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This study aims to investigate the research question: how do women leaders in the professional business services (PBS) sector develop and approach workplace (in)authenticity?

Ten senior women leaders in the Midlands region of the UK were purposefully selected and interviewed. A semi-structured approach meant that the author adopted a social constructionist paradigm and feminist interpretation. Questions were designed to elicit rich descriptions from the participants. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted to address the study’s purpose.

Four themes were important to women when they developed and approached workplace (in)authenticity: (1) Power Structures, (2) Fit to Belong, (3) Influential Femininity and (4) Through Her Evolution. Women described masculine-majority organisations exerting power. They were pressured into altering their behaviours to “fit” into workplaces. When women had the latitude to be themselves, their leadership excelled. Women’s authenticity developed through increased self-knowledge, helping them to overcome workplace challenges. The study concluded that women face complexities when developing and approaching their constructions of authenticity, namely in the barriers and ramifications they face.

The study suggests several implications for practice and theory concerning enablers and barriers to women leaders' workplace authenticity. The link between authenticity and workplace gender equity needs to be investigated.

The study provides evidence that women are challenged when becoming authentic, therefore, altering their careers irrecoverably in some cases.

The author aims to walk beside the singular privileged class of White women’s suffrage feminist origin story to (re)construct plausible feminist fragmented threads as antenarratives in the context of business management education. To accomplish this (re)assembling of threads, the author examined two North American business trade publications created and used within two business schools, Harvard University’s Harvard Business Review (HBR), established in 1922, and Western University’s The Quarterly Review of Commerce (The Quarterly), established in 1933.

The author carefully reviewed almost 4,000 articles from HBR and The Quarterly, focusing on 308 articles that addressed the experiences of complex women. With this subset of collected articles, the author highlighted overlooked details, accidents and errors, generating interest and curiosity about the emergence of these fragmented and paradoxical origins that align with Foucault's histories of errors. By grouping these narrative fragments into themes and conducting a critical discourse analysis that incorporated influences from the external environment, the author reconstructed plural feminist origins antenarratives.

The themes discovered, including women as consumers, explicit working women concerns, women as authors/coauthors, diversity and social justice initiatives, and women in higher education/training, are not merely descriptive observations. They are the building blocks for identifying and analyzing the power relations circulating among feminist origins antenarratives within management education circles. These antenarratives include shedding light on women working in capitalist contexts, the educational needs of business women, and men and naming (but not breaking) the “mythologies” of women at work. These findings are transformative to the understanding of plural feminist origins.

The uniqueness of this work lies in its threefold contributions: moving away from the notion of a singular feminist origin story and instead embracing the complexity of multiple, paradoxical and incomplete origins; shedding light on the spectrum of power relations – ranging from productive to oppressive – that shaped the experiences of women in two management educational circles during the first half of the 20th century; and introducing the concept of inflection points, which underscores the fluidity of knowledge.

This paper aims to investigate the ethical challenges within same-day delivery (SDD) operations in the gig economy, focusing on promoting fairness and justice for independent contractors by applying Rawlsian justice principles.

Adopting a philosophical and theoretical methodology, the authors synthesize insights from business ethics, corporate governance and Rawlsian ethical theories. This study critically examines the application of these theories within SDD business models through a comparative analysis of seminal and contemporary ethical discussions. Importantly, the authors reverse the traditional antecedents, decisions and outcomes framework to start with outcomes, offering a novel methodological execution that enhances the study’s approach to ethical research.

The analysis identifies pronounced ethical deficiencies in treating SDD contractors, emphasizing the need for systemic reforms. The study proposes a series of hypotheses to rectify these issues, including recommendations for enhancing algorithmic transparency, ensuring equitable compensation and fortifying worker protections. These proposed changes advocate for restructuring corporate policies to foster a fairer SDD business environment.

By interweaving Rawlsian ethical principles with practical corporate responsibilities specific to the gig economy, this paper enriches the discourse on business ethics. It introduces a novel framework for analyzing the ethical treatment of gig workers, proposing actionable strategies that bridge theoretical ethics with real-world applications. This approach advances academic understanding and guides industry practices toward more ethical and sustainable models.

The purpose of this manuscript is to explore an assignment given to students in an online survey of leadership theory and practice graduate course to help them learn and apply information on authentic leadership theory and critically examine the literature on this theory through a feminist lens.

After studying authentic leadership theory, students were prompted to examine Taylor Swift’s public statements, actions and impact on her industry and society and how her words and actions support or refute her status as an authentic leader. Students were challenged to examine how Swift’s gender impacts her status as an authentic leader and to critically examine how the demographics of the authors who developed this theory could affect its application.

Students critically engaged with the concept of authentic leadership, thoughtfully applied their knowledge to a real-world case study, and displayed an understanding of the interplay of gender and authentic leadership.

Recommendations are provided to inspire new ideas for leadership educators who seek to prepare students to understand (the often gender-influenced) applications of authentic leadership in a modern setting.

The popularity of employee resource groups (ERGs) has grown, yet there has been limited critical examination of the outcomes of membership individuals. This paper aims to better understand ERG member experiences and the role and impact of allies, or members who do not share the identity around which the group is centered.

Two survey studies collected data from ERG members and non-members to uncover individual membership outcomes.

Our findings reveal that ERG members report greater career satisfaction yet also experience higher levels of emotional loneliness compared to non-members. Additionally, the presence of allies in ERGs has a complex impact, offering both positive and negative effects on the experiences of focal group members.

Our findings provide a more expansive view on employee experiences related to ERG membership and suggest decisions to allow or require openness of ERGs to everyone should be undertaken with caution. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

This study contributes to the diversity management literature by exploring individual outcomes of ERGs, a popular type of organizational diversity practice.

This study responded to calls to investigate the behavioural and social antecedents that produce a highly positive response to AI bias in a constrained region, which is characterised by a high share of people with minimal buying power, growing but untapped market opportunities and a high number of related businesses operating in an unregulated market.

Drawing on empirical data from 225 human resource managers from Ghana, data were sourced from senior human resource managers across industries such as banking, insurance, media, telecommunication, oil and gas and manufacturing. Data were analysed using a fussy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The results indicated that managers who regarded their response to AI bias as a personal moral duty felt a strong sense of guilt towards the unintended consequences of AI logic and reasoning. Therefore, managers who perceived the processes that guide AI algorithms' reasoning as discriminating showed a high propensity to address this prejudicial outcome.

As awareness of consequences has to go hand in hand with an ascription of responsibility; organisational heads have to build the capacity of their HR managers to recognise the importance of taking personal responsibility for artificial intelligence algorithm bias because, by failing to nurture the appropriate attitude to reinforce personal norm among managers, no immediate action will be taken.

By integrating the social identity theory, norm activation theory and justice theory, the study improves our understanding of how a collective organisational identity, perception of justice and personal values reinforce a positive reactive response towards AI bias outcomes.

This paper is intended as an original contribution to researching ESG from a PR perspective, as well as offering a case study of the use of letters as a mode of corporate communication.

The methodology is interdisciplinary but is centred on a critical discourse analysis of the organizational rhetoric on ESG in the annual letters of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink from 2018 to 2023. The article also considers the content of the BlackRock letters alongside the campaign rhetoric deployed by opponents to ESG over the same period.

The analysis of the letters showed up a difference in tempo and tone between the courteous, collaborative and somewhat “corporate” style of text in the Fink letters and the more urgent and confrontational tone of opponents that adopted a populist line of argumentation against ESG in general and Larry Fink and BlackRock in particular.

While advantages can accrue to CEOs and corporations for speaking out on issues, there are also perils awaiting in the contemporary environment for opinion. The findings suggest it is also important to gauge the intensity of cultural and political division in society when speaking out on contentious issues and make a judgement on whether to proceed based on that analysis. Moreover, in countries where the middle ground of public opinion has eroded, ideology and cultural affiliations can prevail instead of openness to argument and counter-argument on topics such as climate change.

The paper presents a fresh case study of a CEO who has been prominent in shaping the discourse on ESG, which has itself become is a matter of contemporary relevance to public relations. The findings offer original insights that are additive to existing guidance and criteria for CEOs deciding to speak out on issues on behalf of their organizations.

The paper explores the potential value of urban assemblage theory as a conceptual framework for understanding the role heritage has in social sustainable urban placemaking. The authors conceptualise urban placemaking as a dynamic and complex social assemblage. Heritage is one of the many dimensions of such a complex and dynamic urban assembly. Based on the approach to urban assemblage theory, the authors aim to uncover how postindustrial city-making unfolds. When approaching the case studies, the authors ask the following: Whose city for which citizens are visible through the selected case studies? How is social sustainability achieved through heritage in urban placemaking?

The main research material is derived from theoretical literature and the testing of an assemblage methodological approach through three Norwegian urban regeneration case studies where heritage partake in urban placemaking. The three case studies are the Tukthus wall (what is left of an 19th century old prison), the Vulkan neighbourhood (an 19th century industrial working area) and Sørengkaia (an 19th century industrial harbour area) in Oslo, Norway. The three case studies are representing urban regeneration projects which are common worldwide, and not at least in a European context.

The paper reveals the dynamic factors and processes at play in urban placemaking, which has its own distinct character by the uses of heritage in each of the case study areas. Placemaking could produce “closed” systems which are stable in accordance with its original functions, or they could be “open” systems affected by the various drivers of change. The paper shows how these forces are depending on two sets of binary forces at play in urban placemaking: forces of “assemblages” co-creating a place versus destabilising forces of “disassembly” which is redefining the place as a process affected by reassembled placemaking.

For research, the authors focus on the implications this paper has for the field of urban heritage studies as it provides a useful framework to capture the dynamic complexity of urban heritage areas.

For practice, the authors state that the paper can provide a useful platform for dialogue and critical thinking on strategies being planned.

For society, the paper promotes the significance in terms of fostering an inclusive way of thinking and planning for urban heritage futures.

The paper outlines dynamics of urban regeneration through heritage which are significant for understanding urban transformation as value for offering practical solutions to social problems in urban planning. The assemblage methodological approach (1) makes awareness of the dynamic processes at play in urban placemaking and makes the ground for mapping issue at stake in urban placemaking; (2) becomes a source for modelling urban regeneration through heritage by defining a conceptual framework of dynamic interactions in urban placemaking; and (3) defines a critically reflexive tool for evaluating good versus bad (heritage-led) urban development projects.

This article explores the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and machine learning (ML) models to discover underlying concepts of gender inequality applied to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in female social media conversations. The first purpose is to characterize female users who use this platform to share content around this area. The second is to identify the most prominent themes among female users’ digital production of gender inequality concepts, applied to AI technologies.

Social opinion mining has been applied to historical Twitter data. Data were gathered using a combination of analytical methods such as word clouds, sentiment analyses and clustering. It examines 172,041 tweets worldwide over a limited period of 359 days.

Empirical data gathered from interactions of female users in digital dialogues highlight that the most prominent topics of interest are the future of AI technologies and the active role of women to guarantee gender balanced systems. Algorithmic bias impacts female user behaviours in response to injustice and inequality in algorithmic outcomes. They share topics of interest and lead constructive conversations with profiles affiliated with gender or race empowerment associations. Women challenged by stereotypes and prejudices are likely to fund entrepreneurial solutions to create opportunities for change.

This study does have its limitations, however. First, different keywords are likely to result in a different pool of related research. Moreover, due to the nature of our sample, the largest proportion of posts are from native English speakers, predominantly (88%) from the US, UK, Australia and Canada. This demographic concentration reflects specific social structures and practices that influence gender equity priorities within the sample. These cultural contexts, which often emphasize inclusivity and equity, play a significant role in shaping the discourse around gender issues. These cultural norms, preferences and practices are critical in understanding the individual behaviours, perspectives and priorities expressed in the posts; in other words, it is vital to consider cultural context and economic determinants in an analysis of gender equity discussions. The US, UK, Australia and Canada share a cultural and legal heritage, a common language, values, democracy and the rule of law. Bennett (2007) emphasizes the potential for enhanced cooperation in areas like technology, trade and security, suggesting that the anglosphere’s cultural and institutional commonalities create a natural foundation for a cohesive, influential global network. These shared characteristics further influence the common approaches and perspectives on gender equity in public discourse. Yet findings from Western nations should not be assumed to apply easily to the contexts of other countries.

From a practical perspective, the results help us understand the role of female influencers and scrutinize public conversations. From a theoretical one, this research upholds the argument that feminist critical thought is indispensable in the development of balanced AI systems.

The results also help us understand the role of female influencers: ordinary individuals often challenged by gender and race discrimination. They request an intersectional, collaborative and pluralistic understanding of gender and race in AI. They act alone and endure the consequences of stigmatized products and services. AI curators should strongly consider advocating for responsible, impartial technologies, recognizing the indispensable role of women. This must consider all stakeholders, including representatives from industry, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), civil society and academia.

This study aims to fill critical research gaps by addressing the lack of a socio-technical perspective on AI-based decision-making systems, the shortage of empirical studies in the field and the need for a critical analysis using feminist theories. The study offers valuable insights that can guide managerial decision-making for AI researchers and practitioners, providing a comprehensive understanding of the topic through a critical lens.

This study aims to examine the impact of digital health technology adoption on female physicians’ work–life balance (WLB) in Bahrain. This study also examines the impact of two moderating variables: career stage, based on the kaleidoscope career model (KCM) and the presence of domestic workers, based on Becker’s theory of the allocation of time.

An electronic quantitative survey was administered to female physicians working in Bahrain. The survey gathered data on various aspects of digital health technology, WLB and demographic characteristics such as age and the presence of domestic workers. From a target population of approximately 1,000 female physicians in Bahrain, 102 participated in the survey.

The authors found that the effect of digital health technologies on WLB is positive in general and specifically for the early-career stage; however, it harms WLB in the middle and late-career stages. This is consistent with KCM predictions. In addition, there is no moderating effect of having domestic helpers.

This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of the effect of technology on WLB by expanding the traditional model (KCM) to include an economic model of how female physicians allocate their time between work and home responsibilities, including the effect that a domestic worker can have on this allocation. Beyond these theoretical contributions, this paper is also the first to study technology and WLB in the health sector in Bahrain following the COVID-19 pandemic.