Management & Organizational History

Scholars of management and organizational history have focused on work and organization as an activity that is paid-for and which takes place outside the home, thus rendering invisible much of what has been women's works of organization in the past. This article seeks to challenge that by presenting an account of a ritual undertaken by women in medieval France. A reading of the cultural symbolism of the ritual allows a glimpse into the material conditions of their lives and of the organizing for which they were responsible. The ritual allowed them to have a sense of control over lives which were precarious and where women were marginalized and excluded from the official rituals of the Church. The use of ritual, liminality, resistance by groups marginal to the focus of power and activities of sense-making and rationalization are all evident in this tale – and all subjects of ongoing debate and conversation between scholars of organization.

This article compares the conditions of service for unmarried women working as house mothers in institutions run by a local authority and a voluntary association (the National Children's Homes) in mid-20th-century England. It explores the different organizational structures within which these women were employed and examines tensions relating to class, gender, occupational and marital status and emotional labour. It concludes that there were conflicts between the high value that was attached to these women's perceived role as nurturers for Britain's citizens of the future and their relatively low professional and economic status. In the case of the local authority, who believed married couples were most suitable for this kind of work, tensions were exacerbated by the women's marital status. Women working in this field often made a high level of personal investment and this was recognized in the National Children Homes, which offered workers a professional training, pay structure and retirement provision. However in both the case histories the hard physical and emotional labour performed by these women and the organizational structures within which their work was located put them under considerable strain, making it difficult for them always to offer the continuity of care the children needed.

This article examines the work of Labour Party women organizers and their activities at a regional level in the inter-war years. It looks at their role in building up the women's sections, in providing education and training and in taking part in electoral campaigning and asks to what extent their methods of organizing were gendered. It argues that the women organizers played an important part in persuading women in the home to become active in the Labour Party and that politics was relevant to their daily lives and would broaden their horizons as women.

This article discusses the construction of images of female careers through a case from musical theater, with a particular focus on following the life and roles of Ethel Merman – ‘The Grande Dame of Broadway’ – both on and off the stage. By focusing on an individual performer, we wish to highlight how we can achieve a more complex understanding of the constructions of female career-possibilities than we can by studying representations or biography alone, and how analyses of gender and popular culture tend to overlook the importance of the performers and instead focus solely on the representation.

As part of the women's movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, flight attendants formed an organization to fight discrimination in the industry. That organization was called Stewardesses for Women's Rights (SFWR). Formed in 1972, SFWR attracted a lot of high profile feminist attention and served as a powerful challenge to sexist attitudes and practices in the commercial aviation industry in the USA. Avowedly feminist in organization and orientation, SFWR nonetheless folded in 1976 under the weight of bitter infighting and a lack of funding. Drawing on archival material, this paper sets out to analyze the rise and fall of SFWR and the lessons for feminist organizing. Using critical hermeneutics (Prasad and Mir 2002) to interrogate the material, we conclude with suggestions for alternative forms of organizing based on Acker's (1995) distinction between organization and organizing and on Ferguson's (1984) call for change strategies based on feminist discourse.

Work memorabilia can include a range of objects from photographs to redundant items of technology. These artifacts breach the secrecy of the workplace and the privacy of the home, making permeable the boundaries between these two distinct social spaces frequently described in opposition to each other and as having distinctly dual characteristics. This article focuses on the oral histories of working life belonging to two retired women and recorded in their homes with their mementoes from work in place as an integral part of the interview process. This approach, combining material culture and oral histories, has the potential for making explicit the complex relationships women have with work over their life course.

This article is about heroines. It is concerned with the virtues of goodness, honesty, integrity and morality: nowadays reduced to values which are much praised in rhetoric but perhaps less observable in everyday life. Understood in this way, virtue has come to be regarded as a Victorian legacy. In The De-moralisation of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1996), the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb characterizes the Victorians as moralists who believed in virtues as qualities of character and morality that they regarded as necessary in a civilized society. She takes the view that virtures have been replaced by values that are relative and subjective. Any and all positions, desires and demands then become personal preferences that can be and are accommodated and met. The stories of the heroines of fifty years ago and more are stories of heroic virtue: of opposition. We are deceived when we are told they are stories of female oppression. Where, at this distance in time from these stories, we feel uncomfortable is with our own persuasive narratives of liberation and heterogeneity.

The management textbook is a fundamental tool in the education of business students. This article uses a critical hermeneutic analysis to examine how major social and political issues of the past six decades have been incorporated into the management textbook in ways that increase the power and unquestioned acceptance of the corporate discourse. The specific social and political events addressed are the feminist revolution and the civil rights movement.

In the early 20th century, the values associated with Frederick Taylor and scientific management affected the American hotel industry through three different avenues: Modern architecture was regarded as the reification of the Taylorist ideal, and secondly, the internal management of hotels reflected the Taylorist ethos. Thirdly, the occupation of traveling sales representative (commercial traveler), who comprised the key market niche for many hotels, grew in numbers and became more tightly organized due to a combination of legal developments and shifts in management philosophies. Numerous large hotels were built in American cities, reflecting the confluence of these three currents in scientific management.