Search Results (3)

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and intensified structural tensions surrounding work−life balance, precarity, and gender inequalities in academia. This paper examines the spatial, temporal, and emotional disruptions experienced by early-career and precarious researchers in Italy during the first national lockdown (March–April 2020) and their engagement in remote academic work. Adopting an exploratory and qualitative approach, the study draws on ten narrative video interviews and thirty participant-generated images to investigate how structural dimensions—such as gender, class, caregiving responsibilities, and the organizational culture of the neoliberal university—shaped these lived experiences. The findings highlight the implosion of boundaries between paid work, care, family life, and personal space and how this disarticulation exacerbated existing inequalities, particularly for women and caregivers. By interpreting both visual and narrative data through a sociological lens on gender, work, and organizations, the paper contributes to current debates on the transformation of academic labor and the reshaping of temporal work regimes through the everyday use of digital technologies in contemporary neoliberal capitalism. It challenges the individualization of discourses on productivity and flexibility and calls for gender-sensitive, structurally informed policies that support equitable and sustainable transitions in work and family life, in line with European policy frameworks. Full article

Interacting global, societal and organizational contexts produce unique organizational inequality regimes. This paper aims to understand multilevel processes influencing gendered, classed, raced and aged inequality regimes and worker hierarchies within “ComCo”, an Australian subsidiary of a multinational company. Our qualitative critical feminist-grounded theory approach triangulated organizational documentation, employee interviews and open-ended questionnaire responses. The emergent theory suggested that ComCo’s globally and societally embedded neoliberal-capitalist–masculine growth imperative produced no longer simplistically one-sided, but multifaceted and diversified masculine–individual–white and feminine–collaborative–colored growth mechanisms, including ideal workers broadening from quantitatively extreme to qualitatively conformant qualities and practices, to constitute not merely unencumbered masculine, but all workers, as existing for company growth. However, feminine–collective–colored mechanisms, co-opted to supporting growth, remained subordinated to masculine–individual–white mechanisms constructed as more effective at delivering growth, reinforcing ComCo’s inequality regimes and worker hierarchies despite diversity initiatives. Organizations must identify and address processes reinforcing inequality regimes to genuinely promote employment equity and diversity. Full article

The over-representation of men and the under-representation of women in senior positions in academic institutions is a familier and deep-rooted problem. While gender inequality in Higher Education Institutions has multiple causes, recruitment and internal promotion practices are particularly potent contributors to inequality regimes. This paper contains an autoethnographic account based on my failure to secure promotion and my subsequent legal action. It offers a personalized account of the experience of gender discrimination, in order to illuminate aspects of the culture of the Higher Educational Institution that contribute to this problem, and the challenges inherent in changing it. The theoretical perspective includes notions of organizational culture as gendered, drawing on the works of Louise Morley and Georgina Waylen, Pat O’Connor, Louise Chappel and Teresa Rees, as well as Carol Agócs work on institutionalized resistance to change, and theories of hidden and invisible power. The paper is a personal narrative autoethnography with self-reflection, adopting an analytic/interpretive approach. Based on an analysis of publicly available documents, personal journaling and media material, I identify four themes; (1) Slow Fuse burning, (2) From indifference to resistance, (3) Fixing me/Fixing women, (4) Solidarity. I conclude with reflections on the importance of seeing gender inequality and discrimination when it occurs and the importance of data in creating greater transparency that facilitates ‘seeing’. I also consider the importance of female anger and the importance of female solidarity. Full article