Search results

My personal and professional lives have blurred into each other throughout my academic career. This paper focuses on one aspect of this blurring—that certain colleagues believe I am intimate with my coauthors, and that I engage in or have experienced the sexual activities which my research has explored—and seeks to account for this interpretation of my private life through the lens of my public endeavours. In discussing such 'signings' of my work, I suggest that they are underpinned by the heterosexual matrix, and perhaps ratify my participation in the academy as a woman. Moreover, such attributions of authorship point to interesting questions concerning the methodology of sex research and the influence that an author's biography has on their research direction. I also contend that these constructions of me as an author indicate that organization studies still struggles with the idea of sex representing a meaningful topic of enquiry.

Organisation studies has paid little attention to the contemporary private security industry, despite its enormous recent growth as a supplement to or replacement for state military services in theatres of conflict. To address this neglect, we investigate the workers at the heart of the industry: private security employees or contractors. Amidst widespread and extremely critical media coverage of their activities, we consider the individual contractor as a central agent of contemporary conflict, identifying three main objections to their deployment: a lack of just cause, virtue and professional legitimacy. Using scholarship on identity work and stigma management more specifically, we analyse contractors' accounts of their employment to identify the communicative strategies they employ to challenge the stigma attributed to their occupation and/or to them as incumbents. Our data set is memoirs written by five British contractors, published between 2006 and 2011. We also suggest that data such as these are under-utilised in organisation studies' treatment of identity work, because they represent a distinctive form of this work which we label identity writing.

This article investigates the organization of Christmas in 15 women's magazines from the 1930s and 2009, using an analytical strategy of close reading to explore the discursive imperatives these texts seem to (re)create around female 'festive labour'. We arrive at two conclusions: (1) a critique of popular perceptions of the 'problem of gift giving' as a contemporary phenomenon; and (2) a shift from the 'domestic goddess' discourse of the 1930s to a construction of women's role in performing Christmas that rests on a somewhat contradictory rendering of managerialism. Our rather pessimistic endpoint is that the pressure on women to pull off the perfect Christmas has intensified—at least in these popular cultural texts—over the last 70-plus years, but at the same time there is a sense here that even the most intensive endeavours are doomed never to entirely succeed.

Paul Johnson's (2008) article 'Rude Boys', published in an earlier issue of Sociology , scrutinizes critically the commodification of the male chav for consumption by middle-class homosexual men. This phenomenon, which Andrew Fraser (2005) calls 'chavinism', takes a number of different forms: pornography, sex lines, club nights etc. In part as a response to Johnson's arguments concerning the ways in which chavinism 'further devalue[s] the individuals and groups' it depicts, creating a form of 'symbolic violence' (2008: 67), our article speculates further on the ambiguous implications of this minority consumer culture. To do this, we develop Connell's (1992, 2002; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005) concept of 'hegemonic masculinity' to discuss what gay chavinism might mean for 'hegemonic homosexuality'.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which Canadian lesbians and gay men manage their non‐hegemonic identities in organizations, given the relative paucity of qualitative data in the area, the importance of work as a site for identity projects in the contemporary west and growing pressure on employers to attend to sexual orientation as part of diversity management initiatives.Design/methodology/approachData were gathered through 16 semi‐structured interviews with lesbian and gay workers from three Canadian cities.FindingsThe data emphasize the importance of organizational environments in which queer people feel able to integrate their identity at work with their identity in the rest of their lives. Role models were identified as especially important in this regard, particularly for women who talked of the organizational "double jeopardy" of being female and a lesbian.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the data reported here are not generalizable, it is worrying that they echo many earlier studies on the negative aspects of lesbian and gay workplace experience. One key implication is that those employees who conform most closely to what Butler calls the heterosexual matrix are less likely to experience problems related to their sexual orientation.Originality/valueThis paper indicates several themes which are not extensively travelled in the existing literature, including the suggestion that coming out to colleagues is easier if one is in a long‐term relationship, as well as a sense that having to negotiate such disclosure simultaneously enhances work‐related interpersonal skills.

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.