Carole Elliott

Articulating the entrepreneurship career: A study of German women entrepreneurs

This article examines how German women construct accounts of entrepreneurship as a gendered career. While becoming an entrepreneur was deemed preferable to not having a career, the interpretative repertoires emerging around entrepreneurial careers mainly referred to structural barriers. These included ‘anti-child anti-woman’ attitudes within German society or acceptance of the ‘male game’ due to gendered role expectations embedded within social institutions. Interpreted from a career perspective, the findings indicate that entrepreneurial careers do not meet women’s expectations as they are subject to the same gendered constraints as those faced in waged employment. The article contributes to boundaryless career theory by illustrating how, even within a country of high employment rates and talent shortage, Germany’s status as a conservative welfare state builds gender inequality into entrepreneurial women’s lives to constrain career choices.

Developing a Tradition of Scholarship: The Emergence and Evolution of the AHRD-Sponsored Journals

The Problem Research and theory are the lifeblood of academic disciplines along with the peer-reviewed journals that disseminate such scholarship. Journals become critical repositories that capture the histories and evolution of such disciplines, and their scholarly contributions generate new knowledge that can stimulate further research and improve practice. The Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD) sponsors four peer-reviewed journals that have contributed to the birth and evolution of the discipline of human resource development (HRD). Yet, little is known about how they came into being, how they have evolved, and what their impact has been within the field of HRD. The Solution This article captures the histories of the emergence and evolution of the four refereed journals sponsored by the AHRD through the unique voices of current and recent past editors of these journals. It then considers common themes of scholarship across the four journals that have helped to shape HRD. The Stakeholders Students, researchers, and scholar-practitioners in the field of HRD and related fields who are interested in learning more about the histories of the journals sponsored by the AHRD, along with their contributions to the scholarship in HRD, will benefit from reading this article.

Human Resource Development International: a celebration of the journal’s first 20 years

It is with great pleasure that we write this editorial introducing HRDI’s 20th anniversary issue. To celebrate the journal’s 20th anniversary we issued an invitation to HRD scholars to write short ...

Modernism, Postmodernism, and corporate power: historicizing the architectural typology of the corporate campus

Abstract This paper explores the potential for a ‘marriage’ of history and critical organization studies through a conceptual synthesis of critical sociology and historiography and its application to a specific organizational phenomenon. It presents a case study of the architecture of the corporate campus headquarters, a type of business complex built in exurban, rural settings, focusing on a series of campuses built in the period 1945–2005. The main purpose of this research is to identify what the transition from architectural Modernism to Postmodernism tells us about the evolution of ideologies that animate corporations in relation to wider developments in capitalism. Our conceptual framework has temporal and spatial dimensions, drawing on architectural historiography and sociological concepts, thus allowing us to connect architecture and the social in relation to the production and projection of corporate power through a delimited historical period. We identify two main drivers behind the construction of the campuses: internally, to integrate the staff as a community, and externally, to project a desired corporate image. We also demonstrate how our conceptual synthesis sheds light on the rise and fall of individual corporations. We make the following contributions to management and organizational history: first, we demonstrate how studying organizations through the lens of corporate architecture helps us understand the connections between symbolic, social and physical space and forms of corporate power. Second, we show how a marriage of history and critical sociology can help us to understand how certain ideologically freighted architectural features endure – or return – within the changing configurations of capitalism and finally, methodologically, we demonstrate how historicizing architecture can shed light on the rise and fall of individual corporations within a given socio-historical context.

Responding to editor and reviewer comments, and a tribute to Tracey Brown

In my last editorial as HRDI’s editor-in-chief I would like to follow up my editorial in volume 21, issue 1, where I discussed how to avoid a desk reject, by presenting some recommendations about how to respond to editor and reviewer comments. In doing so I am drawing on my experience of writing editorial letters for the past 3 years, and a symposium that took place during the recent University Forum for HRD conference, held at the University of Northumbria, UK from 6 to 8 June 2018. I am also taking the opportunity in this editorial to pay tribute to one of HRDI’s former managing editors, Tracey Brown, who sadly died in April 2018.

Additions to the editorial team and how to avoid a desk reject

As HRDI enters its 21st year, I start this editorial by welcoming new colleagues to our editorial team. Recognizing the need to encourage submissions to the journal from authors located in countrie...

Women Learning Leadership

This quote from May Blood, of her time working in a linen mill and as a union representative, exemplifies the focus of this chapter; how women learn leadership. In particular it indicates the significance of learning as being informal and emerging from the doing of leadership and we explore this in more detail later. The quote also points to the significance of gender, how she was often the only woman, and how women were not asking for enough. Through women leaders’ accounts Chapter 4’s analysis illustrated how gender is reproduced through social interaction and through organisational processes. This analysis demonstrated that women have to negotiate gendered processes in order to achieve and maintain leadership roles. Furthermore, it foregrounded that women leaders had limited learning opportunities from social networks to help them do this.

Women’s Experiences of Becoming Leaders

This quotation from our interview with Baroness Betty Boothroyd, first woman Speaker of the House of Commons highlights the theme of this chapter: what are women’s experiences of becoming leaders? In this quotation Betty Boothroyd indicates that becoming an MP is not something that is done in isolation. In this account she describes the context to this achievement as the culmination of different experiences, and she also points out that there are relationships that support this role including contact with others. We concluded the previous chapter by proposing that we need more critical studies to explore women’s experiences of leading, so that we can gain a deeper insight into what enables women to become leaders. In this chapter therefore, we want to examine women’s accounts of their experiences of leadership. What influences women in their practice of leadership? How do they develop their leadership role and how do they maintain it?

Women’s Leadership Identity

Our focus in this chapter is to draw on the analyses we presented in previous chapters and consider the implications these raise for women’s leadership identity. We explore why women are not readily identified as leaders particularly when, as the quote from Sayeeda Khan above illustrates, your appearance contrasts with received understandings of what leaders look like and can elicit negative responses. Drawing on Ashcraft and Mumby’s (2004) framework the chapter’s objective is to consider how discourse organises identity. That is, we will examine the relationship between broader societal narratives of gender and dominant discourses in organisations and work towards making sense of how certain discourses of leadership identity come to be privileged. We recognise that the topic of identity is a much contested and debated field. Alvesson, Ashcraft and Thomas (2008) note that within organisation studies identity can be associated with a range of organisational processes and intervention, from company mergers and project teams through to motivation and politics. Collinson (2003) examines the influence of organisations.

Common Understandings: Leadership and Leadership Development

In this chapter we have two main aims. First, we aim to highlight the limited empirical base upon which our understanding of women’s leadership is formed, particularly how they become leading women. Second, we aim to show how conceptions of leadership and leadership development are defined from a relatively narrow research base. This chapter seeks to meet these aims by providing an overview of the major trends in leadership and leadership development research.