This article explores the representation of women small business owners in three contemporary novels; Chocolat, The Shipping News and Back When We Were Grownups. The primary contribution is to demonstrate how fiction can both challenge and collude in dominant constructions of entrepreneurship, which is more generally gendered as male and masculine. Judith Butler's thinking on performativity with regard to gender and sexual desire is applied to women's identities and extended to include their behaviour as entrepreneurs. The article demonstrates that these novels both 'do' and 'undo' gender and business ownership. They portray women who are successful in business while displaying culturally accepted norms of femininity but who are set apart from other female characters. However, their partial and conflictual identification with norms of gender and entrepreneurship could lead a reader to question those norms and through the undoing of the protagonists, the novels offer alternative performances and performativities of doing gender and of doing business.Butler's body of work is considerable and her questioning of the formation of identities and subjectivities does not progress in a linear fashion but, rather, UNDOING FICTIONS 419
Purpose -The purpose of this research is to assess the place of language skills in the international orientation of decision-makers of successfully internationalised SMEs. The position of language skills in this area of literature and policy is problematic and a new paradigm is proposed. Design/methodology/approach -This paper considers findings from an empirical project using both quantitative and qualitative methods, first, a 1,200 company telephone survey and second, an 80 company batch of face-to-face interviews. Findings -Strong international orientation seems indeed to be a determinant of success in international trade. The decision-makers of the successful companies were notably more likely to have foreign language skills than those in the other groups and were also the only group to include self-reported skills at the highest level. However, comparison of the countries in which the firms were dealing with the languages in which decision-makers claimed skills shows very clearly that the decision-makers of the "successful" international companies were often not using their foreign language skills in business. In addition, these decision-makers also possessed better attitudes towards foreign experience and other elements of international orientation. Practical implications -The paper discusses the implications of the findings for policy-makers responsible for training and trainers themselves. The evidence supports the view that government subsidies focusing on language training might be better directed at a more varied range of activities to develop international orientation. Originality/value -The article contributes to the development of qualitative research in this area in examining the foreign language use of decision-makers in successful international SMEs and locating this within their broader international orientation. It posits that language skills make an indirect contribution to overall international business success which is more valuable than their direct contribution to improved communication with specific foreign clients and markets.
This article responds to the recent calls for rethinking management education, particularly to those that emphasize space, affect and atmosphere, and makes the case for the practice of dérive as a way of infusing management education with experiential, experimental and reflexive learning processes. The authors draw on ideas and practices of the art movement Situationist International who proposed the dérive, informed by the concept of psychogeography as a way of exploring and reimagining the atmospheres of everyday life. The paper is illustrated by the authors’ teaching experiences in this area (or space as one might say). The authors argue that the dérive in management education may foster future managers’ imaginative skills and inspire an imaginative self-reflection of the business school and its spatial organization. The paper concludes that in re-enacting their experience of educational space, participants may learn about, reflect on, and develop their affective capacities for becoming part of organizational processes, both as students of the business school and as future managers.
This paper explores teaching business students research methods using a psychogeographical approach, specifically the technique of dérive. It responds to calls for new ways of teaching in higher education and addresses the dearth of literature on teaching undergraduate business students qualitative research methods. Psychogeography challenges the dominance of questionnaires and interviews, introduces students to data variety, problematizes notions of success and illuminates the importance of observation and location. Using two studies with undergraduate students, the authors emphasize place and setting, the perception of purpose, the choice of data, criteria of success and the value of guided reflection and self-reflection in students’ learning. Additionally the data reflect on the way students perceive research about management and the nature of management itself. The paper concludes that the deployment of psychogeography to teach business research methods although complex and fraught with difficulty is nevertheless viable, educationally productive and worthy of further research.
This article charts Asphodel's development in political and theological terms, from her dialectic with her political roots, through the maelstrom of 1970s socialism and feminism. Asphodel's clearsightedness recognized and challenged sexism in left-wing politics as well as in religion. She also challenged the scientific ideal of objectivity by recovering subjectivity as a source of knowledge. For the present day, Asphodel provides the same clearsightedness, m recognizing the reliance of various postmodernisms on
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