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"On October 17, 2023, during the 100th Dies Natalis of Radboud University, Stella Nkomo received an honorary doctorate from Radboud University. This doctorate was awarded in recognition of her groundbreaking research on the intersection between race and gender in managerial and organisational contexts. This edition includes honorary promotor Yvonne Benschop's laudatio, Stella Nkomo's acceptance speech, and a detailed recollection of Stella Nkomo's professional history.Stella Nkomo was among the first researchers to address race as a distinct and relevant category within the field of management and organisation studies. In her research, Nkomo revealed that the notion of race neutrality in organisations is but a myth, and that systemic racism is alive and well within organisational contexts. Nkomo also played a big part in bringing intersectional research to life within management and organisational studies, noting that gender and race should be studied as interrelated factors that impact each other. She continues to strive for greater equality in managerial and organisational contexts, as well as for the decolonisation of management and organisational studies, to this day.Honorary promotor Yvonne Benschop, professor of business administration and organisational behaviour: "your pioneering scholarship exemplifies what it means to make a significant impact, in the strategy words of our university. Your deep commitment to racial justice and equality and your willingness to engage in difficult conversations respectfully is motivating many of us."

Purpose
This paper aims to examine the discursive constitution of leadership identities by senior women leaders working in the City of London. This study draws on postfeminism as a critical concept to explore this constitution, as it has produced the cultural conditions for the reconfiguration of masculine and feminine gender norms in leadership.


Design/methodology/approach
In a qualitative study, 13 women leaders in positions of power in the City of London were interviewed. Discourse analysis techniques were used to unpack the postfeminist shaping of leadership identities


Findings
At the heart of the leadership identities that senior women leaders construct is a gendered hybridity that is a multifaceted calibration of masculine and feminine attributes and behaviours. Postfeminist discourses of individualism, choice and self-improvement are entangled with discourses of authenticity, relatability and connectivity as particular leadership assets. The gendered hybridity of leadership identities unfolds the possibility for a fundamental makeover of leadership by opening-up space for a transformative change that accommodates women leaders.


Originality/value
To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is among the very few studies that foreground the leadership identities that women leaders construct within the confines of postfeminist gender regimes. It shows how these women invoke authenticity, unfolding possibilities for the transformational change of and political challenge to traditional gendered leadership in their organizations.

This article discusses how female entrepreneurs of Moroccan and Turkish origin in the Netherlands construct their ethnic, gender and entrepreneurial identities in relation to their Muslim identity. We contribute to theory development on the interrelationship of work identities with gender, ethnicity and religion through an intersectional analysis of these women's gender and ethnic identities within their entrepreneurial contexts and in relation to their Muslim identity. We draw on four narratives to illustrate how the women interviewed perform creative boundary work at these hitherto under-researched intersections. Islam is employed as a boundary to let religious norms and values prevail over cultural ones and to make space for individualism, honour and entrepreneurship. Moreover, different individual religious identities are crafted to stretch the boundaries of what is allowed for female entrepreneurs in order to resist traditional, dogmatic interpretations of Islam. Our study contributes to studies on entrepreneurship by showing how these female entrepreneurs gain agency at the crossroads of gender, ethnicity and religion.

This paper describes the results of an empirical study of the gender subtext in organizations. We examine the divergence of practice and impression of gender distinctions: gender inequality is still persistent in organizational practices while a dominant perception of equality occurs at the same time. Our analysis focuses on the processes (re)producing this divergence. We argue that both the persistency of gender inequality and the perception of equality emerge from a so-called gender subtext: the set of often concealed, power-based gendering processes, i.e. organizational and individual arrangements (objectives, measures, habits), systematically (re)producing gender distinctions. These gendering processes are examined in five departments in the Dutch banking sector. We explore the gender subtext in three organizational settings: show pieces (the token position of the few women in top functions), the mommy track (the side track many women with young children are shunted to) and the importance of being asked (the gendered practices of career making).

PurposeThe authors aim to contribute to current knowledge on women's networks in organizations by exploring the strategies employed by members of women's networks, Human Resources (HR) management and senior line management to negotiate the role of these networks in their organizations.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ the theoretical perspective of micro-politics to analyze qualitative data they collected in an action research project using open-ended interviews and participant observation. The interviews were conducted with network board and active members, and members of their organizations' HR departments and senior management. Participant observation of the interviewees' interactions took place during facilitated workshops.FindingsAdding to the literature, the authors find that members of the different parties employ different micro-political strategies. Many senior HR and management members demand that the networks' activities contribute to the organizations' diversity aims and bottom line. They largely avoid strategic cooperation with the networks. Most network members, in turn, resist the restricted role of the networks as an instrument to realize their organizations' business case. They claim some freedom to independently decide on the networks' strategies and activities. They resist being attributed tasks and responsibilities that they consider to reside with their organizations. Moreover, they try to sustain cooperative relationships with senior HR and management in an advisory role.Originality/valueThe action research approach enabled the authors to contribute to existing knowledge and extend the micro-politics theoretical perspective to include the collective agency of members of organizational groups and cooperation between these groups.

Academic excellence is allegedly a universal and gender neutral standard of merit. This article examines exactly what is constructed as academic excellence at the micro-level, how evaluators operationalize this construct in the criteria they apply in academic evaluation, and how gender inequalities are imbued in the construction and evaluation of excellence. We challenge the view that the academic world is governed by the normative principle of meritocracy in its allocation of rewards and resources. Based on an empirical study of professorial appointments in the Netherlands, we argue that academic excellence is an evasive social construct that is inherently gendered. We show how gender is practiced in the evaluation of professorial candidates, resulting in disadvantages for women and privileges for men that accumulate to produce substantial inequalities in the construction of excellence.

About the contributors -- Introduction -- Postfeminism: negotiating equality with tradition in contemporary organizations / Patricia Lewis, Yvonne Benschop and Ruth Simpson -- Postfeminism and organization -- Postfeminism and gendered (im)mobilities / Patricia Lewis -- Doing-it-all : exploring work life balance in Nigeria through a postfeminist lens / Itari Turner and Ruth Simpson -- Keep calm and carry on being slinky : postfeminism, resilience coaching, and whiteness / Elaine Swan -- Postfeminism, queer and work / Nick Rumens -- Contested terrain : the power to define, control and benefit from gender equality efforts / Elisabeth K. Kelan -- Postfeminism and the performance of merit / Savita Kumra and Ruth Simpson -- Analysing entrepreneurial activity through a postfeminist perspective : a brave new world or the same old story? / Helene Ahl & Susan Marlow -- How postfeminism plays out for women elite leaders / Sharon Mavin and Gina Grandy -- Future directions in postfeminism and organizations -- Make do and mend? working postfeminism and vintage / Philip Hancock and Melissa Tyler -- Postfeminism as new materialisms : a future unlike the present? / Marta B. Calás, Linda Smircich and Seray Ergene

This article contributes to the literature on identity work and small business studies, by identifying various forms of identity work of female business owners of Turkish and Moroccan descent in the Netherlands, in relation to two sets of identity regulations stemming from their families, regarding the norms of 'being a good woman' and 'dealing with family support'. Identity work refers to the way subjects form, maintain, strengthen or revise constructions of self in relation to the claims and demands issued on them. Our analysis, which is based on McAdams's life-narrative approach, demonstrates in detail how social actors perform identity work in continuous interplay with their family environment when powerful, multiple, and even contradictory normative demands are made on those identities. We have demonstrated how these migrant female business owners use various cultural repertoires to negotiate and manipulate the family norms and values in order to seek and hold their position in the public domain effectively. Our research has revealed a variety of identity work manifestations, all strategically maneuvering between conflict and compliance.

PurposeThis paper aims to examine if the notion of gender subtext is still a useful concept to study the implicit processes of gender distinctions in organizations. It also aims to confront the authors' earlier elaboration of the concept of gender subtext with recently developed insights on how organizational processes produce gender at work.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the literature that was used to develop the notion of gender subtext. Then it turns to the new insights, concepts and theories that should be included in the update of the notion of gender subtext. The discussion focuses on three elements in particular: the entrance of intersectionality, the disappearance of the layered processes and the prevailing persistency of power.FindingsThe paper concludes that the original concept of gender subtext as a power‐based set of arrangements that reproduce gender distinctions can benefit from the recent theorizing on gender in organizations. The new notion genderplus subtext takes the interference of multiple inequalities into account. Gender is one important part, but not the only, or even the most important, form of inequality at work. To understand the dynamic process of (re)production of these inequalities, the paper points to the interplay between structural, cultural, interaction and identity processes in organizations, and to the hybrid power processes of compliance, accommodation, resistance and counter‐resistance.Practical implicationsThe authors hope that this updated version may trigger more debate about the reproduction and, more importantly, about change of gender inequalities in organizations.Originality/valueThe paper reconceptualizes gender subtext, bringing a new perspective to the understanding of the power processes that produce or alter complex inequalities in organizations.