Elaine Swan

On Bodies, Rhinestones, and Pleasures: Women Teaching Managers

In this article I review what kinds of emotions might be felt by women who are teaching managers. I counterpoise arguments that women’s bodies are over-determined as motherly or lacking in masculinity, and therefore lack embodied authority, so leading to feelings of inadequacy, fear, and anxiety with the view that there are spaces, modes and moments when women can exceed, or interrupt these interpolations to produce most pleasurable relations. As a way into the debates, I examine ideas drawn from women’s studies on the emotions associated with pleasure—pleasure specifically based on women’s embodied erotics. Arguing that pleasure is not necessarily political resistance, or indeed, unproblematic, I argue that these ideas on pleasure and erotics can be applied to our understanding of women teaching in the management classroom. I conclude that an acknowledgement of some of these pleasures may provide us with a better platform for conceptualizing teaching than simply notions of nurturance, learner-centredness or disembodied rationality.

Commodity Diversity: Smiling Faces as a Strategy of Containment

Arguing that commodities used in diversity management are relatively under-researched, this article examines a popular diversity image—a photograph of diversity as a mosaic—in order to explore what it can tell us about how racial difference is represented visually. In its close reading of the composition of the picture, the article argues that this diversity image acknowledges difference while at the same time it actually homogenizes it. The mosaic inscribes difference within a sameness grid and commodifies it. In so doing, it attempts to disable any political antagonism from minoritized groups, and placate the imagined white viewer, operating as a strategy of containment. The article contributes to critical diversity studies by drawing attention to visual techniques as technologies of ‘race making’ and visual images as important sites of power struggle.

‘Eating at us’: Representations of knowledge in the activist documentary film Food, Inc.

Abstract Writing on social movement learning and environmental adult education invokes particular views on knowledge that need further examination and development in relation to food social movements. Although food social movements take different forms, the paper argues that the politics of food knowledge is at the centre of many of these movements. Contributing to the discourse of social movement learning, this article focuses on the film Food, Inc., an important activist resource and documentary film about a particular food movement. We analyse how it legitimates certain forms of knowledge about food production and consumption and de-legitimates others. Whilst a useful case study on knowledge and film activism in itself, the article seeks to challenge what it sees as some key tenets about knowledge in social movement learning literature. One key tenet is that it is self-evident whose interests are served by ‘ordinary peoples knowledge’ and ‘scientific knowledge.’ Instead, it is argued that when it comes to collective action for food there is ambiguity, messiness and contestation about what constitutes knowledge and, in particular, anti-capitalist knowledge. But realisation of such ambiguity, messiness and contestation should not lead to paralysed inaction, but to informed and nuanced action. A question then for social movement learning practitioners is how they can mobilise social change through a broader sense of knowledge and its effects.

Let's not get too personal: critical reflection, reflexivity and the confessional turn

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to ask how we can think about critical reflection as a pedagogical practice given the “confessional turn”. By the “confessional turn” the author refers to the idea that “subjective, autobiographical and confessional modes of expression” have expanded exponentially across a wide range of social spheres, including education, the legal system, the media and the workplace. Examining these developments, this paper asks what these debates on critical reflection and confession mean for pedagogical practice.Design/methodology/approach – The main approach is a review of key debates in the literature on critical reflection and also in the wider social sciences.Findings – The discussion compares different debates. Thus it shows that for critics, the turn to the “first person” technologies is narcissistic, psychologistic and de‐politicising. On this view, critical reflective practice might be understood as an individualistic and individualising pedagogy in spite of its claims to...

Becoming Flexible: Self-Flexibility and its Pedagogies

Much of the debate on flexibility has remained at a stubbornly macro, demographic level without looking closely at individual attempts to become more flexible. This paper argues that the debate on flexibility has been dominated by attention to the structural side, looking at flexi-time and part-time contracting, for example, to the neglect of what we call self-flexibility through self-reflexivity and self-transformation. The paper begins to redress this imbalance drawing upon two different cases which examine specific forms of self-flexibility: feedback and personal malleability and risk-taking through experiential learning. Drawing upon sociological research, we seek to examine critically the ways in which self-flexibilities are taken up and pursued by employees in their attempts to remain employable and their gendered implications.

Feminist Challenges and Futures: Women, Diversity and Management Learning

Drawing on the category of the ‘social’ in social learning theory as a ‘mini case study’, we argue in this article that gender, race and class are still neglected in the field and practices of management learning. We suggest that feminist work is a growing part of the journal and field of management learning but on limited terms. Thus we argue that feminism has not been mobilized to interrogate core categories and concepts in management learning, such as the ‘social’ in social learning. In addition, we outline how issues of race and class are even more marginalized and raise a number of questions to indicate how management learning might be researched and theorized if race, gender and class were taken seriously as mainstream issues.

Oscillating politics and shifting agencies: equalities and diversity work and actor network theory

Purpose – The paper has two purposes: to introduce a new perspective on power and resistance in equalities work; and to trouble either or theorisations of success and failure in this work. Instead it offers a new means of exploring micro‐practice.Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies/develops an “actor network theory” (ANT) analysis to a single case study of Iopia, a Black woman equalities practitioner working in a prison education context. It uses this to explore the ways in which Iopia interacts with a variety of human and non‐human objects to challenge racism in this context.Findings – Iopia, from an initial position of marginality (as a Black woman experiencing racism) is able to establish herself (by virtue of this same identity as a Black woman combating racism) as central to a “new” network for equality and diversity. This new network both challenges and sustains narrow exclusionary definitions of diversity. Thus, Iopias case provides an example of the contradictions, and paradox, experi...

Uneven Relationalities, Collective Biography and Sisterly Affect in Neoliberal Universities

This article deploys a collective biographical methodology as a political and epistemological intervention in order to explore the emotional and affective politics of academic work for women in neoliberal universities. The managerial practices of contemporary universities tend to elevate disembodied reason over emotion; to repress, commodify, or co-opt emotional and affective labor; to increase individualization and competition among academic workers; and to disregard the relational work that the article suggests is essential for well-being at work. The apparent marginalization of feminist and feminine ways of being, thinking, and feeling in academia is examined through close readings of three narrative vignettes, which are based on memories of the everyday academic spaces of meetings, workshops, and mentoring. These stories explore moments of the breaking of ties among women and between men and women, as well as document how feminist relationalities can bind and exclude. The article suggests that academic ties are both part of the problem and the solution to countering neoliberal policies, and that academic relationships, especially with other women, are often experienced as unrealized spaces of hope. Building on feminist scholarship about race and diversity, the article reflects on how relational practices like collective biography create both inclusions and exclusions. Nevertheless, it suggests that the methodology of collective biography might engender more sustainable and ethical ways of being in academic workplaces because it provides the resources to begin to create a new collective imaginary of academia.

“A testing time, full of potential?”: Gender in management, histories and futures

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look back since the first edition of what was then Women in Management Review as a way of looking forward to suggest a future potential.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on some historical work on issues central to the literature and practices associated with women/gender in management. It also draws on feminist theories to outline what the author calls “testings” – theoretical, conceptual and activist challenges – to some of that early thinking.Findings – The paper emphasises the importance of differentiating women in order to understand the complexity of inequalities, and white middle class womens part in reproducing inequality. In addition, the different theoretical turns have emphasised the multiple and intersecting sources of discrimination – economic, cultural, psychosocial, social, linguistic and ideological.Originality/value – The paper offers insights into gender in management, histories and futures.

The politics of equality: professionals, states and activists

Purpose – The paper draws out the key conceptual, methodological and substantive issues raised in the papers around the politics of equalities.Design/methodology/approach – Rather than reviewing and summarising each paper in turn this introductory article synthesises the key themes from papers to develop an overview of the key issues raised in the edited collection.Findings – The papers trouble traditional dichotomies in equalities studies, suggesting complex and fluid relationships between states, activists and professionals. They also identify some key elements of current equalities work such as equalities framing, diversity interpretation and the negotiation of ambiguity produced through the seesaw of hope/failure characterising this work.Research limitations/implications – The collection highlights the continuing dearth of work around certain equalities strands, in particular, around sexualities and generation. It also suggests avenues for further work developing postcolonial analysis of equalities wo...