Today most organizations define job responsibilities less clearly than they did in the past. Additionally, increasing emphasis on personal initiative, empowerment, and self-management places a higher burden on workers to control their own activities. As such, decisions about whether to perform discretionary helping tasks, such as requested favors, is an important issue that faces all working professionals as they try to balance the many divergent demands on their time. This dissertation focuses on how individuals make decisions regarding whether to agree to favor requests, defined as “discretionary, prosocial behavior that is performed in response to a specific, explicit request from one person to another,” in the workplace. I show favors—because they are externally requested—are phenomenologically distinct from in-role behaviors and voluntary helping behaviors. I examine favor requests from the perspective of the performer to identify the motivations that influence responses to favor requests. I consider how favor decision-making—both the factors that people consider as well as the decision outcome— changes across individuals and situations. The dissertation contains three papers that contribute to this goal. Paper 1 defines favors and favor requests, distinguishes them from other workplace helping behaviors, and proposes a framework of the motivational processes of favor request decisions. Paper 2 provides an empirical test of the motivational framework proposed in Paper 1. Paper 3 examines the relationship among helping context, comparing favors versus volunteerism, gender, and guilt proneness. Overall, this stream of research is intended to develop an understanding of how people behave when confronted with favor requests.

With this thesis I wanted to find out how a teacher-team in Stockholm reason about and whether they have specific expectations of male teachers in the early school years. Interviews with five teachers from pre-school to grade 3 and in after-school have shown that specific expectations of male teachers is something obvious. Are male teachers expected to enter into the role of male role models to contribute with masculinity and a male perspective? However, the informants are not able to define how a male role model is or should act. Men and women are often defined as two separate, and often as opposite, groups. According to Lpo´94 the school has to counteract traditional gender patterns, making specific expectations of male teachers problematic, when these rather helps to underpin these patterns.  The conclusion is, based on the perception of gender as a socially constructed phenomenon, that schools and teachers contribute to gender-building by setting, and constantly repeating and practicing the standards for what is considered male and female. As long as this continues, the school will remain an arena where these gender patterns are reinforced rather then counteracted.

This thesis analyses discourses about the roles and barriers to access for women to decision-making positions in Israeli sport organisations. In particular it focuses on the exploration of discourses of masculinity and femininity that underpin the relatively recent construction of Israel society and the institutions of sport within it. It is observed that for the most part, Israeli sport organisations are governed by men and have served the interests of forms of hegemonic masculinity. In order to understand and explore the social construction of these gendered discourses in Israeli sport, two innovative and significant policy initiatives toward gender equity in sport were explored through the perceptions and discourses of key actors. These include the establishment of a Volleyball Academy for Young Talented Girls (VAYTG) and the creation of the National Project for Women and Sport (NPWS). The theoretical framework for this thesis is informed by poststructuralist feminism, which provided an alternative way to understand and analyse voices of the (predominantly female) 'other' and thus to explore the historical contextual construction of current discourses of masculinity within Israeli sport organisations and society as a whole. The process of narrative revisions and production of gendered knowledge revealed how discourses produce and reinforce gender inequities in Israeli society, such as the discourse of militarisation or the unique political affiliation system in the sporting arena which continue to implicitly exclude women (and some men) from gaining access to leadership positions in sport organisations. Within this theoretical frame, Critical Discourse Analysis was employed as a methodological approach to analyse how female and male interviewees, all considered to be 'insiders' within their organisations, explained the process of the construction of gendered roles and barriers. Included in the interview data was also the auto-ethnographical accounts of the author, who was a primary actor in the process of developing policy in the two case study initiatives addressed. Dominant discourses of femininity (such as the discourse of sisterhood and of the processes of mentoring), and of masculinity (and how these promote uniformity) were identified as mechanisms for reproducing the gendered reality of sport leadership in Israel. The implication of a critical theoretical approach is that it should be emancipatory in its ambitions and impact, and the study is intended to contribute to enhancing the understanding of how discourse not only reflects but also creates barriers and opportunities so that the construction of such barriers can be challenged in progressive policy discourses.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2004. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.