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This paper aims to invite reflection and action among scholars of gender in management to the shaping and meeting of commitments to universal justice.

In total, 12 women employed as senior scholars in public universities in Aotearoa New Zealand were invited to discuss their career experiences. An observed disjuncture between radical feminist analyses of their career experiences and their liberal feminist responses to issues arising for them prompted reflection on a wider disjuncture in the shaping of justice wherever neoliberal directives prevail, generating this paper’s activist call to integrity between analyses and practice among scholars as agents of change.

Implications drawn from the conversations with participants vindicated earlier critiques of diversity management under the conditions of neoliberalism when accommodating damaging social outcomes and systemic compliance is morally compromising.

Exploring accommodation of system preserving career strategies of scholars claiming commitment to justice is an evocative and original call to scholarly activism.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on career aspirations and experiences explored with senior women organizational scholars employed in neoliberally driven public universities in Aotearoa (New Zealand) legally mandated to serve as a critic and conscience of society.

Over the 18 months period, three sequential research conversations were conducted with each of 12 participants known for their commitment to social justice and planetary well-being. The conversational approach allowed for spontaneous participant-lead development of ideas. Sequencing of conversations allowed for reflection on matters raised in previous conversations.

Vitality and creativity deemed essential to scholarly careers were reportedly under pressure. Career concepts in use indicate a protean commitment to self-direction but also recognized constraints of institutionally driven neoliberal output regimes. Detrimental impacts of neoliberal values permeating their employing institutions were offered spontaneously often in radical feminist terms but paradoxically given liberal feminist remedies.

The 12 diverse transcripts of participant conversations generated remarkable similarities that indicate the influence of career articulations on the social construction of reality. The implications of this interpretation invite further reflection on the consequences of normalization of career metaphors and their implication in the intensification of institutional control, the weakening of professional autonomy and the system preserving restriction of career-related responsibilities.

Highlighting constraints to creativity and vitality necessary for scholarly work can inform further research into professional influences on justice and environmental matters in and beyond the Academy.

In this paper a short review of Aotearoa (New Zealand) as in vanguard of neoliberal intensification globally, the implication of this doctrine in neoliberally driven universities and the impacts on career opportunities, degradations and responsibilities of scholars are explored.

The conversational research process contrasts with more tightly framed empirical research methods by generating spontaneous participant-led articulations of career-related dynamics explored and expanded over subsequent conversations.

EEO and the management of diversity Volume 8 Number 5 of the Journal of Organizational Change Management contains an article by Maria Humphries and Shayne Grice entitled “Equal employment opportunity and the management of diversity: a global discourse of assimilation?”

The purpose of this paper is to bring wider‐reaching feminism to confluence with relational indigenous values for transformative responses to systemic exclusion.

The authors critique the prevailing (corporate) institutional logic in higher education through their stories and experiences, weaving in diverse feminist perspectives. Liberal feminist perspectives, the most visible gender critique, may merely increase numerical equality, diversifying the biographical characteristics of privilege. Exclusion for many is systemically retained. The authors argue that relational logics underpinning indigenous worldviews hold generative potential for institutional change toward deeper inclusiveness and justice.

Liberal feminists' two‐fold transformative aspirations for gender equality and deeper respect for currently marginalized “feminine” values leave room for deeper and wider reflection on how indigenous perspectives might contribute to institutional change.

This exploration may be applied to university recruiting, selection, evaluation, and promotion policies; articulating and assessing career competencies and trajectories; curriculum evaluation; organizational and management research; and pedagogical development and research.

An indigenous critique of liberal feminism and indigenous perspectives on justice, relationality, and inclusivity may enhance social, university, corporate, community, and family life.

Interweaving feminist and indigenous insights into a critique of the prevailing corporate institutional logic informing organizational practice – in higher education and all sectors of society, it highlights the generative potential of indigenous contributions and encourages inclusion of diverse indigenous perspectives in organization theory and practice.

As part of an ongoing project on worker well‐being, this paper aims to examine the application of flexible work arrangements through the experiences of core workers in a small, European‐owned, New Zealand manufacturing firm.

A participatory action research approach is taken.

The research reveals that flexible employment arrangements utilised in this firm did not afford protection to core workers as theory suggests. Both core and peripheral workers were exposed to pressure primarily to extend their hours of work and to reduce their expectations regarding remuneration. Production level increases were not reflected in increases in numbers of core workers; in fact perceived job security was low. Core workers felt pressure to work extended hours out of their commitment to the firm, each other, and to maintain their own employment.

The use of more democratic processes inherent in action research oriented at workplace well‐being are shown to have had some value toward enhancing worker well‐being.

The paper demonstrates that the participative project placed pressure upon management and that it had the potential to redress a power imbalance within the employment relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to disenchant advocates of sustainability of the current form of capitalism and to argue that under current intensification of globalisation of economic and political efforts, “privilege” and “alienation” might be relocated/rearranged/redistributed but that the basic dynamic will remain constant. The very poor and vulnerable appear to be treated as collateral damage by capitalist practices reified as “The Market” and which we have personified as “The Master”.

The authors draw on the metaphor of subaltern studies to amplify their call for further discussion. Portraying the economic system as The (ruthless) Master invites further conversation about complicity or subjugation and invites reflection on alternatives to associated agency.

The Master's powers are amplifying globally. He continues to demand sacrifices. The most recent demand comes in the call for the protection of his economy at the expense of those to be most affected by climate change. These sacrifices are to be enacted by the willing high priests, the compliant, and the ignorant. Their sacrificial lambs are those who are forcibly harnessed to a system that exploits them, who become dependent on that system for survival, and who may be summarily dismissed when their “usefulness” is deemed diminished. The paper is here concerned with the people whose alternatives are reduced or destroyed and with the tolerance of this destruction of lives and livelihoods by an enabling population.

This paper is an invitation to continued conversation, not a research paper in the positivist sense. The paper may be viewed as an experiment to see how far alternative perspectives can flourish in the academy and in our classrooms, boardrooms, and cafeterias. Conversations are posited as a means of change – of self and society.

This paper invites practitioners and academics to engage with critical self‐reflection as a necessary aspect for transformational learning and leadership. The extent to which positivists models of knowing prevail, papers more exploratory of diverse ontologies may be diminished or dismissed with significant implications for the enhancement or depletion of (intellectual and spiritual) diversity.

The attractiveness of “sustainability” discourses are a mixed blessing. They may be generated to unsettle and used to transform ways of knowing and being that have led to the current crises facing humanity. The proffered remedies for these crises may also enable The Master to become better informed and more able to assimilate those who criticise. A subaltern position would make this less likely.

The value of an amplified subaltern voice lies in the honing of more critical insights and thus the discovery of not only more creative technical solutions to issues of sustainability and justice but the co‐creation of covenants that may generate a form of human and environmental flourishing beyond the Wealth of Corpor‐Nations.

The Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) are a United Nations led initiative that includes a mandate to engage with voices generally marginalized in business classrooms. The voices of Indigenous peoples are among such marginalized voices. Inclusion of indigenous worldviews offer opportunities to enhance the capacity of the PRME to contribute to more just and sustainable management and development of humanity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

PRME Principle One inspires opportunities to integrate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP) and through this confluence, contribute to manifesting the espoused aspirations of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) – i.e. the transformation of poverty and environmental degradation toward universal human and environmental thriving.

Greater attention to relational ethics through critical pedagogy encourages reflection on the paradoxes of the market logic that permeates management education. The outcome in practice of this logic appears to result in ever increasing disparity. Its unfettered trajectory risks both people and planet. An indigenous call to respect all life, including that of the planet, brings the principles of universal inclusiveness to light in a compelling way.

This essay is unique in its call to construe together the PRME, UNGC, Business Reference Guide (BRG), and the DRIP to progress aspirations of inclusiveness and sustainability; and contribute indigenous worldviews for their intrinsic value in critical reflection on the damage caused by the market logic endemic to management education.

Persistent patterns of employment segregation have long been challenged through what is here called “the discourse of equity”. Associated equity legislation and equal employment policies have not succeeded in changing these patterns. “The management of diversity”, a newly‐developing discourse, is claimed by its proponents to encapsulate traditional equity issues in a more managerially compelling format. Additionally, through this new discourse, progressively addresses issues associated with managing diverse people in a global context. Argues that, in the context of globalizing capitalism, a new homogeneity with different patterns of exclusion is being achieved. The pragmatic focus on “the management of diversity” may diffuse the emancipatory imperative implicit in “the discourse of equity”. Urges an examination of the extent to which traditional equity concerns have been co‐opted to divert attention from new forms of systemic employment segregation.

Critical Management Studies (CMS) in Postmodernity (PM) has been playfully posed as a double oxymoron, i.e. “CMS” to examine the contradiction of an emancipatory discourse predominantly cast in a managerialist tenor; “CMS in PM” to examine the feasibility of taking any position at all in the context postmodern theorizing. Using playful references to Darth Vader’s pursuit of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, proceeds with a deconstruction of the critical theorists’ pursuit of metatheories to explain (true) oppressions to be addressed in the liberation of victims. Teases the postmodernist magical elimination of victims in their discourse of difference. Sadly though, the elimination of “victims” in theorizing does not mean racism, sexism, and economic oppression are no longer experienced by human beings. Takes a light‐hearted but serious approach in regaining the emancipatory potential of Critical Management Studies to inform organizational change.