Authority and Gender

A growing literature examines the organizational factors that promote women’s access to positions of organizational power. Fewer studies, however, explore the implications of women in leadership positions for the opportunities and experiences of subordinates. Do women leaders serve to undo the gendered organization? In other words, is women’s greater representation in leadership positions associated with less gender segregation at lower organizational levels? We explore this question by drawing on Cohen and Huffman’s (2007) conceptual framework of women leaders as either “change agents” or “cogs in the machine” and analyze a unique multilevel data set of workplaces nested within Fortune 1000 firms. Our findings generally support the “agents of change” perspective. Women’s representation among corporate boards of directors, corporate executives, and workplace managers is associated with less workplace gender segregation. Hence, it appears that women’s access to organizational power h...

From the early 1970s until 2011, the Syrian shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab flourished as a minor centre of Shiʿi learning. It predominantly served Iraqi Shiʿi refugees, but also temporary visitors from Iran and the Gulf countries. The seminaries viewed it as their responsibility to draw in transient Shiʿa and turn them into students and loyal followers of important marājiʿ al-taqlīd or Shiʿi legal scholars who mainly reside in major centres of Shiʿi learning, such as Najaf, Karbala and Qom. While the seminaries in Sayyida Zaynab aimed at strengthening institutional affiliation among lay Shiʿa, they concurrently aided the questioning of authoritative religious edicts and opinions emanating from Iranian and Iraqi centres of learning and produced local religious authorities. This article examines two spheres in which central authority was challenged in the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab. First, it was contested in seminaries where students and teachers debated legal rulings, and second, in contested public Muharram practices such as self-flagellation processions and the showing and selling of recorded laṭmiyyāt, which are chants performed during ritual mourning gatherings.

In this paper, I will discuss Maro Douka (b. 1947), one of the ‘canonical’ living authors in Greece today, focussing mainly on her historical novel Enas Skoufos Apo Porfyra (1995), translated into English by David Connoly as Come Forth, King (2003). I will discuss how a writer’s entry in the literary canon in Modern Greece is connected to her or his engagement with history and is attested by approval from established agencies in the academe and through translation. I will then discuss Douka’s canonical status and its particularities, especially how she engages with history in her own terms via a highly subjective and gendered approach, bringing women and historically marginalised characters to the fore of the narrative and to interpretation of history.

This book chapter addresses the experience of black female creatives as depicted in plays by Caribbean women writer; Maryse Condé’s 'Pension les alizés' (1988), and Gerty Dambury’s 'Trames' (2008) and her 'Des doutes et des errances' (2014). The plays here analyzed depict female characters as artists, writers, or even performers, who attempt to reconcile everyday life, relationships and their creative work. Condé and Dambury stage the obstacles relating to race and gender discrimination their characters face, but also how these women transcend stereotypes and strive for a new form of creative expression. Looking at plays written between the 1980s and the mid-2010s – a period which witnessed intense fluctuations of the concepts of race, gender, and identity in the arts and society – allows us to appraise the development of these concerns from the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century.