Double agents: gendered organizational culture, control and resistance

Author's pre-publication draft. Final version of the article published in Sociology; available online on http://online.sagepub.com/This article presents ethnographic data showing how recruitment consultants negotiate managerial attempts to control workforce culture. I suggest the values which senior managers encourage consultants to embody prioritize so-called`masculine' attributes over `feminine' ones. I attempt to demonstrate the limits of cultural control by outlining three ways in which the consultants engage with this imposed culture: defiance, parody and ritual. These activities contain gendered assumptions similar to those embedded in corporate culture. I discuss the potential such practices have for resisting corporate culture and the gender within it, suggesting that one source of ambiguity within workplace `control' and `resistance' practices is that they employ overlapping cultural resources and assumptions

How does a succession influence investment decisions, credit financing and business performance in small and medium-sized family firms?

We examine the influence of succession in small and medium-sized family businesses by focusing on investment decisions, credit financing, and business performance. Using data on German SMEs, we find that the succession event affects investment behavior negatively before but positively after the transfer takes place when compared to firms without any succession intentions. With respect to performance, we show that firms’ growth rates increase after succession has taken place. Although hypothesized, we find no empirical evidence to suggest that banks tend to reject successors more often than they reject other business owners when deciding to extend credit to firms for investment purposes