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Drawing on a Bourdieuian theoretical framework, this article examines how the urban/rural divide informs the embodiment of customer service work at retail counters in shopping malls in India. Based on an analysis of extensive interviews as well as on‐site observations during 4 years of fieldwork, I document the cross‐class interactions between urban middle‐class customers and rural migrant lower‐class retail workers. I found that rural migrant workers engage in bodywork to embody service work in line with urban cultural “protocols” for customer interactions. Despite their efforts to acquire this valued embodied cultural capital, urban middle‐class customers continuously othered rural migrant workers. The study extends the service work literature on embodiment by pointing to the urban/rural divide in contexts of sustained rural/urban migration, such as India, and more broadly, the Global South. Second, it shows the symbolic violence in customer–worker dynamics reproducing class domination along the urban/rural divide.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the under-researched dynamics of gender, workplace support, and perceived job demands in two different contexts, the United States and India.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws from two studies conducted in different contexts (the United States and India) via different methodological approaches (quantitative and qualitative, respectively). In Study I of this paper, data was collected using questionnaires from a nationally representative sample of adult workers in the United States. In Study II, interviews were conducted with 48 workers in India, selected using convenience sampling.FindingsIt was found that both in the United States and India, women perceived considerably greater job demands than men. In terms of workplace support, both the studies found that workplace culture and supervisors’ support influenced the perception of job demands, but the same was not true for coworkers’ support, which mainly helped in coping rather than actually reducing the perception of job demands.Research implicationsThe article contributes to research by concluding that job demands as a construct are not clearly segregated from gender demands or expectations, especially in the way women “perceive” it. Women construct job demands as “job-family” demands and workplace support as “job-family” support. Moreover, being a woman in the workplace, women feel the “burden” of gender.Practical implicationsIt would be useful for organizations and policy makers to understand that women remain “conscious” of their gender in the workplace, and for them, the meaning of job demands and workplace support are “job-family” demands and “work-family” support, respectively.Social implicationsThis research intends to contribute toward thinking about gender relations and empowerment of people within organizational and work settings from a new light.Originality/valueThe present study provides an alternative way of thinking about gender, job demands, and workplace support. Its value underlies in the way it raises the voices of women workers.

Women entrepreneurship literature has unveiled the gendered assumptions of entrepreneurship. More recently, critical woman entrepreneurship literature is increasingly focusing on the neoliberal discourses in women entrepreneurship. What remains relatively under‐explored is how women entrepreneurs experience the tensions amidst neoliberal and gendered experiences especially in the context of the Global South. Based on the narratives of middle to upper‐middle‐class women entrepreneurs in India, I find that being middle to upper‐middle‐class, women entrepreneurs shared a sense of attaining a neoliberal agency through entrepreneurship, so much so that they ignored, denied, or naturalized the gendered constraints in entrepreneurship. However, soon their accounts reflected an underlying tension as they admitted facing gendered constraints while previously denying them. I contribute to the literature of women entrepreneurship by theorizing the conflicting narratives of women entrepreneurs using the concept of liminality. In doing so, I extend the concept of liminality as an in‐between position of neoliberal and gendered experiences.

Leadership and knowledge are often paired together. Yet, certain forces that operate on businesses and individuals are often unknowable. In this study, we consider leaders’ perceptions of the consequences of not knowing and how leaders discursively cope with a sense of not knowing. Based on interviews with 33 participants working in multinational companies in India, we find that leaders perceive negative consequences of not knowing and engage in discursive tactics such as posing, delaying, clarifying, admitting, being silent, and stating “I don’t know,” that sustain and are sustained by the Discourse of leadership as knowledge. The findings contribute to the discursive leadership literature by demonstrating tactics leaders use as they attempt to balance the discursive construction of leadership as knowledge and lived experiences of not knowing. We discuss how the Discourse of leadership as knowledge will hamper knowledge extension as it undermines not knowing and privileges knowing over not knowing.