Women leaders,self‐body‐care and corporate moderate feminism: An (im)perfect place for feminism

This article offers self‐body‐care as an aspect of corporate moderate feminism and a manifestation of postfeminism for women leaders. It explains how postfeminism as a bodily practice surfaces through women leaders' body work and how women ‘top' leaders strategize to stabilize their credibility by identifying their own and other women' body work needs and the steps they take to meet these. Self‐body‐care extends understandings of body work as part of postfeminist governmentality and contributes to understandings of moderate feminism as that which deflects and reflects feminism and constrains and empowers subjects. As such self‐body‐care offers an (im)perfect space for disruption and for Gender and Organization Studies (GOS) scholars to pursue the implications and potential of postfeminism. We call for women elite leaders to be part of feminist futures and illustrate self‐body‐care as an aspect of corporate moderate feminism by highlighting complexity in the postfeminist thesis and reflexively re‐examining two of our previous published empirical studies of women ‘top' leaders.     

‘Nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care

What is the significance of caring for thinking and knowing? Thinking and knowing are essentially relational processes. Grounded on a relational conception of ontology the essay argues that ‘thinking with care’ is a vital requisite of collective thinking in interdependent worlds, but also one that necessitates a thick vision of caring. A speculative exploration of forms of thinking with care unfolds through a rereading of Donna Haraway's work, specifically of its take on feminist discussions on the situated character of knowledge. The notion of thinking with care is articulated through a series of concrete moves: thinking‐with, dissenting‐within and thinking‐for. While weaving Haraway's thinking and writing practices with the trope of care offers a particular understanding of this author's knowledge politics, the task of caring also appears in a different light.     

COVID‐19 as a breakdown in the texture of social practices

‘A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?’ This invitation — sent by one of the authors to the others — led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID‐19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together‐with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID‐19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.     

The Visibility of Feminist Thought in Family Studies

We assessed feminist visibility in family journals by tallying the feminist content of articles in Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Issues, and Family Relations. There was an increase in feminist visibility from 1972 to 1992, at which point the growth of visibility stalled. From 1992 to 2002, almost 1 out of 4 articles appeared to be influenced, at least minimally, by feminist scholarship when including in our tally a measure of articles' mentioning of gender in its abstract or title without a detectable feminist perspective in the article. Only about 6% of articles, however, involved an explicit feminist analysis. We offer explanations for this apparent glass ceiling for feminist visibility and make suggestions for future research.     

Interorganizational network portfolios of nonprofit organizations: Implications for collaboration management

Increasingly, nonprofit organizations engage in interorganizational collaboration to address large‐scale social problems. Scholarship typically focuses on the characteristics of both within‐sector and cross‐sector partnerships of two collaborating organizations or all partnering organizations involved in a collaboration, but we know little about the patterns of interorganizational relationships that single nonprofit organizations maintain. This research draws upon surveys from 452 nonprofits and introduces nonprofit network portfolios, which we define as the number, integration, intensity, and duration of relationships that nonprofits purposefully develop with other organizations. Using 12 network measures, Ward cluster analysis revealed three distinct network portfolios: restricted within‐sector (n = 319, 70.58%), which included limited collaboration and prioritized within‐sector partnerships; robust within‐sector (n = 80, 17.70%), which included more nonprofit partnerships than restricted within‐sector portfolios; and cross‐sector (n = 53, 11.72%), which had a rich assemblage of integrative partnerships with nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies. Further, nonprofits that maintained each type of portfolio differed in their revenue and social mission, suggesting these factors are related to the types of collaboration that nonprofits maintain. This study makes contributions to existing research on interorganizational networks and cross‐sector collaboration and suggests practical and policy implications for nonprofit network management.     

Agents for Change and Changed Agents: The Micro‐politics of Change and Feminism in the Academy

This article explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular, it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro‐politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localized spaces of resistance and in the small but significant individual efforts at making changes in academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The article explores the range of change strategies that participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualized, bottom‐up perspective on change that, unlike more totalizing theorization, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual.     

Women Empowering Women

As women in this female-centered profession of social work, we have not effectively advocated for ourselves in terms of leadership in our educational systems. We reexamine the 2008 special section of the Journal of Social Work Education on women in the academy and build on information that suggests social work has lost its momentum to advocate for a more unified feminist voice and standpoint epistemology in our scholarly literature, teaching materials, and leadership models. We reflect on pioneers who helped pave the way, and we question our own involvement as women in surrendering to the dominant voice. We conclude with suggestions for eliminating status-based disparities, unifying our stance as women, and strengthening the feminist voice in leadership, mentorship, and education through the lens of relational-cultural theory.     

Knowledge co-production with social movement networks. Redefining grassroots politics,rethinking research

Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement networks in Spain, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of research collaboration. My project focused on the emerging logics and practices of collective action, the ongoing re-definition of grassroots politics. The engagement with social movements as reflexive communities – not simply objects to be studied, but subjects actively producing their own analysis and explanations, their own ‘knowledge-practices’ – deeply transformed the in-fieldwork encounter. Through a series of co-analysis workshops, designed and implemented together with the research subjects/collaborators, this research became an open-ended dialogue of reflexivities. The shift from working on social movements to working and thinking together with social movement activists as co-researchers produced new scholarly knowledge, advancing our understanding of contemporary collective action, while simultaneously making research useful for the activists. Moreover, locating epistemic and methodological questions at the centre of the project, I addressed salient debates in social science, exploring collaborative frameworks in order to problematize traditional forms of knowledge production and validation.     

Curriculum Implications for Collaborative Practice From Veterans Health Care Sector Social Workers Serving OIF/OEF Veterans

This study examined veterans health care social workers’ perceptions of collaboration and practice with Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom veterans with the purpose of developing curriculum implications for social work education. Using a mixed-methods design, including surveys (n=21) and interviews (n=13), associations between serving this veterans cohort and the occurrence of collaboration were assessed. Surveys revealed that reflection on collaborative processes increased when serving this cohort. Interviews identified frequent high acuity in behavioral health conditions and emotionally overwhelmed veterans as contributors to this finding. Curriculum recommendations include infusing content on interprofessional collaboration in practice courses, improved instruction on intervening with colleagues to promote effective client processes and outcomes, and education on developing positive interprofessional climates.     

Mobilizing betrayal: Black feminist pedagogy and Black women graduate student educators

This article addresses Black women graduate students' educational labor in higher education teacher training programs. We ground this reflective account of our respective teaching praxis in the educational betrayal we endured as younger students, connecting it to our engagement of Black feminist pedagogy. We illustrate how this praxis empowered us as undergraduate educators to implement pedagogies of equity and justice. Employing a structured vignette analysis framework, we draw on a Black feminist paradigm and Black feminist autoethnography to examine field notes of our teaching praxis. These two field notes, one from Francena and one from ArCasia, demonstrate challenges that emerged in our instruction of mostly white undergraduates. Despite the precarious nature of our political and professional positions, we discuss why working toward an anti‐oppression praxis remains our ultimate pedagogical aim.     

Romance and agency: An argument revisited

Sociological discussions of romance novels are sparse. As a cultural artifact, the formulaic genre of romance fiction (and its more than 50 million readers) has been ignored by many scholars, disdained by some for its mass‐pop culture appeal, and condemned as a tool of the “patriarchal apparatus” by others. Some feminist scholars have cautioned against outright dismissal, however, pointing to oppositional codes and empowering elements in the texts themselves. Others have highlighted the expectations readers bring with them to the text. This important, though limited, discourse has contributed to the enduring debate over culture, that is, structure versus agency. We argue that the debate has remained one sided, as those who claim to afford women readers autonomy have done so within an equally deterministic framework (i.e., feminist politics). Implications for affording readers even more autonomy are discussed.     

Status Compatibility,Physical Violence,and Emotional Abuse in Intimate Relationships

This article analyzing national data (N = 7,408) examines the connection between men's and women's relative economic contributions in families and the risk of husband‐to‐wife physical violence and emotional abuse. Family violence researchers have conceptualized the association between economic variables and the risk of intimate partner violence with respect to the structural dimensions of sociodemographic factors, whereas feminist researchers connect economic power to family dynamics. Marital dependency and stress frustration theories treat income, education, and employment as socioeconomic resources, whereas some feminist research points to the need for research that treats these economic variables as symbolic resources. Although income and educational attainment reduce women's risk of physical violence and emotional abuse by husbands, I find that status incompatibilities between partners that favor women increase the likelihood of emotional abuse.     

Studying Postmodern Families: A Feminist Analysis of Ethical Tensions in Work and Family Research

Through dialogue and reflexivity, feminist researchers aim to create knowledge that is emergent from people in relationship with one another. Reflexivity is a process whereby researchers place themselves and their practices under scrutiny, acknowledging the ethical dilemmas that permeate the research process and impinge on the creation of knowledge. Guided by these tenets, we analyzed the relations among our research practices, our participants, and ourselves to understand and reduce the ethical tensions we encountered in a multimethod research project designed to investigate work and family processes. Our reflective efforts underscore both the active nature of research participants and the importance of the sociopolitical contexts within and around the research process. We make suggestions for more ethical research.     

Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday: From Bananas to Bingo

Abstract

Feminist studies of political economy have long pointed to the multifaceted ways in which global transformations are constituted by deeply gendered economic practices at the everyday level. Nonetheless, the increased analytical focus on the everyday within the study of international political economy (IPE) frequently fails to connect with feminist theories and gendered approaches. In this introductory essay, we argue that any discussion of a ‘turn’ towards the everyday in IPE must acknowledge the role of feminist contributions that predate, and indeed make possible, this shift in IPE scholarship's analytical gaze towards the everyday. We map out what might be understood as feminist political economies of the everyday—highlighting the points of connection between feminist scholarship on the everyday, as well as the ways in which feminist scholars engage with the notion of an everyday political economy in quite distinct and diverse ways—a diversity that reflects the methodological and theoretical pluralism of feminist political economy scholarship as well as the ever broadening geographical scope of feminist research.     

Resolving the (Apparent) Talker Recognition Paradox in Developmental Speech Perception

The infant literature suggests that humans enter the world with impressive built‐in talker processing abilities. For example, newborns prefer the sound of their mother's voice over the sound of another woman's voice, and well before their first birthday, infants tune in to language‐specific speech cues for distinguishing between unfamiliar talkers. The early childhood literature, however, suggests that preschoolers are unable to learn to identify the voices of two unfamiliar talkers unless these voices are highly distinct from one another, and that adult‐level talker recognition does not emerge until children near adolescence. How can we reconcile these apparently paradoxical messages conveyed by the infant and early childhood literatures? Here, we address this question by testing 16.5‐month‐old infants (N = 80) in three talker recognition experiments. Our results demonstrate that infants at this age have difficulty recognizing unfamiliar talkers, suggesting that talker recognition (associating voices with people) is mastered later in life than talker discrimination (telling voices apart). We conclude that methodological differences across the infant and early childhood literatures—rather than a true developmental discontinuity—account for the performance differences in talker processing between these two age groups. Related findings in other areas of developmental psychology are discussed.     

The Standpoint of Art/Criticism: Cindy Sherman as Feminist Artist?*

Feminist Standpoint Theory identifies knowledge as a social product developed from a specific social position. We apply this theory to explore the dominant standpoint informing the social organization of Western art via an institution we call art/criticism. We find that the assumptions, values, and analytic strategies informing mainstream art and art criticism express the standpoint of privileged men. As a test of our argument, we consider the case of an artist who is often hailed as a feminist artist and yet is one of the most successful woman artists today: Cindy Sherman. We find that while Sherman is working with some fertile possibilities for feminist analysis, her work ends up re‐directing this potential into a disempowering play with images. We conclude that rather than countering our argument, the celebration of Sherman’s work as feminist reveals the workings, as well as the limits, of the privileged male standpoint in art.     

When food becomes a feminist issue: popular feminism and subaltern agency in the World March of Women

In ongoing contests over neoliberal globalization, feminists are increasingly forging alliances with non-feminist others around common struggles, both locally and transnationally. This is indicative of a broader shift in transnational feminist politics from intra-movement to inter-movement alliances, and maps onto a historic transition from the UN era (roughly 1985–1995) to the global justice era (roughly 1995–present). Engagement with new partners on non-traditional issues is shifting the scope and contours of the feminisms in question and raising anew the question of hierarchy in transnational feminist networks and in their coalition politics. This article traces the appropriation of food sovereignty by the World March of Women in the context of its alliance with the transnational peasant movement, Vía Campesina, the development of a feminist politics and discourse of food sovereignty, and enquires into the relationship between these processes and “grassroots” members of the March – the rural, peasant and Indigenous women who are understood to be the primary subjects of a feminist politics of food sovereignty.     

The Development of Impulse Control and Sensation‐Seeking in Adolescence: Independent or Interdependent Processes?

This study examines whether changes in impulse control and sensation‐seeking across adolescence and early adulthood reflect independent or interdependent developmental processes. Data are drawn from a national longitudinal study (N = 8,270; 49% female; 33% Black, 22% Hispanic, 45% non‐Black, non‐Hispanic). An autoregressive latent trajectory model is used to test whether development in one trait influences development in the other. Although levels of these traits are inversely correlated, we do not find evidence that change over time in either trait is influenced by the prior level of the other. This failure to reject the null hypothesis is consistent with the view that sensation‐seeking and impulse control are the products of distinct neuropsychological systems that develop independently of one another.     

‘Writing’ aesth‐ethics on the child's body: Developing maternal subjectivities through clothing our children

What could we learn from the ‘aesth‐ethic’ practices of clothing children? The dual focus of this article is to analyse the everyday clothing of children as well as the development of maternal subjectivities as relevant to discussions of aesthetic labour in the field of organization studies. Drawing upon the literatures on aesthetic labour and maternal subjectivities in the field of organization studies, we develop a fine‐grained understanding of the relatively intense and effortful maternal labours that clothing our children encapsulates. Methodologically, we use autoethnographic diary notes combined with feminist ‘memory work’ to analyse clothing as an affectual form of storytelling or ‘writing’ on the child's body that (re)produces certain sociocultural understandings about mothering, sustainability and childhood(s) in a Nordic context embraced by western consumerism. By considering the limitations of the approach taken to drawing wider conclusions about motherhoods, identity construction and clothing, this article advances our understanding of the development of particular middle‐class maternal subjectivities seeking to problematize mass consumerism through childrenswear, and how idea(l)s concerning gender and childhood(s) are being (re)produced in and through clothing.     

Vulnerable relational knowing that matters

This paper explores vulnerable relational knowing, and in it we open up our own embodied habits and experiences as feminist academics. We discuss how displaying our academic bodies as naked, both symbolically and physically, enhances and appreciates—instead of hiding—vulnerability. We also discuss how our academic bodies entangle with a range of more-than-human creatures and material surroundings to highlight the multispecies and material nature of vulnerable relational knowing. Two detailed stories, “Intimate sharing of academic knowledge: A recumbent study circle” and “Keropirtti: A place and space to work differently” provide unique examples of the enactment of alternative ways of working in academia, and their analysis demonstrates the potential of vulnerability for embodied relational knowing in academia, which has, to date, been commonly analyzed in the context of writing.