Work-Related Intimate Partner Violence (WIPV): A Systematic Review and Feminist Conceptual Analysis

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a long-standing and egregious social issue that inherently impacts and is impacted by work and workplaces. Work-related intimate partner violence (WIPV) is a pattern of IPV that both directly and indirectly undermines victim-survivors' employment, work, and careers, yet scant attention has been paid in management studies to workplace responses and responsibilities regarding this form of violence. Hence, we conduct a systematic review and conceptual analysis of 111 WIPV-focused papers utilizing three well-established feminist lenses to ascertain and conceptualize what we know and do not know about the WIPV domain and, more importantly, to outline an agenda for what we should know from a gendered perspective about WIPV. We develop a gender-sensitive, multilevel framework with which we investigate and challenge the WIPV research agenda from individual, interactionist, and structural viewpoints, including the interaction between these perspectives. A key purpose of this paper is to extend debate about WIPV beyond the current focus of human resource management (HRM) research and practice on micro-level employment issues to include meso-level organizational and macro-level societal issues. A second and connected purpose is to draw attention to the need to address big societal challenges related to workplaces and to highlight the pivotal role of HRM in fostering ethical and socially sustainable workplaces. Thus, we advance the vital debate about WIPV, provide a template for how gender can be conceptualized in HRM and workplace research, and challenge the boundaries for organizational involvement in areas traditionally deemed as private or societal.