Online retailing challenges the traditional male coding of warehousing. Based upon an ethnographic study at two Swedish online retail warehouses, this article seeks to understand why certain warehouses are numerically dominated by women. Employees express that men are less focused and more careless and easily bored than women, and hence not desirable for the goods-handling work. The warehouses extend to hard-working women driven by the shame of doing wrong, which reflect their orientation of bodies in the direction of enhancing production and profit. Workers attribute the positive social atmosphere at the warehouses to the numerical dominance of women and the small size of the workplaces. At the one hand, the constructed sameness of (women) workers through hard work and jargon contribute to a collective identity that strengthens them. At the other hand, the binary gendering of work and workers also contribute to making the ware houses into ‘straight spaces’ (Ahmed, 2006).

Nursing homes for older people are an integral part in most postindustrial  welfare  states.  The  strong  formalization  and  regulation of the Swedish care sector have contributed to a comparatively large share of frontline workers being native-born  Swedish  women  with  a  shorter  educational  back-ground. Yet, an aging population in interplay with increased difficulties  to  recruit  sufficient  numbers  of  native-born  care  workers  has  led  to  Sweden  following  an  internation-ally  observed  trend  with  an  increased  reliance  on  not  only  migrant  women  but  also  migrant  men  as  care  workers  in  residential  care  facilities.  However,  little  is  known  about  migrant men's experiences of care work and the challenges and obstacles they might face because of their gender and skin color, not least when it comes to experiences of being exposed  to  gendered  racism  from  the  residents.  The  study  builds on interviews with 21 managers employed at Swed-ish  elder  care  facilities  in  the  Stockholm  area.  The  results  suggest that both Black women and men to a greater extent than  other  ethnic  minority  workers  risk  being  exposed  to  racism. At the same time, the results suggest that Black men, due  to  their  gender  and  skin  color,  constitute  the  group  of  staff that most of all risks encountering racism in the every-day life of caregiving. Taken together, this points to the need of highlighting how stereotypes of gender and race as well as gendered racism are given and gain meaning in elder care. This  points  to  the  importance  of  not  considering  “migrant  care workers” an undifferentiated category of workers when working  on  creating  nondiscriminatory  and  inclusive  work-ing conditions for all visibly racialized care workers.

This article analyses how formalization of promotion criteria and procedures influences clarity and transparency of academic assessment. Based on a longitudinal, structural micro-study of a new tenure track system in a Swedish higher education institution, we find that inequality was reproduced through the choice of explicitly gendered metrics across all areas of assessment (research, teaching and service). We further demonstrate how the formalization of a 'good enough' standard, in addition to a standard of 'excellence', reinforced the scope for interpretational flexibility among assessors. This combination of explicitly gendered metrics and dual standards of performance gave gatekeepers broader discretion in hiding or communicating failure, with gendering effects. Finally, we conclude that the choices made about how to formalize assessment work placed a small group of senior academics firmly behind closed doors, thus ensuring that gatekeepers' discretion and power were entrenched rather than restricted by formalization.

This article seeks to critically investigate the assembling, production and organization of female and male sexuality in contemporary Swedish sex education. The empirical focus is on booklets and leaflets published by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (the RFSU). Employing the concept of assemblages articulated by Deleuze and Guattari and rearticulated in social, organizational and feminist theorizing, the article examines how the RFSU material assembles, produces and organizes the sexual spaces of female and male embodiment (bodily zones, passages, surfaces, interiors, extensions, orifices and cavities) by promoting particular sexual practices. While the RFSU assemblages may seem to express a celebratory attitude towards sexual diversity, freedom and enjoyment, the article argues that the extent to which they undo a dichotomous and stereotypical organization of sexuality and gender is limited. Finally, the article discusses what implications this may have for organization theory.

In this article we present a comparative study of media texts in Sweden and Finland, two societies traditionally viewed as Nordic welfare states. Focusing on the controversial question of introducing gender-based quotas on the boards of companies, we analyse how representations of gender and management are affected in Sweden and Finland by contemporary market discourse. We argue that market discourse takes different forms in the two societal contexts and that the space for questioning and criticizing it from a gender equality perspective remains different. Our analysis thus complements recent contributions stressing that both societal particularities and transnational processes must be considered in studies of gender and management (Calas and Smircich, 2006).

In this article we explore ways in which vertical gender inequality is accomplished in discourse in the context of a recent chain of cross-border mergers and acquisitions that resulted in the formation of a multinational Nordic company. We analyse social interactions of 'doing' gender in interviews with male senior executives from Denmark, Finland and Sweden. We argue that their explanations for the absence of women in the top echelons of the company serve to distance vertical gender inequality. The main contribution of the article is an analysis of how national identities are discursively (re)constructed in such distancing. New insights are offered to studying gender in multinationals with a cross-cultural team of researchers. Our study sheds light on how gender intersects with nationality in shaping the multinational organization and the identities of male executives in globalizing business.

Sweden is known to be one of the most gender-equal societies in the world. Thus, it remains as an enigma why a large discrepancy continues to exist regarding the gender balance in career choice and progression in many professions. Drawing on Hirdman's (1988) theory of gendered systems, in this paper, we explore the role of career resilience in the career progression of women who choose to work in the male-dominated IT sector. We draw attention to how the day-to-day process of practicing career resilience in a gendered workplace tends to evolve as women progress in their careers. Based on an interview study with 50 female IT professionals as well as a discourse analysis of 502 newspaper articles on women in this sector, we develop a process model of career resilience in gendered professions, outlining different coping strategies that allow women to develop and enhance such resilience over time. We conclude the paper by providing some practical recommendations. 

This paper critically examines the hospitable body and how it is put to work, how certain bodies are selected and become associated with certain occupations and spaces of work, and how the hospitable body is produced, transformed, and commodified in accordance with prevailing modes of production. Drawing on examples primarily obtained from the Nordic countries, I review current research on hospitality workers, while also manifesting how employers portray and, at times, exploit the hospitable body. This is followed by a presentation of a research agenda for the continued study of the hospitable body at work, addressing the need for in-depth, context-sensitive studies on worker strategies to counteract harassment. I conclude by suggesting that the working body can be theorized as concurrently being relational and “in the making,” and as a bounded territory in need of protection against the hazards of flexible work regimes, stress, harassment, and precariousness.