Bernauer, Vanessa

Studies into international airlines have made important advances in our understanding of gender and diversity in management. While the flight attendant profession was initially a male one, it has evolved into a female-dominated profession. Today, images of the sexy stewardess and the heroic pilot permeate popular culture. The gendered nature of the airline industry serves various analyses on discriminatory workplace practices, traditional heteronormative gender processes and the (re)production of inequalities.

Gendered class work is an empirically grounded concept that combines the concepts of class work and inequality regimes with a particular focus on the luxury service segment. It refers to perceptions and practices of status enhancement and status dissonance among service workers as well as to gender practices and meanings such as specific feminized roles that service workers take on. From a critical management perspective, it highlights the highly gendered nature of class work in luxury service encounters and conceptualizes intersectional patterns of the enactment and reproduction of status differences between luxury service customers and workers.

Mills and Helms Mills’ careers have spanned nearly 40 years. Together, they have forged a fruitful and productive scholarly partnership in developing theories, methods and critical insights into gender in management and organization studies. Now they are regarded as key scholars in several subfields, including critical management studies and management history for advancing equity, diversity and inclusion themes in research. Their legacy also involves training dozens of doctoral graduates in Canada and Finland.

Despite extensive legal and organizational measures to promote diversity, inequalities in organizations, e.g. based on gender, class, or sexual orientation, persist or are (re)produced. This cumulative dissertation comprises six manuscripts that examine issues of diversity and inequality in organizations from a critical perspective. What are differences and inequalities and how are they maintained and (re)produced in daily work practices? The focus is on different aspects of doing difference and diversity as well as on specific contexts of work, management and organization, such as equal participation through e-voice in a digital alternative organization, intersections of gender and class in service work in the luxury segment, barriers and success factors for women’s entrepreneurship in the hospitality and tourism industry, and gay leaders in management. In the dissertation’s frame, the studies’ research perspectives and their critical, politicizing aim are reflected in order to position them within the research field of Critical Management Studies with a focus on diversity and (in)equality as well as in the field of Critical Diversity Studies with a focus on management and organizations.

Research often portrays women as weaker entrepreneurs in the hospitality and tourism (H&T) industry. Our systematic literature review sheds light on women's entrepreneurial success in H&T by examining four determining factors to success (or failure) for women's entrepreneurship: (1) motivations that lead women to become entrepreneurs, (2) barriers they face, (3) non-government strategies, and (4) governmental policies. Our findings suggest that financial and legal support, training, political, social, and cultural backing are among the consistent success factors examined in previous studies. However, scholarship is silent on how the four key themes can be aligned to support women to succeed in H&T entrepreneurship. As a key contribution, this systematic literature review provides a template for future research that starts from the identifiable success factors. In addition, this work provides practitioners such as policymakers and industry leaders with a better understanding of how to reduce barriers to women's entrepreneurship.

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to provide insights on Albert J. Mills' and Jean Helms Mills' lifelong methodological journey in the airline culture. The interview offers a retrospective and reflective insight of their research into organizational culture and the airline industry, reasons for this research, their methodological journey, challenges they faced and ways forward. Design/methodology/approach: This article is based on an interview with Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills, which was virtually conducted for a professional development workshop (PDW) at the 2020 Academy of Management Meeting. Findings: Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills provide insights and reflections on their lifelong methodological journey, focusing organizational culture, discriminatory practices, and the impact of this on what constitutes men and women's work. Originality/value: This paper draws from Albert J. Mills' and Jean Helms Mills' lifelong experience in studying gender, intersectionality and historiography in airline cultures. Scholars will be encouraged by their insights on how to start a long-term study, potential challenges, impacts of current trends and how to deal with them.

Digitalisation permeates all aspects of organizational life, especially the ways we communicate with each other. Drawing on a case study of an alternative organisation—the German collective Premium, which is almost entirely digitally organised—we seek to explore contextual factors that facilitate or hinder the expression of electronic voice (e-voice). Based on 20 semi-structured interviews with different members of the collective, we identified various contextual facilitators and barriers to e-voice expression: Collective belief in the value of diverse voices, cautious online and complementary face-to-face communication facilitate e-voice, while less formalised structures, power and knowledge asymmetries, and information overload hinder it. These findings demonstrate that despite an alternative organisation's firm intention and self-reflective efforts to create an inclusive and participatory digital space, tensions arise. Further, our study contributes to employee voice theorising by outlining contextual factors that are specifically relevant to e-voice practices.