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The purpose of this paper is to analyze how global and local changes in higher education impact upon writing practices through which doctoral students become academics. The study explores how norms and values of academic writing practice are learned, negotiated and resisted and elucidates how competences related to writing come to determine the academic selves.

The study uses memory work, which is a group method that puts attention to written individual memories and their collective analysis and theorizing. The authors offer a comparison of experiences in becoming academics by two generational cohorts (1990s and 2010s) in the same management studies department in a business school.

The study indicates that the contextual and temporal enactment of academic writing practice in the department created a situation where implicit and ambiguous criteria for writing competence gradually changed into explicit and narrow ones. The change was relatively slow for two reasons. First, new performance management indicators were introduced over a period of two decades. Second, when the new indicators were gradually introduced, they were locally resisted. The study highlights how the focus, forms and main actors of resistance changed over time.

The paper offers a detailed account of how exogenous changes in higher education impact upon, over time and cultural space, academic writing practices through which doctoral students become academics.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on reflexivity in organization and management studies by scrutinizing the possibilities of self‐reflexivity.

By means of auto‐ethnography, the authors analyze their own experiences as (pro‐)feminist men in the field of gender studies.

The authors argue that self‐reflexivity is partial, fragmentary and transient: it surfaces in situations where the authors’ activities and identities as researchers are challenged by others and they become aware of their precarious position.

The paper's perspective complements more instrumental understandings of self‐reflexivity, and stimulates further debate on its limits as well as potential.

This paper acts as a commentary on the paper “Self‐reflexivity scrutinized: (pro‐)feminist men learning that gender matters” (Styhre and Tienari, 2013).

The following discussion seeks to build on Styhre and Tienari's argumentation and points to arguments of agreement and disagreement.

First, the authors argue that while self‐reflexivity cannot be fully taken into account it would be detrimental to social change to restrict it to accidental, haphazard happenings. Second, they argue that perhaps Styhre and Tienari do not always take self‐reflexivity far enough. In order to increase our understanding of why particular kinds of structural hierarchies take place in academia, it is important to locate these incidents within a system of practices that contribute to the marginalisation/privileging of certain groups of people.

The authors further see it as a researcher's moral obligation to at least attempt to overcome the identity‐related, cultural, political and structural conditions that make self‐reflexivity difficult, tiresome and emotionally constraining. We should encourage ourselves to have an ongoing conversation with our whole self about what we are experiencing as we are experiencing it, not only after a critical incident has taken place.

In conclusion, the authors are more inclined to argue along the lines of Alvesson et al., who see reflexivity as a skill or capacity that can be developed, while remaining in consensus with Styhre and Tienari that it can never be fully under the control of the researcher or practitioner.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which gender is “done” in executive search. The authors uncover how the ideal candidate for top management is defined in and through search practices, and discuss how and why women are excluded in the process.

The study is based on in‐depth interviews with male and female Austrian, Finnish and Swedish executive search consultants. The authors study the ways in which consultants talk about their work, assignments, clients, and candidates, and discern from their talk descriptions of practices where male dominance in top management is reinforced.

The ways in which gender is “done” and women are excluded from top management are similar across socio‐cultural contexts. In different societal conditions and culturally laden forms, search consultants, candidates and clients engage in similar practices that produce a similar outcome. Core practices of executive search constrain consultants in their efforts to introduce female candidates to the process and to increase the number of women in top management.

The study is exploratory in that it paves the way for more refined understandings of the ways in which gender plays a role in professional services in general and in practices of executive search in particular.

Unmasking how gender is woven into the executive search process may provide openings for “doing” gender differently, both for consultants and their clients. It may serve as a catalyst for change in widening the talent pool for top management.

Research on gendered practices in executive search is extremely rare. The study provides new insights into this influential professional practice and its outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to address gender and management in contemporary globalization by focusing on the ways in which male top managers in a multinational corporation (MNC) construct their identities in interviews with researchers.

Qualitative analysis based on interviews with virtually all top managers in the Nordic financial services company Nordea (53 men and two women).

It is found that becoming international induces a particular masculine identity for the top managers. In becoming international, however, their national identification persists. The unstability of the MNC as a political constellation leaves room for questioning the transnational identity offered.

This paper's findings suggest that in the global world of business, national identity can also be interpreted as something positive and productive, contrary to how it has been previously treated in feminist and men's studies literature.

This paper aims to examine the role and experiences of women working in the industrial relations (IR) academy and to explore the recent claim that the subject of industrial relations has “been very receptive to the contributions of feminist analysis”.

An examination is made of the liminal position of women IR scholars in the IR academy and their concern for feminist and gender analysis. Parallels are drawn with IR and trade unions, focusing mainly on Britain, which also occupy, simultaneously, insider and outsider spaces. This approach draws on the relevant literature and is then tested through a questionnaire survey of women scholars working in the field, the author included, together with interviews and interactive discussions about the findings.

Gender politics remain highly contested in the IR academy, with women and their work experiencing considerable marginalisation and exclusion. Nevertheless women IR scholars display a high level of commitment to the field, especially its emphasis on policy and practice. The conclusion is that so far, a “gender turn” has yet to occur in the field in the way that women's studies is claimed as being part of a new knowledge movement.

A limitation of the study is a relatively low response rate to the questionnaire, with a bias towards older, more senior women academics.

For probably the first time the role and experiences in the IR academy of women researchers/ academics are examined and published. The study reveals that the exclusion and sexism experienced there closely reflect the gender and diversity analyses in the IR field.

This chapter was inspired by and tells of a conference experience. Most “ordinary” academics like me go to a varying number of conferences annually and regularly share stories of these experiences with our colleagues. The conference stories are about a central set of practices in academic work, at least for active researchers. However, it is difficult to find studies of conference practices (for exceptions, see Radford, 2000), and, in particular, their broader meanings to both organizers and participants.

This paper aims to outline different views on international business (IB) as an academic discipline and looks into how IB scholars can cope with challenges to their disciplinary identity when stand-alone IB departments are merged with other departments such as management, marketing or strategy in business schools and universities.

The article offers a critical reflection on the development and future of IB as a discipline. The two authors are an IB and a Management scholar, both of whom were engaged in recent departmental mergers at their respective business schools. While the authors do not analyze these particular mergers, their experiences are inevitably interwoven in the views they express.

Mergers of stand-alone IB departments with other departments bring to light the nature of the IB discipline as a contested terrain. The article discusses how these structural changes challenge the disciplinary identity of IB scholars. It contributes, first, to discussions on the development of IB as a discipline and, second, to understanding identities and identification during major organizational change events in academia.

The authors suggest that the threat of marginalization of IB in the context of business schools and universities necessitates a move beyond the “big questions” debate to a critical self-examination and reflection on IB as a discipline and as a global scholarly community.

The article offers a critical view on current processes and challenges related to IB as a discipline and an academic community.