The #MeToo and the Time’s Up movements have raised the issue of sexual harassment encountered by women to the level of public consciousness. Together, these movements have captured not only the ubiquity of sexual harassment in the everyday functioning of the workplace, but they have also demonstrated how women are silenced about their experiences of it. Inspired by the political and the social currents emerging from these movements, and theoretically informed by ideas of discursive hegemony, rhetorical persuasion and affective practice, this article draws on a qualitative study of early- and mid-career female academics in business schools to answer the following question: How are victims who start to voice their experiences of sex-based harassment silenced within the workplace? Our findings reveal that organizational silence is the product of various third-party actors (e.g. line managers, HR, colleagues) who mobilize myriad discourses to persuade victims not to voice their discontent. We develop the concept of ‘reluctant acquiescence’ to explain the victims’ response to organizational silencing. In terms of its contributions to the extant literature, this article: (i) moves away from explanations of sex-based harassment that focus solely (or predominately) on the actions of individual perpetrators; and (ii) shows how reluctant acquiescence leads to maintaining the status quo in the organization. In highlighting features of academic work that facilitate reluctant acquiescence, we call for more contextualization of the dynamics of sex-based harassment specifically, and other forms of workplace mistreatment broadly.
In this article we use the term 'sexualised visibility' to describe how in male dominated work settings such as engineering, women are inscribed with sexual attributes that overshadow and obscure other attributes and values. From a career point of view, sexualised visibility is deeply problematic. However, as yet we have only limited understanding of how women in such settings navigate sexualised visibility and what this means for their careers. Drawing on social identity based impression management (SIM) to examine the career experiences of 50 women in petroleum, mechanical and automotive engineering in the UK, we develop new insights into the relationship between perception, power and relations of visibility. Specifically we identify the interplay between career stage and power and show how the strategies that women adopt to navigate sexualised visibility in their work settings vary by career stage. Furthermore we argue that women's collective efforts to ensure a favourable representation of their group leads to the reproduction of an implicit but powerful prescriptive gender stereotype which constrains their career progression.
We have considerable understanding of the obstacles that women engineers encounter and the reasons that they leave the field, but we know less about what enables them to remain. Adopting an interpretivist approach, this article examines how a group of British women engineers in two FTSE 100 companies account for “staying on” in their male‐dominated work settings. We delineate four specific forms of help that facilitate women's retention in the field. We argue that exposure to help leads to women developing a habitus that enables them to continue working in engineering. To conclude, we draw on our findings to outline HR practices that will facilitate supportive relationships in the workplace and pave the way towards developing more positive organisational climates.
Elite higher education institutions in the UK and the US are under increasing pressure to intensify their widening participation efforts and improve access for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and other underrepresented groups. Through a case study of business and law students who participated in a widening participation scheme at an elite university in the UK, we examine how WP candidates undertake identity work in order to negotiate a sense of fit in an elite higher education setting. We make two theoretical contributions. First we show the complex identity work that social minorities undertake to negotiate a sense of fit in diversifying organisations-dynamically backgrounding and foregrounding their minority identity as the situation befits. Second we illustrate how diversity and inclusion practices form an integral component of a HE institution's identity workspace to crucially shape the identity work that social minorities undertake to negotiate a sense of fit, illuminating how an elite university's inclusive practices facilitate the rhetoric of diversity and enable elite HE institutions to maintain their exclusive status. We discuss the practical implications of our findings.
A wide range of ethnic groups make up labour markets in most advanced economies. However, we lack a nuanced understanding of how specific groups experience minority ethnic identity within the workplace. This article addresses how an under-represented minority ethnic group, British Sri Lankans, experience being assigned a broad Asian panethnic identity in their workplace, which is both positively and negatively stereotyped. Drawing on theories of social identity-based impression management and selfstereotyping, we highlight how individuals responded to panethnic stereotypes imposed on them by both claiming and rejecting a broader Asian identity, and at the same time attempting to carve out a more distinctive British Sri Lankan identity. We advance knowledge of the multi-level nature of ethnic identity, demonstrating ways in which movement between superordinate and subordinate levels of ethnic identity can occur. Counter-intuitively, we suggest that individuals' positive self-stereotyping efforts may, over time, contribute to a more constricted career path that may leave them less prepared for senior management positions. Practitioner pointsTo help facilitate the development of genuinely inclusive organizations and maximize the use of available talent, practitioners need to be vigilant about the prevalence of ethnic group stereotypes in contemporary work settings. Practitioners should not discourage conversations around ethnicity and culture at work, but they should make it clear that the aim is not to encourage the proliferation of group stereotypes. Proliferation of group stereotypes may contribute to unconscious bias.
I develop a critique of the cross-national transfer of diversity management in multinational companies. Adopting a critical approach to diversity management, and considering diversity as a discourse, I examine how and why employees in an overseas subsidiary challenged the diversity practices transferred by their foreign parent company. Drawing on a case study of a Sri Lankan knowledge work firm that was in the process of implementing its Western parent company’s Diversity Management agenda, which they had had little input in shaping, I highlight how challenge is triggered by a desire to reject unfavourable subject positions attributed to individuals in transferred discourses of diversity and to reposition the self more favourably. My contribution involves showing how dynamic power relations between parents and subsidiaries shape the global transfer of diversity across MNCs, depicting subsidiary employees as agentic subjects as opposed to passive recipients.
Rationally tailoring a controlled spatial organization of enzymes in a nanoarchitecture for multienzyme cascade reactions can enhance the catalytic efficiency via substrate channeling. However, attaining substrate channeling is a grand challenge, requiring sophisticated techniques. Herein, we report facile polymerdirected metal−organic framework (MOF)-based nanoarchitechtonics for realizing a desirable enzyme architecture with significantly enhanced substrate channeling. The new method involves the use of poly(acrylamide-co-diallyldimethylammonium chloride) (PADD) as a modulator in a one-step process for simultaneous MOF synthesis and co-immobilization of enzymes (GOx and HRP). The resultant enzymes-PADD@MOFs constructs showed a closely packed nanoarchitecture with enhanced substrate channeling. A transient time close to 0 s was observed, owing to a short diffusion path for substrates in a 2D spindle-shaped structure and their direct transfer from one enzyme to another. This enzyme cascade reaction system showed a 3.5-fold increase in catalytic activity in comparison to free enzymes. The findings provide a new insight into using polymer-directed MOF-based enzyme nanoarchitectures to improve catalytic efficiency and selectivity.
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