Mutual Flourishing?

This article explores the experiences of women priests in the Church of England through the lens of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence. Comparing acts of symbolic violence perpetrated against women in the priesthood with the categories of domestic abuse set out in the Duluth Wheel of Power model, I highlight how institutional discourses in the Church and relational interactions can hold hidden abuses based on how gender is constructed at the symbolic level. My intention is to show that the Church of England’s split structure, known as the two integrities, is a manifestation of religious discourse that frames women as differently human and that this fundamental view of gender perpetuates masculine domination and violence against women, often in unseen ways. My argument concludes with a call to better understand the nature of gendered symbolic violence and how religious institutions provide justification for and legitimisation of such violence.

Taking a “Whole” Classroom Perspective: Theorizing Classroom Typologies Using a Video-Based Observational Protocol

Inspired by a “whole child” framing, the current study takes a “whole classroom” perspective to consider classroom practice. Study aims included: (1) presenting a systematic video-based observational coding strategy to concurrently consider practice domains that have implications for learning—cognitive instruction, classroom management, and teacher–student relational interactions; (2) identifying distinct and interrelated classroom typologies based upon this coding strategy. The framework was developed through coding and analysis of 58 purposively sampled urban 4th–9th grade classrooms from the Measures of Effective Teaching study. Analyses revealed three overarching typologies: task-focused (52%), low stimulation (43%), and optimal (5%). We conclude by discussing implications for urban education.

Exploring caring leadership through a feminist ethic of care: The case of a sporty CEO

This work critiques the normative construction of ethical leadership and contributes to understanding the ethics of care in leadership from a lifestyle and embodied perspective. Drawing on feminist notions of ethics of care, we question the ethicality of the practices of a sporty and health-oriented leader who claims to transform his attempts at self-care into care for others through role-modelling lifestyle behaviours. We explore inherent moral dilemmas in connecting a seemingly creative self-care project with well-intentioned practices of caring for others. We highlight the need to question persistent masculine rationalisations in ethical leadership, and to engage in and encourage, organisational and relational interactions that take account of specific employee needs. We argue that the leaders’ claiming to care for others by insisting on particular lifestyle behaviours and role-modelling aesthetic bodily ideals introduce new managerial norms in the organisation. The Instrumental intentions come to hamper an ethical care for the well-being of employees, whilst demonstrating the power of the leader to influence employees both inside and outside the organisation.

Making sense of algorithms: Relational perception of contact tracing and risk assessment during COVID-19

Governments and citizens of nearly every nation have been compelled to respond to COVID-19. Many measures have been adopted, including contact tracing and risk assessment algorithms, whereby citizen whereabouts are monitored to trace contact with other infectious individuals in order to generate a risk status via algorithmic evaluation. Based on 38 in-depth interviews, we investigate how people make sense of Health Code ( jiankangma), the Chinese contact tracing and risk assessment algorithmic sociotechnical assemblage. We probe how people accept or resist Health Code by examining their ongoing, dynamic, and relational interactions with it. Participants display a rich variety of attitudes toward privacy and surveillance, ranging from fatalism to the possibility of privacy to trade-offs for surveillance in exchange for public health, which is mediated by the perceived effectiveness of Health Code and changing views on the intentions of institutions who deploy it. We show how perceived competency varies not just on how well the technology works, but on the social and cultural enforcement of various non-technical aspects like quarantine, citizen data inputs, and cell reception. Furthermore, we illustrate how perceptions of Health Code are nested in people’s broader interpretations of disease control at the national and global level, and unexpectedly strengthen the Chinese authority’s legitimacy. None of the Chinese public, Health Code, or people’s perceptions toward Health Code are predetermined, fixed, or categorically consistent, but are co-constitutive and dynamic over time. We conclude with a theorization of a relational perception and methodological reflections to study algorithmic sociotechnical assemblages beyond COVID-19.

From Infantilizing to Collaborating: Interactions in an Adult Day Center in Taiwan

Many studies have found that interactions in long-term care settings are characterized by infantilizing speech towards older adults, which was principally interpreted as detrimental to older adults’ health and self-esteem. These studies, however, focused on how caregivers talked to older adults and were conducted primarily in Western countries. How older adults respond to and make sense of such speech has received little empirical investigation (Marsden & Holmes, 2014). In this paper, I re-examined issues related to infantilizing speech based on 6 months of fieldwork in an ADC in Taiwan, which serves 33 older adults (aged 66-94), including 16 diagnosed with dementia. My data (including observational fieldnotes, 72 hours of video-recordings of naturally-occurring interactions, and conversations/interviews with caregivers, older adults and their family members) show that the ADC was discursively co-constructed as a learning place with frequent didactic interactions that occurred both ways. Many older adults (those with dementia included), with little or no education before, cherished the opportunity to be “students” for the first time. Caregivers also appreciated learning various things from the older adults. Furthermore, didactic interactions co-occurred or were interspersed with relational interactions, including teasing, humor, and bodily interactions that show mutual friendliness and care. By taking into account the wide variety of interactions, attending to the contributions of all parties, and situating these interactions in the personal as well as social histories, this study demonstrated that even didactic or so-called infantilizing interactions were used by caregivers and older adults as they collaborated to create strong positive relationships.

Making Sense of Algorithms: Relational Perception of Contact Tracing and Risk Assessment during COVID-19

Governments, institutions, and citizens of nearly every nation have been compelled to respond to COVID-19. Many measures have been adopted, including contact tracing and risk assessment, whereby citizen whereabouts are constantly monitored to trace contact with other infectious individuals and isolate contagious parties via algorithmic evaluation of their risk status. This paper investigates how citizens make sense of Health Code (jiankangma), the contact tracing and risk assessment algorithm in China. We probe how people accept or resist the algorithm by examining their ongoing, dynamic, and relational interactions with it over time. By seeking a deeper, iterative understanding of how individuals accept or resist the algorithm, our data unearths three key sites of concern. First, how understandings of algorithmic surveillance shape and are shaped by notions of privacy, including fatalism towards the possibility of true privacy in China and a trade-off narrative between privacy and twin imperatives of public and economic health. Second, how trust in the algorithm is mediated by the perceived competency of the technology, the veracity of input data, and well-publicized failures in both data collection and analysis. Third, how the implementation of Health Code in social life alters beliefs about the algorithm, such as its further role after COVID-19 passes, or contradictory and disorganized enforcement measures upon risk assessment. Chinese citizens make sense of Health Code in a relational fashion, whereby users respond very differently to the same sociotechnical assemblage based upon social and individual factors.

Relational interaction and embodiment: Conceptualizing meanings of LGBTQ+ activism in digital China

This article theoretically and empirically explores meanings of recent activism practised by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other non-heterosexual groups (LGBTQ+) in China. Chinese LGBTQ+ individuals, like the majority of Chinese citizens, are generally self-restrained in popular contention because of the political risks involved. They also face widespread discrimination from the public when revealing their LGBTQ+ identities. This article is concerned with the perceived meanings of Chinese LGBTQ+ individuals suppressing engrained self-constraint to promote LGBTQ+ contention and certain level of collective action. Theoretically, I conceptualize Chinese LGBTQ+ protests as relational interactions undertaken by LGBTQ+ individuals with other people of queer identities (ingroup members), authorities and the public based on the logic of connective action. I also explore the concepts of embodiment and online embodiment to understand individuals’ sensual experiences during LGBTQ+ contention. Empirically, I examine university student Qiu Bai’s lawsuits with the Education Ministry and her social media campaign against homophobic textbooks. Drawing on in-depth interviews and textual analysis, the case study provides a dialectical account of individuals’ experience of embodiment and self-constraint.

Glocalization of the Television Format in China

For the past two decades, global television formats have received more attention in academia. Being theorized as mass-produced transnational cultural products, global TV formats have been articulated as dynamic junctures of cultural imperialism, media imperialism, and cultural homogenization in the realms of media and popular culture. These theoretical approaches, however, adopt a dualistic understanding of globality and locality, ignoring the multi-relational interactions between discourses of the global format and the local context constrained by specificities of global TV formats’ importing countries. Compared to the notion of globalization, glocalization attends more to the dialectical relationship between the global and the local, with its emphasis on postmodern understanding of local contents’ reproduction or repackaging within the framework delineated by global TV formats. With global TV formats’ transnational flow, these cultural commodities have gone through complex reproduction or adaptation in order to fit importing countries’ specific cultural, social, and even political milieus. Besides adaptation, global TV formats are inevitably subject to incompatible constraints in importing countries and thus exposed to disputes that may bring damages to their sustainability outside of their countries of origin. In order to present a comprehensive review of cross-border transaction and glocalization of global TV formats, it is necessary to examine this phenomenon’s origin and global expansion and explore its entrance into China. This can be done by analyzing the rise and fall of The Voice as a representative case and as one of the most successful global TV formats in the Chinese context within the framework of glocalization.

Acquaintances or friends? Exploring the effects of contracts, trust and ethical level on opportunism in manufacturer-distributor relationships

Purpose This study aims to examine how contractual mechanisms, trust and ethical levels impact opportunism in marketing channel relationships between manufacturers and distributors. Because the type of interactions, short-term or transaction-based vs long-term or relation-based, may also affect the level of opportunism, the study includes two scenarios to assess the impact of interaction type. Design/methodology/approach Survey data from 145 distributors were collected with 69 being transaction-based and 75 being relation-based interactions. Findings The sole use for transaction-based and relation-based interactions is not a significant deterrent for opportunistic behavior by a distributor. Ethical level is negatively related to opportunism in transaction-based interactions, perhaps because of calculative commitment. Trust positively moderates the relationship between contractual enforcement and opportunism in transaction-based interactions. Under relation-based interactions, the opposite occurs as trust reduces contractual enforcement efforts, and thus, opportunism is reduced as well. Ethical level negatively moderates the relationship between contractual enforcement and opportunism in transactional and relational based interactions. Originality/value Researchers have called for a more holistic approach to better understand phenomena. This study addressed that call by being the first to include contracts, trust, ethical level and opportunism within the context of the transaction and relation-based interactions between a manufacturer and a distributor. Contractual enforcement is not a significant deterrent of opportunism for transactional or relational interactions. Trust is negatively related to opportunism only in transaction-based interactions; perhaps, the threshold for acting opportunistically may be lower because of the short-term nature of the interaction. The ethical level is negatively related to opportunism in transaction and relational interactions.

Gender in Organizations

Gender in management and organizations is an ever-present, though somewhat marginalized, topic. Unlike sex, which is linked to biology and reproduction, gender is a social category, though the two terms are closely connected, and the latter is seen as a social expression of the former. Gender is often raised in the context of persisting inequalities in labor markets and organizations. Legislation in many countries outlaws gender-based discrimination at work, yet gender equality has not so far been achieved in most organizations—in either advanced or developing economies. Various approaches drawn from psychological, sociological, and cultural theories explain the role of gender as an attribute, focusing on the unequal treatment of women in management (WIM). These approaches assume that organizational structures, including reward and beliefs systems, shape individual identities and influence micro-level behaviors in work organizations. A related trend concerns “women’s voice” literature, accounting for women’s experiences, interests, and values. In contrast, feminist thinking influenced by social constructivism theorizes inequality by proposing a conception of gendering as an outcome of relational interactions in organizational contexts. Rather than conceiving gender as a variable, such explanatory frames focus on organizing processes by which members are judged, defining their relationships with desirable organizational outcomes. Overall, feminist theory sees gender as an effect of social processes that are amenable to change. The shift from gender as an attribute possessed by individuals or practiced in organizations to gendering as an act we perform is also underscored by the recent shift toward intersectionality. These approaches and feminist postcolonial insights criticize the assumption that the term woman has a uniform meaning, irrespective of context and history. Rejecting the concept of gender identity and organizations as immutable and stable, in Gender and the Organization: Women at Work in the 21st Century (London: Routledge, 2017), Fotaki and Harding take their inspiration from Judith Butler’s post-structuralist feminist ideas. Taken together, such perspectives explain the politics of gender by offering a more nuanced and complex account of how organizations work in a global context, and they stress the power of gendered discourses and practices in reproducing gender. The latter must be constantly performed by the subjects themselves to reinforce social norms. This article addresses topics concerning WIM, and it considers gendering as a process created and reproduced by organizations. It focuses specifically on examining the causes of gender inequality in work organizations and argues the importance of feminist perspectives to better understand these issues. The article offers a selective review of the most influential books, textbooks, and articles on a range of topics relating to both WIM and gendering in organizations. It also discusses key feminist ideas that have influenced gender scholarship in management and organizations and outlines their potential for addressing persisting inequalities in organizations and society.