Gender Subtexts – Reproduction of Exclusion in Organizational Discourse*

Many scholars have set out to re-read, deconstruct and reconstruct organizational texts in terms of gender. Their work examines the gender subtexts in the extant literature. First, this text uses the term ‘gender subtext’ and discusses the methodological basis of gender subtext discourse. Then, eight forms of gender subtext are presented, which reflect the current reproduction of gender in organizational discourse. These variations of gender subtext are based on a re-reading of 24 texts. This paper forms part of a wider intellectual objective of creating discursive space, which transgresses mainstream malestream disciplinary borders, aiming to create ‘gendered organization theory’.     

Unhealthy Weight in Indian Families: The Role of the Family Environment in the Context of the Nutrition Transition

India faces a dual burden of increasing obesity and persistent underweight as it experiences the nutrition transition—the dietary and lifestyle changes that accompany globalization, economic development, and technological change. Yet, the nutrition transition is not solely a top-down process; rather, global forces converge with local practices at multiple levels of the social ecology. The family environment, a key site for the transmission of local customs and norms, remains largely unexplored in India. We examined the extent to which opposite-gender siblings and mother–child pairs were concordant or discordant in body weight, and whether domains of the family environment, specifically, food practices, food-related gender norms, and household resources, were associated with patterns of unhealthy weight within and between families. Multilevel dyadic analysis and logistic regression were conducted using survey data from a representative sample of 400 families in a Southern Indian city. We identified substantial clustering of weight among opposite-gender sibling pairs (ICC = 0.43) and mother–child pairs, as well as important patterns of discordance, including 11% of families experiencing a dual burden of underweight and overweight. Household resources, including mother’s education and income, were salient in explaining the distribution of body weight within and between families. Importantly, less examined domains of the family environment were also relevant, including food practices (e.g., grocery shopping frequency), and food-related gender norms (e.g., mother’s control of food served at home). Continued exploration of how global and local practices converge in households will be necessary to develop programming that effectively addresses India’s dual burden of unhealthy weight.     

Gender Mainstreaming: An Assessment of Its Conceptual Value for Gender Equality

Evaluations of gender mainstreaming show that there has been limited change to gender equality and it has been very fragmented across EU countries. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to evaluate the heuristic and conceptual value of the term gender mainstreaming as a metaphor for gender equality. Our results from applying an image‐schematic model of metaphor evaluation show that gender mainstreaming represents a nonsensical metaphor for gender equality. We conclude with recommendations for reconceptualizing gender mainstreaming.     

Black Immigrants and the Rhetoric of Social Distancing

This article focuses on the empirical evidence of social distancing in the interdisciplinary literature on black immigrants. I argue that the conventions that have guided popular and scholarly representations of relations between foreign-born and native-born blacks have been shaped by seminal writings in sociology. Treating interviews with black immigrants as sites of various kinds of discursive practices, my aim is to illustrate a shift in the expression of social distance that maps onto contemporary ways of talking about race in the US. I argue that social distance rhetoric is an expression of what black immigrants learn about race and ethnicity in American society. This reading challenges the widely held interpretation that social distancing accurately reflects individual subjectivity and collective identity.     

Inequality in the “Cradle of Liberty”: Race/Ethnicity and Wealth in Greater Boston

New data collected for the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area provide detailed information on financial assets that allow analysis to extend beyond the traditional black–white divide. Targeting US-born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Hispanics, findings from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color survey underscore the large racial and ethnic disparities in financial wealth, even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic status. Further, some notable differences between Boston’s communities of color highlight the importance of detailed analyses for research on the racial wealth gap. In particular, among non-white communities Dominicans report comparatively low asset and high debt amounts, while Caribbean blacks report relatively higher levels of wealth. Altogether, these findings point to the need for wealth building opportunities in communities of color and further investigation of the causes and consequences of financial disparities between groups of color disaggregated by specific ancestral origin.     

Recalibrating Management: Feminist Activism to Achieve Equality in an Evolving University

In this paper we examine the process of incorporating gender equality into a higher education institution as it evolves into a managerial university. The case illustrates the ongoing processes between structure, activism and features of gender equality, and provides insights into how activists adapt to changes in governance and influence managerial responses to equality. Tracing the interaction of employee activism with new managerialism over nearly two decades, four phases of change are identified. These provide a basis for generating two concepts – managerial recalibration and individual activism – while challenging the social abeyance hypothesis of social movements.     

Strategic contextualisation: free movement,labour migration policies and the governance of foreign workers in Europe

Heightened levels of internal labour mobility since the European Union (EU)'s Eastern enlargements in 2004 and 2007 have shifted the context for member state policies geared towards the admission of non-EU workers. This article contends that the strategic use of the internal mobility regime by member states, as a justification for selective recruitment of labour from outside the EU, deserves more analytical attention. This contribution examines how labour migration policies (LMP) in the United Kingdom, France and Germany make use of the EU free-movement framework in current legislation, and how associated policy rationales are justified. In an interpretive policy analysis of legislative documents and decision-makers' meaning-making, as related in semi-structured interviews, the article identifies the logics, tools and rationales which link LMP to EU free movement. These links are shown to be highly selective and they serve common as well as nationally distinct governance goals. Across all three cases LMPs ascribe various degrees of relevance to EU internal labour supply, depending on the different skill levels of migrants targeted in respective policies. This shared pattern of economic coordination of LMP by skill level – in which the EU common labour market plays the role of delimiting additional migration in the skilled and especially low-skilled segments – is conflated with national migration control agendas. Member states draw on EU free movement to justify migration restrictions targeted at specific sending countries. As a result, the governance of the foreign workforce produces skills- and origin-based privileges rather than granting rights to mobile migrant workers in Europe.     

A multivariate analysis of adverse childhood experiences and health behaviors and outcomes among college students

Objective: This study investigated associations between adverse childhood experiences (ACE) prior to age 18 years and multiple health behaviors (eg, cigarette and other substance use) and outcomes (eg, obesity, depression) for a large college sample. Participants: 2,969 college students from seven universities in the state of Georgia were included in the analysis. Methods: Web-based surveys were completed by students (45–60 minutes) during the spring semester, 2015. Results: Findings indicate that more ACEs are associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms, ADHD symptoms, cigarette use, alcohol use, marijuana use, and BMI, in addition to lower levels of fruit and vegetable intake, and sleep. Conclusion: ACEs may carry forward in the lifespan to influence a range of unhealthy outcomes among college students. College intervention programs may benefit by recognizing the pervasiveness of ACEs and their associations with health behaviors and outcomes, and include interventions across more than one health behavior.