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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

  Class Matters: The Role of Social Class and Organizational Sector in High-Achieving Women's Legitimacy Narratives

  Judith A. Clair, Kathleen L. McGinn, Beth K. Humberd, Rachel D. Arnett and Katherine Chen

  While prior research recognizes that women struggle to maintain legitimacy for their successes and that self-narratives play a key role in building such legitimacy, theory provides limited insight into how women build legitimacy through their self-narratives. Our findings from an inductive, qualitative study of 40 women who rose to elite levels in corporations or entrepreneurial ventures during the latter half of the 20th century, despite considerable underrepresentation by women in similar roles, shed new light on how women narrate their own legitimacy. We build a theoretical framework showing how women legitimate their successes in the face of gender-based challenges, identifying six discursive legitimation strategies women use to explain and justify success against the odds. We also explore why women differ in the constellations of strategies they present in their self-narratives. While women universally pull upon multiple discursive legitimation strategies to explain their successes, we find that women’s social class origins and the organizational sector in which women ascended, either corporate or entrepreneurial, relate to the discursive strategies women employ in their legitimacy narratives.

  Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Gender; Success; Diversity; Perception; Situation or Environment;

  Citation:

  Clair, Judith A., Kathleen L. McGinn, Beth K. Humberd, Rachel D. Arnett, and Katherine Chen. "Class Matters: The Role of Social Class and Organizational Sector in High-Achieving Women's Legitimacy Narratives." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-014, August 2018. (Revised August 2018 for requested resubmission.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2016

  Cataumet Boats, Inc.

  W. Earl Sasser and Mark Davis

  Jaime Giancola, an MBA student, has recently completed an operations management course in which aggregate production planning (APP) was one of the topics. She believes that her family's business, Cataumet Boats, which her grandparents started and which her mother and uncle now own, might benefit from applying APP concepts to identify the different ways they might schedule workers, which could be especially valuable during the peak demand seasons of fall and spring. The goal of using APP is to reduce labor costs without sacrificing the high level of customer service that Cataumet Boats is known for providing.

  Keywords: Business or Company Management; Family Business; Production; Cost Management; Transportation; Customer Satisfaction;

  Citation:

  Sasser, W. Earl, and Mark Davis. "Cataumet Boats, Inc." Harvard Business School Brief Case 917-509, July 2016.  View Details

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• Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | July 2016

  Cataumet Boats, Inc. (Brief Case)

  W. Earl Sasser and Mark Davis

  Citation:

  Sasser, W. Earl, and Mark Davis. "Cataumet Boats, Inc. (Brief Case)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 917-510, July 2016.  View Details

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