Clothing, image, and presence: women in the corporate workplace

Taken from Introduction: The purpose of this paper is to examine in detail the existing literature addressing the history of Western women in the workplace, the importance of first impressions, gender discrimination and stereotypes in the workplace, and the cognitive and behavioural effects of clothing on both wearers and perceivers. These topics will be analyzed across various fields of study, such as economics, psychology, sociology and gender studies. This review focuses on women as they relate to appearance and professional settings because many of the issues faced by women in professional settings are unique. It would not, therefore, be appropriate to address these issues as they relate to both men and women within the same framework; women’s experiences in regards to these notions deserve special attention. Once these theories are explored and analyzed, they will be expanded upon using ideas of executive presence and how it affects these particular areas of study, as well as how it can be used by women to overcome many of these issues.

Clothing, image, and presence: women in the corporate workplace

Taken from Introduction: The purpose of this paper is to examine in detail the existing literature addressing the history of Western women in the workplace, the importance of first impressions, gender discrimination and stereotypes in the workplace, and the cognitive and behavioural effects of clothing on both wearers and perceivers. These topics will be analyzed across various fields of study, such as economics, psychology, sociology and gender studies. This review focuses on women as they relate to appearance and professional settings because many of the issues faced by women in professional settings are unique. It would not, therefore, be appropriate to address these issues as they relate to both men and women within the same framework; women’s experiences in regards to these notions deserve special attention. Once these theories are explored and analyzed, they will be expanded upon using ideas of executive presence and how it affects these particular areas of study, as well as how it can be used by women to overcome many of these issues.

Islam, Law, and the State

In the ever-growing corpus of anthropological scholarship addressing Islam and Muslim lifeworlds, comparably few studies centre on the intersections of Islam, law, and state power. This chapter begins with an introduction to some classical legal anthropological works that were influential in fields such as Islamic courtroom ethnography, disputing, and legal pluralism and that reflected on positivistic reconfigurations of the sharia caused by (post)colonial forces, most of which were not overly interested in the state as a core object of empirical and analytic enquiry. The chapter then shifts attention to more recent works that have opened up new directions and dealt increasingly with Islam’s intricate and contingent relationships with law, the state, and wider legal politics in specific contextual settings, factoring in overlapping sovereignties such as marketization in the religious and political field. These studies address, for example, the (trans)formation of sharia norms in corporate workplace settings, halal politics and related state-market dynamics, and the societal workings of state attempts to govern and bureaucratize Islam. They derive their strength from long-term ethnographic endeavours that follow social actors into spheres where they render the sharia meaningful, often in ways that would not immediately be associated with law or legal studies as a result of European-rooted secular distinctions. These and other emerging fields offer sociolegal scholars a range of timely and often understudied avenues for future research that could potentially hold significance for broad readerships within and beyond anthropology and sociolegal studies.

Imagined Hillarys: Feminism, Fantasy, and Fictional Clintons in The Good Wife and The Good Fight

In the 2010s, Hillary Clinton emerged as a central character not only in American political life but also in its imagined political scenarios. This article considers the centrality of Clinton as a model for women's legal and political empowerment in CBS drama The Good Wife (2009–16), arguing that the show's generic blend of the television procedural with melodrama and soap is key to both its normative portrayal of women in the corporate workplace and its positioning of Clinton as an aspirational figure for white liberal feminists. A similar tension is also central to Clinton's bid for the presidency in 2016, and this article dissects the ways in which Clinton's anticipated victory has provided a powerful but ultimately misleading “feminist” fantasy for many television shows of the last decade. A final section concludes this article with a brief analysis of The Good Wife's 2017 spin-off The Good Fight, to argue that this show pivots from a fantasy of women's empowerment to a much more interesting dystopic picture, tapping into the surrealism of the present moment to convey the difficulty of women's aspiration under a Trump administration in ways that more directly, if still imperfectly, tackle the failings of liberal feminism to account for racial and economic difference.

‘We don’t need to abide by that!’: Negotiating professional roles in problem-solving talk at work

In this article, we focus on problem solving talk in the business meeting event. We zoom in on the processes of formulating, negotiating and ratifying an issue as a problem, and we argue that individuals negotiate their stances in relation to their perceived/projected professional roles. The processes of problem-solving are, simultaneously, processes of self/other positioning. We take an Interactional Sociolinguistic perspective and draw on audio-recorded meeting talk collected in a multinational corporate workplace. Our analysis shows that interactants draw on issues of accountability, perceived/projected responsibilities and expertise in pursuit of their own interactional agenda in the problem-solving meeting. We close the article with directions for further research.