Glass ceilings and sticky floors: drawing new ontologies

How did the ‘glass ceiling’ and related characteristics of female labour force experience become recognised as a proper object for social scientific study? Exploring interactions between the contexts of discovery and justification reveals how this phenomenon was recognised and established by combining different forms of expertise and experience that came from both within and without the social scientific fields. The resulting object of study might well be described as embedding a ‘civil or community ontology’, for the intersections of facts and values in these different knowledge communities was equally important in defining the content of that object of research.