Understanding Women Leaders in a Male-Dominated Profession: A Study of the United States Marine Corps\u27 Women Generals

Contemporary organizations are increasingly realizing that future success requires a significant shift in leadership due to globalization, flattened organizational command and control structures, rapid technology growth, and the shift from manufacturing to service industries. Specifically, current leaders and scholars have begun to recognize the importance of employee diversity within organizations, and in particular the critical need to tap into the underutilized half of the population—women. Yet, the efforts to recruit, develop or retain women has been minimal, leading to metaphors such as glass ceiling and labyrinth, which characterize the institutional, social and personal barriers women encounter when seeking high-level leadership positions. While many women have pushed past these barriers, the current body of literature tends to focus more on the challenges that serve to hold women back. As a result, there are few studies of highly successful women in high-level leadership positions, and even fewer of those that have examined successful women in male-dominated career fields such as the United States Marine Corps. Although the organization is noted for rigid institutional barriers and pervasive gender bias, women have been able to achieve the highest positions of responsibility within the the Corps’ general-level ranks. This exploratory case study/cross-case analysis examined the career trajectories of eight of the ten women Marines who achieved the rank of general, revealing the complexity of navigating success in the male-dominated context of the Marine Corps. An exploration of personal, organizational, and cultural influences revealed three themes consistent across the women generals: a willingness to settle for short-term career goals, the privileging of their Marine identity, and a strong affinity with the core values of the Corps’ culture. Beyond this, the women generals attributed their success to an array of differing strategies, motivations, and decisions. As Brigadier General Reals concluded, “There is no magical path or yellow brick road” leading to success of women in the Marine Corps. This inquiry not only offers a rare glimpse into the careers of successful military women, but also provides greater understanding of some of the factors that support and challenge leadership achievement for women more generally

Paradox Research in Management Science: Looking Back to Move Forward

Paradox studies offer vital and timely insights into an array of organizational tensions. Yet this field stands at a critical juncture. Over the past 25 years, management scholars have drawn foundational insights from philosophy and psychology to apply a paradox lens to organizational phenomena. Yet extant studies selectively leverage ancient wisdom, adopting some key insights while abandoning others. Using a structured content analysis to review the burgeoning management literature, we surface six key themes, which represent the building blocks of a meta-theory of paradox. These six themes received varying attention in extant studies: paradox scholars emphasize types of paradoxes, collective approaches, and outcomes, but pay less attention to relationships within paradoxes, individual approaches, and dynamics. As this analysis suggests, management scholars have increasingly simplified the intricate, often messy phenomena of paradox. Greater simplicity renders phenomena understandable and testable, however, oversimplifying complex realities can foster reductionist and incomplete theories. We therefore propose a future research agenda targeted at enriching a meta-theory of paradox by reengaging these less developed themes. Doing so can sharpen the focus of this field, while revisiting its rich conceptual roots to capture the intricacies of paradox. This future research agenda leverages the potential of paradox across diverse streams of management science

Real-Time Articulation Of The Upper Body For Simulated Humans In Virtual Environments

(Maximum 200 words) 14. SUBJECT TERMS 17. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF REPORT 18. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF THIS PAGE 19. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF ABSTRACT 15. NUMBER OF PAGES 16. PRICE CODE 20. LIMITATION OF ABSTRACT 5. FUNDING NUMBERS i Waldrop, Marianne S. September 1995 Master's Thesis Unclassified Unclassified UL Unclassified 88 REAL-TIME ARTICULATION OF THE UPPER BODY FOR SIMULATED HUMANS IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CA 93943-5000 The views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the United States Government. Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. The problem addressed in this thesis is that most large-scale networked virtual environments (VE) do not possess an interface to produce dynamic, real-time interactive simulated human motion. In order to attain a high level of realism in the virtual world, the user must be able to dynamically inter..

Real-time Upper Body Articulation of Humans in a Networked Interactive Virtual Environment

With the recent introduction of realistic human entities into large-scale networked virtual environments, there exists a requirement for dynamic, real-time human motion. The future for distributed virtual environments will include upwards of 100,000 participants capable of participating from anywhere in the world, interacting with any entity that exists in the environment. In order to attain a high level of realism in the virtual world, the user must be able to dynamically interact with his environment. For the lower body, we find that scripted locomotive motion is adequate. However, the same is not true for upper body motion because humans by their nature interact with their environment largely with their hands. The focus of this research is the development of an interactive interface which will achieve dynamic upper body motion currently not possible with scripted systems. We present the basics of ongoing work involving the representation of realistic, realtime upper body motion of a..

Seasonality and resource availability control bacterial and archaeal communities in soils of a temperate beech forest

It was hypothesized that seasonality and resource availability altered through tree girdling were major determinants of the phylogenetic composition of the archaeal and bacterial community in a temperate beech forest soil. During a 2-year field experiment, involving girdling of beech trees to intercept the transfer of easily available carbon (C) from the canopy to roots, members of the dominant phylogenetic microbial phyla residing in top soils under girdled versus untreated control trees were monitored at bimonthly intervals through 16S rRNA gene-based terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism profiling and quantitative PCR analysis. Effects on nitrifying and denitrifying groups were assessed by measuring the abundances of nirS and nosZ genes as well as bacterial and archaeal amoA genes. Seasonal dynamics displayed by key phylogenetic and nitrogen (N) cycling functional groups were found to be tightly coupled with seasonal alterations in labile C and N pools as well as with variation in soil temperature and soil moisture. In particular, archaea and acidobacteria were highly responsive to soil nutritional and soil climatic changes associated with seasonality, indicating their high metabolic versatility and capability to adapt to environmental changes. For these phyla, significant interrelations with soil chemical and microbial process data were found suggesting their potential, but poorly described contribution to nitrification or denitrification in temperate forest soils. In conclusion, our extensive approach allowed us to get novel insights into effects of seasonality and resource availability on the microbial community, in particular on hitherto poorly studied bacterial phyla and functional groups