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Our research takes inspiration from stories of kindness in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic and investigates what generational entrants, namely those entering the workforce in large numbers, dubbed emerging leaders (ages 19–39) think of the phenomenon of kindness and its potential role in organizations. Guiding the study is the question: “What can emerging leaders tell us about kindness and work?”

Adopting discourse analysis fused with kindness as research praxis, we conducted 66 qualitative interviews with young leaders (born between 1981 and 2001) across North America, Europe and Africa. Interviews were conducted in the summer and fall of 2020.

Our research sets out to expand theorizing related to kindness as a phenomenon, illustrates implications relevant to management and organizational studies and offers insights into the value of kindness as research praxis. This paper makes three related contributions and one methodological one: (1) it contributes to the literature on kindness and how it can be theorized in management and organizational studies, (2) it explores emerging leaders perceptions of kindness in a pandemic context, (3) it offers insights into how kindness might be leveraged as a model of moral and ethical behaviour valued in organizational environments, and (4) the paper promotes epistemic properties of kindness when fused with research praxis.

Authored during a rapidly unfolding scholarly conversation on the influences of the pandemic on organizational life, our research draws insights from experiences of kindness during COVID-19. This paper applies discourse analysis fused with kindness as research praxis to an understudied area of human behaviour (kindness) which has implications for management and organizational theory and practice. These implications include: (1) individual kindness capacity or inclination towards kindness behaviour that may be depleted by stressors such as the pandemic, (2) that kindness has socially contagious qualities, (3) and kindness as praxis has material benefits in the context of research methods, benefiting the research team and the research outputs.

The aim of this study is two-fold: (1) to promote a model of youth participatory research and offer a window of understanding into how it can be enacted and (2) to understand youth perspectives on youth empowerment. This study asks: “how can youth help us understand youth empowerment?”

The study applies youth participatory action research (YPAR) and interpretative phenomenological analysis. The study illustrates how to enact a model of YPAR by engaging youth in the process of research in a youth-serving community non-profit organization.

This study sets out to make two important contributions, one methodological and one theoretical: First, the study contributes to our understanding of the opportunities and benefits of youth-engaged, peer-to-peer research. Specifically, this study promotes a model of youth participatory action research and knowledge making processes, and the associated social and formal benefits for youth. By extension, this study illustrates an approach to engage youth in formal contexts which has implications for both management and organizational studies and education. Finally, the study extends our understanding and conceptualization of the phenomenon of youth empowerment (as informed by youth perspectives).

The study offers insight into how to conduct youth participatory action research and specifically how to address two limitations cited in the literature: (1) how to authentically engage youth including how to share power, and (2) how to perform youth participatory action research, often critiqued as a black box methodology.

This article explores memory work and storytelling as an organising tool through family histories, offering theoretical and methodological implications and extending existing conceptualisations of memory work as a feminist method. This approach is termed as impressionist memory work.

To illustrate impressionistic memory work in action, the article presents two family histories set during Second World War and invite the reader to engage in the “undoing” of these stories and dominant ways of knowing through storytelling. This method challenges the taken-for-granted roles, plots and detail of family histories to uncover the obscured or silenced stories within, together with feminine, affective and embodied subjectivities, marginalisation and social inequalities.

This study argues that impressionistic memory work as a feminist method can challenge the silencing and gendering of experiences in co-constructed and co-interpreted narratives (both formal and informal ones).

This study shows that engagement with impressionistic memory work can challenge taken-for-granted stories with prominent male actors and masculine narratives to reveal the female actors and feminine narratives within. This approach will offer a more inclusive perspective on family histories and deeper engagement with the marginalised or neglected actors and aspects of our histories.

Purpose: This study seeks to determine the marketplace practices in which consumers engage with regard to masculine and feminine codes employed in product design. Since extant consumer research argues that consumers prefer marketing stimuli that match their sex or gender identity, this study also asks how consumers’ practices inform this understanding of the possession-self link.

Design/methodology/approach: This study used semi-structured interviews with an auto-driving component to answer the research questions. Data from 20 interviews were analyzed using feminist critical discourse analysis and a poststructuralist feminist-informed theoretical framework.

Findings: Four consumer practices identified in the data show that interpretations and evaluations of product gender are sometimes, but not always, a reflection of the gendered self.

Research limitations/implications: This research shares a snapshot of a cohort of individuals that interact with the marketplace, but there are some perspectives missing. Future research must engage with individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as non-binary or gender nonconforming individuals, in order to enhance or even challenge these findings.

Practical implications (if applicable): Evidence from the marketplace demonstrates intense criticism of products that have been coded as masculine or feminine based on gender stereotypes or men and women’s perceived aesthetic tastes. Marketers are encouraged to use gender codes to differentiate products catered to men and women based on their ergonomic or biological needs.

Originality/value: This study complicates theory on the possession-self link to show cases in which that link is broken. Engaging critically with the topic of product gender from a poststructuralist feminist perspective also illustrates how marketing practices may help or harm consumers.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

With the rise in the number of women faculty since the 1970s, the traditional academic model of an exclusive devotion to work has been increasingly contested. Broad changes have occurred in academic culture and policies to make many universities more family-friendly. Recent research on graduate students points to a shift in attitudes about work/family management as well. Graduate students, both male and female, seem to balk at expectations for a sole devotion to an academic career to the exclusion of family life. We examine how faculty members carry out acts of resistance to this traditional model.

This article presents research from two separate but related qualitative studies for a combined sample of 74 faculty members with children.

Women and men faculty make professional and personal choices and engage in behaviors that, in essence, are acts of resistance against the dominant but perhaps “old” culture of academe.

Resistance to the ideal worker norm in academia has been largely overlooked in studies about faculty parents (particularly fathers) and work/family balance. We demonstrate how faculty members act as agents of social change in academia.