And then I undress the work (Turunen et al. 2025) | FT50 HR

English Podcast Start at 00:00:00Bengali Podcast Start at 00:16:51Hindi Podcast Start at 00:24:23Welcome to Revise and Resubmit 🎧✨ — your weekly dive into ideas that refuse to sit still.Today, we’re opening a door, then a wardrobe, then a makeup drawer, then—yes—the body itself. We’re stepping into a study that doesn’t just look at professionalism; it touches it, wears it, feels it. It’s titled: ‘And then I undress the work’: Materiality and embodied identity work among professional mothers. Written by Taija Turunen, Saija Katila, Astrid Huopalainen, Seonyoung Hwang, and Marjo-Riitta Diehl, and published OnlineFirst on 11 Aug 2025 in Human Relations—an FT50 journal, one of the most prestigious homes for organizational scholarship. 🏛️📚This is a story of suits and seams, pumps and posture, lipstick and lingering aches. It’s about borders drawn with blazers, and blurred by baby wipes. It’s about how material things—aching flesh, affective makeup, the everyday objects we carry—don’t just decorate identity; they negotiate it. Push it. Pull it. Argue with it. And sometimes, set it free. 💄👜🧥Across 31 interviews with professional mothers in Finland, we see three currents, three rhythms:The stride of performing professionalism—fabric that signals competence, polish that says “I’m here.”The guardrail of bordering—keeping the “messiness” of motherhood at bay to fit the office frame.The tug of reclaiming the pre-pregnancy body—an intimate choreography with time, shape, and self.And then, the turn: subtle micro-resistances. A softer shoe that still stands tall. A blouse that breathes. A schedule that refuses to pretend bodies are clocks. These moves don’t shout; they hum. But they hum in tune with a bigger question: What if our organizations stopped pretending to be fleshless? 🌬️🫀Because here, materiality isn’t just matter. It’s meaning. It’s agency. It’s the body as author and archive. And when the body writes, who edits?Stick with us as we ask: When professionalism is tailored to disembodied ideals, what happens when the fabric finally fits the flesh instead of the other way around? 🤔Big thanks to the authors—Taija Turunen, Saija Katila, Astrid Huopalainen, Seonyoung Hwang, and Marjo-Riitta Diehl—and to SAGE Publications for this powerful piece in Human Relations (FT50). 🙏If you’re nodding, curious, or just love research that breathes, subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, follow our YouTube channel Weekend Researcher, and find us on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcast. 🔔🎙️📱ReferenceTurunen, T., Katila, S., Huopalainen, A., Hwang, S., & Diehl, M.-R. (2025). ‘And then I undress the work’: Materiality and embodied identity work among professional mothers. Human Relations, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267251359190Taija Tuulia Turunen, Saija Katila, Astrid Huopalainen, and Seonyoung Hwang, 2024: “And Then I Undress the Work”: Materiality and the Embodied Identity Work Among Working Mothers. Proceedings, 2024, https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2024.17464abstract‌‌Youtube Channel⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠Support us on Patreonhttps://patreon.com/weekendresearcher