Why it's a good career move to join a women's business network - new research

Article URL : https://theconversation.com/why-its-a-good-career-move-to-join-a-womens-business-network-new-research-186605Women-only professional networks have become a familiar feature of the corporate world. Set up to organise and channel female voices and experiences, some have even become big businesses themselves

Dis/Organising Women’s Freedom: Feminist Dialectical Tensions in Women’s Business Networks Blogs

The growing popularity of women’s business networks (WBNs) is paralleled by a critique of their postfeminist character: by promoting individualist ideals in line with neoliberalism, WBNs are considered to disorganise rather than contribute to women’s freedom. To unpack this tension between the empirical phenomena and the feminist critique, we employ an inductive approach combining topic modeling, thematic coding and dialectical analysis to examine over 1,500 blog posts from four WBNs. We show how multiple discourses are circulated in the blogs and exist in tension with each other, and interpret the interstices for change and action that these tensions open. We thus contribute to understanding the ways to women’s freedom at the intersection of neoliberalism and postfeminism and extend the comprehension of how WBNs can contribute to this agenda. Furthermore, we make ancillary methodological contributions by using topic modeling in conjunction with other qualitative analysis tools and a large corpus of blog posts

Communities of practice: from innovation in practice to the practice of innovation

Emmanuel Josserand and Florence Villesèche INTRODUCTION In the quest to explain competitive advantage, the knowledge view of the firm appears to be one of the most topical alternatives to transaction costs economics. The ability to share and generate knowledge is thus considered a key capability (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Merali, 2000). Beyond the initial fads around technology and ITdriven knowledge management projects (Swan et al., 1999), research points to the importance of cultural (McDermott, 1999; Ndlela and du Toit, 2001) and structural change (Grant, 1996; Buckley and Carter, 2002) to favour openness to learning and sharing. This openness is deemed hard to achieve in bureaucratic organizations (Gupta and Govindarajan, 2000; Ravasi and Verona, 2001). How do organizations deal with the apparent contradiction between a necessary order that could lead to bureaucracy and the strategic importance of an innovative openness that could lead to chaos? According to Wenger and Snyder: todays economy runs on knowledge, and most companies work assiduously to capitalize on that fact. They use cross-functional teams, customer- or productfocused business units, and work groups to name just a few organizational forms to capture and spread ideas and know-how. In many cases, these ways of organizing are very effective and no one would argue for their demise. (Wenger and Snyder, 2000, p. 139) However, these forms are usually formal groups often driven by shortterm objectives. Communities of practice (CoPs) a new name for an old practice have been theorized since the early 1990