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This study offers a lens for exploring women leaders’ production of resistance through postfeminist discourses. Through the case study of Bozoma Saint John, a high-profile Black C-Suite executive, this study examines micro-acts of subversion and considers the extent they can promote feminist thinking in the corporate world and the implications for feminist theorising about women in leadership.

Interviews with Saint John were collected from YouTube and examined using feminist critical discourse analysis informed by intersectionality, feminist poststructuralism and Foucault’s notion of “reverse discourse”.

Saint John reproduces elements of the postfeminist confidence discourse to defy stereotypes of Black women, while simultaneously reversing the individualistic conception of confidence in favour of corporate and collective action. This has the potential to facilitate positive change, albeit within the boundaries of the confidence culture.

Combining reverse discourse, intersectionality and feminist poststructuralism with a micro-level analysis of women leaders’ language use can help to capture the ways postfeminist concepts are given new subversive meanings.

Whereas existing studies have focused on how elite women’s promotion of confidence sustains the status quo, this study shifts the research gaze to the resistance realised through rearticulations of confidence, illustrating how women-in-leadership research can advance feminist theorising without vilifying senior women even as they participate in postfeminist logics of success.

Consumption has generally become more fragmented, hedonic and individual specific, satisfying not only functional but also emotional needs. In parallel, customer satisfaction is now thought to be both a cognitive and affective response, and the closely related concept of job satisfaction is commonly seen as an emotional reaction. The reasoning within quality management does, however, still lean heavily toward cognitive judgements (i.e. performance ratings), the emotional component clearly being under explored. Further, performance variables have shown not to be significant in predicting satisfaction for certain “experience products”, the effect fully mediated by emotions. as a consequence a cognitive judgement based quality cocnept has lost its ability to predict satisfaction, which clearly contradicts with the modern quality definition, stressing quality as the ability to satisfy the customer. Emotions have however entered the quality discourse and it has been proposed that having customers that are merely feeling satisfied will not suffice. Instead, there has been a plethora of executive exhortations in the trade press calling on business to “delight the customer”. Strategies for doing so have however usually been imprecise and unclear, and the different drivers of delight and satisfaction are not well explored. This paper aims to complement the previous cognitive dominance by exploring the multiple emotional responses involved in customer satisfaction. A conclusion being that we currently are measuring something, in terms of satisfied, that is more or less independent of what we aim for, in terms of delight. It is also most likely that ‐ depending on the situation, product, and person – other positive and negative emotions are more important outcomes of purchase and usage than merely satisfaction. It is questioned whether a single, summary response such as satisfaction is feasible or even desirable.

Previous research has been relatively insensitive to the potential combined effects that the shared industry background and country of origin might play in the development of MNCs. This is although there are various external constituents that pose distinctive demands especially on such groups of MNCs. The 15-year period of internationalization of three major Finnish paper companies examined in this study represents MNC development as a collective endeavor in which individual companies are especially influenced both by each other and by their joint external constituents. These influences materialize in analogous timing and patterns of internationalization across individual companies. In its entirety, the study thus suggests that the development of MNCs which operate in the same line of industry and originate from the same country can be considered an outcome of a mutual process that involves interaction both with each other and their shared external constituents. This also means that MNCs then are not only competitors, but simultaneously also a source of mutual support in their ever-continuing evolution.

While past research has explored how opting-out enables mothers to break free from masculinist organizational cultures, less attention has been given to how they resist disciplinary power that constitutes and governs their subjectivities. This paper aims to add to the discussion of opting-out as a site of power and resistance by proposing the concept of “constructive resistance” as a productive vantage point for investigating opted-out mothers' subversive practices of self-making.

This Malaysian case study brings together the notion of constructive resistance, critical narrative analysis and APPRAISAL theory to examine the reflective stories of eighteen mothers who exited formal employment. These accounts were collected through an open-ended questionnaire and semi-structured email interviews.

The mothers in the sample tend to construct themselves in two main ways, as (1) valuable mothers (capable, tireless, caring mothers who are key figures in their children's lives) and (2) competent professionals. These subjectivities are parasitic on gendered and neoliberal ideals but allow the mothers to undermine neoliberal capitalist work arrangements that were incongruent with their personal values and adversely impacted their well-being, as well as refuse organizational narratives that positioned them as “failed” workers.

Whereas power is primarily seen in previous opting-out scholarship as centralized and constraining, this case study illustrates how the lens of constructive resistance can be beneficial for examining opted-out mothers' struggles against a less direct form of power that governs through the production of truths and subjectivities.

The capability of an organization to perform not only incremental quality improvements to the existing processes and products but also innovative or radical improvements that explore new opportunities is referred to as organizational ambidexterity. Research indicates that the long-term success of organizations demands a dynamic balancing of and excelling at both perspectives. However, there is considerably less clarity as regards how this can be achieved. The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore enabling factors for organizational ambidexterity in the public sector.

This study is a qualitative study based on interviews with managers at two public organizations in Sweden. The analysis is conducted using a soft system methodology.

Nine enabling factors for organizational ambidexterity are identified and presented in two pictures inspired by the Soft System Methodology. The study indicates that it above all is important to create leeway for exploration to achieve organizational ambidexterity in the public sector. The study strengthens the belief that some quality movement values and tools can be considered important, whereas others can counteract the ability to achieve organizational ambidexterity in public administration.

Practitioners and scholars can use the identified enablers and the Soft System Methodology presented in this study to examine and develop the organizational ambidexterity of other public organizations.

This study explores empirically the concept of ambidexterity in the public sector, a perspective that few previous scholars have studied.

Based on a comparative case study of nine firms in the Canadian graphic arts industry in 1964–86, this paper suggests that managerial conduct plays a significant role in technological change. There were clear differences in managerial conduct between technological leaders and followers, and managerial conduct was influenced by firm performance, managerial capacities and attitudes and contextual conditions. These four elements, managerial conduct, firm performance, managerial capacities and attitudes, and contextual conditions, constituted feedback cycles of technological change. Firm performance induced managerial conduct that was influenced by managerial capacities and attitudes and by contextual conditions and led to technological change, depending on the intensity and extent of conduct, and technological change further affected firm performance. The paper focuses on managerial work processes as they cause differences in technological change in technological leaders and followers, but other elements of the feedback cycles are considered as well. Technological change has increased productivity growth and standard of living, but technological development also “destroys the economic viability of certain industries, firms, and jobs, as it creates new ones” (Nelson, 1981: 1054). This kind of impact has created a need to predict and control technological change, and thereby to understand the phenomenon better. Despite the fact that technological change takes place in firms (Moss, 1981: 51–53), most of the economics research explains technological development at the aggregate level (see Kamien & Schwartz, 1982 for a review), and the majority of the so called innovation studies concentrate on individual adoption behaviour (see Rogers, 1983 for a review). However, in order to understand the process of technological change, we must go inside the firms where the change takes place. A useful starting point seems to be a comparison between firms that are technological leaders and followers (Schumpeter, 1934; Porter, 1983). This would increase understanding of the factors facilitating and preventing technological change. Technology can be defined as the tangible production process of converting inputs to outputs (Shen, 1981), and it is often embodied in physical capital (Nelson, 1981). Changes in production processes via production equipment are the main concern here. The central question of this paper is: Why do some firms become technological leaders while others are followers? And more specifically: How does managerial conduct differ between technological leaders and followers? The answers were sought through a comparative case study of Canadian graphic arts firms. The results indicate that the crucial factor determining leadership and followership was managerial conduct, shaped by firm performance and by the context of the firm. The role of managerial conduct in technological leadership and followership is focused on in this report.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge concerning the dynamics and potential cultural tensions that occur when applying user involvement and design thinking (DT) for improving quality in a health-care setting.

This paper is based on a case study following a quality improvement (QI) project in a medium-sized Swedish county council in the field of somatic care. The project involved eight health-care professionals, one designer, four patients and two relatives. A multiple data collection method over a period of ten months was used. It included individual interviews, e-mail correspondence and observations of workshops that covered the QI project.

The result shows tensions between QI work and the daily clinical work of the participants. These tensions primarily concern the conflict between fast and slow processes, the problem of moving between different fields of knowledge, being a resource for the individual clinic and the system and the participants’ expectations and assumptions about roles and responsibilities in a QI project. Furthermore, these findings could be interpreted as signs of a development culture in the health-care context.

There are several practical implications. Among others, the insights can inspire how to approach and contextualize the current concepts, roles and methods of DT and user involvement so that they can be more easily understood and integrated into the existing culture and way of working in the health-care sector.

This study provides a unique insight into a case, trying to uncover what actually is going on and perhaps, why certain things are not happening at all, when user involvement and design practices are applied for improving health-care quality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe the perspectives and reasoning of senior development leaders in healthcare organizations, when reflecting on design as theory and practice in relation to more traditional methods and tools for improving quality and support innovation.

The paper is based on a qualitative interview design with five development and innovation leaders from separate healthcare regions in Sweden. They have, to varying degrees, applied design theory and practice for quality improvement and innovation in their organizations. The interview transcript was analysed using a content analysis together with an interpretive approach.

The major findings are to be found in the balancing act for leadership and organizations in healthcare when it comes to introducing and combining different theories and practices for improving quality and support innovation. The balance is between the change in power dynamics and pushing traditional boundaries in a complex healthcare world.

The narratives from the leaders' experience of applying design theory and practice for improving healthcare quality can help us create readiness and knowledge about how we prevent and/or facilitate planning and implementing design theories, practices, methods and tools in a healthcare context.

The study provides a unique insight when it captures and illustrates five different organizations' experiences when applying design for developing healthcare quality.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology that can support the process of understanding and designing for the satisfaction of high-level needs in practice. The satisfaction of high-level needs has seldom been in focus when it comes to customer satisfaction surveys or the process of new product or service development. However, needs do occur on various levels, and the satisfaction of high-level needs actually appears to have the greatest potential for the creation of loyalty among customers and customer satisfaction. The satisfaction of high-level needs has furthermore been pointed out as a strategy for the creation of attractive quality.

The paper is based on literature studies and the application of the Ideation Need Mapping (INM) methodology in a specific case.

The paper presents the INM methodology that could be used for guiding product and service innovation in practice. More specifically, the methodology supports the process of understanding and designing for the satisfaction of high-level needs.

This paper aims to contribute to envisioning and demonstrating how the understanding of, and design for, satisfaction of high-level needs can be done in practice.

This study aims to understand the role of digital literacies as a moderator between employee engagement and its antecedents, namely, workplace digitalisation and innovative culture.

A total of 256 valid samples were used in the analysis. The respondents were individuals used as management-level executives in companies located in Selangor/Kuala Lumpur. The model was tested using structural equation modelling.

The findings reveal that there exists a significant association between employee engagement and its antecedents, namely, workplace digitalisation and innovative culture. Digital literacies are found to moderate the relationships between workplace digitalisation-employee engagement and innovative culture-employee engagement.

This paper provides new insight to the practitioners about the role of digital literacies in raising employee engagement in the digital workplace.

These findings enrich the literature on employee engagement, whereby, improving employee digital literacies strengthens employee acceptance to workplace digitalisation and benefit from the innovative culture to stay engaged.