Sara Louise Muhr

None so queer as folk: Gendered expectations and transgressive bodies in leadership

This paper investigates the relationship between the body and leadership through a case study of a transgender leader. The study shows that the leader’s body, presumed gender, and gendered appearance are salient markers that employees use to make sense of leaders and leadership, and that this gendered nature of leadership shows the deep roots of gender dichotomies and the heterosexual matrix that permeate our understanding of leadership. These two findings lead us to emphasize the need to queer leadership. All leaders experience gendered restrictions, to some extent, via the social norms and expectations of the way leadership should be performed. The construction of leadership through a transgender body reminds us to stay open to the exploration of performativity, particularly the relationships between bodies, gender, sexuality, and leadership and how any body can benefit from queering leadership.

The frantic gesture of interpassivity: Maintaining the separation between the corporate and authentic self

Purpose – With the help of Slavoj Žižeks concept of interpassivity, this paper seeks to illustrate the frantic activities performed by employees to maintain a separation between the idea of an authentic self and the idea of a corporate self. Furthermore, this paper aims to illustrate these activities empirically.Design/methodology/approach – The empirical example is based on a case study of three of the largest international consultancy firms. About 50 consultants were interviewed in this study, but this paper primarily focuses on the experiences of one of these consultants, and goes into depth with his experiences to illustrate the frantic mechanisms of interpassivity.Findings – The paper shows how the maintenance of an “authentic self” outside of the corporate culture demands a distinct and frantic activity; that this activity can best be understood as interpassive in the sense that it involves taking over the passive acknowledgement for which someone else is responsible; and how the separation of an a...

Specters of colonialism – illusionary equality and the forgetting of history in a Swedish organization

This paper investigates how an organization in Sweden, a country normally not considered among the former colonial powers, is still haunted by the specters of a western colonial history. Based on in-depth interviews as well as participant observation in the headquarters of a Swedish multinational organization, we show how an overarching colonial discourse – although not acknowledged – shapes the experience that foreign employees have of work. This leaves foreign workers in an integration dilemma, as they are expected to suppress home-country values and identities in order to become accepted, while at the same time they always are bound to fail to become ‘Swedish’ because of the same foreign origins. Although Swedish culture – partly by distancing itself from having a colonial past – has successfully built up an image of openness, we argue that without acknowledging and confronting the role that European colonial history has played in the shaping of national identity, Swedish organizations (and organizations in other western countries not assumed to have a colonial history) will not be able to integrate their foreign employees successfully.

Identity, diversity and diversity management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the identity and diversity literatures and discuss how a better understanding of the theoretical connections between the two informs both diversity research and diversity management practices. Design/methodology/approach – Literature review followed by a discussion of the theoretical and practical consequences of connecting the identity and diversity literatures. Findings – The authors inform future research in three ways. First, by showing how definitions of identity influence diversity theorizing in specific ways. Second, the authors explore how such definitions entail distinct foci regarding how diversity should be analyzed and interventions actioned. Third, the authors discuss how theoretical coherence between definitions of identity and diversity perspectives – as well as knowledge about a perspective’s advantages and limitations – is crucial for successful diversity management research and practice. Research limitations/impli...

Strangers in familiar places – using generic spaces in cross-cultural identity work

Employees working across multiple cultures are exposed to a vast number of different norms and values, and consequentially work is often a struggle to retain a coherent sense of self. However, when international workers travel, they also encounter more bland spaces where familiarity and similarity are important. These spaces appear culturally generic to the Western traveler, but are highly Westernized to bring comfort to Western employees traveling in foreign cultures. This paper argues that these spaces are important in cross-cultural identity work in the sense that international workers – professional strangers – need these places to belong and relate to familiarity and to regain a sense of identity. Drawing on an illustrative empirical vignette of an international consultant, I demonstrate how culturally generic spaces can be used in identity work of an international relations consultant.

Reflections on responsibility and justice: Coaching human rights in South Africa

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to question whether business is ethical as long as it follows rules, and on this view, to reflect over the relation between responsibility and justice.Design/methodology/approach – To exemplify this relation, the paper is based on in‐depth interviews with a human rights consultant. In this way, the paper presents a story from the field and thus follows a narrative method to retell the story of the consultant leading a human rights project in South Africa.Findings – The paper concludes that following rules is not enough to ensure ethical business in a global market place. As global business rests on dynamics and flexibility, it seems limited that most business ethics rests on bureaucratic notions. The value of also viewing ethical decision‐making as personal responsibility is introduced through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.Research limitations/implications – The study is based on in depth interviews with one person. Although this method ensures access to deepl...

Branding Atrocity: Narrating Dark Sides and Managing Organizational Image:

Research on the dark side of organizations has usually focused on atrocities committed by organizations or specific persons within them. Less attention has been paid to how organizations can utilize atrocities they had no part in creating. In this article, the manner in which atrocities can be utilized, managed and narrated in corporate image-work is discussed through two empirical illustrations: The Body Shop’s campaign against trafficking, and a campaign by a social movement organization to curb violence towards women in Congo. The article argues that analyzing differences in how organizations choose and position external atrocities in their branding can benefit our understanding of both organizational image-work and the dark side of organization.

Workload, Aspiration, and Fun: Problems of Balancing Self-Exploitation and Self-Exploration in Work Life

Contemporary working life highlights the challenge between exploitation and exploration both on a general and a more individual level. Here, we focus on the latter, and connect the critical debate regarding self-management to Marchs exploitation/exploration trade-off, as this forms a useful theoretical frame to understand how employees make sense of their self-management efforts. The employee is subjected to an individual responsibility to understand and manage an exploration of the self while handling the norms of self-exploitation that a self-management culture creates. Through an empirical study of a large group of management consultants, we explore how they perform and make sense of self-exploitation and self-exploration through three specific discourses: the discourse of workload, the discourse of aspiration, and the discourse of fun. Through these, the consultants try to identify optimal amounts of work, play, and ambition, all while handling the trade-off between self-exploitation and self-exploration. We show how this keeps failing, but how it reappears as a necessary condition for avoiding future failures. In all three discourses, the trade-off therefore presents itself as the problem of as well as the solution to self-management.

Regarding gifts—on Christmas gift exchange and asymmetrical business relations

Gift exchange, and the economy associated with it, is not restricted only to those tribal cultures where it has mostly been studied, but can also appear as an element of contemporary market economies. Yet despite this, the practical functioning of gift relationships between business partners is an understudied area. By studying the giving of corporate Christmas gifts, this article contributes to closing this gap. Gifts are seen here as signifiers of hierarchy, position and intent, and although market economy reigns supreme in Western societies, important layers of social economies—such as gift economies—dictate the way in which we behave and read the market economy. Christmas gifts thus represent more than their economic value, and have a social value that is capable of connecting or separating business partners in very specific ways. An understanding of this is crucial for companies trying to manage their image and the signals they send to business partners.

Luck of the draw? Serendipity, accident, chance and misfortune in organization and design

Designer culture has become an important feature in contemporary life. It is one that carries significant claims for design as aesthetic innovation (Ewenstein and Whyte 2009) and a source of consumer delight. ‘Designer-made’ suggests a superior type of good, one that commands a premium price in the marketplace, where mass-produced products are replaced by personalized and branded goods and services (Lipovetsky and Charles 2005). In contrast to engineers and managers, designers are cast in current discourses as artists or free spirits capable of elevating the mundane into the realm of beauty (Bolter and Gromala 2003). Design is then viewed as an engine of value creation and renewal for industrial economies, calling upon resources of creativity and imagination in place of deskilled toil and blind mechanization. Design also stands at the core of a different range of discourses – one that places it not in opposition to management but at its very heart. Organizations themselves, their architectures and cultures, are products of design where practices, meanings and relations are carefully devised and controlled by managers and armies of advisers, consultants and gurus who work for them (Casey 1996; Dunbar and Starbuck 2006; Sarasvathy, Dew, Read, and Wiltbank 2008; Yoo, Boland, and Lyytinen 2006). The process of scientific enquiry itself is viewed as guided by carefully planned and executed research designs that adhere carefully to tested procedures and protocols of scientific methodology. While different disciplines and traditions may be allowed a degree of variation, scientific discovery is then viewed, at heart, as the result of tightly managed and controlled practices, far removed from the clumsy attempts of mere amateurs and dilettantes. Design is thus part of a rationalist regime that seeks to define and control what is scientific, what is truthful and what is useful. There is, however, a different approach to organizations as well as to scientific discovery and knowledge. Instead of design, this approach emphasizes the part played by accidental discoveries and chance mutations over which no direct control can be exercised. This is a view that places great importance on surprises, good and bad, on fortune and chance. Organizations are then seen as outcomes of innumerable local initiatives, conflicts, compromises and accidents, chance discoveries and unlucky lapses, where