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Over the past decade, feminist theorists have made significant contributions to the study of organizations by offering critiques of accepted management principles and articulating the ways in which organization theory and practice are systematically biased against women (e.g., ). There is little research or theory, however, on how to use this work to change organizations in ways that will make them more gender equitable. In an effort to move out of 'armchair' theorizing, our research team 2 set about the task of developing an approach to organizational change, based in critical feminist perspectives on organizations, that we could then use collaboratively with partners inside organizations to advance gender equity.As one of our first tasks, we contracted with the chief executive of a global manufacturing and retail company, who shared our interest in achieving greater gender equity and who offered her company as a site for engaging with us in a collaborative, interactive process of critique, experimentation, and change. In this paper, we describe what we have learned about translating feminist organization theory into interventions that organization change agents might carry out in practice. Specifically, we discuss: 1) what we initially thought most relevant from feminist theories of gender and organizations and how we attempted to introduce these ideas to the company; 2) what we learned from these initial encounters with our change agent partners inside the company, and 3) the framework we eventually developed to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

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Labor mediators lack formal authority to compel parties to settle. What authority mediators do have emanates from their person, their behavior and skill, and the parties' ongoing assessment of them during a case. These “expressive” dimensions of mediation are latent features of the process, which makes them difficult to isolate and study. In this study, a dramaturgical framework is applied to observational case data to identify a core of expressive tactics commonly used by mediators. These tactics are organized around the theme of professional work. The findings suggest that mediators manage impressions of their expertise to frame settlements, impressions of their social position to convey neutrality toward the parties and a shared collegial network with chief negotiators, and impressions of their legitimacy to establish reputations for action and success. Contrasts in the ways these tactics are used suggest tentative postulates about the differential ways authority is mobilized in mediation.