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This paper takes a “social movements” approach to employee activism regarding diversity and inequality in the workplace. The social context is often neglected in studies of organizational change, while the workplace as a locus of activism receives less attention from social movement theorists than other organizational settings. We do not seek to differentiate employee activists from quiescent employees but to understand the concerns, language, and tactics of small groups of employee activists when they mobilize. Our study is based on interviews with thirty-nine activists from nine grassroots employee groups in a 900-person division of a high technology firm. We learn how employee activists pursue changes that question power relations, draw links to broader societal issues, sustain their “passion” and collective efforts over cycles of involvement, manage risks to their careers and their mission, handle the protection and constraints offered by the “umbrella” of management, and make sense of their accomplishments. We close by highlighting the significance of local, fragmented change efforts. Without being too sanguine about employee activism nor too cynical about its cooptive function, theorists should allow a place for piecemeal change.

The author uses a novel narrative style to detail the stories of two women coming to feminism and the impact organizational experiences have had on their gender awareness. Frames these two stories by detailing her own journey in becoming a feminist. Together the stories bear witness to the importance of organizational experiences in shaping their identities, specifically in relationship to their awareness of gender, and conversely how their identities in turn affect the way we approach and make sense of their lives inside and beyond organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the stigma surrounding old age, which in many ways has increased rather than decreased with the ageing of the population.

The approach of this paper is to introduce the reader to recent writing and research surrounding talk of a “demograhic time bomb”, with the ageing of populations world wide. It also looks back on the work on “ageing studies” over the last two decades, revealing the prevailing disavowals of old age among the old themselves, as well as the contrasting gendered dynamics of the ways in which we are, as Margaret Gullette writes, “aged by culture”.

–The author introduces the conceptual notion of “temporal vertigo” to the complicated effects of the multiplicity of continuities and discontinuities older people experience when reflecting upon who they are over a lifetime. Ageing is of interest for those who have always been sceptical about any notion of the “true self”, allowing us to puzzle over how the account the old give of themselves will rely upon their ability to incorporate differing versions of the self, woven into the volatilities of memory and fantasy.

The paper's exploration of the radical ambiguities in the representation and discussions surrounding old age in these times.

Inequality is an important organizational phenomenon. Scholars have argued that inequalities persistently dwell in the flow of our lives and have a lingering impact. Yet, despite such compelling evidence, research has overlooked how individuals make sense of the inequalities they face inside and outside the organizations. The purpose of this paper was to address these gaps and capture its complexity on individual lived experiences with inequalities.

The present study used Seidman's adapted 2-interview strategy to collect the data. The first interview placed the participant's life history at the center, allowing the participant to share their childhood and adulthood experiences with inequalities inside and outside the organizations. The second interview focused on the concrete details of the participant's present lived experience and their reflections on the meaning of their experiences. In total, the present study relied on 26 interviews with 13 participants.

Lived experiences provided an extended-time view and allowed the researcher to explore how study participants perceived, coped and were shaped by inequalities throughout their lives. In addition, the sense-making perspective offered a new lens to study inequalities. Findings underscore the racial, class and gendered dynamics within organizations supporting their intersectional impact and acknowledge the pre-existing societal norms that condition individual actions and choices.

The study presents an “engaged” view of inequality to highlight it as a cumulative and complex experience. The findings help us recognize that participants are immersed in their specific contexts to act, negotiate, empower and make decisions under real-life pressures. Overall, the study pushes the boundaries of inequality research beyond its current episodic treatment.

Purpose/approach: This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

Research implications: The chapters in this volume present original research employing empirical and textual methods illustrating the complex responses and policy challenges posed by contemporary understandings and misunderstandings of the nature of gender. Various forms of gender panic and responses to it within individuals, institutions, national states, and the world society are explored.

Practical and social implications: Research demonstrates that gender panic can lead to potentially harmful reactions and fruitless policies that reinforce rather than dismantle the gender binary, thereby, impacting vulnerable members of societies.

Value of the chapter: The chapter and the volume are intended to illustrate the nature of current gender panics and related policies and to encourage further scholarship with the goal of promoting greater understanding as well as developing constructive solutions to issues raised.

Purpose – This chapter responds to interdisciplinary debates regarding studies of sex, sexuality, and gender. I briefly examine how the sex/gender paradigm of the 1960s shaped feminist theory in the social sciences and explore two feminist frameworks that have contested the sex/gender paradigm: West and Zimmerman's “doing gender” and Butler's performativity. I situate this literature, and related debates about intersectionality, in the context of Margaret Andersen's (2005) Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) feminist lecture.

Methodology/approach – Using empirical analyses of brief television excerpts, I develop an ethnomethodological study of practice and poststructural analysis of discourse to demonstrate how trenchant forms of cultural knowledge link together gender, sex, and sexuality.

Findings – Sex and gender function as disciplinary forces in the service of heterosexuality; consequently studies of gender that do not account for sexuality reproduce heterosexism and marginalize queer sexualities. These findings, considered in relationship to Andersen's analysis of intersectionality, illustrate both a narrow conceptualization of the field rooted to a 19th century European model and a methodological mandate that must be examined in relationship to the politics of social research.

Practical implications – A more fruitful conceptual starting point in thinking through intersectionality may be citizenship, rather than systematic exploitation of wage labor. In addition, a more full analysis of intersectionality would also require that we rethink our methodological orientations.

Originality/value of paper – The chapter illustrates some of the analytic effects and political consequences that commonsense knowledge about gender, sex, and sexuality holds for feminist scholarship and advances alternative possibilities for future feminist research.

This chapter aims to advance understandings of agency and embodiment by considering the relationship between identifying as a feminist and choosing to engage in sexually submissive practices with men.

Thematic analysis of seven feminist-identified women’s solicited diaries and follow-up interviews are paired with a feminist phenomenological framework of agency and embodiment in order to highlight how inhabiting and investing in dominant heterosexual norms is a means of locating oneself in one’s own desires and sexuality.

Engaging in sexual submission as a feminist can be met with feelings of guilt and a sense of justification; a number of participants questioned whether these sexual choices put their political identity in crisis or open to critique. Others felt that their choice to be submissive warranted no problematization – even if the female, feminist subject inhabits dominant heterosexual norms surrounding what it means to be a woman as defined by heteronormative, patriarchal terms.

The present study is part of a broader PhD project based on heterosexuality and feminism in practice, where choosing submission also occurs between instances of sex (in everyday encounters with men) and beyond the context of sex (within the broader context of a romantic relationship). As such, choosing submission within the context of sex is only one aspect of this much more complex relationship.

This chapter aims to contribute to a growing body of literature that considers the way agency is conceptualized and in doing so, offers empirical evidence to show these theories are applicable to sexual practices as well as understandings of gender and feminism.

This chapter explores how power obtained from societal hierarchies of gender, race, and economic status is covertly used by individuals within relationships, further maintaining systems of stratification. The case of marriage is used to examine how social stratification translates into and is reinforced within even the most intimate relationships in terms of control over decision making. Analysis of in-depth interviews with black and white wives in same-race and interracial marriages illustrates how economic inequality affects who makes what decisions within marriage and how race affects what decisions are made. In the midst of income and racial inequality, socialized gender roles dictate which spouse controls certain arenas versus others. Gender norms operate covertly to affect decision making dynamics through mechanisms of availability, areas of knowledge, and preference.