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The paper introduces the autoethnography as a healing and everyday resistance strategy for marginalized voices. The focus is to deliver the author’s own reflections on some key moments and experiences to stimulate the discussion on autoethnography as a critical instrument channeling one’s reflexivity in the higher education context.

The paper draws on a case study of Chinese academic professionals to inspire the discussion on the research and practical values of autoethnography. It also provides conceptual reflections on the political meaning and functions of autoethnography.

The paper highlights two key aspects of autoethnography in the higher education context. Firstly, it emphasizes the importance of autoethnography in navigating the personal political front. Secondly, it promotes the integration of autoethnography into the ordinary lives of overseas Chinese academic professionals for daily healing and resistance.

The paper explores political sensitivity as an important dimension of workplace ethnography. Recognizing political sensitivity avows autoethnography a political act and a research framework, through which the (auto)ethnographer examines his or her own principles for negotiating justice and interpreting the ownership of personal identity against the influx of politically-charged opinions from the surrounding.

This study explored the mediating effect of political embeddedness on the relationship between gender and performance of private enterprises in the emerging economy of China. Political embeddedness is examined in terms of personal characteristics of owners and their firm.

Secondary data were collected from the Chinese Private Enterprises Survey for the years 2002, 2006, 2014 and 2016 using responses to identical questions. Tobit models were implemented to examine hypotheses related to the gender gap. A bootstrapping approach was applied to examine hypotheses related to mediation through political embeddedness.

The gender effect on enterprise performance was found to be partially mediated by political embeddedness at the personal level and even more strongly by political embeddedness at the firm level, which is beyond the well-known mediation effect of bank loans.

The Chinese sample, in which guanxi plays a significant role with respect to women-led firms, may limit the generalizability of the findings to other emerging economies.

Given the mediating effects on firm performance of political embeddedness at the personal and firm levels, women business owners in China should pursue political involvement, possibly with the support of policymakers and mentors.

The relationship between businesswomen and political embeddedness is underexplored. This study innovates by applying the gender lens to the notion of political embeddedness and extending the construct of personal political embeddedness to the firm level.

The young feminists in this chapter were part of several feminist groups in Manchester, analysed in this ethnographic case study as part of Manchester’s feminist movement. The young women described their motivations for ‘be(com)ing feminist’ as ‘personal-political’ and ‘political-personal’ journeys (Hanisch, 1970) that came about because of individual and group experiences of gendered disadvantage and a recognition that the needs of women, and women’s equality, would not be achieved in current political and democratic arrangements that favour a focus on the ‘common good’. While the young women campaigned for several causes (abortion rights, safer streets, sexual objectification, and so on), their frustrations with the mainstream neglect of women’s issues were the key drivers for self-organising for political action. The aim of their activism was to dismantle (or at the very least diminish) the patriarchal social order, and their participation and activism focused on women’s issues and rights and the need to create a ‘politics of difference’ (Young, 1990) that addresses their group needs, differences, and specificities.

President Obama embraced social media and remains one of the most followed persons on Twitter. The focus of this study is twofold: to assess how the President’s use of Twitter affected (a) Millennials’ perception of Obama and (b) Millennials’ interest and likelihood to participate in the political process. Study findings provide support for a model derived from information processing theory. Results also suggest that message orientation (or perceived favorability) predicted source credibility, which stems from message content as well as the Twitter medium by which the message was delivered. Implications for study findings – including optimal strategies for cultivating a social media presence – are discussed.

The ‘symbiotic’ relationship between media and politics has multiple effects on the way political elites act and behave. However, only limited attention has been given on the impact of contemporary media in the emerging, recruitment and composition of the political elites. Drawing heavily on the various approaches of social, political and media capital, this chapter paper seeks to explore the main profiles and paths of the politicians having practised media-related professions, during the last 30 years in Greece. For the scopes of our research we will take advantage of two related databases offering quantitative data. Our analysis demonstrates that media have a considerable impact in political selection procedure given the fact that elected candidates with a media background have increased considerably during the last years, their candidacies are mainly addressed to wide electorates, while media constitutes an important path for the elections in political elites' positions.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

The purpose of this paper is to describe processes of learning from personal experiences of mental distress when mental health service users participate in occupational therapy education with tutors and students who have also had experiences of mental distress.

A post-structural theoretical perspective was applied to stories which emerged from the research process. Semi-structured group and individual interviews were used with three service users, three students and three tutors (including the author) who had all had, at some time in their lives, experiences of mental distress.

Stories based on previously hidden personal experiences of mental distress began to shift dominant understandings. Further, as educators, service users challenged whose authority it is to speak about mental distress and permitted different narrative positions for students and tutors. However, technologies of power and technologies of self of powerful discourses in professional education continued to disqualify and exclude personal knowledges. Learning from stories requires a critical approach to storytelling to expose how hidden power relations maintain some knowledges as dominant. Further, learning requires narrative work, which was often hidden and unaccounted for, to navigate complex and contradictory positions in learning.

Although storytelling based on personal experience can help develop a skilled and healthy mental health workforce, its impact will be limited without changes in classrooms, courses and higher education which support learning at the margins of personal/professional and personal/political learning.

Learning from stories of mental distress requires conditions which take account of the hidden practices which operate in mental health professional education.