Sara Louise Muhr
Biographic Data
| ID | 2274246 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sara Louise Muhr |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sara Louise |
| FAMILY NAME | Muhr |
| SIGNATURE | MUHR S L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3198-9718 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 193 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Differences in and around organizations
The anti-DEI agenda: Navigating the impact of Trump’s second term on diversity, equity and inclusion
Purpose This article aims to critically analyse and critique the impact of President Donald Trump’s second term on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States of America and beyond. It aims to document the policy changes enacted under Trump, explore the resulting consequences for various sectors (government, higher education and private sectors) and assess the broader implications for social justice and global conversat…
The business of pornography: Contributions from organization studies—Introduction to the special section
Organization and management research has largely ignored the pornography industry. In many ways this is understandable; production often takes place under disturbing conditions, and the dissemination and consumption of porn is considered taboo. Nonetheless, we cannot neglect the fact that it is a multi-billion-dollar industry with significant economic, social and cultural impact. We believe scholars have an obligation to study and understand not …
Accounting for change: The impact and implications of using the intervention-based research method GenderLAB at a big four accounting firm
Purpose This article shows how qualitative interventions can engender both an immediate impact and the possibility of sustained change at the research site. We investigate this by assessing the impact generated from a research project that utilized the GenderLAB method. In doing so, we expand the notion of impact to include the changes that intervention-based research can initiate at a research site. Design/methodology/approach We illustrate the …
Time management between the personalisation and collectivisation of productivity: The case of adopting the Pomodoro time-management tool in a four-day workweek company
Time-management technologies and their adoption into daily working life have been discussed as solutions for managing individual productivity and as problems that intensify individualised productivity, enhance the norms of busyness and disconnect colleagues from one another. However, drawing on the case study of a company that implemented a four-day workweek, this paper argues that this is not always so. In our case company, a digital marketing a…
Theorising work–life balance endeavours as a gendered project of the self: The case of senior executives in Denmark
Recent work–life balance (WLB) studies offer considerable insight into the challenges and strategies of achieving WLB for senior managers. This study shifts the focus from asking how to asking why individuals are so invested in pursuing a particular kind of WLB. Through analysing 62 life history interviews with male and female senior executives in Denmark, we develop the concept of the gendered project of the self to theorise WLB. We show how for…
Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries
This special issue explores how solidarity in difference can be organized as a mutual relation that is based on participation on equal footing, fostering bonds of heterogeneity beyond conceptualizations of solidarity that depend on homogeneity. In this editorial and the five articles comprising this special issue, not only are the challenges to such an endeavor explored, but also the achievements in the present and emerging imaginaries of organiz…
Hyphenated voices: The organization of racialized subjects in contemporary Danish public debate
Applying a conceptual framework of hyphenation, understood as the organization of racialized subjects, this paper investigates rhetorical strategies for working existing hyphens as practiced within an Action Aid Denmark initiative to train young people to become public opinion leaders in anti-discrimination matters. We identify three such rhetorical strategies: (1) Silencing: Racialized subjects are organized by majority voices that speak of/for …
Organizational norms of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in Danish academia: From recognizing through contesting to queering pervasive rhetorical legitimation strategies
Studies of sexual harassment in professional contexts, including academia, provide detailed explanations of the predominance and pervasiveness of sexist organizational norms that enable harassing behavior—and offer a thorough critique of the structures and practices that support and reproduce these norms. When sexist organizational norms are linked to acts of sexual harassment, it becomes clear that harassment is systemic, and that organizations …
From institutionalized othering to disruptive collaboration: A postcolonial analysis of the police force in Greenland
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the construction and everyday maintenance of racialized psychological borders in the Greenlandic Police Force reproduce a postcolonial hierarchy of knowledge, where Danish knowledge and perceptions of professionalism are constructed as superior to Greenlandic knowledge and perceptions of professionalism. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on an ethnographic study comprising 5 day…
The im-/possibility of hybrid inclusion: Disrupting the ‘happy inclusion’ story with the case of the Greenlandic Police Force
The notion of uniqueness, as articulated at the centre of most organisational inclusion literature, is inextricably tied to Western-centric idea(l)s of the autonomous, individual and self-sufficient subject, stripped of historical inequalities and relational embeddedness. Following a critical inclusion agenda and seeking alternatives to this predominant view, we apply a Bhabhaian postcolonial lens to the ethnographic study of organisational effor…
Repoliticizing diversity work? Exploring the performative potentials of norm‐critical activism
Diversity management efforts often turn diversity issues into a business case, thereby depoliticizing these issues and shying away from more political concerns of inequality and discriminating norms of difference. In this study, we explore the performative potential of activist practices to promote the repoliticization of organizational diversity work. To do so, we draw on interviews with three explicitly norm‐critical activists, discussing how i…
Between vulnerability and resistance: How a woman copes with dramatic implications of Covid‐19 in Russia
During the summer of 2020, a woman in Russia not only contracted COVID-19 herself but also lost her husband to virus-related health complications and, later, lost her job. This article is based on interviews with her about vulnerability and ways of coping with the pandemic's effects as the sole caregiver and breadwinner for her 4-year-old child. Her ways of dealing with this chain of severe, life-changing events inspired us to analyze her case th…
Breaking the unchangeable pattern of old habits in organization studies: Introducing the view of Ravaission’s notion of habit as a dynamic inclination
This paper will present and discuss two perspectives on habits in organization studies. The first, which we label the conservative view, sees habit as automatic behaviours: rigidified and lifeless. The second perspective, which is far less discussed in organization studies, views habit as a dynamic inclination and emphasizes its relationship to agency and change. Aiming at debunking the conservative view of habit and unfolding the potential of a …
Performative identity regulation in rehabilitative home care work: An analysis of how experts’ embodied mediation of the managerial ideology ‘activates’ new frontline identities
This article explores how therapists when introduced as new so-called frontline ‘experts’ in home care work, become both discursive and embodied mediators for the managerial ideology of rehabilitation, and how their presence regulates the care aides’ subjectivities at work. We show how the managerial discourse of rehabilitation mobilizes the care aides to transform their identity from traditional nurturing to rehabilitation, as a result of promot…
Holding on to both ends of a pole: Empowering feminine sexuality and reclaiming feminist emancipation
In this article, we study pole dancing as a potential site of feminist theorization. Finding that instructors at pole dancing studios figure themselves in and through tensions between empowering feminine sexuality and the taint of sexualized labour, we discuss the productive potential of these tensions in terms of postfeminist discourse, on the one hand, and the feminist critique of this discourse, on the other. Holding on to both ends of this po…
Sexual Harassment in Higher Education - Experiences and Perceptions among Students at a Danish University
Taking higher education to be an arena in which professional and social interaction has a special propensity to overlap, this paper investigates university students’ experiences and perceptions of sexual harassment. Based on survey data, we find varying responses according to their gender and nationality, indicating that men and Danish students are least likely to experience and perceive situations as sexual harassment. Further, we find a wide-sp…
Together we rise”: Collaboration and contestation as narrative drivers of the Women’s March
The Women’s March is arguably the most important counter-narrative to Trump’s post-truth regime, but does it also present a leadership alternative to his populist and authoritarian style? And is this alternative necessarily better than currently dominant social formations? In this paper, we argue that the Women’s March is partially configured by similar forces of affective circulation as those governing pro-Trump narratives, but that it is differ…
Coding military command as a promiscuous practice? Unsettling the gender binaries of leadership metaphors
Despite abundant scholarship addressed to gender equity in leadership, much leadership literature remains invested in gender binaries. Metaphors of leadership are especially dependent on gender oppositions, and this article treats the scholarly practice of coding leadership through gendered metaphor as a consequential practice of leadership unto itself. Drawing on queer theory, the article develops a mode of analysis, called ‘promiscuous coding’,…
Desired diversity and symptomatic anxiety: Theorising failed diversity as Lacanian lack
This paper conceptualises organisational diversity as constituted by psychoanalytic lack. Empirically, we show how diversity as Lacanian lack is understood as nothing in or of itself, but as an empty signifier with no signified. The lack of diversity becomes a catalyst for desiring particular ideas of diversity that, however, constantly change due to the empty form of diversity. Anxiety manifests itself in the obsession of unobtainable idealised …
Managing protean diversity: An empirical analysis of how organizational contextual dynamics derailed and dissolved global workforce diversity
Recently, global workforce diversity and its management have received criticism for not paying attention to the contextual influence stemming from socially constructed dialectics of power and politics. These contextual dynamics, however, tend to be viewed as external to the organization. In this article, we follow the call for critically investigating the contexts influencing diversity management by analyzing the development of a global human res…
Identity, diversity and diversity management: On theoretical connections, assumptions and implications for practice
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 …
Situated Transgressiveness: Exploring One Transwoman's Lived Experiences across Three Situated Contexts
This study investigates the lived experience of one transwoman, Claire, a public advocate and a manager with client services responsibilities. We examine Claire's story in order to discuss how situated contexts, such as different roles, locales and interactions, shape the way she experiences and perceives her trans body and gender identity. In particular, our analysis centres on how Claire's lived experience of personal and professional life shif…
Luck of the draw? Serendipity, accident, chance and misfortune in organization and design
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,In proving foresight may be vain:The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ menGang aft agley,An’ lea'e us nought but grief an’ pain,For promis'd joy!(Robert Burns) Designer
On Gendered Technologies and Cyborg Writing
Since H élène C ixous introduced it in 1975, the notion of a specifically feminine writing — écriture féminine — has been discussed as a provocative and potentially disruptive form of representation that breaks with masculine and authoritarian modes thereof. However, in this paper we will discuss how the notion of écriture féminine may itself be at risk of getting trapped within the gender binary its progenitors tried to break free from. As a com…
Caught in the Gendered Machine: On the Masculine and Feminine in Cyborg Leadership
Many studies have shown that female managers have to work harder than men to gain recognition, and that this often leads top female managers away from the leadership style characterized by soft skills and emotional understanding. Instead, another characterization can be seen; that of tough gendered machines fighting their way to the top - cyborgs. This article uses Haraway's metaphor of the cyborg to explore the way in which a top female manger t…
Professionalization as a Branding Activity: Occupational Identity and the Dialectic of Inclusivity‐Exclusivity
The current literature yields contrasting diagnoses of the diversity problem in the professions: (a) a dominant ‘absence’ view, which explains the exclusion of certain people as a lack to be rectified and (b) an alternative ‘presence’ view, which explains exclusion as a consequence of tacit inclusion. Although the latter challenges the former by exposing the historical interdependence of exclusion and inclusion, it fails to illuminate a path towa…
Coding military command as a promiscuous practice? Unsettling the gender binaries of leadership metaphors
Despite abundant scholarship addressed to gender equity in leadership, much leadership literature remains invested in gender binaries. Metaphors of leadership are especially dependent on gender oppositions, and this article treats the scholarly practice of coding leadership through gendered metaphor as a consequential practice of leadership unto itself. Drawing on queer theory, the article develops a mode of analysis, called ‘promiscuous coding’,…
Identity, diversity and diversity management: On theoretical connections, assumptions and implications for practice
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 …
Situated Transgressiveness: Exploring One Transwoman's Lived Experiences across Three Situated Contexts
This study investigates the lived experience of one transwoman, Claire, a public advocate and a manager with client services responsibilities. We examine Claire's story in order to discuss how situated contexts, such as different roles, locales and interactions, shape the way she experiences and perceives her trans body and gender identity. In particular, our analysis centres on how Claire's lived experience of personal and professional life shif…
The dream consultant: Productive fantasies at work
Consultants are known to work extreme hours. We show empirically how consultants fantasize about off-work activities, which are impossible to realize with their work schedule. These fantasies are, however, not obstructing their work, but important to justify the extreme hours and sustain desire for work. We draw on Lacan's notion of desire as the Other's desire and analyze the consultants' desire as controlled by a need for recognition at work. W…
Theorising work–life balance endeavours as a gendered project of the self: The case of senior executives in Denmark
Recent work–life balance (WLB) studies offer considerable insight into the challenges and strategies of achieving WLB for senior managers. This study shifts the focus from asking how to asking why individuals are so invested in pursuing a particular kind of WLB. Through analysing 62 life history interviews with male and female senior executives in Denmark, we develop the concept of the gendered project of the self to theorise WLB. We show how for…
Between vulnerability and resistance: How a woman copes with dramatic implications of Covid‐19 in Russia
During the summer of 2020, a woman in Russia not only contracted COVID-19 herself but also lost her husband to virus-related health complications and, later, lost her job. This article is based on interviews with her about vulnerability and ways of coping with the pandemic's effects as the sole caregiver and breadwinner for her 4-year-old child. Her ways of dealing with this chain of severe, life-changing events inspired us to analyze her case th…
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 tw…
Repoliticizing diversity work? Exploring the performative potentials of norm‐critical activism
Diversity management efforts often turn diversity issues into a business case, thereby depoliticizing these issues and shying away from more political concerns of inequality and discriminating norms of difference. In this study, we explore the performative potential of activist practices to promote the repoliticization of organizational diversity work. To do so, we draw on interviews with three explicitly norm‐critical activists, discussing how i…
On Gendered Technologies and Cyborg Writing
Since H élène C ixous introduced it in 1975, the notion of a specifically feminine writing — écriture féminine — has been discussed as a provocative and potentially disruptive form of representation that breaks with masculine and authoritarian modes thereof. However, in this paper we will discuss how the notion of écriture féminine may itself be at risk of getting trapped within the gender binary its progenitors tried to break free from. As a com…
The anti-DEI agenda: Navigating the impact of Trump’s second term on diversity, equity and inclusion
Purpose This article aims to critically analyse and critique the impact of President Donald Trump’s second term on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States of America and beyond. It aims to document the policy changes enacted under Trump, explore the resulting consequences for various sectors (government, higher education and private sectors) and assess the broader implications for social justice and global conversat…
Organizational norms of sexual harassment and gender discrimination in Danish academia: From recognizing through contesting to queering pervasive rhetorical legitimation strategies
Studies of sexual harassment in professional contexts, including academia, provide detailed explanations of the predominance and pervasiveness of sexist organizational norms that enable harassing behavior—and offer a thorough critique of the structures and practices that support and reproduce these norms. When sexist organizational norms are linked to acts of sexual harassment, it becomes clear that harassment is systemic, and that organizations …
Sexual Harassment in Higher Education - Experiences and Perceptions among Students at a Danish University
Taking higher education to be an arena in which professional and social interaction has a special propensity to overlap, this paper investigates university students’ experiences and perceptions of sexual harassment. Based on survey data, we find varying responses according to their gender and nationality, indicating that men and Danish students are least likely to experience and perceive situations as sexual harassment. Further, we find a wide-sp…
Together we rise”: Collaboration and contestation as narrative drivers of the Women’s March
The Women’s March is arguably the most important counter-narrative to Trump’s post-truth regime, but does it also present a leadership alternative to his populist and authoritarian style? And is this alternative necessarily better than currently dominant social formations? In this paper, we argue that the Women’s March is partially configured by similar forces of affective circulation as those governing pro-Trump narratives, but that it is differ…
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. Thi…
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 traveli…
Managing protean diversity: An empirical analysis of how organizational contextual dynamics derailed and dissolved global workforce diversity
Recently, global workforce diversity and its management have received criticism for not paying attention to the contextual influence stemming from socially constructed dialectics of power and politics. These contextual dynamics, however, tend to be viewed as external to the organization. In this article, we follow the call for critically investigating the contexts influencing diversity management by analyzing the development of a global human res…
Ethical interruption and the creative process: A reflection on the new
Both organizations and management theory seem obsessed with creativity and 'the new,' but lately, the 'newness' of this so-called 'new' has also been questioned. With this paper, I continue in this critical fashion and point to the peculiar fact that the obsession with the new is accompanied by just as strong a rejection of that which is different. Overcoming this paradox, the paper emphasizes the relatively ignored ethical element in organizatio…
Breaking the unchangeable pattern of old habits in organization studies: Introducing the view of Ravaission’s notion of habit as a dynamic inclination
This paper will present and discuss two perspectives on habits in organization studies. The first, which we label the conservative view, sees habit as automatic behaviours: rigidified and lifeless. The second perspective, which is far less discussed in organization studies, views habit as a dynamic inclination and emphasizes its relationship to agency and change. Aiming at debunking the conservative view of habit and unfolding the potential of a …
Performative identity regulation in rehabilitative home care work: An analysis of how experts’ embodied mediation of the managerial ideology ‘activates’ new frontline identities
This article explores how therapists when introduced as new so-called frontline ‘experts’ in home care work, become both discursive and embodied mediators for the managerial ideology of rehabilitation, and how their presence regulates the care aides’ subjectivities at work. We show how the managerial discourse of rehabilitation mobilizes the care aides to transform their identity from traditional nurturing to rehabilitation, as a result of promot…
Holding on to both ends of a pole: Empowering feminine sexuality and reclaiming feminist emancipation
In this article, we study pole dancing as a potential site of feminist theorization. Finding that instructors at pole dancing studios figure themselves in and through tensions between empowering feminine sexuality and the taint of sexualized labour, we discuss the productive potential of these tensions in terms of postfeminist discourse, on the one hand, and the feminist critique of this discourse, on the other. Holding on to both ends of this po…
Desired diversity and symptomatic anxiety: Theorising failed diversity as Lacanian lack
This paper conceptualises organisational diversity as constituted by psychoanalytic lack. Empirically, we show how diversity as Lacanian lack is understood as nothing in or of itself, but as an empty signifier with no signified. The lack of diversity becomes a catalyst for desiring particular ideas of diversity that, however, constantly change due to the empty form of diversity. Anxiety manifests itself in the obsession of unobtainable idealised …
Ethical interruption and the creative process: A reflection on the new
Both organizations and management theory seem obsessed with creativity and 'the new,' but lately, the 'newness' of this so-called 'new' has also been questioned. With this paper, I continue in this critical fashion and point to the peculiar fact that the obsession with the new is accompanied by just as strong a rejection of that which is different. Overcoming this paradox, the paper emphasizes the relatively ignored ethical element in organizatio…
Caught in the Gendered Machine: On the Masculine and Feminine in Cyborg Leadership
Many studies have shown that female managers have to work harder than men to gain recognition, and that this often leads top female managers away from the leadership style characterized by soft skills and emotional understanding. Instead, another characterization can be seen; that of tough gendered machines fighting their way to the top - cyborgs. This article uses Haraway's metaphor of the cyborg to explore the way in which a top female manger t…
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…
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 traveli…
The dream consultant: Productive fantasies at work
Consultants are known to work extreme hours. We show empirically how consultants fantasize about off-work activities, which are impossible to realize with their work schedule. These fantasies are, however, not obstructing their work, but important to justify the extreme hours and sustain desire for work. We draw on Lacan's notion of desire as the Other's desire and analyze the consultants' desire as controlled by a need for recognition at work. W…
Professionalization as a Branding Activity: Occupational Identity and the Dialectic of Inclusivity‐Exclusivity
The current literature yields contrasting diagnoses of the diversity problem in the professions: (a) a dominant ‘absence’ view, which explains the exclusion of certain people as a lack to be rectified and (b) an alternative ‘presence’ view, which explains exclusion as a consequence of tacit inclusion. Although the latter challenges the former by exposing the historical interdependence of exclusion and inclusion, it fails to illuminate a path towa…
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. Thi…
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 tw…
Luck of the draw? Serendipity, accident, chance and misfortune in organization and design
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,In proving foresight may be vain:The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ menGang aft agley,An’ lea'e us nought but grief an’ pain,For promis'd joy!(Robert Burns) Designer
On Gendered Technologies and Cyborg Writing
Since H élène C ixous introduced it in 1975, the notion of a specifically feminine writing — écriture féminine — has been discussed as a provocative and potentially disruptive form of representation that breaks with masculine and authoritarian modes thereof. However, in this paper we will discuss how the notion of écriture féminine may itself be at risk of getting trapped within the gender binary its progenitors tried to break free from. As a com…
Situated Transgressiveness: Exploring One Transwoman's Lived Experiences across Three Situated Contexts
This study investigates the lived experience of one transwoman, Claire, a public advocate and a manager with client services responsibilities. We examine Claire's story in order to discuss how situated contexts, such as different roles, locales and interactions, shape the way she experiences and perceives her trans body and gender identity. In particular, our analysis centres on how Claire's lived experience of personal and professional life shif…
Managing protean diversity: An empirical analysis of how organizational contextual dynamics derailed and dissolved global workforce diversity
Recently, global workforce diversity and its management have received criticism for not paying attention to the contextual influence stemming from socially constructed dialectics of power and politics. These contextual dynamics, however, tend to be viewed as external to the organization. In this article, we follow the call for critically investigating the contexts influencing diversity management by analyzing the development of a global human res…
Identity, diversity and diversity management: On theoretical connections, assumptions and implications for practice
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 …
Desired diversity and symptomatic anxiety: Theorising failed diversity as Lacanian lack
This paper conceptualises organisational diversity as constituted by psychoanalytic lack. Empirically, we show how diversity as Lacanian lack is understood as nothing in or of itself, but as an empty signifier with no signified. The lack of diversity becomes a catalyst for desiring particular ideas of diversity that, however, constantly change due to the empty form of diversity. Anxiety manifests itself in the obsession of unobtainable idealised …
Together we rise”: Collaboration and contestation as narrative drivers of the Women’s March
The Women’s March is arguably the most important counter-narrative to Trump’s post-truth regime, but does it also present a leadership alternative to his populist and authoritarian style? And is this alternative necessarily better than currently dominant social formations? In this paper, we argue that the Women’s March is partially configured by similar forces of affective circulation as those governing pro-Trump narratives, but that it is differ…
Coding military command as a promiscuous practice? Unsettling the gender binaries of leadership metaphors
Despite abundant scholarship addressed to gender equity in leadership, much leadership literature remains invested in gender binaries. Metaphors of leadership are especially dependent on gender oppositions, and this article treats the scholarly practice of coding leadership through gendered metaphor as a consequential practice of leadership unto itself. Drawing on queer theory, the article develops a mode of analysis, called ‘promiscuous coding’,…
Performative identity regulation in rehabilitative home care work: An analysis of how experts’ embodied mediation of the managerial ideology ‘activates’ new frontline identities
This article explores how therapists when introduced as new so-called frontline ‘experts’ in home care work, become both discursive and embodied mediators for the managerial ideology of rehabilitation, and how their presence regulates the care aides’ subjectivities at work. We show how the managerial discourse of rehabilitation mobilizes the care aides to transform their identity from traditional nurturing to rehabilitation, as a result of promot…
Holding on to both ends of a pole: Empowering feminine sexuality and reclaiming feminist emancipation
In this article, we study pole dancing as a potential site of feminist theorization. Finding that instructors at pole dancing studios figure themselves in and through tensions between empowering feminine sexuality and the taint of sexualized labour, we discuss the productive potential of these tensions in terms of postfeminist discourse, on the one hand, and the feminist critique of this discourse, on the other. Holding on to both ends of this po…
Sexual Harassment in Higher Education - Experiences and Perceptions among Students at a Danish University
Taking higher education to be an arena in which professional and social interaction has a special propensity to overlap, this paper investigates university students’ experiences and perceptions of sexual harassment. Based on survey data, we find varying responses according to their gender and nationality, indicating that men and Danish students are least likely to experience and perceive situations as sexual harassment. Further, we find a wide-sp…
Breaking the unchangeable pattern of old habits in organization studies: Introducing the view of Ravaission’s notion of habit as a dynamic inclination
This paper will present and discuss two perspectives on habits in organization studies. The first, which we label the conservative view, sees habit as automatic behaviours: rigidified and lifeless. The second perspective, which is far less discussed in organization studies, views habit as a dynamic inclination and emphasizes its relationship to agency and change. Aiming at debunking the conservative view of habit and unfolding the potential of a …
The im-/possibility of hybrid inclusion: Disrupting the ‘happy inclusion’ story with the case of the Greenlandic Police Force
The notion of uniqueness, as articulated at the centre of most organisational inclusion literature, is inextricably tied to Western-centric idea(l)s of the autonomous, individual and self-sufficient subject, stripped of historical inequalities and relational embeddedness. Following a critical inclusion agenda and seeking alternatives to this predominant view, we apply a Bhabhaian postcolonial lens to the ethnographic study of organisational effor…
Repoliticizing diversity work? Exploring the performative potentials of norm‐critical activism
Diversity management efforts often turn diversity issues into a business case, thereby depoliticizing these issues and shying away from more political concerns of inequality and discriminating norms of difference. In this study, we explore the performative potential of activist practices to promote the repoliticization of organizational diversity work. To do so, we draw on interviews with three explicitly norm‐critical activists, discussing how i…
Between vulnerability and resistance: How a woman copes with dramatic implications of Covid‐19 in Russia
During the summer of 2020, a woman in Russia not only contracted COVID-19 herself but also lost her husband to virus-related health complications and, later, lost her job. This article is based on interviews with her about vulnerability and ways of coping with the pandemic's effects as the sole caregiver and breadwinner for her 4-year-old child. Her ways of dealing with this chain of severe, life-changing events inspired us to analyze her case th…
Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries
This special issue explores how solidarity in difference can be organized as a mutual relation that is based on participation on equal footing, fostering bonds of heterogeneity beyond conceptualizations of solidarity that depend on homogeneity. In this editorial and the five articles comprising this special issue, not only are the challenges to such an endeavor explored, but also the achievements in the present and emerging imaginaries of organiz…
Hyphenated voices: The organization of racialized subjects in contemporary Danish public debate
Applying a conceptual framework of hyphenation, understood as the organization of racialized subjects, this paper investigates rhetorical strategies for working existing hyphens as practiced within an Action Aid Denmark initiative to train young people to become public opinion leaders in anti-discrimination matters. We identify three such rhetorical strategies: (1) Silencing: Racialized subjects are organized by majority voices that speak of/for …
Sociology (28 works) · Political science (21 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (18 works) · Gender Diversity and Inequality (16 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works)