Sieben, Barbara

Purpose: With a focus on service encounters in the luxury segment of hospitality and tourism, the authors analyse how inherent social class distinctions and status differences are (re-)produced and which role gender plays in this process of “doing class”. Design/methodology/approach: The authors combine concepts of class work and inequality regimes with a focus on intersections of class and gender. The empirical study is based on interviews in Germany with first-class flight attendants, five-star hotel employees, and luxury customers on how they perceive and legitimize luxury services, working conditions and status differences. Findings: The authors identify perceptions and practices of status enhancement and status dissonance among luxury service workers, as well as gender practices and meanings such as specific feminized roles service workers take on. The authors also conceptualize these intersecting patterns of inequality reproduction as “gendered class work”. Originality/value: The study broadens empirical accounts of labour relations in the service industries. The concept of organizational class work is extended towards worker–customer interactions. With the concept of gendered class work, the authors contribute to research on the intersectionality of class and gender and the reproduction of inequalities.

In this paper, we explore how institutional actors push or resist equality, diversity and inclusion in light of power relations in their respective country contexts. We conducted interviews with a range of institutional actors, including governmental organizations, employer representatives, unions, professional associations, and civil society organizations working on EDI issues in Germany and Turkey, two countries with very different socioeconomic and political settings. Our findings suggest that EDI fields are structured by country-specific power relations: they appear as competitively dispersed in Germany and politically polarized in Turkey, depending on the social position of the actors and the type of field fragmentation. These field characteristics, in turn, nurture different patterns of actors’ strategies such as framing and mobilizing aimed at maintaining or disrupting the institutionalized status quo of EDI. We propose that a critical, power-sensitive institutional work approach to EDI is a useful lens through which to examine extra-organizational country contexts in international HRM research and, in particular, context-sensitive studies of EDI. As a practical implication, EDI and HR managers will be sensitized to the relevance of building coalitions with external stakeholders if they are to advance EDI within their organizations.

The goal of this article is to provide a fine-grained analysis of international human resource management research that addresses the different perspectives applied in that research. We coded 203 peer-reviewed international human resource management articles published between 2011 and 2018 with content analytical methods guided by the compass of management research developed by Sieben, which is rooted in critical management research. We were particularly attentive to the various discursive orientations international human resource management scholars have adopted, including ideologically critical, poststructuralist, functionalist and interpretive perspectives. We further examined which methods, theoretical perspectives and topics were common within and across different perspectives. This analysis indicated that critical research intending to politicize and question existing structures and ways of organizing is still marginal. Along with the dominance of functionalist and interpretive studies, papers in our dataset commonly use a strategic human resource perspective, are predominantly interested in the human resource management–performance link and focus rather narrowly on multinational corporations and expatriates. Furthermore, while international human resource management scholars increasingly account for the contextual embeddedness of organizations through macro-level theories, they mainly apply institutional perspectives that view organizations as adapting to institutional constraints. We propose a more diverse and reflexive approach – inspired by ideologically critical and poststructuralist perspectives – that may help to overcome these blind spots. Such an approach might, for instance, look at types of organizations other than multinational corporations and individuals other than highly skilled expatriates and might explicitly bring multiple, external stakeholders into the picture. We conclude by suggesting that international human resource management research and practice would benefit from more research diversity which enables more holistic analyses of phenomena, more innovative research and resultant insights, and more space for meta-theoretical reflections.

What do the relaxed social events held by companies and organizations do for continued gender inequality? This article argues that outings, barbecues and parties offer opportunities for members of an organization to challenge unequal gender regimes. But they can also end up maintaining these inequalities instead. The article draws on Joan Acker’s theory of gendered organizations, and Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity. Based on 208 accounts of organizations’ social events, it identifies the following four areas of gender performativity and their varying significance in reaffirming or challenging unequal gender regimes: gender images, status differences, the body and sexuality. The findings indicate that practices reaffirming unequal gender regimes outnumber practices that possibly balance or break them. Paradoxically, practices that challenge unequal gender regimes, when joined with powerful responses from the hitherto privileged party, can form a vicious circle which again ends up continuing unequal gender regimes. The article provides a more nuanced understanding of ambivalences and the contested nature of gender regimes which is important in identifying avenues for gender equality.