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As part of the women's movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, flight attendants formed an organization to fight discrimination in the industry. That organization was called Stewardesses for Women's Rights (SFWR). Formed in 1972, SFWR attracted a lot of high profile feminist attention and served as a powerful challenge to sexist attitudes and practices in the commercial aviation industry in the USA. Avowedly feminist in organization and orientation, SFWR nonetheless folded in 1976 under the weight of bitter infighting and a lack of funding. Drawing on archival material, this paper sets out to analyze the rise and fall of SFWR and the lessons for feminist organizing. Using critical hermeneutics (Prasad and Mir 2002) to interrogate the material, we conclude with suggestions for alternative forms of organizing based on Acker's (1995) distinction between organization and organizing and on Ferguson's (1984) call for change strategies based on feminist discourse.

PurposeIllustrates how the NHS workforce‐review team looks at the area of medical workforce planning and some of the problems that planners face.Design/methodology/approachDescribes a structure for workforce planning and examines some of the challenges workforce planners and those working in the human‐resources field face.FindingsArgues that workforce planning is more than simply number crunching; it requires the application of both art and science skills.Practical applicationsDemonstrates how the workforce is calculated in terms of the need, demand and supply for the future.Social implicationsHighlights the important advantages, for individual organizations as well as for society as a whole, which can result from successful workforce planning.Originality/valueFills a gap in the literature about whether workforce planning is an art or science.

Purpose -Joan Acker proposed her gendered theory of organization as a framework to analyze organizations and to understand how gender underlies organizational structure in such a way as to subordinate women. Much of the previous work that has utilized this framework has examined highly (male-) gendered organizations. This archival case study aims to use Acker's framework to examine a purportedly female-gendered organization -the 1970s feminist organization, Stewardesses for Women's Rights (SFWR). Design/methodology/approach -Using these archived materials, this paper uses a critical hermeneutic approach across Acker's framework of gendered organization to make sense of the rise and fall of SFWR. The paper discusses lessons learned from this short-lived organization. Findings -The paper finds that societal pressure and organizing women's understanding of what is "real" and valued in an organization pushed them to create an organization that was as highly (male) gendered as the organizations from which they were escaping. Many in the organization never saw SFWR as a "real" organization because of the underlying organizational logic that was directing what the organization should be. Even if the organization did, on the surface, look different than other explicitly male-gendered organizations, the same underlying organizational logic manifested itself in similar organizational structure. Originality/value -This archival case study uses Acker's framework to examine a purportedly female-gendered organization -the 1970s feminist organization SFWR and reveals lessons learned.