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Exploring our relationship with mealtime leftovers tells us a lot about not only our relationships with waste, but with one another, in the home. In our study of British mealtimes we explore how leftovers are transformed and reused as meals. We refer to theories of disposal in exploring the skills involved in transforming leftovers. We also explore the motivations behind these transformations. Drawing on the work of Miller (1998) we examine how the reuse of leftovers involves sacrifice by individual family members for the greater good of the whole family. We also find that reusing and eating up leftovers involves a collective sacrifice by family members which marks out their membership to the family unit.

This paper explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro-politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localised spaces of resistance and in the small, but significant, individual efforts at making changes within academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The paper explores the range of change strategies participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and/or incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualised, bottom up perspective on change which, counter to more totalizing theorisation, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual.

Brand scholarship traditionally resides within the marketing literature and focuses on organizations' external relationships with customers. However, increasing critical attention in organization studies has focused on the brand in order to understand its impact on the internal dynamics of employment relations in contemporary organizations. Drawing on an ethnography of frontline service work in an IT consultancy call centre, we explore the brand as an internal organizational resource sustaining the process of employee meaning-making activities. Documenting the 'work of the brand', we outline what the brand offers both employees and employers and, in doing so, we theorize the brand at work as a connecting mechanism between processes of identity formation/re-formation and regulation. While employees are encouraged to internalize particular brand meanings (in this case prestige, success and quality), we found that they often willingly buy into these intended brand meanings as a palliative to 'cope' with mundane work. In this way brand meanings are central to producing a self-disciplining form of employee subjectivity. Keywordsbrand, call centres, employee branding, ethnography, identity, organizational control 'All I want in life is a little bit of love to take the pain away.'Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space 'In ev'ry job that must be done, there is an element of fun.You find the fun and snap! The job's a game. And ev'ry task you undertake becomes a piece of cake. A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.'

Discourses of intensive mothering now seem to dominate European and American parenting cultures. This is a problem for those mothers who do not currently possess the resources to match up. In a study of Italian and British mothers who are experiencing low or reduced incomes, we observe the ways in which they internalize intensive mothering discourses through a process of ethical self-formation. This mode of self-formation involves detailed self-surveillance and self-discipline and abnegation of their own needs in place of other individual family members, and the family as a whole. We find a series of contradictory emotional effects which generate both pride and self-worth but also stress and anxiety. We advance the theory that mothers operate within an optimistic affective regime to make sense of these contradictory effects and retain a sense of agency and control over their lives and those of their families. However, drawing on Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, we argue that such affective regimes may be very pernicious in their effects, only serving to hold mothers in a relation that is ultimately impassable and often unfulfilling.

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This article explores the coping strategies of women in 10 middle-class Italian families facing economic crisis. We investigate food provision revealing the ceaseless extra work that goes into meal preparation. Adopting anthropological theories of thrift and sacrifice, we unpack participants' micro-coping strategies, observing their tendency to redirect resources towards their loved ones and abnegating their own needs for the greater good of the family. This sacrifice is done out of necessity, reinforcing traditional gender inequalities in the home. However, there is also evidence that women take pride in their coping, developing new competencies and maintaining control over meal provision and thus the wider patterning of family life. We explore the significance of recessionary times for the constitution of female subjectivities at home.

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