Contingent Masculinities: Disruptions to ‘Man’agerialist Identity

Abstract

The management arena may not appear at first sight the most obvious place in which to explore the contingency of identity, for surely management speaks of control and certainty. Indeed, if management cannot speak with certainty, how does it speak? Is certainty not the essence of leadership? To believe in one’s self and, from that, to be able to articulate and publicly communicate an appropriate and convincing organizational vision, is this not the very stuff of the ‘modern manager’? Certainly it would appear so. If you aspire, for example, to educational leadership then having a ‘vision’ is now de rigueur,as a cursory scan of the job advertisements in the educational journals will reveal. But there is, of course, an additional aspect to management—it is gendered. Management is gendered through both the sheer numerical dominance of men as managers (Institute of Management, 1995; Marshall, 1995, Collinson and Hearn, 1996), and, importantly, through the masculinist cultures which prevail in most organizational settings (Roper, 1994; Connell, 1995; Cheng, 1996). When men managers speak then, they speak from a position of double certainty; as men and as managers.