Management Communication Quarterly

This article examines an innovative philanthropic program instituted by a Midwestern U.S. manufacturing company during organizational downtimes. Rather than institute layoffs and unemployment, the organization chose to enact a policy of “loaned labor,” securing employee pay and benefits in exchange for work in local nonprofit organizations. This case study examines the tensions that emerged when a traditionally structured company instituted a program indicative of incremental shifts toward feminist organizing principles. In this analysis of traditional structures and feminist management principles, the authors examine the promises and problems of this philanthropic program. Lastly, the authors explore the pragmatic and far-reaching benefits of this program for the employees, the community, and the organization as a whole.

Organizational learning has become a popular initiative for responding to unstable environmental conditions. Relational development and community building that cultivate exploration, experimentation, and risk are foundational to the organizational learning enterprise. This essay offers a conception of mentoring as a dialogic practice and as a core relational practice for learning organizations. We argue that dialogic mentoring has advantages over both conventional mentoring relationships and extant practices for generative learning in organizations, and we suggest implications for research and practice.

The purpose of this project is to illustrate how the cultural practice of discursive essentializing in a woman-owned and operated business accomplished simultaneous agendas of power and resistance. Utilizing Foucault’s (1980) conceptualization of power and resistance and Fuss’s (1989) and Spivak’s (1988) views of essentializing as a political move, the author illustrates how the performance of gendered stereotypes, rather than having expected negative consequences, allowed organizational members to suppress conflict and to reproduce the owners’ concept of the ideal workplace for women. The women’s essentializing discourse created a community of support, flexibility, and loyalty while simultaneously suppressing dissent and strategically subordinating the employees’ interests to the owners to achieve larger goals for themselves in the long term.