DISRUPTING MASCULINITIES

Career Interruptions: A Reconceptualization From a Chinese Taoism Perspective

This paper is a first attempt to draw attention to the misconception and stigma of career interruptions and provide a new conceptualization of this widely existing career phenomenon. The unique contribution of introducing Taoism into conceptualizing career interruptions is to help bring the ontological aspects of career interruptions into a sharper focus. The present study borrows the conceptions such as Wu, Wu-Wei, and the cyclic motion of time from Chinese Taoism to reveal the attributes of career interruptions and introduce the appreciator stance into the career interruption literature. The article is structured as follows. First, an overview of the literature is provided. Second, the present study argues that a reconceptualization is needed to deal with the misconception and stigma associated with career interruptions. Third, borrowing from the wisdom of traditional Chinese Taoism, four propositions are developed to help reconceptualize career interruptions. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Professional ethics and social responsibility: military work and peacebuilding

This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature through the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment.

Women's career interruptions: an integrative review

Purpose

The purpose of this integrative literature review was three-fold: to explore the phenomenon of women’s career interruptions as revealed by publications in the past two decades, to propose a new career decision tree model (CDTM) and to outline an agenda for future research.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors adopted the integrative literature review approach proposed by Torraco (2005, 2016) and used a mind mapping application called MindMeister to synthesize 64 identified articles.

Findings

The proposed CDTM can assist those who are interested in exploring individuals’ career decisions to think systematically about career influencers at different levels.

Originality/value

The CDTM is significantly different from existing career models and theories in that it explains women’s career interruptions in a context-sensitive manner. This model can assist human resource development professionals in analyzing the influencers of women’s career decisions and tackling individual problems level by level.

Minding the gaps: Examining skill shortages in Australian rural non-agricultural workplaces

This article examines skills shortage in rural Australian mining and food and beverage processing industries by analyzing the concept of skill and differentiating between gaps in skills and skill shortages. Drawing on Acker's sociological concept of inequality regimes, we analyze workforce profiles informed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics data, and qualitative interview data with human resource personnel. Emphasis is given to gender and Indigeneity, and the recruitment and retention practices by place and organization. We argue that the term ‘skill shortage’ is contentious as current workforce profiles are narrow and thereby exclude segments of the rural labor market. We also argue that underlying assumptions about gender and race in organizations need to be addressed for rural-based organizations to more fully utilize the available workforce.

Minding the gaps: Examining skill shortages in Australian rural non-agricultural workplaces

This article examines skills shortage in rural Australian mining and food and beverage processing industries by analyzing the concept of skill and differentiating between gaps in skills and skill shortages. Drawing on Acker's sociological concept of inequality regimes, we analyze workforce profiles informed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics data, and qualitative interview data with human resource personnel. Emphasis is given to gender and Indigeneity, and the recruitment and retention practices by place and organization. We argue that the term ‘skill shortage’ is contentious as current workforce profiles are narrow and thereby exclude segments of the rural labor market. We also argue that underlying assumptions about gender and race in organizations need to be addressed for rural-based organizations to more fully utilize the available workforce.