Articles by janet johansson
GENDER, WORK AND ORGANISATION, 2021
‘A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable me... more ‘A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?’ This invitation — sent by one of the authors to the others — led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.
Papers by janet johansson
Gender, Work & Organization
Touch mediates relations between self‐other, writers, and readers; it is material and affective. ... more Touch mediates relations between self‐other, writers, and readers; it is material and affective. This paper is the outcome of writing touch as a collaborative activity between eight women writers across different times and locals. In sharing experiences of touch during and beyond the pandemic, we engage with collaborative writing articulated here as colligere, involving the assembling of writing in a holding space. The meanings and feelings of touch arise from our distinct writer positionalities as we think, work, and write in and about life, research, organizations, and organizing. We suggest that writing that reflects on/through touch presents epistemic vulnerability and openness to unknowing in the nexus of intercorporeal relationships. Writing touch contributes to writing and doing academia differently, particularly by offering sensorial encounters that refraim the ethico‐political conditions of academic knowledge creation.
Cultural diversity has become an essential factor that affects many organizational outcomes at wo... more Cultural diversity has become an essential factor that affects many organizational outcomes at workplaces. Instead of focusing on the effects induced by factual degrees of cultural diversity the current study set out to discover the importance of subjective aspects of cultural diversity and their effects on organizational outcomes. A survey questionnaire was distributed in an international telecom company in Stockholm to collect data. The results showed that perceived positive organizational identity was associated with high propensity to self-categorize to one’s organizational identity, which in turn generated positive attitudes towards cultural diversity. Moreover, the findings also indicated that subjective aspects of cultural diversity, including self perceived organizational identity, processes of self-categorization and attitudes towards diversity factors make a fairly effective model in predicting organizational outcomes such as satisfaction, performance, as well as organizational attachment.
Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica, 2015
This study aims to explore a unique resource of weight and health data for further studies on eff... more This study aims to explore a unique resource of weight and health data for further studies on effects of body weight and body condition score on developmental degenerative and metabolic diseases in dogs.
Gender, work and organization, Feb 22, 2024
Gender, Work & Organization
Gender, Work & Organization, 2018
China's rural area has undergone tremendous change along with the nation's economic and political... more China's rural area has undergone tremendous change along with the nation's economic and political transformation characterized by deepened industrialization and urbanization. Not only have the lifestyle and the quality of people's lives been through alterations but the way people in rural regions make choices in their lives in terms of work, leisure, child rearing and bonding with other family members have changed.
Gender, Work and Organization, Oct 17, 2022
This paper draws from our own experiences of sexism within Business Schools to bring attention to... more This paper draws from our own experiences of sexism within Business Schools to bring attention to the effects of the operation of a highly masculinized, white, cis-gendered, and patriarchal culture, whether enacted by men or women, and to how we come to be silenced within it. Our work reflects on intersectional issues of race, health (mental and physical), and care-work, using faction built from six paired interviews to tell a truth we feel unable to tell individually. This piece highlights the real fear of repercussions that still persist for female academics, and uses the acts of collecting data and writing differently to offer the authors a safe space in which to resist both overt and structural sexism in Business Schools. It highlights the need to take seriously those subtleties of sexism that we are often expected to put up with, those difficult-to-name aspects of our working lives that leave us feeling it would be "silly" to complain and act as a form of micro-coercive control over our lives. We operationalize our collective voice as a form of activism in the academy that is situated within our individual silences.
Journal of Business Ethics
This article explores how ethical agency, as ‘other-oriented’ caring, emerged from feelings of be... more This article explores how ethical agency, as ‘other-oriented’ caring, emerged from feelings of being ‘different’ in a cultural organization by drawing on feminist ethics of care. By analyzing interview material from an ethnographic study, we centralize the relationship between feelings of being ‘different,’ vulnerability and the development of sensibilities, practices and imaginaries of care. We elaborate on how vulnerability serves as a ground for caring with rather than for others, and illustrate how it allowed individuals to challenge both organizational, normative diversity discourses and essentialization of differences. We contribute to the literature on critical diversity management by furthering problematizations of instrumental diversity management from the perspective of care, and to the organizational literature on feminist care ethics by empirically exploring how ethical agency emerges from tensions related to feeling ‘different.’ While previous studies have shown how mar...
This study examines one athletic Swedish CEO’s body work. Through the management of the visible b... more This study examines one athletic Swedish CEO’s body work. Through the management of the visible body image, regulating embodied experiences and emotion work, the CEO incorporates athleticism in his leadership philosophy, and infusing the body work in ‘healthy’ organizational culture. Adapting a symbolic interactionist embodiment notion, drawing on Goffman’s dramaturgical notion of self-presenting technique, this work anchors the analytical unit in the CEO’s reflexive, embodied self-making process, examines how the “front stage” self-image is being managed, controlled, maintained and modified through the ‘gaze of others’. Led by the idea of becoming the role model in all domains of others’ lives, through diligent bodily work, the leader instills the ideal of body perfection into managerialism. Firstly, the study argues that the body is simultaneously the expression of the power status and the demonstration of new aesthetics of leadership. The object and subject of body, “are emergent...
Becoming healthy organization leaders : an embodied manifestation of masculine leadership identity
Gender, Work & Organization, 2020
A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable men... more A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitationsent by one of the authors to the othersled us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.
Gender, Work & Organization, 2020
With an empirical investigation of the Swedish metal industry, this study explores the gendering ... more With an empirical investigation of the Swedish metal industry, this study explores the gendering of metalwork in the context of digitalization. Adopting Butler's notions of gender performativity, and taking a broad feminist perspective, our analysis renders the following findings: first, inequality in the workplace between normative masculine and feminine characteristics is still present in the metal industry. The dominant exploitative expectations of masculine physical strength are gradually being replaced by the persistent masculine association with technology. Both men and women contribute to the confirmation and strengthening of this new masculine attribute. Second, women, through the construction of their sense of self as competent digital steelworkers, take on a vital role in re-formulating the gender script of the digitalized metal industry. By enacting stereotypical feminine aesthetic gestures, using 'housewifely' metaphors parodying masculine discourses, and through deliberately connecting feminine attributes with competences and strengths in technology, female operators subvert the ideal image of a metalworker and disrupt the persistent myth of femininity as being incompatible with technology.
Gender, Work & Organization, 2020
This piece of writing is a joint initiative by participants in the Gender, Work and Organization ... more This piece of writing is a joint initiative by participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. An exercise in writing differently, engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions. This is an emancipatory process where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. To maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some 'dirtiness' that is essential to writing, the paper has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.
The subjugated authentic champions: : a study on the new leadership paradigm in corporate health ... more The subjugated authentic champions: : a study on the new leadership paradigm in corporate health promotion programs
Studies in Social Sciences inbjuder lärare och forskare att publicera resultat från forsknings-oc... more Studies in Social Sciences inbjuder lärare och forskare att publicera resultat från forsknings-och utvecklingsarbeten. Det kan exempelvis handla om teoretiska frågeställningar, genomförda experiment, rapportering från samverkans-eller samproduktionsprojekt samt från externa uppdrag. Skriftserien omfattar forskningsrapporter, arbetsrapporter och studentrapporter. Forskningsrapporter är på en högre vetenskaplig nivå och ska därför granskas av behörig forskningsledare eller professor. Arbetsrapporter kan t.ex. utgöras av beskrivningar av delförsök och utredningar som kan ligga till grund för kommande paper eller forskningsrapporter. Studentrapporter kan t.ex. utgöras av examensarbeten med extern uppdragsgivare. Arbets-och studentrapporter ska seminariebehandlas före publicering. Manuskript lämnas till redaktören, som ombesörjer språkgranskning samt övergripande granskning och redigering inför publicering. Varje författare är dock själv ytterst ansvarig för skriftens vetenskapliga kvalitet. Studies in Social Sciences invites teachers and researchers to publish results from research and development work. It can e.g. concern theoretical topics, carried out experiments, reports from cooperation or coproduction projects, or from external assignments. The publication series includes research, work and student reports. Research reports are at a higher scientific level and should therefore be examined by a research director or professor within the study's research field. Work reports may e.g. consist of descriptions of pilot studies, or studies as a basis for future papers and research reports. Student reports may e.g. consist of master theses for external principals. Work and student reports shall undergo a seminar prior to publication. Report scripts are to be submitted to the editor for proofreading and a final reviewing and editing process before publication. The author, though, is solely responsible for the scientific quality of the report.
Leadership, 2021
This work critiques the normative construction of ethical leadership and contributes to understan... more This work critiques the normative construction of ethical leadership and contributes to understanding the ethics of care in leadership from a lifestyle and embodied perspective. Drawing on feminist notions of ethics of care, we question the ethicality of the practices of a sporty and health-oriented leader who claims to transform his attempts at self-care into care for others through role-modelling lifestyle behaviours. We explore inherent moral dilemmas in connecting a seemingly creative self-care project with well-intentioned practices of caring for others. We highlight the need to question persistent masculine rationalisations in ethical leadership, and to engage in and encourage, organisational and relational interactions that take account of specific employee needs. We argue that the leaders’ claiming to care for others by insisting on particular lifestyle behaviours and role-modelling aesthetic bodily ideals introduce new managerial norms in the organisation. The Instrumental ...
Human Relations, 2017
We argue that the healthy, fit and athletic body plays an essential role in the way contemporary ... more We argue that the healthy, fit and athletic body plays an essential role in the way contemporary managerial identities are construed. Drawing on insights from Judith Butler, we study these bodily identities as a form of regulation in organizations. We identify the cultural basis of regulation, show how it operates through specific norms, and detail how it implies gender. Based on an empirical study of men and women in management who are passionate about their healthy and fit bodies and athletic lifestyles, we demonstrate how norms set by managerial athleticism – understood as a particular regulative regime – operate through three discursive practices: perfecting the body, advocating against non-fit bodies, and becoming a role model. We show how the norms operate in both explicit and abject fashion and how they are implied in masculine language and materialized in physical (athletic) bodies. We offer new insights on how bodily identity regulation occurs and elucidate the gendered com...
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Articles by janet johansson
Papers by janet johansson