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The authors aim to explore how perspective-taking and attribution of blame lead to side-taking by human resource professionals (HRPs) when making judgements and handling complaints of sexual harassment.

Employing qualitative methodology, the authors used semi-structured in-depth interviews with 35 HRPs from 30 companies in Sri Lanka. Attribution theory and perspective-taking were used as theoretical lenses.

In handling complaints of sexual harassment incidents, HRPs take the perspectives of the alleged perpetrator, complainant, or the company and attribute the blame to the alleged perpetrator or the complainant. Irrespective of the gender of the HRPs and the perspective they take, they would most often blame the female complainants due to sexual harassment myths and misperceptions and traditional sex-role beliefs. Thus, they either take the side of the alleged perpetrator or the company, explicitly/implicitly or intentionally/unintentionally.

The central originality of this research is the finding that HRPs take sides in resolving complaints of sexual harassment and perspective-taking and attribution of blame by HRPs lead to this side-taking in organisational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the particular culture within which research is conducted and its norms and values can give rise to additional challenges and complications for the researcher when the research area is sensitive in nature.

Drawing on research on sexual harassment of working women in Sri Lanka, the researcher engages in self and methodological reflections to elucidate the many challenges faced.

Carrying out sensitive research in an Asian cultural context, with various stereotyping cultural norms, values and beliefs can give rise to additional culture-specific challenges for the researcher, even when the researcher is a cultural insider. How these cultural complexities influence the manner in which the participants respond to data collection and the manner in which the researcher is seen and understood by others are explained. Strategies to overcome these challenges are discussed in light of the cultural competencies propose by Deardorff and Sewyer et al.

The paper highlights the need for researchers engaged in sensitive research to carefully plan and conduct their research, being mindful not only to the sensitive nature of the topic, but also to the cultural edifices and ethos.

The influence of cultural context in conducting sensitive research is not sufficiently addressed. Culture-specific challenges that can arise in cultures outside the West, such as Asia, have specifically being neglected. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by focusing on the culture-specific challenges faced by researchers, whether they are cultural insiders or outsiders.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how human resource (HR) managers in garment factories in a Sri Lankan export processing zone (EPZ) navigated the tension between their role as stewards of employee welfare and their role to maximise firm productivity in response to time and production pressures imposed by international buyers. Relatively little attention has been paid to the role of HR managers as liaisons between firms and labour. This omission is significant, given the importance of human resource management in the recruitment and retention of labour and the role of HR managers in organisational performance and regulatory compliance.

A qualitative approach was used based on interviews with 18 HR managers, factory managers and other key informants, and 63 factory workers from 12 firms in the Katunayake EPZ. The interviews and focus groups in English were transcribed and coded into themes arising from the literature and further developed from the transcripts. Initial codes were analysed to identify common themes across the data set.

HR managers were acutely aware of the competitive pressures facing the EPZ garment factories. While examples of company welfarism were evident, HR practices such as incentive payment systems and the management of employee absences reinforced a workplace environment of long hours, work intensification and occupational injury.

This paper goes some way towards filling the gap in our understanding of the roles played by HR managers in garment factories in the Global South, raising theoretical debates regarding the potential for HR managers in developing countries to distance themselves from the negative consequences of HR practices such as individual and team reward systems.

This paper aims to explore the motivations behind women in a developing South Asian country – Sri Lanka – to embark on entrepreneurship in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, which is a doubly masculine hegemony operating within a culturally nuanced gendered context.

The study employs a qualitative research approach, conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 STEM women entrepreneurs, following the theoretical lenses of push and pull motivation theory and gender role theory.

Although the motivations of STEM women entrepreneurs cannot be exclusively categorized as either push or pull factors, the pull factors had a greater influence on the participants in motivating them to become entrepreneurs. The primary motivators for starting businesses in STEM were: inspiration from something or someone, inner calling, the identification of business opportunities, the need for flexibility, necessity and/or desire to help society. It was often difficult to identify one dominant motivator in many instances, as many factors were interlinked to motivate women to start a business. The study also revealed that gender ideologies could stifle the participants' motivation, while the inner need to break these gender ideologies implicitly stimulated their motivation.

The study contributes to and expands the knowledge of STEM women entrepreneurs in general and to the limited existing knowledge of STEM women entrepreneurs in developing countries specifically. The paper brings contextual novelty as Sri Lanka produces more female STEM graduates than men, which is unique compared to most other parts of the world.

This paper aims to revisit the debate on the insider-outsider positionality of the researcher in conducting qualitative research by highlighting the challenges of researching sexual harassment and harassment among stigmatized or hidden groups of individuals in a culturally value-laden backdrop in South Asia.

The authors drew on a bricolage of methods to analyze and write this paper. First, the authors borrowed from the case study approach to select three research projects that would shed light on the argument raised in the study. Then, narratives, together with self and critical reflexivity were used to write reflective narratives, which served as data for this paper. Next, the authors used the thematic analysis method to analyze the reflective narratives. Finally, the authors drew from literature and the experiences to provide recommendations for the challenges thus identified.

The critical reflections highlight three overarching challenges the authors encountered as insider-outsiders in researching a sensitive topic among stigmatized/hidden groups in a value-laden cultural backdrop: 1) difficulty in recruitment, 2) internalized gender norms and 3) unconscious biases. Based on these challenges, the authors posit that what is pertinent is not whether a researcher is an insider, outsider or in-betweener per se, but how to maximize benefits and minimize pitfalls of being an insider or outsider and employing other means of overcoming the drawbacks. The authors also claim that being more sensitive to the culture, reflexive, flexible and experienced would help overcome challenges faced when conducting research of this nature as insiders-outsiders.

There appears to be little empirically derived inquiry on the insider-outsider positionality of the researchers at the intersection of sensitive topics, stigmatized participants and culture. Our reflections and suggestions address this lacuna while revisiting the simplistic use of insider-outsider dichotomy and proposing other means to overcome the drawbacks brought on by the researcher positionality.

This study aims to explore how and why employees perceive technology-mediated interruptions differently and the role of sociocultural factors in this process using sociomaterial analysis.

Data were gathered from 34 Sri Lankan knowledge workers using a series of workshop-based activities. The concept of sociomateriality is employed to understand how sociocultural elements are entangled with technology in work-life boundary experiences.

The findings of the thematic analyses suggest how culture is intertwined in the way employees perceive technology-mediated interruptions and how they manage information communication technologies (ICTs) to balance their work and nonwork demands. Participants have been unable to avoid technology-mediated boundary interruptions from work, as organisations have created norms to keep employees connected to organisations using information communication technologies. Traditional gender roles are specifically found to be entangled in employees' boundary management practices, disadvantaging women more.

The findings highlight how national culture and gender norms create challenging work-life experiences for female employees than males. This could create a disadvantageous position for female employees in their career progression. It is crucial to consider factors such as boundary preferences and family concerns when deciding on family-friendly work policies. Also, organisations have to consider the development of explicit guidelines on after-hours communication expectations.

Using the lens of sociomateriality, researchers can understand the contextual entanglement of ICTs with national culture and gender norms in creating different work-life boundary experiences. It seems ICTs are creating a disadvantage for female employees when managing work–nonwork boundaries, especially in power distant and collectivist cultures where traditional gender norms are highly valued and largely upheld. This study also contributes to the current discourse on work-life boundaries by providing insights from non-western perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how and with what reasons, divorced women respond to harassment they face at work, within a patriarchal culture of stigma and prejudice about divorced women. This inquiry will be performed by integrating stigma-management and identity-management research with research on responding to and coping with harassment.

Using qualitative research methodology, semi-structured, in-depth interviews were carried out with 12 divorced working women.

Findings of the study illuminate the manner in which stigma management interacts with harassment coping/respond mechanisms in dynamic ways, leading to complex response strategies for divorced women, which can be broadly identified as stigma-focused response strategies and harassment-focused response strategies. A strategy typology – consisting of seven major quadrants and nine major strategies therein – is thus provided, explaining how divorced women struggle to maintain their identity and manage stigma while coping with harassment.

The paper point towards the need for organisations to be mindful of the struggles of stigmatised individuals in coping and responding to harassment, and their distinct situations and experiences in developing and implementing interventions such as training, awareness creation and policies on harassment.

While research on reaction to harassment is abundant, how divorced women – as a stigmatised and marginalised group of individuals in society – cope with harassment at work is almost non-existent. The present study fills this gap by exploring harassment responses at the nexus of stigma and identity management.

This paper aims to explore how sexual harassment is experienced and understood by heterosexual working men in their day-to-day work lives in an Asian patriarchal culture, underpinned by rigid sex-role norms and gender role stereotypes, which promote heterosexual hegemonic masculinity

Using qualitative research approach, 19 in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with self-identified heterosexual men.

The findings indicate common, yet unique, ways heterosexual men experience sexual harassment at workplaces, perpetrated by women and men, holding different organizational positions. Unwanted sexual attention, gender harassment, sexploitation and sexual hubris are, thus, identified as the main manifestations of sexual harassment for men. The nature of the experiences, how they were understood and perceived by heterosexual men, who the harassers were, how men have responded to their experiences and the existing theories point toward numerous explanations for the heterosexual men’s experiences of sexual harassment. Among these reasons, hegemonic masculinity, power and sexual attraction were found to be predominant.

The themes and explanations of different and sometimes unique sexual harassment experiences expand and add to the understudied area of sexual harassment of heterosexual men in general, and in a cultural context, rarely explored, more specifically.

This study aims to explore the challenges and barriers encountered by Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) women entrepreneurs in an emerging country context – Sri Lanka – within a context of strict gender role stereotyping beliefs and norms.

Using qualitative research methodology, 15 in-depth, in-person, semi-structured interviews were conducted with STEM women entrepreneurs using the theoretical lenses of intersectionality and social role theories in tandem.

Findings revealed that participants were confronted with an array of structural/administrative and gender-related challenges at the intersections of gender, entrepreneurship and characteristics mapped with STEM fields. Accordingly, lack of access and reach to networks and opportunities, procedural obstacles, difficulties in staffing, difficulties in obtaining finances, lack of understanding and support from family and society, difficulties in managing work-life, and legitimacy obstacles appear to restrain the participants in starting and running their businesses. These challenges have their roots embedded in a complex web of ideologies and expectations related to gender.

This research contributes to the scant body of literature on STEM women entrepreneurship in general and specifically to the literature on challenges facing STEM women entrepreneurs from the perspective of a non-Western – emerging economy, which is built on strong cultural strictures and gender ideologies.

The decision-making styles of human resource professionals (HRPs) in resolving complaints of sexual harassment are extremely important as they form the backbone of effectiveness in the resolution of a complaint. The purpose of this paper is to explore these decision-making styles and gauge their effectiveness in resolving such complaints.

Employing a qualitative research approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 HRPs of 30 companies in Sri Lanka.

We found eight decision-making styles used by HRPs in resolving complaints of sexual harassment: (1) analytical, (2) behavioural, (3) directive, (4) conceptual, (5) avoidant, (6) dependent, (7) intuitive and judgemental, and (8) manipulative and persuasive. HRPs were found to generally adopt combinations of these styles, with one or two styles being dominant while one or two were used as back-up styles. In resolving complaints of sexual harassment, certain combinations of these styles were found to be more effective than others because they led to procedural, distributive and interactional justice.

The implications of these findings for self-reflection and in training for the HRPs are also discussed.

The findings of this study assist us in understanding how and why HRPs make different decisions when resolving seemingly similar complaints and the effectiveness of such decisions.