ABSTRACT
Conventional business and feminist business perspectives have very different approaches to three central questions: What should be the goals of business and work? How should collective control and coordination be achieved? What values will lead to a business’s success? In conventional business thinking, the mechanisms for coordinating different interests and offering shared direction emphasize dominance and obedience, power and submission. In constrast to conventional business’s reliance on domination to generate power and authority, feminist business thinking emphasizes developing “power-with” other people, groups, and actors, through mutual recognition and for mutual gain. Most feminist organizations have hybrid structures that combine conventional and innovative structures to balance their feminist principles with the demands of the market. Conventional leadership models rely on power-over, while feminist leadership practices rely on positive expressions of power-with, power-to, and power-within. Feminist leadership models can be difficult to enact in conventional organizations and even in transitional, “enlightened” ones.
