Forgotten feminists: The Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933-1969

The research that I have been undertaking during my study leave is the start of a two-part project into women’s business networks. Recently it has become more common to hear that women’s networks – either external or internal to an organisation – are ways for women to gain ground in terms of their professional status and opportunities. There has also been a recent spate of media articles and reports on women’s networks. This is in part the result of a deliberate media presence on behalf of Catalyst, the US based women’s organisation and partly interest in women such as Glenda Stone, who has recently come to prominence by creating the Aurora Network (formerly known as Busygirls). ‘Gender capital management’, (as Aurora like to refer to strategies for being a woman in professional life) has, for the moment at least, identified women’s networks as the next big idea in achieving equality of opportunity. However, it is difficult to know how to conceptualise these networks – are they contemporary forms of women’s activism or ‘clubs’ that exist, in part, to allow women to market services and products to other women? Are they associations based on calculated self-interest or do they represent a new form of gender solidarity? Are they as forward thinking as they often claim or are they deeply conservative? In order to answer some of these questions I designed a comparative research project, looking at historical forms of women’s business networks and contemporary forms. The first stage of the research involves studying the papers of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (or ‘the Federation’, for short). The Federation was formed in 1935 and was active until the end of the 1960s, finally winding up in 1968. At its peak it represented, through its affiliated professional associations, about 100,000 working women across a number of different professional and industrial sectors

Forgotten feminists: the Federation of British Professional and Business Women, 1933-1969

Using archive documents of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW) this article explores the role of this early business organisation in campaigning for feminist issues in the post-war period. It argues that the BFBPW is indicative of the complexities of the women’s movement in the post-suffrage era when it fragmented into interconnecting campaigning organisations around a multitude of women’s issues. The article suggests that businesswomen in this period acted in ways that anticipated modern ‘femocratic’ practice in the way they sought to use business networks to gain access to parliamentary policy networks

Does woman + a network = career progression?

Question: I am an ambitious and talented junior manager who has recently been hired by FAB plc, a large multinational company. I am also a woman and, as part of my induction pack, have received an invitation to join FABFemmes - the in-company women's network. I don't think my gender has been an obstacle to my success thus far and so I don't really feel the need to join. But on the other hand I don't want to turn my back on something that might offer me a useful source of contacts to help me advance up the career ladder. What would be the best thing to do? - Ms Ambitious, UK

Bmp7 Functions via a Polarity Mechanism to Promote Cloacal Septation

During normal development in human and other placental mammals, the embryonic cloacal cavity separates along the axial longitudinal plane to give rise to the urethral system, ventrally, and the rectum, dorsally. Defects in cloacal development are very common and present clinically as a rectourethral fistula in about 1 in 5,000 live human births. Yet, the cellular mechanisms of cloacal septation remain poorly understood.We previously detected Bone morphogenetic protein 7 (Bmp7) expression in the urorectal mesenchyme (URM), and have shown that loss of Bmp7 function results in the arrest of cloacal septation. Here, we present evidence that cloacal partitioning is driven by Bmp7 signaling in the cloacal endoderm. We performed TUNEL and immunofluorescent analysis on cloacal sections from Bmp7 null and control littermate embryos. We found that loss of Bmp7 results in a dramatic decrease in the endoderm survival and a delay in differentiation. We used immunological methods to show that Bmp7 functions by activating the c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) pathway. We carried out confocal and 3D imaging analysis of mitotic chromosome bundles to show that during normal septation cells in the cloacal endoderm divide predominantly in the apical-basal direction. Loss of Bmp7/JNK signaling results in randomization of mitotic angles in the cloacal endoderm. We also conducted immunohistochemical analysis of human fetal sections to show that BMP/phospho-SMAD and JNK pathways function in the human cloacal region similar as in the mouse.Our results strongly indicate that Bmp7/JNK signaling regulates remodeling of the cloacal endoderm resulting in a topological separation of the urinary and digestive systems. Our study points to the importance of Bmp and JNK signaling in cloacal development and rectourethral malformations

Current understanding of hypospadias: relevance of animal models

Hypospadias is a congenital abnormality of the penile urethra with an incidence of approximately 1:200-1:300 male births, which has doubled over the past three decades. The aetiology of the overwhelming majority of hypospadias remains unknown but appears to be a combination of genetic susceptibility and prenatal exposure to endocrine disruptors. Reliable animal models of hypospadias are required for better understanding of the mechanisms of normal penile urethral formation and hence hypospadias. Mice and/or rats are generally used for experimental modelling of hypospadias, however these do not fully reflect the human condition. To use these models successfully, researchers must understand the similarities and differences between mouse, rat and human penile anatomy as well as the normal morphogenetic mechanisms of penile development in these species. Despite some important differences, numerous features of animal and human hypospadias are shared: the prevalence of distal penile malformations; disruption of the urethral meatus; disruption of urethra-associated erectile bodies; and a common mechanism of impaired epithelial fusion events. Rat and mouse models of hypospadias are crucial to our understanding of hypospadias to ultimately reduce its incidence through better preventive strategies

The personal becomes polemical? The problematic second generation of facilitative practice

This article looks critically at approaches to management development that privilege process over content. By comparing some contemporar y practices with the principles of adult learning outlined by Knowles, it questions whether by following the subjective turn we have come to distort the concept of `facilitation'. The article explores how our faith in process over content is often unreflexive and suggests that the second generation of facilitative practices needs more careful thought and consideration in terms of the type of learner it is helping to recreat

Critical management education: From pedagogy of possibility to pedagogy of refusal?

In this article we use the frame of the debate between Ellsworth and the Freirean education movement over a decade ago to examine the current state of critical management education (CME). We question why an equivalent debate has not taken place within the field of critical management education, which also positions itself as a critical pedagogy. Our argument is that CME theory and practice need repositioning, much in the same way that Ellsworth’s challenge to critical pedagogy attempted to do for that field. We conclude that to define CME using ‘traditional’ emancipatory aims is to misread its possibilities and position as pedagogy. Instead we use the concept of ‘colonizers that refuse’, borrowed from Memmi to illuminate some of the dilemmas critical management educators face and to think through the implications of our ‘Pedagogy of Refusal’

Fat cats from the big end of town? A comparison of media framing of big business in Australia and the UK

Linda Perriton and Paul Corcora

The Political Economy of Networked Learning Communities in Higher Education

This article uses the example of the recent (ill-fated) experiment in the creation of a global education product—the UKeU—to explore how the concept of community in learning changes in this context. It uses a framework borrowed from the literature on changes in the welfare state to explain how the new economies of on line education distort the traditional ideas of learning communities. The article argues that ignoring the underpinning structural and economic institutions in the global economy (or assuming that they will somehow be overcome) is naiumlve, and runs the risks of allowing the more extreme forms of the 'new' economic model of networked learning to colonise discourses of democracy and student-centredness