Reflexivity and the construction of competing discourses of masculinity in a female-dominated profession

This paper contributes to the debates on reflexivity and change by extending our understanding of (non-)reflexivity mechanisms in the discursive constructions of gender. Specifically, I explore how and why women persistently construct contradictory discursive accounts of men and masculinity in a female-dominated profession of counselling psychology in Russia. Drawing on the concept of ‘interpretative repertoires’ I argue that female counsellors construct different kinds of masculinities based on three ‘repertoires’: psycho-biological, structural and relational. I demonstrate how these constructions of masculinity are imbued with different meanings and are used to explain only certain contexts, which precludes women's ability to reflect on their contradictory nature. I conclude by discussing how an exploration of discursive (non-)reflexivity extends our understanding of the conditions for gender transformation

Book review: Jane Horan, How Asian women lead: lessons for global corporations

Review of "Jane Horan, How Asian Women Lead: Lessons for Global Corporations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, £21.99 hbk, (ISBN: 9781137378712), 192 pp.

Postfeminism, neoliberalism and a 'successfully' balanced femininity in celebrity CEO autobiographies

This article explores the construction a ‘successfully’ balanced femininity in the female celebrity CEO autobiography genre, and how it is shaped by the postfeminist and neoliberal context. The paper shows how achieving successful and therefore desirable balance requires one to embrace femininity but in a calculated, market-oriented fashion that benefits business goals, ensuring that one remains a ‘good’ postfeminist as well as neoliberal subject; and argues that this new femininity poses little challenge to the existing gendered power relations in organizations. This paper adds to the existing debates on doing gender in the workplace by providing an understanding of how and why certain ways of doing femininity in organizations are allowed or disallowed, specifically, how certain organizational femininity comes to be constructed as more successful and valuable in contemporary postfeminist and neoliberal context. Furthermore, by examining how these ideals of balanced femininity are constructed in celebrity CEO autobiographies, the paper highlights the value of exploring these texts as representations of contemporary postfeminist and neoliberal cultural norms

The making of a glass slipper: exploring patterns of inclusion and exclusion in a feminized profession

Purpose – The purpose this paper is to deploy the concept of the “glass slipper” to unpack the construction of systematic patterns of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of gender, age and class in the emerging, female-dominated profession of psychological counselling in Russia. Design/methodology/approach – The study draws on an analysis of 26 in-depth qualitative interviews with practising counsellors in Russia. Findings – Drawing on the glass slipper concept, the article demonstrates how seemingly neutral discursive “rules” of professional conduct articulated by counsellors create an association between a collective professional identity and the social identities of typical practitioners, making this profession appear most suitable for middle-aged, middle-class women. The author’s findings also show how certain embodied identities – in this case masculinity – may be able to “fit” into a slipper that was not made for them. Originality/value – The paper extends the understanding of the dynamics of inequality patterns in a feminized profession in the Russian context by unveiling previously underexplored patterns of marginalization along the lines of class and age. It also strengthens the collective-associative view of occupational identity and extends the glass slipper concept by exposing the mechanisms of body-work association in this profession and demonstrating that certain identity characteristics may be more universally privileged in the construction of professional identities

Object oriented studies into artificial space debris

A prototype simulation is being developed under contract to the Royal Aerospace Establishment (RAE), Farnborough, England, to assist in the discrimination of artificial space objects/debris. The methodology undertaken has been to link Object Oriented programming, intelligent knowledge based system (IKBS) techniques and advanced computer technology with numeric analysis to provide a graphical, symbolic simulation. The objective is to provide an additional layer of understanding on top of conventional classification methods. Use is being made of object and rule based knowledge representation, multiple reasoning, truth maintenance and uncertainty. Software tools being used include Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) and SymTactics for knowledge representation. Hooks are being developed within the SymTactics framework to incorporate mathematical models describing orbital motion and fragmentation. Penetration and structural analysis can also be incorporated. SymTactics is an Object Oriented discrete event simulation tool built as a domain specific extension to the KEE environment. The tool provides facilities for building, debugging and monitoring dynamic (military) simulations

Failure of morphology of (0 deg)8 graphite/epoxy as influenced by environments and processing

Optical and scanning electron microscopy were used to investigate the failure morphology of graphite/epoxy specimens which had been tested until tensile failure. Failure morphology was studied as a function of the quality control variables of specimen preparation technique, prepreg batch, and cure condition, and also as a function of the environmental parameters of temperature and moisture content. Defective specimens were found to exhibit a low energy failure morphology. Poor specimen edge preparation and one batch of prepreg when tested at elevated temperature or moisture content also exhibited energy failure morphology. Postcuring had no effect on strength but did slightly alter failure morphology. Temperature or moisture appeared to decrease flaw sensitivity and thus increase strength; however, moisture also appeared to increase interfacial debonding between filament and matrix. When combined moisture and temperature increased interfacial debonding and made the epoxy matrix more prone to fracture

Detection of Aliphatically Bridged Multi-Core Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Sooting Flames with Atmospheric-Sampling High-Resolution Tandem Mass Spectrometry.

This paper provides experimental evidence for the chemical structures of aliphatically substituted and bridged polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) species in gas-physe combustion environments. The identification of these single- and multicore aromatic species, which have been hypothesized to be important in PAH growth and soot nucleation, was made possible through a combination of sampling gaseous constituents from an atmospheric pressure inverse coflow diffusion flame of ethylene and high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry (MS-MS). In these experiments, the flame-sampled components were ionized using a continuous VUV lamp at 10.0 eV and the ions were subsequently fragmented through collisions with Ar atoms in a collision-induced dissociation (CID) process. The resulting fragment ions, which were separated using a reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometer, were used to extract structural information about the sampled aromatic compounds. The high-resolution mass spectra revealed the presence of alkylated single-core aromatic compounds and the fragment ions that were observed correspond to the loss of saturated and unsaturated units containing up to a total of 6 carbon atoms. Furthermore, the aromatic structures that form the foundational building blocks of the larger PAHs were identified to be smaller single-ring and pericondensed aromatic species with repetitive structural features. For demonstrative purposes, details are provided for the CID of molecular ions at masses 202 and 434. Insights into the role of the aliphatically substituted and bridged aromatics in the reaction network of PAH growth chemistry were obtained from spatially resolved measurements of the flame. The experimental results are consistent with a growth mechanism in which alkylated aromatics are oxidized to form pericondensed ring structures or react and recombine with other aromatics to form larger, potentially three-dimensional, aliphatically bridged multicore aromatic hydrocarbons

Compositions of professionalism in counselling work: an embodied intersectionality framework

This paper explores the embodied constitution of professionalism in the context of the counselling psychology profession in Russia. We develop an embodied intersectionality framework for theorizing embodied compositions of professionalism, which allows us to explain how multiple embodied categories of difference intersect and are relationally co-constitutive in producing credible professionals, and how these intersections are contingent on intercorporeal encounters that take place in localized professional settings. Our exploration of how professionalism and professional credibility are established in Russian counselling shows that, rather than assuming that a hegemonic ‘ideal body’ is given preference in a professional context, different embodied compositions may be deemed credible in various work settings within the same profession. An embodied intersectionality framework allows us to challenge the notion of a single professional ideal and offer a dynamic and contextually situated analysis of the lived experiences of professional privilege and disadvantage

Effects of moisture on torsion and flexure properties of graphite-epoxy composites

The effects of moisture and temperature on unidirectional and multi-ply laminates of T300/934 and AS/3501 graphite-epoxy systems were investigated. Properties studied were static flexure strength, and flexure and torsion fatigue strengths at room temperature and at 74 C. Specimens with increased moisture content showed a reduced static flexure strength; water as the test environment had only a negligible influence. In flexure fatigue and torsion fatigue, the water environment caused somewhat reduced fatigue strengths at room temperature and significantly greater degradation in 74 C water. The failure mode in all cases was interlaminar delamination