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This article presents the emotional challenges of managing affectively committed volunteers and the associated impacts on the managerial task. Through a qualitative arts-based study at a U.K. nonprofit organization, the National Trust, dominant rhetoric positioning volunteering as positive is problematized. Paid managers find managing affectively committed volunteers emotionally demanding and are often reluctant to address what they perceive to be difficult volunteer behavior. This study conceptualizes the emotionally challenging behaviors of volunteers and the reluctance of their paid managers to address them, as a consequence of a variation in adherence to the organizational display and feeling rules that define their shared emotional arena. This is influenced by the existence or lack of an employment contract within the context of their affective commitment. Suggestions are made for further research and practice regarding the management of volunteers.

This article considers the customary choice of silence over voice of two groups of UK workers – women clergy and women actors – who routinely tolerate poor quality conditions rather than express dissatisfaction. We argue that a key mediating factor is an expanded version of Hirschman's (1970) concept of loyalty. The article considers how occupational ideologies facilitate loyalty as adaptation to disadvantage in ways that discourage voice, in framing silence as positive. Consequently, we also identify this type of loyalty as potentially salient in understanding silence in other occupations. A descriptive model comparing strength of occupational ideology and voicing of dissatisfaction is outlined, and through discussion of findings the article offers conceptual refinements of loyalty in accounting for worker silence.

AbstractThere has been a shift at the organizational level away from a traditional "equal opportunity" paradigm underpinned by notions of social justice, with a specific focus on tackling gender inequalities towards a business‐led "diversity management" paradigm, with a focus on the individual and their contribution to the organization. We argue that diversity management as a concept and model has the potential to undermine the gender equality project, but drawing on a UK‐based study we conclude that whether or not it presently does so in practice is less clear. Nevertheless, our study, presenting views and experiences of multiple organizational actors, demonstrates the seductiveness of the diversity discourse, which could herald danger for the future direction and substance of the gender equality project. Copyright © 2010 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article is concerned with strategies for managing the careers of women who work in paid positions in the union movement. Recently there has been some debate about the positive potential offered by the use of ICTs in a variety of areas of trade union activity. We link this to debates about the role of trade union education in developing women's careers within trade unions by exploring the experiences of participants on a recent British Trades Union Congress (TUC) online course for women. The study suggests that the potentialities of ICTs in this sphere of trade union activity are mediated by a number of gendered constraints.

This article compares the viewpoints of trade union activists in the UK and Denmark on diversity management. While this concept is spreading rapidly across Europe, very different attitudes are revealed among equality activists and officials in the two countries. The article distinguishes between understandings of diversity management as a descriptor, theoretical approach, and policy approach. The main differences between the countries emerge with regard to diversity management as a policy approach, which is regarded with great scepticism in the UK and with great enthusiasm in Denmark. Explanations for these differences are offered, involving prior experiences of anti-discrimination activities, industrial relations approaches, and the wider political context.

This article discusses a process of workplace change at a manufacturing company. The firm had sought to radically change traditional working practices, organizational culture and labour management relations. The article identifies a significant mismatch between management rationale for the changes and their subsequent behaviour, on the one hand, and workrs'views, objwtives and aspirations about their work lives, on the other. Explanations for this are grounded within the competing discourse of workers and managers. The article argues, in particular, that the relative failure of the change process derived largely from the unwillingness of management to recognize the way in which the workplace culture is embedded in a context of social and historical traditions. This analysis of 'paternalism'is situated within a disussion of the psychological contract.