Reflection seminar with Professor Karen Ashcraft

Occupational Identity and Difference: Reflections Toward Military Practice

Reflection seminar with Professor Karen Ashcraft

Occupations, like individuals, take on a mix of social identities such as gender and race. The social identity of an occupation has profound effects, for example, on wages and prestige, degree of professionalization, cultures of safety and risk, and ability to recruit and retain diverse members. Sifting the historical evidence, Professor Ashcraft develops a new concept—the “glass slipper”—that explains how durable associations between certain occupations and people arise and how they circulate among us like powerful brands. Despite appearances, this complex process is neither natural nor determined. It is deeply systemic, however, revealing challenges more daunting than most popular diversity advice would suggest. But if the social identities of occupations are strategically constructed, they also can be challenged through creative work practices. Professor Ashcraft invites such reflection in military contexts.

On June 23, 2015 the CBS Public-Private Platform and the Platform's cluster LEAF (Law Enforcement and Armed Forces) will host a public lecture with keynote by Karen Ashcraft. The event is open to all interested. Please sign up by email: publicprivateplatform@cbs.dk

Program

15.00-15.10: Welcome by platform member Sara Louise Muhr
15.10-15.50: Presentation by Karen Ashcraft
15.50-16.10: Practitioner reflections with discussants Major Charlotte Ankerstjerne and Captain, Navy Henrik Ryberg
16:10-16.30: Discussion / Questions
16.30-17.00: Networking and light reception
 

Karen Lee Ashcraft is a professor as well as the director of the Communication & Society Residential Program, a living-learning community for early college students broadly interested in communication, media, journalism and related themes. Her research examines organizational and occupational formations—such as identity, culture and mode of governance—and is guided by an interest in relations of power and difference, particularly gender, race, sexuality and class.

Ashcraft’s past research explored the texture and sustainability of alternative forms of organizing. Specifically, she investigated feminist communities seeking to counter bureaucratic logics and practices, or to merge them with egalitarian forms—a project that resulted in several award-winning works devoted to the potential of hybrid organization. Her recent empirical research traces the historical evolution and contemporary organization of professional identity in the context of commercial aviation, among others. For work in this vein, she recently received the Best Article of the Year Award from the Academy of Management Review. 

Ashcraft has published some 50 articles and chapters on these and related themes in the journals of communication and management as well as work and organization studies. Her book with Dennis Mumby, Reworking Gender: A Feminist Communicology of Organization (2004, Sage), received the Book of the Year Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association.

Read more about Karen here.

Read more about Charlotte Ankersjerne

Read more about Henrik Ryberg