Is there a feminist ideological undertone when women choose to organise separately, or are their motivations purely instrumental? While this question has been addressed by numerous researchers, most studies are mono-national; most extrapolate meaning from different types of networks/groups, and most do not carry out close examination of network members’ orientations. This article explores varieties of orientations to feminism among members of four networks for business and professional women in the UK and Germany. The findings suggest that even within a (...) single network, members’ feminist orientations can vary, and can be different from the publicly/officially declared organisational position. (shrink)

Ethics is enabling of agency, but also normative and conventional. At the moment a gendered ethics, or the gendering of ethics, is a helpful approach because it is concerned with issues to do with people often peripheral to and excluded from power. At the moment it can work to keep ethics responsive, but how do we halt the drift into the normative, both as prescriptive and as ideological? A feminist ethics maintains the responsive and undermines prescriptive categories, and is committed (...) to involving disempowered voices in the conversation. The article is particularly concerned with the articulation of the situated, and raises questions about attending to, learning how to listen to and learning how to speak, so that many people from different places can get involved in ethics. Otherwise ethics isn’t ethical. (shrink)