Research Projects
My interest in research began shortly after I completed my undergraduate degree. My professional experience in a multinational organization caused me to wonder why few upper-level management positions are held by women. Moving forward, I became fascinated by the complexity of organizations as social systems and the subsequent impact on gender relations. I began to question how gender relations change across organizations and nations. Today, I am strongly motivated to study organizations from cultural, historical, and political perspectives, and to foster the method of intersectionality to study inequalities of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. I aim to advance our critical knowledge in the field of management and organizational studies by exploring how organizations reproduce multiple inequalities. Using this knowledge I want to create new ways to think, design and structure today’s organization.
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Current Scholarly Work
Currently, I am a research assistant for two projects:
1) Canadian Domestic Homicide Prevention Initiative - Saint Mary’s University, Sociology & Criminology Department, Canada
2) Intersectionality at Work: Time, Location, and Socio-political Context—Case Studies of four International Airlines - Saint Mary’s University, Management Department, Canada
PhD Thesis
My dissertation, Representation of Latin America in Pan American Airways: Decolonial Feminism on a Multinational, researched PAA material to study intersectionality in the representation of Latin Americans over a four-decades context, between 1920 and 1960. My stated goals were exploring the role of multinationals framed in decolonial feminist theories and applying intersectionality as a feminist strategy to address the representations of race, gender, and nationality. I combined narrative analysis and intersectionality as a method to analyze PAA's archives.
My thesis contributes to three contemporary discussions unfolding in the management and organizational studies field:
1.Theoretical development of decolonial feminism: in an attempt to tease out the explicit connection between the use of grand narratives (dominant discourses), antenarratives (fragmented stories) (Boje, 2008, 2010), and intersectionality, these methods expand while connecting different levels of analysis (individual-organization-society) through the power of the narrative in the construction of cultural hierarchies or differences among women.
2.Application of intersectionality over time: the application of an intersectionality framework has challenged the complexity embedded in the process of social labeling itself. This dissertation contributes to the use of intersectionality as a method to analyze the construction of race, gender, and sexuality informed by a decolonial-feminist lens. My study demonstrates that women-ofcolour literature (Anzaldúa, 2007; Matsuda, 1991; Sandoval, 1990) provides an alternate guiding tool to understand the process of image making among Western representations.
3.Study of gender in postcolonial organizational studies: this dissertation responds to the feminist call for more studies focusing on gender and non-Western women in management and organization studies (Calás, Smircich, & Holvino, 2014). This thesis sees the representation of gender at the intersection with other social identities such as race, sexuality, and nationality. By so doing, I demonstrate two things: first, gender cannot be studied isolated from other social identities, and, two, postcoloniality has never been gender-neutral (Acker, 2004).
I am working to transform my dissertation into several journal articles related to the role of a multinational in creating postcolonial advertisement of the Latin American culture during the early 20th century.
Past Research
I have conducted extensive research on the problematization of gender and diversity policies in organizations, using discursive and narrative analysis, storytelling, and dramaturgy as theoretical frameworks. For example, I applied the theater metaphor to study IBM Argentina (Paludi, 2009), to move beyond the glass ceiling phenomenon that explains the low representation of women in senior management roles. Following a critical sensemaking approach, I have studied how female executives in multinationals located in Argentina make sense of their role as top managers, Argentines, and mothers (Paludi & Helms Mills, 2013). I also identified how global equality programmes designed from a North American perspective do not make sense in local settings like Argentina or other Latin American countries, where individual’s culturally situated sense of gender differs from North America (Paludi & Helms Mills, 2015). My interest in the operationalization of intersectionality is reflected in a co-authored chapter for Oxford University Press where we conducted a literature review focused on the assumptions, methods and ways of applying intersectionality in organizations (Mercer, Paludi, Helms Mills, & Mills, 2015).
I have participated in international and national projects, in part due to my skills as a qualitative researcher. An early project, Innovation Capability Building, Learning and Institutional Frameworks in LAC's Natural Resource Processing Industries: Experiences from Argentina, Brazil and Chile was sponsored by IDRC Canada. The second project, How to make a satellite out of a nuclear reactor. Research-technology management at Invap, was sponsored by Universidad National de General Sarmiento, Argentina. My involvement in these projects has given me experience in planning, designing research strategies, and developing multidisciplinary applied research methodologies in the fields of technology, innovation and social studies of science. I have presented my research results at national and international conferences, and I have submitted some of these papers to refereed journals.
I strongly believe in the recursive relationship between research, practice and teaching and this is evidenced in my experience combining teaching, research, and practice within my research interests. My involvement as a consultant in the Firm Certification Training of Gender Equality Project, sponsored by World Bank and the Argentine National Institute Against Discrimination (INADI), granted me teaching experience in gender and human rights, work-life balance, and communication; the creation of research knowledge regarding global policies in local contexts (Paludi & Helms Mills, 2015); and the experience of organizing a panel with members of the community, local business, and academic scholars such as, Gender and Management: The MEGA programme in Portsaid and Desiderata.
Other academic activities include collaborative organization of international and national conferences, such as the International Doctoral Consortium Canada, 2016, 2015; Atlantic School of Business Conference Canada, 2015, 2014.
Currently, I am a research assistant for two projects:
1) Canadian Domestic Homicide Prevention Initiative - Saint Mary’s University, Sociology & Criminology Department, Canada
2) Intersectionality at Work: Time, Location, and Socio-political Context—Case Studies of four International Airlines - Saint Mary’s University, Management Department, Canada
PhD Thesis
My dissertation, Representation of Latin America in Pan American Airways: Decolonial Feminism on a Multinational, researched PAA material to study intersectionality in the representation of Latin Americans over a four-decades context, between 1920 and 1960. My stated goals were exploring the role of multinationals framed in decolonial feminist theories and applying intersectionality as a feminist strategy to address the representations of race, gender, and nationality. I combined narrative analysis and intersectionality as a method to analyze PAA's archives.
My thesis contributes to three contemporary discussions unfolding in the management and organizational studies field:
1.Theoretical development of decolonial feminism: in an attempt to tease out the explicit connection between the use of grand narratives (dominant discourses), antenarratives (fragmented stories) (Boje, 2008, 2010), and intersectionality, these methods expand while connecting different levels of analysis (individual-organization-society) through the power of the narrative in the construction of cultural hierarchies or differences among women.
2.Application of intersectionality over time: the application of an intersectionality framework has challenged the complexity embedded in the process of social labeling itself. This dissertation contributes to the use of intersectionality as a method to analyze the construction of race, gender, and sexuality informed by a decolonial-feminist lens. My study demonstrates that women-ofcolour literature (Anzaldúa, 2007; Matsuda, 1991; Sandoval, 1990) provides an alternate guiding tool to understand the process of image making among Western representations.
3.Study of gender in postcolonial organizational studies: this dissertation responds to the feminist call for more studies focusing on gender and non-Western women in management and organization studies (Calás, Smircich, & Holvino, 2014). This thesis sees the representation of gender at the intersection with other social identities such as race, sexuality, and nationality. By so doing, I demonstrate two things: first, gender cannot be studied isolated from other social identities, and, two, postcoloniality has never been gender-neutral (Acker, 2004).
I am working to transform my dissertation into several journal articles related to the role of a multinational in creating postcolonial advertisement of the Latin American culture during the early 20th century.
Past Research
I have conducted extensive research on the problematization of gender and diversity policies in organizations, using discursive and narrative analysis, storytelling, and dramaturgy as theoretical frameworks. For example, I applied the theater metaphor to study IBM Argentina (Paludi, 2009), to move beyond the glass ceiling phenomenon that explains the low representation of women in senior management roles. Following a critical sensemaking approach, I have studied how female executives in multinationals located in Argentina make sense of their role as top managers, Argentines, and mothers (Paludi & Helms Mills, 2013). I also identified how global equality programmes designed from a North American perspective do not make sense in local settings like Argentina or other Latin American countries, where individual’s culturally situated sense of gender differs from North America (Paludi & Helms Mills, 2015). My interest in the operationalization of intersectionality is reflected in a co-authored chapter for Oxford University Press where we conducted a literature review focused on the assumptions, methods and ways of applying intersectionality in organizations (Mercer, Paludi, Helms Mills, & Mills, 2015).
I have participated in international and national projects, in part due to my skills as a qualitative researcher. An early project, Innovation Capability Building, Learning and Institutional Frameworks in LAC's Natural Resource Processing Industries: Experiences from Argentina, Brazil and Chile was sponsored by IDRC Canada. The second project, How to make a satellite out of a nuclear reactor. Research-technology management at Invap, was sponsored by Universidad National de General Sarmiento, Argentina. My involvement in these projects has given me experience in planning, designing research strategies, and developing multidisciplinary applied research methodologies in the fields of technology, innovation and social studies of science. I have presented my research results at national and international conferences, and I have submitted some of these papers to refereed journals.
I strongly believe in the recursive relationship between research, practice and teaching and this is evidenced in my experience combining teaching, research, and practice within my research interests. My involvement as a consultant in the Firm Certification Training of Gender Equality Project, sponsored by World Bank and the Argentine National Institute Against Discrimination (INADI), granted me teaching experience in gender and human rights, work-life balance, and communication; the creation of research knowledge regarding global policies in local contexts (Paludi & Helms Mills, 2015); and the experience of organizing a panel with members of the community, local business, and academic scholars such as, Gender and Management: The MEGA programme in Portsaid and Desiderata.
Other academic activities include collaborative organization of international and national conferences, such as the International Doctoral Consortium Canada, 2016, 2015; Atlantic School of Business Conference Canada, 2015, 2014.