Jo Brewis

• The Open University

Drawing on interview and diary data from twenty-one women in the UK, this paper focuses on how endometriosis, a long-term gynaecological condition, is lived and navigated alongside paid employment. It discusses the intersectional dynamics of gender, disability, race and ethnicity to explore how certain bodies are precarized across space and time by...

This paper uses Leder's work on dys-appearance to explore qualitative data from interviews with 50 menopausal cis women working in the UK and the Netherlands. We focus on the viscerality of menopausal experiences, how these disrupt women's working lives and how they respond accordingly. We propose a threefold framework of misrecognition on this bas...

Purpose The 7th decade manager (7DM) is an overlooked and under-researched group in organisation studies. This paper explores the changes which 7DMs experience in later life through the lenses of age, work and identity. Design/methodology/approach An interpretivist methodology was adopted and data were obtained via semi-structured interviews with...

In this short editorial conclusion, we draw out the key messages offered throughout the volume's chapters, highlighting areas where these chapters complement each other and/or make contributions to the knowledge base on menopause transitions and the workplace. This foundation is then used to re-assess areas which require further development, or whi...

Introduction This chapter focuses on cis women's experiences of problematic hot flushes at work and how their shared workspaces are often beset with tensions around temperature and ventilation as a result. I draw loosely on Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ (2010, 2015, 2017, 2020) reading of spatial justice, and Sophie Watson's (2020) use of th...

When a pregnancy ends in England and Wales, statutory time away from paid employment is limited to circumstances where there is a live birth or stillbirth. Forms of leave, such as Maternity Leave or Paternity Leave, depend on parental status derived from the civil registration of a new person or a post‐viability stillbirth. Other early pregnancy en...

¬This paper reviews research on cis women’s bodily self-discipline in the workplace. We compare literature exemplifying the ‘bodily turn’ in organization and management studies to scholarship on menopause at work, to identify key themes across these oeuvres and the significance of the blind spots in each. There is little overlap between them: only...

It is often suggested that some occupations are inherently more suited to men or to women. Such beliefs can become norms that can have powerful effects on those who inhabit, or wish to enter, such occupations. This article explores the discursive framing of gendered occupations by considering the experience of cis female military firefighter office...

This paper contributes to debates on the intersections between organizations, the body, and reproduction by exploring how the non‐reproductive female body is discursively (re)constructed by organizations which provide fertility treatment, such as private clinics and fertility magazines. Organization studies has neglected the non‐reproductive body,...

Although Collier’s [2002. “The Changing University and the (Legal) Academic Career – Rethinking the Relationship between Women, Men and the Private Life of the Law School.” Legal Studies 22: 1–32] ‘emotional economy’ of academia is well travelled in management and organization studies research, this literature is predominantly informed by Hochschil...

In discussing the events leading up to the resignation of the former Open University Vice Chancellor in April 2018, we focus on the enactment of a form of resistance against proposals for the university through a WhatsApp group, enabling rapid information exchange, discussion of tactics and concrete planning for action. We suggest our group – ‘the...

This paper offers two key arguments. The first is that HRM scholars and HR practitioners need to pay a good deal more attention to the bi‐directional relationship between menopause and the workplace—how menopausal symptoms can affect women's experience of work and how work can exacerbate a woman's symptoms. We outline the social responsibility, dem...

Presenting findings from our global evidence review of menopause transition and economic participation emboldened us to establish a menopause policy at the university where we all worked at the time. Our report was published in July 2017 and the policy was in place by November that year. Our critical reflection on this activism focuses on issues th...

Objectives: This study explored experiences of, attitudes to, and knowledge about menopause in the workplace among participants from the UK to assess the extent to which menopause remains a taboo in this context. Method: An online survey was distributed via Trades Union Congress, UK networks and social media, and was completed by 5399 respondents....

Purpose In reflecting on the experiences of bidding for, winning, completing and disseminating a government-funded report on the effects of menopause transition on women’s economic participation, the purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of these experiences on the author’s work and on the authors. These experiences took place in a varie...

Reading secondary data from military memoirs of recent conflicts through the prism of scholarship on emotional labour, this paper discusses feeling rules fostered by the total institution of military service. The military is a significant context for such analysis, given that it socializes its personnel into mastering the practices and skills of le...

This article suggests new possibilities for queer theory in management and organization studies. Management and organization studies has tended to use queer theory as a conceptual resource for studying the workplace experience of ‘minorities’ such as gay men, lesbians and those identifying as bisexual or transgender, often focusing on how heteronor...

Management and organization studies commentary on how authors experience peer review of journal papers suggests that it can be an overly interventionist process which reduces the originality and coherence of eventual publications. In the literature on co-authorship, this argument is reversed. Here, free riders who do not contribute fully to researc...

Organisation studies has paid little attention to the contemporary private security industry, despite its enormous recent growth as a supplement to or replacement for state military services in theatres of conflict. To address this neglect, we investigate the workers at the heart of the industry: private security employees or contractors. Amidst wi...

Even in organization studies scholarship that treats gender as performative and fluid, a certain ‘crystallization’ of gender identities as somehow unproblematic and stable may occur because of our methodological decision-making, and especially our categorization of participants. Mobilizing queer theory — and Judith Butler’s work on the heterosexual...

The rise of modern corporations has been accompanied by an expansion of salaried executives who have replaced owner-managers. With this expansion, the new class of managers/executives came to regard themselves as stewards of large and complex corporations, and not principally or exclusively as agents for the owners. Emerging as a self- styled ‘prof...

Scholarship on the ethical complexities resulting from friendships which develop with respondents during qualitative data collection is well established. There has also been consideration of the ethics of researching existing friends across various disciplines. But, although management and organization scholars use convenience samples of the latter...

This article aims to offer a consideration of hospitality in organizations, occupations and thresholds to illustrate the sociocultural dimensions of hospitality spaces. Our aim is to open up thinking around spaces of hospitality offered by organizational members, particularly those employees who work with the vulnerable ‘other’, across thresholds i...

Despite the international reach, and increasing global importance, of the free market provision of military and security services-which we label the Private Security Industry (PSI)-management and organization studies has yet to pay significant attention to this industry. Taking up Grey's (2009) call for scholarship at the boundaries between securit...

This paper argues for the value of engagement research in order to encourage public sector accounting academics to take such an approach. Given that there is little evidence about the practice or value of engagement research, however, we set out to explore, evaluate and establish the lessons learned from a specific episode of engagement research. I...

This paper explores the relationship between masculinity, the body and the military through a close reading of the film Jarhead. Drawing on a Foucauldian frame of analysis, we consider three performances of the masculine military body that form key aspects of the film’s representational economy: the disciplined body, an outcome of the processes of...

This paper explores underwear – a neglected (at least by academic literature) aspect of clothing – and the ways it is implicated in the (re)production of women's identities. Although underwear is ostensibly hidden from view, as part of women's clothing, we argue that it functions as a resource for identity construction. We present data from three f...

This article investigates the organization of Christmas in 15 women’s magazines from the 1930s and 2009, using an analytical strategy of close reading to explore the discursive imperatives these texts seem to (re)create around female ‘festive labour’. We arrive at two conclusions: (1) a critique of popular perceptions of the ‘problem of gift giving...

This paper was published as Sociology, 2010, 44 (2), pp. 251-268. It is available from http://soc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/2/251. Doi: 10.1177/0038038509357201 Metadata only entry Embargoed until April 2011. Full text of this item does not appear in the LRA. Paul Johnson’s (2008) article ‘Rude Boys’, published in an earlier issue of Soci...

The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies provides an overview of theoretical approaches, key topics, issues, and subject specialisms in management studies, as well as a set of reflections on the progress and prospects of Critical Management Studies (CMS). CMS has emerged as a movement that questions the authority and relevance of mainstre...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which Canadian lesbians and gay men manage their non‐hegemonic identities in organizations, given the relative paucity of qualitative data in the area, the importance of work as a site for identity projects in the contemporary west and growing pressure on employers to attend to sexual orie...

Fournier and Grey (2000) suggest that those inhabiting the contested terrain of Critical Management Studies (CMS) share a commitment to identifying inequality and subordination in organizations and to the associated possibility of emancipation, however this is conceived. Despite their additional claim that one crucial distinction between critical a...

Purpose This paper aims to introduce a special issue, consisting of a selection of papers on the subject of gender, paid employment and life issues in accounting practice and education. Design/methodology/approach The paper identifies relationships between work, life and identity in accounting practice and education. Findings The paper finds that...

Smoking was for most of the 20th century a normal part of everyday life in western society, including work organizations. Within a very short space of time it has become much less acceptable in the workplace and, in many countries, banned altogether. Why has this happened? This article seeks to answer this question. Although the main legislative ba...

This paper examines an important recent development in thinking on the role of sexuality and eroticism within organizations, namely Re-eroticization theory. The paper contextualizes this development by contrasting it with modemist-masculinist and modernist-feminist discourses on eroticism and organizations prior to synthesizing the many disparate s...

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. T...

In 'The normalization of 'sensible' recreational drug use' Parker, Williams and Aldridge (2002) present data on illegal drug use by adolescents and young adults in the UK. They argue that it is both widespread and largely socially benign - ie, normal. We contrast this 'normalisation' thesis with evidence of an increase in the introduction of drug p...

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 prac...

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 o...

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...

In addressing the 'sex and the city' theme, this paper begins by suggesting that British women's lives have altered substantially since the late 1960s, given their rapidly increasing uptake of paid employment ('the city') and several important changes in their personal lives ('sex'). Moreover, 'the city' in its more literal sense of urban expanse i...

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 preg...

This paper reviews qualitative data from academic research into prostitution, accounts from prostitutes themselves in the UK and Australia, and data from one of the authors' own research in New South Wales to analyse the ways in which female sex workers negotiate and construct their sense of themselves. This analysis is informed by the suggestion t...

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 t...

This paper consists of a panel discussion of the merits and demerits of the regulation or legalization of the sex industry. The contributors are an academic researcher, a policy adisor, an agency network co-ordinator and a sex-worker representative. The debate covers sex work and the law; attitudes of courts, police and public; the conditions and e...

This paper uses the work of Georges Bataille to claim that we Westerners seek to stave off death by engaging in various future-oriented projects, by organizing ourselves, each other, and our environments in particular ways. Given that we organize to try to forestall death, we therefore suggest that organizing is a much more widespread and significa...

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...

La sexualidad es vista como la antítesis de lo que las organizaciones laborales representan: el control, la racionalidad, y la represión de las emociones y de los instintos en beneficio de la productividad. En esta obra, los autores discuten que no sólo la sexualidad invade cada aspecto de las organizaciones laborales, sino que también las estructu...

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 we...

Mats Alvesson and Yvonne Du Billing, Understanding Gender and Organizations, London: Sage, 1997, £40.00, paper £14.99, viii+1248 pp. - - Volume 12 Issue 4 - Joanna Brewis

Following the recent resurgence of interest in time and space in the social and organizational sciences, this paper examines the significance of time in prostitution. Prostitution provides a useful basis for analysis, given that it is at once similar (in its provision of consumer services) and different (in that sexuality is not fully commodified)...

This paper argues that our understandings of ourselves as gendered, as either masculine or feminine, are a power effect of the contemporary discourse of gender difference. The main premise of the paper is that this social construction of gender allows for gender difference to be resisted-and the form of resistance analyzed here is gender-inappropri...