Alison Pullen

• Professor (Full) at Macquarie University

Civil society is a concept representing space autonomous from both the market and the state, originally encompassing constructs such as families, churches, education and associations. Previous research highlights a shrinking of this space in favour of political society in countries led by populist governments. Yet, the mechanisms underpinning such...

This paper addresses how corporeal ethics can lead to progressive change in the name of justice and equality through the assembly and recognition of bodies in political action. Building on research in corporeal ethics and organizations, the paper focuses on the relations between situated bodies that are organized in acts of political assembly. The...

This paper takes its departure from Rebecca Solnit's idea that there should be “hope in darkness” as we work towards a shared preferred future that resists gendered and racial inequities and oppressions. We put forward “actionable” hope which embodies hope as an everyday action, an activism enacted by “tempered radicals” (Meyerson & Scully, 1995)....

As Organization celebrates its 30th Anniversary, this paper asks: what might it mean to be a good business school? The paper reviews research published in this journal to assess the current state of business schools, revealing a somewhat dismal picture of institutions beholden to instrumental managerialism, top-down hierarchical control, obsession...

Touch mediates relations between self‐other, writers, and readers; it is material and affective. This paper is the outcome of writing touch as a collaborative activity between eight women writers across different times and locals. In sharing experiences of touch during and beyond the pandemic, we engage with collaborative writing articulated here a...

This paper problematises the ways women’s leadership has been understood in relation to male leadership rather than on its own terms. Focussing specifically on ethical leadership, we challenge and politicise the symbolic status of women in leadership by considering the practice of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. In so doing, we demonstra...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is among society’s most pernicious and impactful social issues, causing substantial harm to health and wellbeing, and impacting women’s employability, work performance, and career opportunity. Organizations play a vital role in addressing IPV, yet, in contrast to other employee- and gender-related social issues, very...

In this paper, we offer a collective, multi‐vocal reflection on using poetry for research purposes. These were reflections on an online sub‐plenary session organized as a workshop, which was held at the European Group for Organization Studies conference in 2021. During this workshop, the first three authors presented a step‐by‐step method for doing...

https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/gleichstellung/veranstaltungen/future-oriented-leadership.shtml The conference "Beyond Wonder Woman and Superman - New Forms of Leadership in Film and TV Series" took place on March 8th 2022 and dealt with gender and leadership in famous films and (TV) series. In the morning, there were German and English contributions...

Impatience rules the systems in which we operate. Since the inauguration of ephemera in 2001, we have witnessed increasing haste which continues until this day. There are endless possibilities for us to work smarter and harder, thereby delivering more in less time and writing to comply with sector and university publishing norms. In this situation,...

This paper problematises the ways women’s leadership has been understood in relation to male leadership rather than on its own terms. Focusing specifically on ethical leadership, we challenge and politicise the symbolic status of women in leadership by considering the practice of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. In so doing, we demonstrat...

CEOs’ social and environmental activism attracts significant public and research interest. Positioned as an expression of personal morality, such activism is potentially highly influential because of CEOs’ public visibility and associated positional and resource-based power. This paper questions the assumption that CEO activism can only be explaine...

Feminist solidarity is a way of being that is embedded in cultural traditions and movements that resist women’s socio‐economic inequalities and patriarchal power. It unites women in, inter alia, a refusal to accept the ongoing prevalence of sexism and misogyny; the exploitation of women’s labour, emotions, and bodies; physical and financial violenc...

Sexual violence against women in the workplace remains rife and poorly addressed. Sexual harassment is often perpetrated by leaders, managers, or supervisors as the result of abusive power relations. Recognising and addressing the cultural tolerance for sexual violence in organizations and society is one of the steps in addressing this issue. In th...

This article is a multi‐vocal account, a form of writing differently, which captures our changing lives and livelihoods under the present global health crisis. Through the process of writing, we create a safe space to understand how the COVID‐19 pandemic exposes our gendered, intersectional lives. Our writing gives voice to suppressed thoughts and...

• Rocks. Geological forces across time and space. Non‐human beings. • Humans. Affect material encounters with rocks. • Connecting. Being. Writing… From the Artic to Eastern Finland. From Sydney to Kangaroo Island, Australia. From the north to the south, and back again. • Corporeal, affective. These rocks live with and through us. Touching rocks—...

In this introductory essay, we outline the relationship between political dissensus and radical democracy, focusing especially on how such a politics might inform the study of business ethics. This politics is located historically in the failure of liberal democracy to live up to its promise, as well as the deleterious response to that from reactio...

Domestic violence is a global pandemic. Domestic violence is gendered violence and perpetuates women’s inequality. Women experience domestic violence at higher rates than men, and the perpetrators are, more often than not, men. Organizations play an essential role in addressing domestic violence. This paper establishes the relationship between dome...

The spread of COVID‐19 acutely challenges and affects not just economic markets, demographic statistics and healthcare systems, but indeed also the politics of organizing and becoming in a new everyday life of academia emerging in our homes. Through a collage of stories, snapshots, vignettes, photos and other reflections of everyday life, this coll...

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together....

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership for diversity informed by intersectionality and radical politics. Surfacing the political character of intersectionality, the authors suggest that a leadership for diversity imbued with a commitment to political action is essential for the progress towards equality. Design/methodology/appr...

Read more at https://wordpress.com/post/relationalintersectionality.com/308

This special issue of Management Learning on ‘Writing Differently’ builds on a groundswell of resistance to ‘scientific’ norms of academic writing. These norms are restrictive, inhibit the development of knowledge and excise much of what it is to be human from our learning, teaching and research. Contributors to the special issue explore how, relea...

This occurs against the revelations about the widespread sexual harassment and persisting inequalities in the workplace such as gender pay gap and the absence of women and minoritized others from positions of power. Simultaneously, there has been a powerful backlash against women’s empowerment taking the form of anti-gender and postfeminist discour...

Bringing together research from critical diversity studies and organization theory, this edited collection challenges unspoken norms and patterns of discrimination in organizational bodies. The authors problematize the management of diversity by focusing on the differentiations between racialized, aged, gendered and sexed bodies. By taking a fresh...

This chapter takes ‘female masculinity’ as a way of teasing out the tensions and contradictions implicit in current approaches to feminine leadership and the ways that they stress the competitive advantage of women in the workplace. Current approaches to feminine leadership run the risk that the entry of the feminine into leadership might actually...

This article critically examines a 21st century online, social movement, the Everyday Sexism Project (referred to as the ESP), to analyse resistance against sexism that is systemic, entrenched and institutionalized in society, including organizations. Our motivating questions are: what new forms of feminist organizing are developing to resist sexis...

This article analyses the meanings tattooists as ‘body workers’ construct around their work. Based on an ethnographic study, the research finds that tattooists adhere to notions of non-conformity, unconventional artistry and professionalism. We locate these meanings within the cultural values and aesthetics of ‘cool’ as an admired set of attributes...

This systematic study is focused on examining women's gendered identity work in an Indian IT company. The research builds a body of work that explores female tokenism at senior positions and highlights tension in practicing gender. Research was conducted through semistructured interviews with twenty two women employees utilizing the case study appr...

Writing. Writing against. Writing for. Together, in part, with difference. Collaborative. Desire for change. Disrupting mainstream ideologies and practices. Resistance. Activism. Against neoliberalism. Feminism in its multiplicity. Fragmented. Moving forward. Rupture. Writing for social change. Writing for life

This article explores the political differences between academic activism and the recently emerged research impact agenda. While both claim that academic work can and should engage with and influence the world beyond the academic ‘ivory tower’, their political meaning and practice are radically different. Following the distinction made by Jacques R...

Woman. Active. Passive. Erased, In writing and thought.

Purpose: This paper aims to review Ruth Simpson’s contribution to the field of gender and management. Design/methodology/approach: This paper looks at Ruth Simpson’s body of work over her career through a conversation that took place between Pullen and Ross-Smith. Findings: Ruth Simpson’s contribution to gender, class, work and organizations is dis...

Research in critical business ethics has demonstrated how economic self-interest is the primary reason that businesses adopt nominally ethical practices. After reviewing this body of research, the authors propose that it can be further developed by questioning its conception of self-interest, by exploring its non-economic dimensions and by reconsid...

Current approaches to the study of affective relations are over-determined in a way that ignores their radicality, yet abstracted to such an extent that the corporeality and differentially lived experience of power and resistance is neglected. To radicalize the potential of everyday affects, this article calls for an intensification of corporeality...

We consider how genre and gender are implicated in academic writing about work organizations, noting that masterful, rational and penetrating masculine forms have long been dominant. The result is the privileging of a masculine style of writing that has come to be seen both as gender neutral and mandatory. This has served both to marginalize women'...

This paper offers a critical reading of the ethics of feminine leadership. Current approaches to feminine leadership run the risk that the entry of the feminine into leadership might actually attempt to control and serve to further oppress women’s subjectivity through its appropriation of the feminine. To advance leadership thinking ‘feminine leade...

This article joins recent critical diversity studies that point to an urgent need to revitalize the field, but goes further by showing the inherent contextual issues and power relations that frame existing contributions. Based on a theoretical reading inspired by Michel Foucault, diversity is presented as discourse that is not independent of the pa...

Noting that ethics and responsibility in business are well established fields of research and practice, we suggest that the limits of dominant approaches lie in their privileging of rationality, penchant for codification, tendency to self-congratulation, predilection to control, affinity to masculinity, blindness to social injustice, and subsumptio...

This article offers an understanding of organizational ethics as embodied and pre-reflective in origin and socio-political in practice. We explore ethics as being founded in openness and generosity towards the other, and consider the organizational implications of a 'corporeal ethics' grounded in the body before the mind. Shifting focus away from h...

This article extends our understanding of how media culture offers a critique of patriarchal gender relations in organizations. Our attention turns to comedies in media culture, arguing that parody harbours the potential to inform a politics of gender at work through the way that it denaturalizes culturally embedded gendered practices. Drawing on J...

While gender very much holds a place in organization studies, this is primarily in relation to being an object of study. Still largely silent and inexplicit is the gendered nature of what organization studies researchers themselves do when they research and write. Our overarching project in this essai is to render the gendered character of organiza...

This paper examines the relation between culture and organizations in terms of the cultural meaning and contradiction that can be located in the ‘products’ of the entertainment industry. Specifically, we focus on the meaning of Australian masculinity as it is located in the cultural expression of commercial Australian rock, or OzRock as it is commo...

As if in a magic trick, the patient vanishes, hidden behind machines and tubes, there unseen by doctors and nurses. But as in any good magic trick, the patient also reappears . . . (Zussman, 1992: 81) The opening quote summarises how ethnographies of hospital intensive care units emphasise the ways in which the bodies of patients are made visible a...

This article critically discusses domestication and women’s work in household organization at Christmas, a case of meta-organizing which fuels commercialization. Located in the growing body of work on contesting femininity that challenges traditional notions of femininity, we problematize the binary divide between women’s work at home and commercia...

This paper examines the relationship between ethics and politics in organizations with a specific focus on ethical subjectivity—that is, how people at work constitute themselves as subjects in relation to both their conduct and their sense of ethical responsibility to others. To investigate this we consider those ethics that were politically mobili...

Understood as an act of violence intentionally perpetuated by one person over another, bullying is a direct affront to ethics, especially when ethics is seen to be grounded in a primary relationship with and responsibility for other people. Existing research has attended largely to providing individualized rather than organizational explanations of...

Although studies in organizational storytelling have dealt extensively with the relationship between narrative, power and organizational change, little attention has been paid to the implications of this for ethics within organizations. This article addresses this by presenting an analysis of narrative and ethics as it relates to the practice of or...

The processes of revealing and concealing gender are easily taken for granted as a simple matter of considering something as being either exposed or covered up such that it might at times be more visible and at other times less visible. Here, revelation is associated with the uncovering of something that exists beneath that which is over it. The ve...

The paper presents a qualitative study of men who do traditionally female dominated and feminized work (specifically nursing and primary school teaching). Men are often seen as not only a minority to women in these contexts, but also their Other. The paper explores the processes of doing gender as a social and discursive practice, highlighting the...