Eudaimonic career identities – Finnish executive women’s career navigation at the top management level

Even in one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, Finland, the share of women in executive business roles has remained at less than 20%. This thesis examines the career identities of executive women in business-related roles in large companies in Finland. A model of eudaimonic career identities was built to understand the enablers of executive women’s career navigation and success. The data were collected through a pilot study consisting of 133 interviews with women and in-depth interviews with 17 Finnish women executives. The research questions the validity of current career models by explaining executive women’s career progression to the top organisational level. This research integrates a missing element—the concept of eudaimonia—into a career identity model, which comprises the enablers of executive careers. The findings suggest how executive women’s career identities are constructed on eudaimonic values instead of objective career success measures, including status, money and power. Moreover, the research challenges the approaches of systematic career planning and position-based career goals as the enablers of career progression. The research findings evidence three types of career patterns leading to the top management team (TMT) level: conventional linear careers and moderate and frequent boundaryless moves. However, executive women were not hindered by the typical barriers that boundaryless career theories suggest that women leaders specifically encounter. The career patterns demonstrate the need for meaningful work, the possibility to influence and continuous challenges, which increase the women’s competence in the executive leader role while accepting new positions within or outside the current employer. Demonstrated excellency in leading people and extensive business understanding, which is acquired often through finance and accounting experience or knowledge, were perceived as imperative enablers of a successful executive career. Additionally, agency, risk-taking and decision-making skills were seen vital career resources. As an academic contribution, this research contests the incongruence of leader and gender roles suggested by the social role theory. The women executives effortlessly demonstrated both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits and behaviours in their leader role identities, without emphasising or compromising their womanness. Moreover, the concept of authenticity operates as a discursive bridge between the gender and leader roles, resonating with eudaimonic aspirations. This research assists professionals and leaders of all genders to aim for excellence and authenticity in their pursuit of meaningful career experiences

What Innocent Spouse Relief Says about Wives and the Rest of Us

Every time spouses sign joint returns, knowingly or not they accept joint and several liability, meaning that either spouse may be held liable for all of the tax due on the joint return. Although joint and several liability facilitates tax collection, it may conflict with a spouse’s claims to have signed the return while being lied to, abused, or manipulated. The question for Congress is how to balance these competing demands. Innocent spouse relief provides some tax relief for spouses Congress does not believe should be jointly and severally liable. The existence of this relief also offers an opportunity to explore how the government views married women, as wives have always composed the lion’s share of seekers and recipients of innocent spouse relief. The relief currently provided is both over- and under-inclusive by (1) not offering relief to all spouses or former spouses who are unable to assess the validity of their returns and (2) offering relief to some who both knew of, and helped orchestrate, tax evasion. This Article argues that the existing innocent spouse relief regime should be replaced with one that respects joint filers’ agency when signing joint returns and affords relief only when a joint filer was unable to exercise that agency. In the event that a spouse is coerced into signing the return, relief needs to be speedier and less burdensome in application than under today’s law. This approach would increase the equity of the tax system and reduce the administrative costs on both the taxpayer and the government

A Quarter-Century of Normalization and Social Role Valorization

During the late 1960s, Normalization and Social Role Valorization (SRV) enabled the widespread emergence of community residential options and then provided the philosophical climate within which educational integration, supported employment, and community participation were able to take firm root. This book is unique in tracing the evolution and impact of Normalization and SRV over the last quarter-century, with many of the chapter authors personally involved in a still-evolving international movement

The First Amendment and the Socialization of Children: Compulsory Public Education and Vouchers

Criticism of American public schools has been a cottage industry since the Nineteenth Century. In recent years the criticism has gone to the roots. Critics charge that to leave children imprisoned in the public school monopoly is to risk the standardization of our children; it is to socialize them in the preferred views of the State. They argue that it would be better to adopt a system of vouchers or private scholarships to support a multiplicity of private schools. A multiplicity of such schools, it is said, would enhance parental choice, would foster competition, and would promote a diversity of views, which in turn would bring the kind of independent perspective needed for the sort of robust private and public debate needed in our constitutional democracy. Arguments such as these are ordinarily associated with conservatives; but they are also attractive to some liberals, particularly to those concerned about the state of public education in many of the central cities. The debate about public and private education raises important questions about the role of the state in promoting a certain kind of person and citizen, which has implications for liberal and democratic theory, the respective rights of children and parents, and the nature of religious freedom in a democratic society. In addressing these issues, I will argue that the debate about compulsory public education has been oversimplified. Too often the argument has been that compulsory public education is always unconstitutional or, less frequently, that it is always constitutional. Similarly, much of the debate about vouchers contends that they are always good or always bad or that vouchers to religious schools either always do or always do not violate the Establishment Clause. I will argue that the interests of children and the state in public education have been underestimated and that government should in many circumstances be able to compel adolescents of high school age, but not pre-adolescents, to attend public schools. No U.S. government is likely to engage in such compulsion, and there are good political reasons not to do so, but analysis of the case for compulsory public education leads to support of a strong presumption against vouchers, at least at the high school level. This presumption, however, is more difficult to defend when public schools are relatively homogeneous or are providing inadequate education to poor children. Even if vouchers could generally be supported, vouchers to religious schools raise serious concerns about the appropriate principles of church-state relations in the American constitutional order. But these concerns might be overcome in certain circumstances. In short, I argue that compulsory public education is sometimes constitutional and sometimes not, that vouchers are generally to be resisted, but sometimes not, and that vouchers to religious schools should ordinarily be considered unconstitutional, but sometimes not. In making these arguments, I do not purport to make claims about what the Rehnquist Court would do; to the contrary, I make arguments about how the Constitution should be interpreted. Part I of this essay criticizes the reasoning in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the first case to consider compulsory public education. Part II presents the strong purposes supporting public education, weighs those interests against the claim that parents have the right to direct the upbringing and education of their children, and concludes that compulsory public high school education should be constitutional in many circumstances; although, it posits that parents should have the right to send their children to private schools in the years prior to high school. Part III argues that the same conclusions follow in the face of First Amendment speech, association, and religion claims, but that they might be vulnerable in some circumstances against a claim for a right to a good education. Part IV argues that vouchers should not be constitutionally required even if it is conceded that parents have a constitutional right to send their children to private schools in the pre-high school years and that serious Establishment Clause concerns arise in the context of vouchers, concerns that should be overcome only in limited circumstances. Finally, Part V contains a brief conclusion

Genealogy of the Concept of Hate Crime : The Cultural Implications of Legal Innovation and Social Change

The term hate crime is new to legislative and public discourse, as well as legal and social science scholarship. A decade after the concept of a hate crime was introduced in Congress, the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), to punish criminal actors who target victims because of their characteristics (race, color ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, gender, gender identity, or disability). Using relevant archival sources, this project uses genealogical qualitative methods to examine the interplay of cultural elements manifested in this provocative term, which reflect dominance and subjugation among social groups (In- and Out-Groups) going back to the earliest settlements on American soil—and long before the term hate crime had emerged. The lens through which this historical progression is interpreted emphasizes hate crime as a signifier—a conceptual red flag—that alerts us to the way that seemingly disparate themes in American cultural development have coalesced in new conceptualizations of Others, Self, and the social process of Othering. The historical, cultural, and legislative antecedents that preceded the HCPA suggest a modern crisis in the way that certain cultural touchstones related to identity are conceptualized, experienced, and deployed. This project seeks to illuminate subtle changes in the meanings attributed to relevant historical events and certain social dynamics to explain their contemporary ramifications for individuals and society, using the concept of hate crime as an organizing principle. Broadly speaking, the project asks: What does the emergence of the concept of hate crimes tell us about larger cultural trends, and what does it suggest about future trends? The question to be answered is how the concept of hate crime emerged over time in order to explain the cultural significance of why it emerged at all. The main theses of this dissertation is that a hypermodern understanding of agency is necessary to reconcile the inversions of meaning in cultural knowledges, without which the concept of hate crime would not have emerged. Thus, this dissertation concludes that the concept of hate crime tracks with the changes in conceptualizations of identity over time. A close examination and analysis of the term reveal an archaeology of social constructions, false logic, flawed (but commercially convenient) assumptions, and compromises on humanity that go to the very core of the American identity

What Innocent Spouse Relief Says about Wives and the Rest of Us

Every time spouses sign joint returns, knowingly or not they accept joint and several liability, meaning that either spouse may be held liable for all of the tax due on the joint return. Although joint and several liability facilitates tax collection, it may conflict with a spouse’s claims to have signed the return while being lied to, abused, or manipulated. The question for Congress is how to balance these competing demands. Innocent spouse relief provides some tax relief for spouses Congress does not believe should be jointly and severally liable. The existence of this relief also offers an opportunity to explore how the government views married women, as wives have always composed the lion’s share of seekers and recipients of innocent spouse relief. The relief currently provided is both over- and under-inclusive by (1) not offering relief to all spouses or former spouses who are unable to assess the validity of their returns and (2) offering relief to some who both knew of, and helped orchestrate, tax evasion. This Article argues that the existing innocent spouse relief regime should be replaced with one that respects joint filers’ agency when signing joint returns and affords relief only when a joint filer was unable to exercise that agency. In the event that a spouse is coerced into signing the return, relief needs to be speedier and less burdensome in application than under today’s law. This approach would increase the equity of the tax system and reduce the administrative costs on both the taxpayer and the government

Contours of everyday life : reflections on embodiment and health over the life course

This study explores lay perceptions of embodiment and health through the narratives ofa group of 'everyday' women and men in a Canadian community. Gender, class and cultural influences on individual and collective experiences of embodiment are examined along with the ways in which these concepts evolve over the life course. The research is based on in depth interviews with a sample of forty working- and middle-class white women and men between the ages of30 and 65. I argue that notions of embodiment and health are multiple, fluid and contextual. They are shaped and reshaped over time in relation to individual biographies and social and cultural influences, and negotiated in relation to the prescribed values of the larger body politic. I suggest that research must attend to the spatial and temporal dimension of ideas about embodiment and health. In the context of this case study, I argue that everyday ideas about regional identity are enmeshed with the cultural codes which signify racial, class and gender identity. These frame peoples' understandings and representations of 'healthy selves' and 'unhealthy others' and are central to their notions of embodiment. Based on these findings, I propose a more nuanced approach to theorizing 'the body' and health in feminist and sociological theory. I argue for a closer engagement between theoretical frameworks and empirical studies with the aim of developing a more fully embodied social theory

The Effect of Remaining Unmarried on Self-Perception and Mental Health Status: A study of Palestinian Single Women

A triangulated design was used to investigate the influences of remaining unmarried on Palestinian women’s self-perception and mental health status. Three-hundred, never-married women between the ages of 25 and 50 years were selected using a convenience sampling technique. All these unmarried respondents filled in the Derogatis SCL.90-R (a self report measure of mental health symptomatology) by themselves. One hundred and sixty three participants of the 300 were successfully interviewed by means of a face-to-face, semi-structured, tape-recorded interviews with 15 open-ended questions. The SCL-90-R was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 10, guided by Derogatis’s (1983) booklet guide. The 163 interviews were transcribed verbatim, typed on Microsoft Word and analyzed qualitatively using thematic and content analyses according to the guidelines of the phenomenological method. Descriptive statistics, Kruskall-Wallis Tests, Spearman Correlation Coefficients, and multiple regressions were uses to analyze the Derogatis SCL.90-R. A comparison of the major findings of the current study with the findings of relevant previous national and international research was presented. Analyses of the SCL-90-R indicated that unmarried Palestinian women in the current study have more psychological problems as represented through the 3 indices and 9 symptom dimensions of the SCL-90-R, than do Palestinian women in general, and more than the female normative group studied by Derogatis (1983). The findings indicated that about one-third of the respondents complained of moderate and above rates of psychological distress on the SCL-90-R’s ‘global severity index’ and the eight of the nine symptom dimensions. Being highly educated and being in employment were associated with better mental health among the unmarried respondents in the current study. The lower the educational level of the unmarried woman, the more emotional and psychological complaints she is likely to have. Unemployed and poorly educated participants were likely to have more psychological problems than employed and highly educated women. Other independent variables were significant under some circumstances, including family composition, place of living and the age of the participants. The analysis of the interviews indicated that there were multiple reasons for remaining single in the Palestinian society that included sociocultural, psychological, financial, familial, and personal factors. On the other hand, most of the respondents approved that marriage is better than singlehood despite its difficulties and excessive responsibilities. The majority of the respondents were harassed, restricted in living and movement, were censured by their families and society in general, which augmented their feeling of estrangement and alienation in their society. The respondents of the current study varied in their feelings and self-perception as a reaction to remaining unmarried. Some were proud, satisfied, and assertive about themselves, while the others had feelings of sadness, inferiority, worry, over-sensitivity, loneliness, insecurity, pessimism or uncertainty about their future and their families. Somatization, withdrawal, vi interpersonal difficulties, aggression, and escape mechanisms were common reactions and behaviours that were reported by the respondents. However, the feelings and reactions of the unmarried women to remaining unmarried were related to the manner in which they were treated by society and their families, and their own attitudes about remaining single. In terms of how they compared themselves to other women, there were no consistent findings as some respondents believed they were more fortunate or less fortunate than other women in their communities. Being educated, employed, independent, assertive and getting one’s family’s support and understanding had positive influence on the self-perception of the respondents in the current study. Despite the negative feelings that were reported by many respondents, very few had ever consulted a mental health professional or sought counseling. Special consideration should be given to the emotional needs and psychological problems of unmarried Palestinian women. This is a challenging area for mental health professionals and family health care providers. Implications were discussed in relation to mental health practice, social systems and social organizations, and further research with emphasis on gender in health care was recommended. This was the first study in Palestinian society that explored self- perception and the mental health state of the unmarried women. In addition, the present study could be the first study of its kind in Arab countries as far as the literature shows, which investigated "remaining unmarried after age 25" among women and focused on the state of their mental health