Rebecca Gill

Empowerment, Constraint, and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Study of White Women Entrepreneurs

Discourses of entrepreneurship and research on women entrepreneurs have proliferated in the last two decades. This study argues that a particular conception of an entrepreneurial self underlies much literature on women entrepreneurs and their empowerment, and identifies several key assumptions of this entrepreneurial self. The study then assesses the motivations and experiences of several white women entrepreneurs in a northwestern state in the United States, finding that aspects of the entrepreneurial self are most evident in the reasons that women provide about why they became entrepreneurs. However, the experiences the women narrate reveal a more constraints-centered discourse, which features a particular interpretation of the frontier myth of the American West, and bears traces of an emergent, collective notion of empowerment. The authors explain such empowerment from critical and feminist perspectives, offering the concept of bounded empowerment as a lens through which to examine entrepreneurship and gender, and discussing its practical implications.

Designing Communication for the Day-to-Day Safety Oversight of Nuclear Power Plants

Inspectors of nuclear power plants manage information to make plants safer and to monitor and evaluate adherence to regulatory requirements. Integrating grounded practical theory and communication as design (CAD), we investigated the collective design of and practice of status meetings—a pair of daily meetings meant to manage information about the day-to-day safety oversight of nuclear power plants. Our analysis focused on (1) the problems these status meetings were meant to address, (2) the techniques participants used or proposed to address them, and (3) the situated ideals reflected in the designs for and practice of these meetings. Clustering the techniques illuminated designable features of status meetings (e.g., what, how much, and how to communicate, turn-taking, timing, pacing, and audience). We extend work on CAD by conceptualizing and investigating collective design work, focusing on the fit, function, and fragmentation of approaches to status meetings. We also contribute to the theory and practice of organizing for safety and reliability by making recommendations for coping when communication processes informed by best practices nonetheless produce persistent, irresolvable tensions that complicate the enactment of safety.

The Evolution of Organizational Archetypes: From the American to the Entrepreneurial Dream

Throughout much of the twentieth century, the image of the organization man dominated the cultural imagination and undergirded capitalist organizing. Yet, in the last 20 years, there has been a signal shift away from the organization man and toward the entrepreneur as an ideal. Although scholars have suggested that entrepreneurship in the new economy is rooted in neoliberal ideology, I argue that neoliberalism alone does not account for the ease with which entrepreneurialism has become a dominant discourse. By critically examining entrepreneurial discourse as communicated through US business periodicals from 2000 to 2009, I present a case for the “entrepreneurial man” as formed at the partial inclusion and/or rejection of aspects of the self made man, organization man, and neoliberalism. Ultimately, this analysis critiques the entrepreneurial man archetype as a rejection of the social contract and the embracing of a privatized, entrepreneurial American dream.

Let's Sit Forward: Investigating Interprofessional Communication, Collaboration, Professional Roles, and Physical Space at EmergiCare.

ABSTRACT Communication is key to hospital emergency department (ED) caregiving. Interventions in ED processes (and health care organizing in general) have struggled when they have ignored the professional role expectations that enable and constrain providers with patients and each other. Informed by a communication as design (CAD) approach, this study explored the intersections of professional roles, physical space, and communication at EmergiCare—an academic medical center and level-1 trauma center hospital. Based on an ethnographic analysis of field notes from 70 hours of shadowing at the EmergiCare ED, this study identified two specific communication patterns, “case talk” and “comfort talk,” that reflect different logics for communication in health care organizing. The findings indicate (a) that case and comfort talk have different status and therefore different influence in EmergiCare ED interprofessional communication and (b) that the arrangement of physical space at EmergiCare ED reflects the requirements of case talk more so than comfort talk. These findings have important implications for theory and practice, including the importance of considering the macro-discursive construction of professional roles reified in the arrangement of work space.

“Us foreigners”: intersectionality in a scientific organization

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore intersectionality as accomplished in interaction, and particularly national difference as a component of intersectionality. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use ethnographic, shadowing methods to examine intersectionality in-depth and developed vignettes to illuminate the experience of intersectionality. Findings – National difference mitigated the common assumption in scientific work that tenure and education are the most important markers of acceptance and collegiality. Moreover, national difference was a more prominent driving occupational discourse in scientific work than gender. Research limitations/implications – The data were limited in scope, though the authors see this as a necessity for generating in-depth intersectional data. Implications question the prominence of gender and (domestic) race/gender as “the” driving discourses of difference in much scholarship and offer a new view into how organizing around identity happens. Specifically...

Making time/making temporality for engaged scholarship

ABSTRACT Research on engaged scholarship has demonstrated that it requires substantial investments of time and requires the negotiation of research partners’ multiple, differing time horizons. Although the importance of time as a resource in research collaborations is generally recognized, the implications of temporal difference among research partners need further exploration. Drawing on the meso-level model of organizational temporality, we develop a heuristic framework for analyzing the temporal enactments, temporal construals, and the designable features of temporality in key practices of engagement, namely, co-missioning, co-designing, and co-enacting. The framework is illustrated with the authors’ firsthand accounts of multiple engaged research projects that highlight concrete strategies for managing the temporal difficulties of long-term engagement.

Questioning as regulatory work practice: The communicative accomplishment of reliability and safety in the oversight of nuclear power plants

ABSTRACT The safety of high hazard systems depends on the organizations that monitor and regulate them, but theorizing of these organizations tends to gloss over the specific communicative practices that comprise organizing for reliability and safety. This article investigates nuclear power plant inspectors’ communicative work practices by studying how asking and answering questions organizes their work. The data include interviews (Nu2009=u200929) and shadowing of resident inspectors at six nuclear power plants and a regional office of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The analysis of communicative work practices central to inspection work (e.g., interrogating, coordinating interaction, and keeping track) contribute to normative theory of questioning in safety organizing with implications for the communicative study of questioning, work practice, and high hazard systems.