Joanna Brewis

Matter over mind? Examining the experience of pregnancy

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.

Signing My Life Away? Researching Sex and Organization

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.

Gender and management

Matthew looked at his watch as he locked his car and began to hurry across the car park. ‘7.45 am,’ he thought, ‘I really should have got in earlier today.’ Slightly breathless, he pushed open the doors of TransCorp, pausing only briefly to nod to the caretaker, and ran up the stairs to his office two steps at a time. The office looked less than welcoming — desk positioned strategically to face the door, filing cabinets gleaming, the only personal touch a small cactus on his windowsill — as he removed his jacket and sat down at his PC. It seemed only minutes later when there was a knock at the door and his boss David entered. He began immediately:

‘The Worst Thing is the Screwing’ (2): Context and Career in Sex Work

This article, and an earlier linked one, focus on the labour process of the modern Western female prostitute. Drawing on available qualitative research from the United Kingdom and Australia, and research undertaken by one of the authors in New South Wales, we argue here that the ways in which individual prostitutes understand themselves, the work that they do and their relationships with clients are at least partly informed by the discursive context of their labour. We seek to highlight the variety of discourses which currently give shape to prostitution in the modern West, and in so doing discuss the ways in which individual workers may engage with these discourses to make sense of their life-world — for example, whether they understand themselves as victims of patriarchy or as feminist activists. In this second article, then, our focus moves from the encounter between the client and the prostitute to the prostitute’s career, and we provide a discussion of the various ways of understanding how and why prostitutes enter the profession, how and why they stay in it, how and why they exit this occupational field and how and why they understand themselves in particular ways following such an exit.

Pushing speed? The marketing of fast and convenience food

The Menu: This paper explores the complex relationship between the marketing of fast and convenience food, and Western constructions and experiences of time in late Modernity, through a polemical analysis of a set of recent British television advertisements for a variety of brands in this sector. A cursory reading of these ads reveals some apparent contradictions in the deployment of time in fast/convenience food marketing: they seem to celebrate both speed (time as “sameness” and “continuity”) and nostalgia (time as “difference” and “discontinuity”). We go beyond a simple understanding of these alternative tropes as indices of competing brand strategies by interpreting their wider relations to the systemic and cultural vicissitudes of contemporary global capital. We conclude that the temporal articulation of fast and convenience foods presented in the ads is not in fact paradoxical, but dialectical. This dialectical relationship is an essential and continuing ideological structure of late Modernity.

Gender in change: gendering change

Purpose – To provide a critical review of existing contributions to gender and change management and in doing so highlight how organizational change needs to be read more readily from a gendered perspective.Design/methodology/approach – This paper argues that gender has received little attention regarding the change management side of managerial practice and reviews recent contributions to gender and change to demonstrate this. The paper then questions how men and women both cope with and drive change and whether the identified differences are more than superficial. The concept of gender is then read into management theory in order to understand how gender affects the way managers think and act, and the gendering of management is discussed. The paper concludes by outlining future research areas – change agents, entrepreneurs, female innovators, psychoanalytic treatments of change and gender experiences.Findings – The paper finds that traditional and dominant conceptions of masculine and feminine values th...

Working with sex offenders

Who is the course for? This course is ideal for all those with a duty of care who know that they do or might come into contact with sexual offenders as part of their work with non-offending populations. It will be of use to those aiming to improve their safeguarding and risk management structures and practices in line with best practice guidance at best value for money. On completion of the course, participants will have:

Foucault, Politics and Organizations: (Re)-Constructing Sexual Harassment

This article reviews the body of knowledge around workplace sexual harassment. In deploying a Foucauldian analysis, it attempts to argue that this knowledge, as part of the wider discourse on sex, may (re)produce consequences counter to those which its proponents espouse. In particular, the discussion seeks to problematize the status of harassment knowledge as truth; the depiction within this knowledge of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sex; the roles this knowledge identifies for men and women within the phenomenon of harassment; and the theme within harassment knowledge that sex is central to our existence. The conclusion aims to suggest the ways in which this kind of analysis is useful by addressing the criticisms usually levelled at Foucaults work.

Passion, Knowledge and Motivation: Ontologies of Desire:

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.

Consuming Chavs: The Ambiguous Politics of Gay Chavinism

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’.