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This paper aims to review Ruth Simpson’s contribution to the field of gender and management.

This paper looks at Ruth Simpson’s body of work over her career through a conversation that took place between Pullen and Ross-Smith.

Ruth Simpson’s contribution to gender, class, work and organizations is discussed.

This piece remembers Ruth Simpson’s feminist scholarship to the field of gender and management.

The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership for diversity informed by intersectionality and radical politics. Surfacing the political character of intersectionality, the authors suggest that a leadership for diversity imbued with a commitment to political action is essential for the progress towards equality.

Drawing lessons from the grassroots, political organizing of the black and Indigenous activist groups Combahee River Collective and Idle No More, the authors explore how these groups relied on feminist alliances to address social justice issues. Learning from their focus on intersectionality, the authors consider the role of politically engaged leadership in advancing diversity and equality in organizations.

The paper finds that leadership for diversity can be developed by shifting towards a more radical and transversal politics that challenges social and political structures that enable intersectionality or interlocking oppressions. This challenge relies on critical alliances negotiated across multiple intellectual, social and political positions and enacted through flexible solidarity to foster a collective ethical responsibility and social change. These forms of alliance-based praxis are important for advancing leadership for diversity.

This paper contributes to studies of leadership and critical diversity studies by articulating an alliance-based praxis for leadership underpinned by intersectionality, radical democracy and transversal politics.

This chapter offers five poems that aim to provide an affective and embodied engagement with the question why women stay silent after experiencing sexual violence. It aims to trouble the idea that coming forward as a victim or survivor is a one-time action or ‘event’. Instead it seeks to make felt how both staying silent and speaking out need continuous negotiation and effort. The poems provide a personal account of the difficulties inherent in navigating systemic power structures such as misogyny and rape culture that produce victims as shameful, guilty and broken. The writing speaks to both ongoing discussions in organisation studies regarding #MeToo (e.g. Ozkazanc Pan, 2018; Pullen & Vacchani, 2019) and efforts that aim to resist norms of academic writing, grouped under the heading ‘writing differently’ (e.g. Fotaki, Metcalfe, & Harding, 2014; Gilmore, Harding, Helin, & Pullen 2019; Grey & Sinclair 2006; Meier & Wegener 2017; Phillips, Pullen, & Rhodes 2014). More specifically, it uses poetic inquiry (cf. Prendergast, Leggo, & Sameshima 2009; van Amsterdam & van Eck, 2019) as the starting point of a feminist ethic of care in order to capture affect, embodiment and tacit knowledge, provide resonance and make an impact on the reader that goes beyond rational understanding.

This chapter takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Academy. It is posted with urgency at a time when Patriarchy is resurging across the globe. My complaint is against the misogyny and the moral injury done to all of us and to our participants through our detached, disembodied, non-relation, pseudo-objective, masculine ways of becoming and being CMS scholars. Drawing on the thinking of Hélène Cixous, I offer five gifts as strategies to break with the masculine reckoning and open up our scholarship to féminine multiplicity and generativity: loving not knowing, return to our material bodies, rightsizing theory, knowledge made flesh-to-flesh and women’s writing. I visit, and suggest our scholarship will benefit from visiting, Cixous’s School of the Dead and her School of Dreams. I advocate for social theatre/performative auto/ethnography as a way to effect change in organisations. Finally, I present a manifesto for women’s writing that can help take our scholarship ‘home’ and contribute to the creation of flourishing organisations. This letter is a Call to Arms.

How do we write from the sensory body in ways that can convey the lived experience of the researcher and the researched, which can allow other researchers to make sense of their lived experience as well? What alternative writings could transform disembodied academia through dialogue and relational reflection? The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the value of the researcher’s embodied reflexivity in academic writing. More specifically, this chapter explores the ways in which we can write differently about organisational phenomena by experiencing aesthetic moments in the field. To accomplish this, I share examples of the aesthetic moments that I, as a researcher, experienced while undertaking three ethnographic projects: a study on professional dance, a study on academic motherhood and a study on female-canine companionship. This chapter identifies three aspects that allow the researcher to experience aesthetic moments – namely, appreciating sensory cues, writing ‘in and from the flesh’ and allowing vulnerability to flourish. Paying attention to the social micro-dynamics that exist between researchers and research phenomena and addressing the analytically marginalised experiences of researchers, therefore, allows for developing academic writing practices in more reflexive and sensory-appreciative directions.