No abstract

Feminist organizations today must maintain their distinctive organizational identities in a competitive marketplace in which feminism has become one choice amidst many social change causes. Alignment among organizational identity, stakeholder images, and organizational culture can give feminist organizations a competitive advantage. However, feminist theory and practice have surfaced alignment challenges that can undermine organizational success. This article extends understandings of identity, image, and culture alignment by accounting for the role of ideology. In particular, this article explores how an independent media business that publishes a feminist popular culture magazine localizes feminist ideology discursively to enable alignment and satisfy diverse stakeholders. In doing so, this article fills a gap in feminist organization research by looking at how and where ideological lines are drawn by an organization trading in the economies of popular culture, image, and branding. Lessons for organizations faced with similar identity challenges are offered.

No abstract

Mentoring centers on the development of another person through career, psychosocial and role modeling support. As popular cultural portrayals and gendered critiques of mentoring show, not all can be categorized as rational, instrumental and positive. There often are unconscious forces that drive particular mentoring arrangements and offer entrée points into mentorship analyses that contrast with rational approaches. Popular culture images provide an arena to critique dominant mentoring practices. Towards this end, we critically examine the award-winning drama Mad Men (Weiner, 2007) and uncover how non-rational mentoring practices are depicted. We argue that characters engage in intimate, ambivalent and erotic mentoring processes in which loyalties shift and neuroses reflect the nature of workplace social relations. Our critique displays characters' complicity in perpetuating asymmetrical gendered workplace relations through practices that are seemingly non-rational, presumably meritocratic and/or captured by archetypal mentoring relationships.

No abstract