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PurposeThis paper acts as a commentary on the paper "Self‐reflexivity scrutinized: (pro‐)feminist men learning that gender matters" (Styhre and Tienari, 2013).Design/methodology/approachThe following discussion seeks to build on Styhre and Tienari's argumentation and points to arguments of agreement and disagreement.FindingsFirst, the authors argue that while self‐reflexivity cannot be fully taken into account it would be detrimental to social change to restrict it to accidental, haphazard happenings. Second, they argue that perhaps Styhre and Tienari do not always take self‐reflexivity far enough. In order to increase our understanding of why particular kinds of structural hierarchies take place in academia, it is important to locate these incidents within a system of practices that contribute to the marginalisation/privileging of certain groups of people.Practical implicationsThe authors further see it as a researcher's moral obligation to at least attempt to overcome the identity‐related, cultural, political and structural conditions that make self‐reflexivity difficult, tiresome and emotionally constraining. We should encourage ourselves to have an ongoing conversation with our whole self about what we are experiencing as we are experiencing it, not only after a critical incident has taken place.Originality/valueIn conclusion, the authors are more inclined to argue along the lines of Alvessonet al., who see reflexivity as a skill or capacity that can be developed, while remaining in consensus with Styhre and Tienari that it can never be fully under the control of the researcher or practitioner.

How is it that some organizational practices flow like clockwork and may even energize us but others seem to be stuck in the mud and diminish our capacity to act? In order to understand this, we develop a concept of affecto-rhythmic order that captures how rhythms and affects interrelate in the flow of organizational practices. Adopting a sociomaterial practice perspective, our ethnographic study of a Nordic startup accelerator demonstrates how participants learn and embody a contextual affecto-rhythmic upbeat order and how this enhances their individual and collective capacity to engage with the fast-paced development of business ideas and sales pitching skills relevant in the accelerator setting. As a contribution, the study theorizes and empirically illustrates the entangled nature of rhythms and affects in organizational practices, provides novel insights into inter-corporeal learning and the regulative nature of practices, and shows how affective ethnography can help scholars examine affect and write about it in organizational research.

Purpose
– The purpose of the paper is to discuss and illustrate how contemporary market discourses rearticulate socio-political relationships and identities, including the rights, duties, and opportunities of individuals and categories of individuals as citizens. More specifically, the purpose is to analyze how "economic citizenship" is articulated and negotiated in the intersection of (Nordic) welfare state ideals and shareholder-oriented market discourses. The paper further elaborates on how different identity markers, especially gender and class, intersect in these articulations and contribute to exclusionary practices.


Design/methodology/approach
– The paper approaches the articulation of economic citizenship through an empirical study that focusses on business media representations and online discussions of a major factory shutdown in Finland. Drawing from discourse theory and the notions of representational intersectionality and translocational positionality, the paper analyzes how gender and class intersect in the construction of economic citizenship in the business media.


Findings
– The study illustrates how financialist market discourses render citizenship intelligible in exceedingly economic terms, overriding social and political dimensions of citizenship. The business media construct hierarchies of economic citizens where two categories of actors claim full economic citizenship: the transnational corporation and the transnational investor. Within these categories, particular systems of privilege intersect in similar ways, rendering them masculine and upper middleclass. Whether interpreted as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic, the financialist discourses rearticulate the social hierarchies and moral landscape in Finnish society.


Originality/value
– The paper contributes to critical/feminist management studies by elaborating on the role of the business media as an important site of political identity work, positioning, and moral regulation, where neoliberal ideas, based upon and reproducing masculine and elitist systems of privilege, appear as normalized and self-evidently valued.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of gender on the usage of different funding sources in a sample of Finnish small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). The aim is also to embed the results into the country‐context, which is characterized by the long history of women's economic activity and bank‐based capital markets.Design/methodology/approachThe database includes variables on terms of credit for the firms' most recent loans and detailed information on the firms' banking relationships. The total number of firm‐year observations in the database is 3,519. The analysis is based on multivariate tests.FindingsThe funding patterns of women‐owned SMEs (WOS) and men‐owned SMEs (MOS) in the data are different: WOS are more likely to use additional equity investments by current owners as a funding source. They do so at least partly because of their positive attitudes towards this funding source. The results also contradict prior studies, which indicate that MOS have easier access to bank lending. The results suggest that there are no gender‐related differences in the use of bank debt. Also in contrast to prior studies, the paper finds no differences in firm size or profitability between WOS and MOS.Research limitations/implicationsThe results of study both confirm and contradict the results of prior research and the paper suggests that this is due to the context‐specific features of the Finnish labour market and the gender system as well as the bank‐centered financial markets.Practical implicationsConcerning the issues of gender and finance, policy makers and financial experts in any country should not uncritically rely on the research results arrived at in other countries.Originality/valueOnly a handful of studies have investigated issues of gender and finance in SMEs embedding the results into the country‐context.

AbstractThe notion of diversity management (DM) has in recent years spread out from its Anglo‐American origins. However, few studies have theorized how alternate discourses established in particular societal contexts can challenge penetration of the organizational agenda by DM discourse. Based on a study of corporate websites, we offer a description of DM discourse in Finnish companies. We show how gender equality as an institutionalized societal discourse shapes the meanings attached to DM, and discuss the power effects of this intertwining. For the burgeoning research on diversity management, the Finnish case illuminates how a gender egalitarian context affects the inclusion of certain manifestations of diversity (and its management), while excluding others. Copyright © 2009 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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