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The purpose of this paper is to challenge existing models of career ambition, extending understanding of how women define and experience ambition at early career stages in a professional services organisation.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 women from a professional services organisation, who were aged 24-33 and had not yet reached managerial positions. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and template analysis was conducted.

The analysis revealed four main themes in the women’s experiences: subjective, dynamic ambition; frustrated lack of sight; self-efficacy enables ambition; and a need for resilience vs a need to adapt. The findings support that women do identify as ambitious, but they vary in the extent to which they view ambition as intrinsic and stable, or affected by external, contextual factors, such as identity-fit, barriers, support and work-life conflict.

These results demonstrated insufficiency of current models of ambition and a new model was proposed. The model explains how women’s workplace experiences affect their ambition and therefore how organisations and individuals can better support women to maintain and fulfil their ambitions.

This study extends and contributes to the redefinition of women’s career ambition, proposing a model incorporating women’s affective responses to both internal (psychological) and external (organisational) factors. It provides further evidence against previous individual-level claims that women “opt-out” of their careers due to an inherent lack of ambition, focussing on the interplay of contextual-level explanations.

The aim of this paper is to explore how an elite group of senior women in banking represent and describe their understanding and experience of the role of meritocracy, within the context of their own career.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 33 senior female directors from six global investment banks. Template analysis was used in the qualitative analysis of the coding.

The paper found that the women's adherence to the notion of meritocracy diminished over time, as merit appeared to be less defined by human capital (ability and experience) and more by social capital (seen as political behaviour). The paper also reveals how the concept is construed on two levels: first, on a symbolic level, demonstrating how the organization defines and rewards success; second, on a personal level, how it affects the individual's cognitions, emotions and self‐belief.

This paper contributes to the small literature on the concept of meritocracy in the management field, with an emphasis on the experiences of successful female directors in global investment banks.

Women remain underrepresented at senior levels in global investment banks. By investigating promotion processes in this sector, and using the concept of a multi-level, relational framework, this paper seeks to examine macro, micro, and meso-level influences, and the interplay between them, as explanations for why more progress is not being made.

Data are taken from two projects with a total of 50 semi-structured interviews with male and female directors and managing directors (MDs), across six investment banks discussing careers and promotions. An inductive approach was taken to data analysis.

Women's lack of representation at the top of investment banks is not simply an individual level problem but is the result of the dynamic interplay between macro- and meso-level influences that impact individual agency, identity and perception of fit.

Public debate should be refocused around the meso-level influences of what organizations can do to promote more inclusive cultures and structures thereby enabling more women to achieve MD positions in investment banking.

The paper considers challenges women face in their promotion to MD using a multi-level framework demonstrating the impact of each level and their interconnectedness. It contributes to the limited qualitative research exploring the career experiences of senior level individuals in global financial services firms.

This editorial aims to introduce the special issue on meritocracy, difference and choice.

The first part is a commentary on key issues in the study of the notions of meritocracy, difference and choice. The second part presents the six papers in the special issue.

Five of the six papers in this special issue explore the work experiences of women managers/directors in senior positions within a variety of organizations. All of these papers demonstrate that despite their economic empowerment, these women are still strongly connected to the domestic realm through their continued entanglement in the traditional roles of mother and homemaker. This has led them to interpret their work situation either through a consideration of what they understand by the notion of merit or a presentation of their situation through the lens of choice. A further paper which explores the experiences of sex workers exposes the gendered nature of agency, highlighting the limitations on “choice” that different types of workers experience.

The authors comment on how contemporary notions of merit and choice individualise women's experience within organisations, ignoring the structural and systemic elements inherent to women's continued disadvantage. This allows “blame” for women's absence in the upper echelons of organisations to lie with women themselves, explaining this in terms of their lack of skills or the traditional “choices” they make. The six papers which make up the special issue explore how women's “choices” are constrained, how the contemporary discourses of merit and choice conceal issues of structure and organizational process and how women struggle to make sense of their own and others' experiences.

The issues discussed in the papers have important implications for understanding women's experience of work and organizations. They highlight the need to introduce a structural and systemic element to the understanding of how women experience work at senior (and other) levels of organizations, why they take the decision to leave a senior position and why women appear to “choose” not to seek senior positions.

Gender and Management: An International Journal invited this special issue on meritocracy, difference and choice to draw attention to the ways in which women draw on these discourses as a means of understanding their organizational situations and how use of these discourses acts to conceal the structural and systemic element connected to their work experiences.

In management studies, assumptions surround the fixed, categorical and binary nature of male, ethnic and other privileges. Compared to white, middle-class men, “others” are typically assumed not to experience privilege. The authors counter this assumption by applying intersectionality to examine privilege's juxtaposition with disadvantage. The paper offers an elaborated conceptualisation of organisational privilege and insight into the agency employed by individuals traditionally perceived as non-privileged. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using diaries and interviews, the paper analyses 20 micro-episodes from four senior minority ethnic women and men's accounts of intersecting ethnic, gender and senior identities. The paper identifies how privilege plays out at the juxtaposition of (male gender and hierarchical) advantage with (female gender and ethnic) disadvantage.

The fluidity of privilege is revealed through contextual, contested and conferred dimensions. Additionally, privilege is experienced in everyday micro-level encounters and the paper illustrates how “sometimes privileged” individuals manage their identities at intersections.

This in-depth analysis draws on a small sample of unique British minority ethnic individuals to illustrate dimensions of privilege.

It is often challenging to discuss privilege. However, the focus on atypical wielders of power challenges binary assumptions of privilege. This can provide a common platform for dominant and non-dominant group members to share how societal and organisational privileges differentially impact groups. This inclusive approach could reduce dominant group members’ psychological and emotional resistance to social justice.

Through bridging privilege and intersectionality perspectives, the paper offers a complex and nuanced perspective that contrasts against prevalent conceptions of privilege as invisible and uncontested.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Does ambition differ between men and women? This question is fraught with danger on so many levels, and perhaps as a result it remains rather a taboo issue. The traditional, patriarchal “Mad Men” view is that men are more ambitious than women and more successful, but that women are “changing” and transporting their competitiveness into the workplace. Thankfully, things have moved on since then, although by how much is perhaps another moot point.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information, and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.