The effects of solo status on women’s and men’s success: The moderating role of the performance context

A considerable body of research has shown that being the only representative of one’s gender group (solo status) when performing an activity affects women more than men. The aim of our two experiments was to show that the performance context can moderate the effects of numerical status (majority vs. solo) on performance and that men can also be disadvantaged by solo status. Our proposal is that a groupwork context which makes the “leader” stereotype more salient will be more beneficial to men while an intergender comparison context in a typically feminine thematic field will tend to favor women. To test this hypothesis, the numerical status of the women and men was manipulated while they were performing a task presented as a human and social sciences test in either a groupwork or intergender comparison context. As expected, the solo women were less successful in the groupwork context than in the intergender comparison context (Experiment 1) whereas the solo men were less successful in the intergender comparison context than in the groupwork context (Experiment 2). The role of the performance context and the gender stereotypes that it foregrounds seems to be a key factor in the effects of solo status on performance.     

Articulation and codification of collective know-how in the steel industry: evidence from blast furnace control in France

In this article, we use the implementation of an expert system to improve blast furnace control in the French steel industry to illustrate the problem of knowledge articulation/codification. Blast furnace related knowledge still largely takes the form of empirical know-how in general and expert know-how tied to specific individuals in particular. Therefore, the articulation/codification of knowledge in this field is a difficult task requiring the identification and selection of ‘best practices’ for the purpose of codification. This process, in turn, affects daily routines and creates new forms of generic knowledge that make use of local knowledge. These new forms of generic information reinforce the tendency to appropriate private knowledge currently prevailing in Usinor, a large French steel company, and create new routes and new insights for R&D policy.