Irene Ryan

A woman's place in hotel management: upstairs or downstairs?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to ask whether it is the notion of choice (a pro‐life work/life balance decision) that influences womans desire to strive for promotion within a hotel organisation or is the choice made for female managers by a system of organisational processes.Design/methodology/approach – This research within an international hotel group in Australia and New Zealand explored what barriers prevent women from reaching the top echelons in hotel management. A qualitative approach used semi‐structured interviews to study the intersection of gender, age and time in life with career progression and their combined impact on the glass ceiling phenomenon.Findings – The interviews revealed that the perception of glass ceiling barriers faced by women differed depending on where they were in their career cycle. They were revealed as the “long hours” culture, the old boys network, hiring practices and geographical mobility. These significantly influenced womens work‐life balance, and persona...

A career journey: an auto‐ethnographic insight

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the use of an auto‐ethnographic life history can provide rich, original data to critically analyse the interplay between the socially constructed self, a career journey over time and societal change.Design/methodology/approach – A reflexive auto‐ethnography is used as a conduit to explore a career journey. The author draws on the fluidity of ageing to make visible gendered organizational processes. The setting is New Zealand.Findings – To understand the interplay of a career journey through a life history approach and intersectional analysis reinforces the life‐long significance of gender with ageing.Originality/value – The author suggests that by reflecting on the complex interplay of ones own life through an intersectional approach can add a further dimension to scholarly thinking on the “doing” of intersectionality when considering the career journey of others.

Long hospitality careers – a contradiction in terms?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore why workers remain in long hospitality careers and to challenge the frequent portrayal of careers in the sector as temporary and unsatisfactory. Design/methodology/approach The study took an interpretative social constructionist approach. Methods used were memory-work, semi-structured interviews and intersectional analysis. Findings A key finding in this study is that career longevity in hospitality is not solely dependent on career progression. Strong social connection, a professional self-identity and complex interesting work contribute to long careers. Research limitations/implications The study contributes detailed empirical knowledge about hospitality career paths in New Zealand. Conclusions should be generalised outside the specific context with caution. Practical implications The findings that hospitality jobs can be complex and satisfying at all hierarchical ranks hold practical implications for Human Resource Managers in the service sector. To increase career longevity, hospitality employers should improve induction and socialisation processes and recognise their employees’ professional identity. Social implications This paper significantly extends the notion of belonging and social connection in service work. “Social connection” is distinctly different from social and networking career competencies. Strong social connection is created by a fusion of complex social relationships with managers, co-workers and guests, ultimately creating the sense of a respected professional identity and satisfying career. Originality/value The contemporary concept of a successful hospitality career is associated with an upwards career trajectory; however, this paper suggests that at the lower hierarchical levels of service work, many individuals enjoy complex satisfying careers with no desire for further advancement.

Understanding context in diversity management: a multi-level analysis

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to operationalize context in diversity management research. Design/methodology/approach – A case analysis provides an example of the influences of context at macro, meso and micro levels. Country context (macro) and professional and organization contexts (meso) are analysed in relation to the micro individual experiences of gender and indigeneity at work. Findings – Tensions and inconsistencies at macro and meso levels impact on diversity management at a micro level. The authors demonstrate how power and context are intertwined in the biopolitical positioning of subjects in terms of gender and indigeneity. The contested legacy of indigenous-colonial relations and societal gender dynamics are “played out” in a case from the accounting profession. Research limitations/implications – Within critical diversity studies context and power are linked in a reciprocal relationship; analysis of both is mandatory to strengthen theory and practice. The multi-level analytical fram...

The practice of intersectionality: the amateur elite sport development game

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to seek the potential of an intersectional methodology to scholars interested in processes of exclusion and subordination in organizations in particular the sport sector. The amateur sport sector in New Zealand is used as a case to address the theme: intersectional practices of organizing and their consequences. Design/methodology/approach – The conceptual paper brings together strands of interdisciplinary research to model an intersectional framework for future research development. In the paper, the interplay of shifting forms of inequality, inclusion and exclusion that are implicit in processes of elite amateur sport management, are made visible. Findings – The paper argues for an intersectional framework to understand the complex processes of inclusion, exclusion and subordination in the elite amateur sport sector. Institutionalized change is a process that can have negative or positive consequences; it depends on perceptions of those affected by it. Sport in the...

Masculinities in Practice: The Invisible Dynamics in Sports Leadership

Contexts such as sport can shed light on cultural constraints and contested spaces. New Zealand (NZ) is a small, geographically isolated country where the presence of sport is difficult to avoid. In particular, the imagery of male dominated team sports is exceedingly visible in a nation that advocates it is ‘passionate about sport’ (Obel et al, 2008: i). In saying this, localized gender regimes in sport have rendered gender invisible because of the overpowering presence of a dominant form of masculinity as hegemonic discourse (Shaw and Cameron, 2008). The privileged position given to institutionalized sport conceals continuing gender based disadvantage and is underpinned by ideologies that link men to power and political leadership. Women are largely absent from positions of power in these contexts. In a recent audit, initiated by the New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC) to quantify the extent of gender imbalance in leadership and decision-making roles at national level sports organizations, the invisibility of women was confirmed (see Cockburn et al, 2007; NZOC, 2008). Men hold 81% of national sport organization (NSO) full time CEO positions (NZOC, 2008), two-thirds of high performance coaching personnel working with senior women’s teams are male as are 77% of national governance boards, a figure that has not changed since 1994 (Cockburn et al, 2007).

The invisible norm: An exploration of the intersections of sport, gender and leadership:

The gender leadership problem is not the underrepresentation of women, but the dominant presence of groups of men and valued forms of masculinities. We argue that critical leadership studies would benefit by considering sport to explain the nuanced relationships between leadership, sport, men and masculinity and the ensuing invisible norms that marginalise women. In doing so, we respond to calls for critical leadership scholars to examine situated power relations in more reflexive and innovative ways. Sport influences, and is influenced by, the inequalities of gender, class, age and race. The intersection of sport, leadership and gender provides an otherwise unavailable insight into what is normalised, men and the masculine subtext of leadership We examine New Zealand’s relationship with Rugby Union to achieve both of these aims. We conclude that Rugby is anything but benign or irrelevant when it comes to understanding gender and leadership in New Zealand.

Profitable margins: The story behind ‘our stories’

Institutionalised sport offers a context of ‘profitable margins’ for gender and diversity scholars in management and organisation studies to understand the intersections of different identity categories. Sport is about gendered bodies which are sorted into overt, pre-determined categories, such as sex, chronological age, ethnicity and disability. The storyline is illustrative of this as it traces a methodological journey and identifies three challenges that evolved in research aimed at exploring the intersections of gender and age in sport. It will discuss how further contributions can be made by placing self as the subject and object of the research through the use of the method known as memory-work. Memory-work is a method theoretically constructed as non-hierarchical, inclusive research. In this article this method is applied from an individual stance which created tensions and unexpected challenges. Despite its limitations memory-work opens up possibilities to those researchers wanting to adopt a multiple lens within gender and diversity research.