This article joins recent critical diversity studies that point to an urgent need to revitalize the field, but goes further by showing the inherent contextual issues and power relations that frame existing contributions. Based on a theoretical reading inspired by Michel Foucault, diversity is presented as discourse that is not independent of the particular research exercise of which it is part but, rather, remains contingent on the prevailing forms of knowledge and choices made by researchers. By attending to more refined understandings of power and context within diversity discourse, this article makes visible and calls into question the categorization and normalization of diversity and its management. It contributes to existing research by suggesting that the knowledge produced by mainstream and critical diversity scholars alike is biopolitical and governmental. To do diversity research differently or ‘otherwise’ requires finding ways to develop theorizations and practices that turn this modality of power against itself.

In this article, we adopt a critical perspective to study how executive search practices reproduce particular understandings of the ‘ideal’ executive body. We show how this disadvantages not only women but also men who are considered not to fit the ‘ideal’, and further demonstrate how search practices are embodied: how aesthetics, the senses and a sensorial way of knowing permeate the practices through which candidates are evaluated. We identify discourses on embodied co-presence, capabilities and voice in search consultants’ talk, and specify how notions of the ‘ideal’ executive body and embodied search practices become intertwined. We offer this contribution to the discussion on the body, gender and management and to research on executive search practice.

Drawing on a reflexive account of a British—Finnish joint publishing experience, we suggest that institutions of academic publishing are constantly reproduced through hegemonic practices that serve to maintain and reinforce core-periphery relations between the Anglophone core and peripheral countries such as Finland. The wider academic milieu with its taxonomies of academic performance and journal quality serves to perpetuate these practices. This results in academic researchers from the periphery contributing to `othering' within the publishing process.

This paper explores how we as female researchers are constructing our professional identities in a male-dominated scientific world. In particular, we focus on the extent to which patriarchal articulations of professional identities influence female academics' self-concept and consciousness of their own abilities. We believe that the business school in which we work reproduces certain inequalities systematically, if unintentionally. We are especially interested in the way in which we, as part of the scientific community, are ourselves discursively producing and reproducing the gender division based on differences of sex. In other words, how we 'do gender' in a particular organizational setting and when assuming a particular organizational role.The argument of this paper rests on the belief that the social construction of gender identities is not taking place only in the interaction of persons but also in the discourses within which those interactions occur. Identity and the meaning it implies are located here especially in language use. Discourses not only constitute meanings for terms and practices, but they also engender personal identities. Identity is not seen as fixed but rather as actively negotiated and transformed in discourse.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which gender is "done" in executive search. The authors uncover how the ideal candidate for top management is defined in and through search practices, and discuss how and why women are excluded in the process. Design/methodology/approach -The study is based on in-depth interviews with male and female Austrian, Finnish and Swedish executive search consultants. The authors study the ways in which consultants talk about their work, assignments, clients, and candidates, and discern from their talk descriptions of practices where male dominance in top management is reinforced. Findings -The ways in which gender is "done" and women are excluded from top management are similar across socio-cultural contexts. In different societal conditions and culturally laden forms, search consultants, candidates and clients engage in similar practices that produce a similar outcome. Core practices of executive search constrain consultants in their efforts to introduce female candidates to the process and to increase the number of women in top management.Research limitations/implications -The study is exploratory in that it paves the way for more refined understandings of the ways in which gender plays a role in professional services in general and in practices of executive search in particular. Practical implications -Unmasking how gender is woven into the executive search process may provide openings for "doing" gender differently, both for consultants and their clients. It may serve as a catalyst for change in widening the talent pool for top management. Originality/value -Research on gendered practices in executive search is extremely rare. The study provides new insights into this influential professional practice and its outcomes.

Feminism is a long established, often neglected empirical and theoretical presence in the study of organizations and social relations at work. This special issue provides a space for research that focuses on contemporary feminist practice and theory. We suggest that now is a new time for feminism, noting very recent examples of sexist oppression in social relations to illustrate why this rejuvenation is happening now. We then reflect on the process of knowledge production involved in guest editorial work for an organization studies journal like Human Relations, to address the issue of why feminism is so poorly represented in the journals that our academic community constructs as prestigious. We suggest that feminism provides opportunities for distinctive practices of knowledge production that challenge the patriarchal social formations which characterize academic work. We conclude with speculations about the future of feminism in organization studies.

This article explores the random strategies women adopt in resisting patriarchal articulations of their professional identity and the kind of organizational discourses women's resistance brings about. The focus is on describing the context, dynamics of contradictory tensions and ambivalence inherent in situations of resisting. The article draws upon the authors' own experiences in academia. In addition to participatory observation, the authors are using themselves as research instruments that enable them to highlight the emotions and ambivalent dynamics in the construction of gendered identities and power relations in organizations.The study indicates that there are several sets of rules in motion in one and the same social situation, such as the rules of organizational behaviour, rules of friendship and the rules of gender relations in public places. By describing two overtly sexualized discourses that women's resistance brought about, the article highlights that organizational sexuality does not necessarily differ in kind or in degree from`street sexuality' or sexuality in semi-public places. The study's findings argue that it is important to extend research to both informal and semi-formal organizational gatherings. These liminal spaces are important sites of communicative struggles over organizational meanings and identities.

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open‐ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.