Exploring the masculinization of innovation practice within a municipality

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to generate an empirically informed theoretical framework which can be used to analyze the relationship between gender and innovation in the context of a municipality. The authors present and analyze three illustrative tales from a feminist perspective. The authors thus offer a more balanced approach to the conceptualization of gendered ascriptions with respect to the possible outcomes of innovation work in a public context.Design/methodology/approachAn ethnographic account which employed “shadowing” as a method of observation.FindingsThe article presents a debate on how the social construction of gender and innovation can be placed in the context of a municipal reality. Our analysis reveals how the complexities of a gendered work life within a municipality can create paradoxes. A constructionism approach was used in the identification of hidden and unspoken paradoxes that exist in public spheres.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors used empirical tales from a very specific context, namely a Swedish municipality. The central implication of this study is the recognition of innovation as being masculine-gendered within the feminine context. This implication thereby deepens our understanding of gender paradoxes in the public sector.Practical implicationsThis study provides insights to practitioners who intend to work with innovation in a public organization.Social implicationsThe social implications of this study is that when a male-gendered concept like innovation is implemented in a female-gendered context, like a municipality, it is of importance to contextualize the concept.Originality/valueThe empirical value of examples of a gendered work landscape at a Swedish municipality.

Al-Rujūlah: Male and Masculinities in Modern Sudanese Narrative Discourse

The purpose of this paper is, first of all, to explore that which is essentially male/masculine in Afro-Sudanese culture and once explored, to reach deeper into its discursive portrayal in modern Sudanese narrative discourse. The paper uses a number of representative short stories written since the early thirties in northern Sudan as sites of inquiry. Drawing from existing studies on the male in the East and the West, the paper examines the representation of male and masculinity in modern Sudanese narrative discourse using the following as strategies: gender conflicts and politics, intra-gender paradoxes, the male as satire and allegory, and the male as a myth.

Sentimental Catechism: Archbishop James Gibbons, Mass-Print Culture, and American Literary History

Building on an ample foundation of (often feminist) revisionary literary scholarship, which over the last decade has fostered a substantial reexamination of “sentimental” texts created by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American novelists, recent studies of sentimentality in nineteenth-century American culture have continued to expose its political import, social complications, gender paradoxes, and racial construction. Once dismissed as shallow tearjerkers, American sentimental novels, which often drew on the example of British fictional models from Samuel Richardson'sPamela(1740) andClarissa(1747-1748) to Charles Dickens'sA Christmas Carol(1843) andLittle Dorrit(1857-1858), have recently been recognized as “the most radical popular form available to middle-class culture.” By now, Leslie Fiedler's despair in the face of the alleged artistic impoverishments of these books has been abandoned by many critics, who, bypassing or modifying Fiedler's aesthetic imperatives, now prefer to ask pointed questions about the “cultural work” that these books have performed within American society.