Masculinities and Management

Conceptual Overview

As noted by David Collinson and Jeff Hearn, until the early 1990s, much of the writing on management, both critical and mainstream, failed to engage with the gendered reality of organizations, notably the fact that the overwhelming majority of managers were men. Most organizations were owned, controlled, and managed by men. They always had been; it seemed they always would be. A silence and invisibility surrounded this omnipresence of men in management.

One of the first critiques of men and management came from Rosabeth Moss Kanter in 1977. Her study exposed and challenged the gendered assumptions behind scientific management. She argued that the promotion of the new rational manager as the organizational ideal was gendered in that it assumed only (white, middle class) men to have the necessary qualities of rationality and efficiency, linked to an ability to manage their emotions. Women, by contrast, were seen as passive, too emotional, and lacking the necessary hardheadedness of the successful manager. As further stated by Collinson and Hearn, Kanter touched on a key dimension of management; its masculinist preoccupation with control, predictability, and order. The masculine ethic that permeates management both validates men's sense of male identity and provides them with an important economic and social power base. This is achieved through a combination of factors; first by promoting a work culture and environment wherein men are required to exercise control over self and others; second, by encouraging homosocial reproduction and thus female exclusion; and third, by validating behaviors and responses traditionally understood to be male qualities: leadership, problem solving, rationality, and an unwavering commitment to organizational goals.

Since the early 1990s, increasing attention has been given to the characteristics of management and its relationship to masculinity by critical gender theorists. Deborah Kerfoot and David Knights revealed the discourses of masculinism operating within the financial services sector, promoting paternalism and competitiveness and reinforced by managerialist practices that privileged men managers. Collinson and Hearn identified at least five dominant masculine discourses operating within organizations, each of which interrelated with different management styles: authoritarianism, paternalism, entrepreneurialism, informalism, and careerism. These different discourses can be taken up by the same man manager at varying moments in an organization's history, the purpose being to maintain that manager's power and position. Similarly, it can be argued that one of the most potent indicators of managerial potential and competence, the MBA, can itself be a powerful dynamic in the reinforcement of masculinities with management.

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