Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series : Services : Center for Gender in Organizations : Simmons School of Management

Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series

The Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series highlights new, cutting-edge research relevant to CGO's work and mission. Each lecture combines discussions on theory and practice, offering opportunities to discuss the practical implications of recent findings and ways to apply them to our own situations.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

"Time Practices and Cultural Scripts"

Norms about time — how it is used, what it signifies and how it is controlled — are often used as an exemplar of gendered organizational assumptions. Indeed, the issue of time practices is central to work/life discussions not only in developed countries, but also in emergent countries including Mexico. In this session, Mayra Ruiz Castro will unpack our understanding of the gendered nature of time practices with findings from a recent research study of professional services firms in Mexico. Her research paid special attention to the social and cultural determinates of time demands and found that it was a particular cultural script related to masculinity —paternalistic masculinity — that influenced organizational norms and assumptions about the use of time. She will describe the key elements of paternalistic masculinity and contrast it to competitive masculinity, which is characteristic of professional service firms in Western countries. Using detailed accounts from managers and staff, she will highlight how the clash between time demands and gender roles had an impact on males and females, both at home and at work.
The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with Evangelina Holvino and Michal Frenkel, who will comment on Mayra's findings through the lens of cultural scripts and cultural repertoires. This seminar is of interest for both practitioners and scholars interested in understanding the interplay between local cultures and global organizational practices.

Biographies

Mayra Ruiz Castro, Ph.D., is Visiting Scholar at the Center for Gender in Organizations (CGO) at the Simmons School of Management. She earned her doctorate in Development, Organizations and Gender from the University College London (UK). She recently worked at the University of Stuttgart, where she conducted an evaluation of mentoring programs for women in German universities. Her research interests include the study of gendered organizational practices in developing countries and the organizational, institutional and societal contexts in which they are embedded. Previous to her career in Europe and the U.S., she worked for leading multinational corporations in Mexico in the areas of human resources and corporate and social responsibility.

Evangelina Holvino, Ed.D., is President of Chaos Management, Ltd. and an Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Gender in Organizations (CGO) at the Simmons School of Management. Her research and consulting practice focus on diversity and equality strategies in organizations and the simultaneity of race, gender, ethnicity, class and other social differences. She currently leads the "Gender in All Its Complexities" grant at CGO.

Michal Frenkel, Ph.D., Michal Frenkel is a Senior Lecturer at the department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on the transformation of local and transnational social orders, in the context of the "globalization" of management practices. Her current studies look at gender related and organizational work family policies, and the ways in which they are framed in different cultural and institutional settings and transform as they travel across cultural boundaries. Her empirical and theoretical publications, which appeared in top journals, have looked at the role of organizational and aesthetics practices in constructing and reconstructing members' gender, ethnic and class identities. In the 2012-2013 academic year Michal is a Schusterman Visiting Professor of Israel Studies and Sociology at Smith College.

Monday, February 4, 2013

(Rescheduled from 10/31/12) "Whole Self or Best Self? Identity Expansion and the Building of Positive Relationships at Work"

This session, presented by Stephanie Creary, is designed to explore the concept of "identity expansion" and provide insight on how we as individuals can embrace our complex identities at work as well as manage identity discrepant-feedback. Through illustrative examples and interactive discussion, Stephanie will explore the different admonitions we often get to bring both our "whole selves" and our "best selves" to work. The presentation will introduce a framework that elaborates what it means to expand one's identity in social encounters at work and engage us in an interactive discussion about the practical implications of this framework for creating high quality connections in the workplace.

Biographies

Stephanie J. Creary is a doctoral candidate in the PhD program in Organization Studies at Boston College Carroll School of Management. Her research interests center on how individuals manage their multiple identities in diverse work environments and how these identities may be used as a resource for individuals, their relationships with others, and for the organizations in which they work. Creary's background and past experiences working as a health care professional informs much of her research. Recently, Creary worked at Harvard Business School as a researcher conducting field research and publishing management case studies and at The Conference Board in NYC as a researcher publishing management research for diversity and human resource practitioners working in the corporate, non-profit and government sectors. She holds an MBA with high honors from Simmons College School of Management, a BS in Communication disorders and MS in speech-language pathology from Boston University Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, and an MS in Organization Studies from Boston College Carroll School of Management.

Laura Morgan Roberts, PhD, is an author, professor, researcher and organizational consultant. She is the Professor of Psychology, Culture and Organization Studies in Antioch University's Ph.D. Program in Leadership and Change. Dr. Roberts has served on the faculties of several of the world's top-ranked business schools: Harvard, University of Michigan, Wharton, Simmons, Georgia State and Tuck. She is also a faculty affiliate of the AVT Business School (Copenhagen, Denmark), the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship (Ann Arbor), and the Center for Gender in Organizations (Boston). A thought leader in the areas of authenticity, identity, diversity, strengths, and value creation, Dr. Roberts has published an edited book, Exploring Positive Identities and Organizations (Roberts & Dutton, Eds.), and dozens of top-ranked, book chapters, and case studies.

Dr. Roberts earned a BA in Psychology with highest distinction and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia. She received her MA and Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan. She lives near Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and business partner, Rev. Darryl D. Roberts, JD, MDiv, and their daughter.

Brianna Barker Caza, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Employment Relations and Human Resources at Griffith Business School in Brisbane, Australia. She earned her doctorate in Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan and has previously held a faculty positions at the University of Illinois, Wake Forest University and the Center for Creative Leadership. The overall aim of her research program is to understand the resources and processes that produce resilience at work. Within this framework her work falls into three interrelated streams of research. The first examines how individuals perceive, experience and react to adversity or setbacks in the workplace. This includes issues involving work crises, interpersonal conflict, incivility, and organizational (in)justice. The second stream of research focuses the nature, construction, and importance of individual and social resources that are used in creating functional responses to this adversity. Important resources include work identity, perceived meaningfulness of work, creativity, relational capabilities, and social support. Third, she examines the processes that foster resilience including cognitive flexibility, behavioral adaptability, and identity confirmation

Thursday, December 6, 2012

"The Global Woman Manager: The Story behind the Story"

The global woman manager is portrayed in the international management literature as balancing her life so she can move around the globe apace with high status men. But what is implied in this portrait, and who is missing from the picture? Who is the global woman manager, and how do depictions of her both reveal and obscure the flow of work and opportunities in a transnational world?

Biographies

Evangelina Holvino, Ed.D., is President of Chaos Management, Ltd. and an Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Gender in Organizations (CGO) at the Simmons School of Management. Her research and consulting practice focus on diversity and equality strategies in organizations and the simultaneity of race, gender, ethnicity, class and other social differences. She currently leads the "Gender in All Its Complexities"
grant at CGO.

Maureen Scully is an associate professor of management and associate dean for graduate programs at the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is also a faculty affiliated at the Center for Gender in Organizations at the Simmons School of Management. Her research interests include how inequality is legitimated by meritocratic ideology and how inequality is sometimes exposed and contested, particularly through grassroots efforts inside organizations.

Banu Özkazanç-Pan is an assistant professor of management and international business at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research interests include examining globalization, gender and development, and inequality in society and organizations through feminist lenses. Currently, she uses postcolonial and transnational feminist perspectives to examine entrepreneurship and identity formation.

Monday, October 1, 2012

"Gender, Status and Organizational Change: How Status-Based Counter Tactics Can Block Organizational Change"

Dual agenda change efforts linking equity and effectiveness are the hallmark of what we call the "CGO approach" to challenging gendered organizations. Professor Kellogg's recent research in surgical units of two prestigious hospitals advances our understanding of dual agenda change in some unexpected ways. Counterintuitively, she found that a change in work rules designed to improve patient safety (effectiveness) and quality of work and personal life for surgical staff (equity) sparked strong opposition, even from those who would benefit personally from the change. In this presentation she details the specific micro-process that led to success in one hospital and the surprising counter tactics -- linking gender and status — that undermined the multi-identity coalitions necessary for change and led to failure in the other. This presentation will be of interest not only to health care practitioners and organizational change agents but also to gender scholars interested in exploring the inner workings of gendered organizational norms and work practices.

Biography

Kate Kellogg, MBA, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her research focuses on social change inside organizations in response to social movements and her papers have been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Organization Science. Her recent book, Challenging Operations: Medical Reform and Resistance in Surgery (2011 University of Chicago Press) has been widely acclaimed as a ground breaking study of organizational change.