Apathy, excitement and resistance:teaching feminism in business and management schools

AbstractFeminism, gender and women’s issues have been side-lined within business and management studies in the United Kingdom, evidenced by the inclusion of only one highly ranked gender journal in the recent ABS journal quality list. While there have been some efforts to critique gendered research norms within business and management schools, less is known about the experiences of those engaged in designing and delivering curricula. This article begins by examining the extant literature on the experiences of feminist academics, leading to a discussion of the limited research on business and management schools. It then moves to a description of the methods adopted, namely, qualitative interviews with academics engaged in feminist teaching, and reflections from the authoring team. The findings are presented, highlighting how participants conceptualize feminism, the use of feminism in curricula development, and how the academic community responds to the teaching of feminism. The article concludes with a consideration of areas for future research. The study contributes to the understanding of the experiences of working within the contemporary business school, specifically for academics engaged in a social justice approach to teaching. It identifies that experiences are not universal, with feminism creating space for excitement for both staff and students, but potentially increasingly vulnerability for isolation and marginalization. This article is published as part of a thematic collection on gender studies.</jats:p

A relative of Hadwiger's conjecture

Hadwiger's conjecture asserts that if a simple graph $G$ has no $K_{t+1}$ minor, then its vertex set $V(G)$ can be partitioned into $t$ stable sets. This is still open, but we prove under the same hypotheses that $V(G)$ can be partitioned into $t$ sets $X_1,\ldots, X_t$, such that for $1\le i\le t$, the subgraph induced on $X_i$ has maximum degree at most a function of $t$. This is sharp, in that the conclusion becomes false if we ask for a partition into $t-1$ sets with the same property.Comment: 6 page

Experiment and simulation validated analytical equivalent circuit model for piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers

An analytical Mason equivalent circuit is derived for a circular, clamped plate piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (pMUT) design in 31 mode, considering an arbitrary electrode configuration at any axisymmetric vibration mode. The explicit definition of lumped parameters based entirely on geometry, material properties, and defined constants enables straightforward and wide-ranging model implementation for future pMUT design and optimization. Beyond pMUTs, the acoustic impedance model is developed for universal application to any clamped, circular plate system, and operating regimes including relevant simplifications are identified via the wave number-radius product ka. For the single-electrode fundamental vibration mode case, sol-gel Pb(Zr[subscript 0.52])Ti[subscript 0.48]O[subscript 3] (PZT) pMUT cells are microfabricated with varying electrode size to confirm the derived circuit model with electrical impedance measurements. For the first time, experimental and finite element simulation results are successfully applied to validate extensive electrical, mechanical, and acoustic analytical modeling of a pMUT cell for wide-ranging applications including medical ultrasound, nondestructive testing, and range finding.Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cooperative Agreement Grant 6923443)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowshi

Gender in the UK Architectural Profession:(re)producing and challenging hegemonic masculinity

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Architecture represents a creative, high profile and influential profession, and yet remains under-theorised from a gender perspective. This article examines how gender is (re)produced in architecture, a profession that remains strangely under-researched given its status and position. The empirical work advances the theoretical concept of hegemonic masculinity via an analysis of gendered working practices and the agency of individuals through resistance and complicity with these norms. It reveals how architectural practice relies on long working hours, homosocial behaviour and creative control. However, whereas women perform their gender in ways which reproduce such gendered norms, white, heterosexual, middle class men can transgress them to challenge aspects of practice culture. This has significant implications for understanding the ways in which hegemonic masculinities are reproduced within creative workplaces

Disability and academic careers:Using the social relational model to reveal the role of human resource management practices in creating disability

Disabled people continue to face a variety of significant barriers to full participation and inclusion in work and employment. However, their experiences remain only sparsely discussed in relation to human resource management (HRM) practices and employment contexts. The current study contributes to this gap in understanding by drawing together relevant work connecting HRM practices, diversity management and disability studies to examine the experiences of a sample of 75 disabled academics in the UK. Through the social relational model of disability, HRM practices socially construct disability in the workplace. Interview and email data from disabled academics in the UK are drawn upon to illustrate how organisational practices and policies, while intended to 'accommodate' disabled people, inadvertently construct and shape disability for people with impairments or chronic health conditions

Gender, authentic leadership, and identity: an analysis of women leaders' autobiographies.

Purpose: Leadership theories have moved from viewing leadership as a personality trait, towards models that recognise leadership as a social construction. Alongside this theorisation, gender and leadership remains of considerable interest, particularly given the under-representation of women in leadership positions. Methodological approaches to understanding leadership have begun to embrace innovative methods, such as historical analyses. The current study aims to understand how high profile women leaders construct a gendered leadership identity, with particular reference to authentic leadership.Approach: Thematic analysis of autobiographies, a form of identity work, of four women leaders from business and politics; Sheryl Sandberg, Karren Brady, Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard.Findings: Analyses reveal that these women construct gender and leadership along familiar normative lines; for example, the emphasis on personal and familial values. However, their stories differ in that the normative extends to include close examination of the body and a sense of responsibility to other women. Overall, media representations of these ‘authentic’ leaders conform to social constructions of gender. Thus in the case of authentic leadership, a theory presented as gender neutral, the authenticity of leadership has to some extent been crafted by the media rather than the leader.Value: The study reveals that despite attempts to ‘craft’ and control the image of theauthentic self for consumption by followers, gendered media representations of individualsand leadership remain. Thus, alternative approaches to crafting an authentic leadership self which extend beyond (mainstream) media is suggested

Communication-Avoiding Optimization Methods for Distributed Massive-Scale Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation

Across a variety of scientific disciplines, sparse inverse covariance estimation is a popular tool for capturing the underlying dependency relationships in multivariate data. Unfortunately, most estimators are not scalable enough to handle the sizes of modern high-dimensional data sets (often on the order of terabytes), and assume Gaussian samples. To address these deficiencies, we introduce HP-CONCORD, a highly scalable optimization method for estimating a sparse inverse covariance matrix based on a regularized pseudolikelihood framework, without assuming Gaussianity. Our parallel proximal gradient method uses a novel communication-avoiding linear algebra algorithm and runs across a multi-node cluster with up to 1k nodes (24k cores), achieving parallel scalability on problems with up to ~819 billion parameters (1.28 million dimensions); even on a single node, HP-CONCORD demonstrates scalability, outperforming a state-of-the-art method. We also use HP-CONCORD to estimate the underlying dependency structure of the brain from fMRI data, and use the result to identify functional regions automatically. The results show good agreement with a clustering from the neuroscience literature.Comment: Main paper: 15 pages, appendix: 24 page

Gender and Disability in Male-Dominated Occupations: A Social Relational Model

Evidence from male-dominated sectors points to high levels of disability and the disabling nature of working environments. However, research of this nature assumes a medical model of disability that does not account for the social construction of disability or the lived experiences of disabled employees. Using data from seven focus groups (n = 44) and semi-structured interviews with professional transport employees with lifelong hidden 'impairments', including dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, ADD/ADHD and Asperger syndrome (n = 22), this paper explores the lived experiences of men and women working in a sector traditionally dominated by men, the transport industry. Key themes include homosociality, public–private divide and the impact of changing work practices. Further, the data revealed how those with hidden 'impairments' in part construct their identities in relation to both non-disabled colleagues and those considered stereotypically representing disability (wheelchair users). This study furthers understandings of the relationality of gender and disability in the workplace, and the lived experiences of disabled employees

‘Being an academic is not a 9–5 job’: long working hours and the ‘ideal worker’ in UK academia

The deregulation of working time has been occurring over recent decades. Academia is one of the many industries that can be characterised by a long hours work culture and intensification of work. This is significant given the negative effects of such a work culture on the physical and mental health and well-being of workers. Using evidence from two UK-based qualitative studies, this paper begins to explore the causes and effects of academic long hours work culture further. It has a particular focus on the extent to which the long hours culture is a result of cultural and structural changes in higher education, which have led to an increased focus on performance and outcome measures. It queries whether this is also shaped by more personal factors, such as the desire to excel and blurred boundaries between work and leisure, whereby the pursuit of knowledge may be a source of leisure for academics. It finds that while individual factors contribute to the long hours culture, these factors are shaped by cultural norms and pressures to cultivate a perception of the ‘ideal academic’ within an increasingly target-driven and neoliberal environment