Suchergebnisse

Smoking was for most of the 20th century a normal part of everyday life in western society, including work organizations. Within a very short space of time it has become much less acceptable in the workplace and, in many countries, banned altogether. Why has this happened? This article seeks to answer this question. Although the main legislative basis of these bans is the health and safety of employees, we argue that the issues at stake are in fact more complex. Smoking, we contend, should be understood as a practice with diverse cultural meanings, and its regulation located within the context of a longstanding and dynamic moral discourse, of which scientific and medical discourse is only one aspect. In so doing we seek to open up a significant gap in the social scientific and organization studies literature for future analysis.

In this paper we address some neglected ontological issues regarding the ideas of passion and knowledge in the contemporary Western context. We argue that passion as a concept can be understood in two main ways. The prevalent interpretation in organization studies is teleological, that of a powerful, purposive motivation to achieve an end result. The second is an ontological understanding of the nature of desire, which in itself is double-sided. Using the ideas of Foucault and Bataille, we suggest desire can be read as lack but also/alternatively as a free-flowing creative force operating behind the quest for knowledge. Through the power effects of discourses like knowledge management and motivation theory, this flow of desire is curtailed in its ability to make meaning through nonknowledge as well as knowledge. This entails that formless, unpredictable desire is discursively condensed into functional motivation, whilst at the same time the protean, curious urge to connect to the externality of the world becomes structured into the instrumental, conservative management of knowledge. We reflect here on both of these discursive trajectories, as well as on some of their implications.

Data collected from interviews with mothers and one mother-to-be characterized pregnancy as a time during which a woman has little jurisdiction over her body.Some respondents found this loss of control discomfiting and unpleasant, but others told of how much they had enjoyed their pregnancies for the same reason. On this basis, we suggest that pregnancy may represent a specific 'body episode' which belies the modern Western conviction that we have and possess our bodies and are able to mould them accordingly. Second, we propose that its physical transitions provided for some informants a disturbing testament to the fact that our influence over our bodies is in fact incomplete – that they are in many ways obdurate and 'wayward'. Third, we suggest that the more positive descriptions of pregnancy could be attributed to the demands of the 'body project', the efforts that women especially invest in sculpting their bodies in culturally acceptable ways. Pregnancy therefore may represent for some women an opportunity to luxuriate in their materiality, because during this period they are unable to govern their bodies in the ways to which they are accustomed in more mundane physical circumstances.

Following the recent resurgence of interest in time and space in the social and organizational sciences, this paper examines the significance of time in prostitution. Prostitution provides a useful basis for analysis, given that it is at once similar (in its provision of consumer services) and different (in that sexuality is not fully commodified) to other industries. Time is significant to prostitution - for example, the industry is to some extent seasonal, human sexual activity being known to increase during spring and summer. Using data from studies of prostitution undertaken in various locations in the UK, the US and Australia, time is addressed from the perspective of the client and the prostitute - and we argue that time for prostitutes and clients is experienced and constructed very differently. Time is shown to be gendered in ways which mean that, paradoxically, the characteristics of time as experienced in the encounter may be the reverse of the participants' gender - female prostitutes experiencing masculine, striated time whilst clients experience or pursue a more feminine, relational time.

Abstract
This article aims to offer a consideration of hospitality in organizations, occupations and thresholds to illustrate the sociocultural dimensions of hospitality spaces. Our aim is to open up thinking around spaces of hospitality offered by organizational members, particularly those employees who work with the vulnerable 'other', across thresholds into homes and organizational spaces. Community social workers illustrate the practice of hospitality as they offer advocacy and inclusion for those individuals excluded from the wider community. The move towards professionalism has been argued as one way of establishing value, authority and confidence in the role of the community social worker and the decisions these individuals make in their work. However, critics have indicated that professionalism emphasizes practices of ideological control, norms and exclusion, in effect undermining key social work values, ethos and practice. Our results illustrate that community social workers developed asymmetric relationships of trust within their community and negotiated with other organizational members in order to create spaces for their work and inclusion.

Fournier and Grey (2000) suggest that those inhabiting the contested terrain of Critical Management Studies (CMS) share a commitment to identifying inequality and subordination in organizations and to the associated possibility of emancipation, however this is conceived. Despite their additional claim that one crucial distinction between critical and non-critical management studies is the `philosophical and methodological reflexivity' of the former (Fournier and Grey 2000: 19), our review indicates limits to this reflexivity in CMS's empirical practices — indeed, we argue these may even be counter-productive with regard to its political allegiances. To encourage wider discussion of these issues, we provide a tripartite framework of understandings of research ethics drawn from within and outside the management academy, and interrogate the opportunities and limitations of each for enriching CMS research.

This paper explores the relationship between masculinity, the body and the military through a close reading of the film Jarhead. Drawing on a Foucauldian frame of analysis, we consider three performances of the masculine military body that form key aspects of the film's representational economy: the disciplined body, an outcome of the processes of basic training; the gendered body, realized through deployment of metaphors of the feminine to strengthen the masculine conception of the military body; and the cyborgian body, the result of the man-machine interface which is rapidly developing in many militaries around the world, and which poses significant questions for performances of military masculinity. We conclude by suggesting that the film's rendering of the material and discursive body reveals an unexpected tension between the expectations of military bodies and the lived experience of their labour. As well as augmenting empirical explorations of male-worker-bodies and analysing the occupation of soldier as requiring a unique kind of body work, our contribution to the body-organization literature turns upon the claim that docile military bodies are made fit for purpose, but may actually no longer have a purpose for which to be fit.

This paper argues that our understandings of ourselves as gendered, as either masculine or feminine, are a power effect of the contemporary discourse of gender difference. The main premise of the paper is that this social construction of gender allows for gender difference to be resisted-and the form of resistance analyzed here is gender-inappropriate dress. Two forms of gender-inappropriate dress-male transvestism and female power dressing-are discussed in the paper and argued to present a particular kind of challenge to our discursively constituted sense of the rigidity and mutual exclusivity of the gender divide. This analysis is used in the conclusion to offer some critical comments regarding the strand of organizational analysis which argues for a "feminization/reeroticization" of the workplace.

It is often suggested that some occupations are inherently more suited to men or to women. Such beliefs can become norms that can have powerful effects on those who inhabit, or wish to enter, such occupations. This article explores the discursive framing of gendered occupations by considering the experience of cis female military firefighter officers in the masculine world of the Corpo de Bombeiros Militar in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo. We identify this Global South organization as extremely gendered but also profoundly colonial in its patriarchal order and its hierarchical culture and structure. We use Kristeva's and Butler's work on abjection to understand how these officers and their bodies are differentiated. Based on interviews and document analysis, we foreground their abjection using three examples: the organization's physical entrance test, the maternal body and its masculine organizational grammar. Yet, just as they are targets of exclusion, these women and their bodies are also necessary to maintain the hypermasculinity of this organization. Our contribution is to analyse abjection in a specific hypergendered organizational context where masculinity is not only amplified by the co-presence of military service and firefighting, but also where gender relations, structure and culture have deep colonial roots.