In this article we present a qualitative study of spousal support for the careers of women managers. The research material consists of the narratives of 25 women managers in Finland.The study has two main implications. Firstly, unlike previous studies, we use a narrative approach to demonstrate that a woman manager's career and spousal support are experienced as ambiguous and evolving over the career. The support was constructed by the women managers as flourishing, irrelevant, deficient or inconsistent. Secondly, to increase our knowledge about gender relations, we combine discussion of the topic with gender order analysis and suggest that gender order is critical for an understanding of the nature of spousal support. We conclude that a male spouse who is willing to break the traditional gender order and provide his wife with various forms of support is often constructed as having a positive influence on the career of his woman manager wife. The study calls attention to families as sites of doing gender.

Tanskanen, J. (2017). Work-to-personal-life conflict among dual and single-career expatriates : Is it different for men and women

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The question of work-family practices commonly arises in both theory and daily practice as a matter of responsibility in today's organisations. More information is needed about them for socially responsible human resource management (SR-HRM). In this article our interest is in how work-family practices, serve as an important element of SR-HRM, constructed as (un)helpful for employees' work-family integration, are realised in organisational life. We investigate the discursive ways in which members of two different organisations working at different organisational levels construct the issue in the Finnish context. Three discourses were interpreted: (1) a discourse of compliance with external pressure, (2) a discourse of negotiation and (3) a discourse of individual flexibility. Discursive constructions of work-family practices make visible the complex interconnectedness of individuals and organisations with the environment in which they operate. Many organisational efforts to create positive work-family practices can, in fact, lead to failure to make these practices either available or usable, and they may result in the unjust treatment of organisation members. Creating sustainable work-family practices is a complex challenge for which SR-HRM must work out a solution.

This article analyses the narratives of men managers to see how they perceive their wives' support in relation to their careers. Our aim is to focus on different forms of spousal support and explore how the support can evolve in the course of the men's careers. We are also interested in what kind of gender relations men produce when narrating their experiences of spousal support for their career. The research material comprises interviews with 29 managers who are fathers. In contrast to many previous studies, the results here suggest that spousal support is not a fixed or uncomplicated phenomenon but is constructed as various and flexible by men: negotiated, enriching and declining. The narrative analysis, in which we detected three different story‐lines — romance, ‘happily‐ever‐after’ and tragedy — shows that the most positive narratives in terms of life satisfaction and career success were those in which spousal support was constructed as negotiated and men were willing to be flexible and adaptable in their gender relations with their spouse. More attention to a father's work and family integration is needed in the field of management and organizations.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to investigate how male managers make meaning the role of their female spouses along with their careers. Design/methodology/approach – The topic was investigated within a Finnish context by analyzing the narratives of 29 male managers. Common to the men were their managerial position and extensive work experience. All the men had or had had one or more spouses during their careers, and all of them were fathers. Findings – A typology distinguishing four types of female spouses was constructed: supporting, balance-seeking, care-providing, and success-expecting types. These types describe the various roles that are constructed in relation to the female partner during a male manager ' s career, pointing out the ambiguous nature of the phenomenon. Originality/value – The study highlights that to understand more about male managers ' experience in their careers, the author needs to acknowledge how a male manager ' s career unfolds in tandem with their family life, as well as the norms and gender roles related to the family. Research approaches that enable examination from that perspective should be developed.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a narrative framework for doing empirical research into business ethics and shows, through two examples, how the framework can be applied in practice in this context. The focus is on interview-based research. Design/methodology/approach A theoretical research based on literature review was conducted. Findings In the developed narrative framework, two main kinds of analysis are distinguished: an analysis of the narrative and a narrative analysis. An analysis of the narrative is a matter of classifying and producing taxonomies out of the data. The purpose of a narrative analysis is to construct a story or stories based on the data. Narrative analysis differs from the analysis of narratives in that the story does not exist prior to the analysis, but is created during the analysis. Research limitations/implications The proposed narrative framework helps those doing empirical research into business ethics avoid simplistic “black and white” interpretations of their material, and helps them to show that ethical realities in the business world are often complex, various and multiple. Practical implications The paper offers a methodological framework for those doing qualitative research into business ethics which will increase the quality and rigor of their studies. Originality/value A value of the narrative approach is that the stories offer researchers an entry point to understanding the complexity of ethics and how people make sense of this complexity. The paper shows in detail how the methods presented can be used in practice in empirical research.

This paper explores variance in how people morally disapprove wrongs related to doping. The variance may pertain to what type of moral disapproval a person uses or to what they disapprove of. Our exploration is both conceptual and empirical. Conceptually, we distinguish between four types of moral disapprovals that we call blame, judging blameworthy, condemnation and sadness.We elaborate these four moral phenomena through a conceptual scheme that we call the matrix of moral disapprovals. The matrix is the central conceptual innovation of our paper. It depicts how the four moral disapprovals relate to each other and characterises their typical instances. In the empirical part of the paper we use the matrix of moral disapproval to examine how decisionmakers in Finnish elite sport organisations talk about doping. The empirical examination is based on 31 interviews with decision-makers from Finnish elite sport organisations. Although we distinguish between the conceptual and empirical approaches in our paper, they are not fully separate, but support and inform each other.