaries. Understanding this differential application of emotion‐management skills helps us to understand how gender and gender inequality are reproduced within caring work.     

Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry

Reputation is an important feature in the interactional contexts of work in “culture industries” such as film and television production. But few accounts have examined how reputations are produced in the everyday worlds in which cultural producers live and work. This paper introduces the concept of “reputation work” to describe the front stage and back stage interactional processes through which cultural producers continuously strive to produce their reputations. Drawing on participant observation data gathered at a Hollywood talent management company and a business school course on the talent industry, this paper shows how Hollywood agents and managers perform four types of reputation work. These include how Hollywood talent representatives work to adhere to institutionalized conventions for reputable physical settings, group contexts, giftgiving practices, and selfhoods. Such reputation work performances are done for the sake of “impression management,” but show how this strategic interaction is governed by industry-wide institutions that govern legitimacy.

Local cross‐sector partnerships

We focus in this article on the challenges local governmental (municipal) and third‐sector (nonprofit) organizations face when they seek to work collaboratively or in partnership. We build on the findings of an action research project to draw out the practical implications of cross‐sector working for the organizations involved. We describe jointly agreed suggestions for tackling the challenges that emerged when third‐sector organizations and local governmental agencies themselves worked collaboratively in a search for mutually acceptable solutions. Finally, we draw out learning points on cross‐sector working for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers.     

Collaborations with faith‐based social service coalitions

Based on the first national survey of faith‐based social service coalitions in the United States, this article presents data on the degree to which these nonprofit organizations collaborate with other specific organizational types, as well as the range and intensity of these collaborations. In general, faith‐based coalitions tend to collaborate most frequently with other faith‐based agencies, a pattern especially characteristic of the more religiously expressive ones. However, collaboration with non‐faith‐based organizations is also quite common. Based on seven organizational characteristics, we are able to predict which faith‐based coalitions are most likely to collaborate with different types of organizations: coalitions that have more explicitly religious policies and practices with reference to clients and staffs are less likely to participate in intense collaborations with some types of secular organizations, and consistently less likely to do so with all types of governmental agencies.     

Sensuality as Subversion: Doing Masculinity with Chinese Australian Professionals

Within western gender structures, dominant discourses of Asian men as weak, feminized and asexual continue to render Asian masculinities subordinate to white hegemonic ideals. Although research of gender in organization studies has revealed important insights into how gender might be redone or undone, non‐white voices remain marginalized in this critical project. This article explores through in‐depth interviews the ways by which Chinese cis‐male professionals in Australia attempt to coopt desexualizing discourses and ‘do’ masculinity through sensuality. Specifically, the findings show how their sensuality is practised across various dimensions at work and beyond, including via the presentation of the self, relationships with others and representations in social texts. In presenting the voices of Asian men, this article seeks to illuminate their individual and collective pursuits for decolonization, agency and pleasure.     

Who cares? A lack of self‐care for women in the non‐profit/non‐governmental sector

In this article I examine the lack of self‐care regimes for women working in the non‐profit/non‐governmental sector. While I draw on ethnographic research conducted in the Malaysian context of women's organizations, the issue of self‐care for activists and feminist activists is a global one that crosses borders and boundaries. I explore the gendered nature of care and care professions to demonstrate how women are predominantly affected in these working environments. To date, there has been little scholarship on self‐care and care in non‐profit/non‐governmental working environments. Using interviews with women working in the sector, I argue that women's emotional, mental and physical health comes at a cost in these hectic workplaces. This article contributes to the literature on gender, work and care in women's organizations by taking seriously women's concerns working in these spaces, where they experience self‐neglect and institutional barriers in care regimes.     

Cisgendered Organizations: Trans Women and Inequality in the Workplace

This article responds to calls to better understand how intersecting “inequality regimes” operate in organizations. Through in‐depth interviews with 25 white trans women about their workplace experiences, my analyses highlight how trans women navigate relational practices that are simultaneously gendered and cisgendered—that is, practices that maintain cultural connections between sex and gender and maintain gender as immutable. Findings demarcate three distinct mechanisms by which cisgenderism, a system that devalues women and trans people, operates and strengthens hierarchical privileges at work: (1) double‐bind constraints; (2) fluid biases of cissexism and sexism; and (3) group practices of privilege and subordination. In the first regard, analyses reveal unique double binds that trans women face—binds that dictate contradictory feminine and masculine ideal worker expectations but also expectations of gender authenticity. Second, I find that trans women often hover between two subordinate statuses (i.e., gender and transgender status) in a given workday, a fact that prods a more fluid conception of cisgenderism. Finally, this study highlights how cis men collectively mobilize through group practices to repair cisgender system breaches. All three dimensions are critical for understanding the production of workplace inequality between not only trans women and cis men, but all feminine‐identified workers.     

Commitment to Work Among Welfare‐Reliant Women

The purpose of this article is to describe the work of welfare‐reliant women and to reveal commitment to work in the experiences of 84 welfare‐reliant, rural women interviewed for this study. Understanding the domains where welfare‐reliant women exhibit commitment to work may help policy makers, trainers, and employers design and implement interventions that enhance chances of success for these women in the formal, paid workforce. Discussion focuses on the women's formal labor force participation in the past and desire for wage work in the future; barriers to labor force participation, both personal and in the rural job market; informal work and the work of care; support networks; survival strategies for making ends meet while receiving welfare; and the stigma of welfare receipt.     

Marijuana,Gender, and Health-Related Harms: Disentangling Marijuana's Contribution to Risk in a College “Party” Context

Sociological studies suggest that there is social change occurring in the acceptance of lesbians and gay men in the workplace. Compared to prior decades, there are more businesses that welcome, value, and even privilege nonheterosexual sexual identities and relationships. Few studies have analyzed workers' experiences in these types of work contexts. In this article, we explore the experiences of “out” LGB women and men who work for organizations that they consider “gay-friendly.” In-depth interviews demonstrated that, although gay and lesbian workers feel that they are accepted in “gay-friendly” organizations, they nevertheless described differential treatment because of their sexual identity. We discuss evidence of stereotyping, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in their work experiences. Although the movement toward greater acceptance of gays and lesbians in the workplace has made significant progress, the transformation is so far incomplete. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for the study of equality in organizations.     

Giving Meaning to Sport Involvement in Managerial Work

I use a discursive analytical approach to explore ways in which senior managerial men working in nonprofit organizations understand the contribution, if any, of their own sport history to their work skills, how this may vary by organizational contexts and how the subtexts of these discourses may strengthen the dominance of managerial men in a specific context. I used semi‐structured interviews to ask 67 senior managerial men about the role they perceive their sport history plays in their managerial skills. Two overlapping topics emerged from the data: team and leadership skills and perseverance and toughness. I explore the meaning these topics had for the managers and the possible gendered subtexts of these meanings. The findings are situated in the critical feminist management and sport literature.