The workplace is an important site for the reproduction of men’s masculine power and status. As entrepreneurs, owners, executives, managers, trade unionists and employees, men have both produced and been shaped by the organisations that now predominate in contemporary societies. While masculinity has fundamentally influenced the nature of the workplace, organisations also significantly impact on men, their power, cultures and identities. Hence, work, organisation and masculinity often co-exist in complex, mutually reinforcing and sometimes contradictory relationships.
Yet within the literature these dialectical interrelations are frequently neglected. Organisational researchers often talk about work without critically examining men or masculinity in any explicit way. Writers on gender and/or men sometimes underestimate the impact of organisations as both the medium and outcome of masculine cultures, identities and practices. However, there is now increasing interest in critically examining men and masculinities and the multiple conditions, processes and consequences of their continued dominance in organisations.
‘Men’ and ‘masculinity’ at ‘work’
Feminist studies highlight the embeddedness of masculine assumptions in organisational structures, cultures and practices. They reveal the significance of paid work as a central source of masculine authority. For many men, employment provides the interrelated economic and symbolic benefits of financia rewards, skills, careers, power and status. Research suggests that masculinity can be embedded in formal organisational practices (e.g. recruitment and promotion) through to more informal, cultural dynamics (e.g. the social construction of skill and workplace friendship). Central to men’s valorisation of ‘work is also a close identification with machinery and technology. Masculine dynamics at work can also be reproduced through men’s sexuality and the sexual harassment of women. DiTomaso (1989) argued that men often engage in a type of workplace power play in which they use sexuality to subordinate women. Kimmel (1993) highlights men’s homophobia and their fear of other men as key factors shaping the dominant definitio n of masculini
Feminist writers also emphasise men’s dominance in the home and how this can reinforce their power in employment. For men, ‘work’ still refers primarily to the organisational, to employment and to what happens in ‘public’. Arguing that unpaid (and often invisible) domestic labour also constitutes important work, feminists suggest that women continue to be responsible for most housework and that men benefit significantly from these domestic labours.
Many feminists use the concept of ‘patriarchy’ to examine men’s power in employment and at home. Others criticise this concept for being too monolithic, ahistorical, biologically overdetermined and dismissive of women’s resistance, difference and agency. Some notions of patriarchy have also been criticised for neglecting inequalities and differences between men, particularly those based on class, hierarchy and status as well as ethnicity, age and other aspects of diversity.
Partly as a result of these criticisms there has been increasing interest in ‘multiple masculinities’ (discussed elsewhere in this volume). Suffice it to say here that the concept of multiple masculinities helps us to appreciate the gendered nature of workplace power and inequality between men as well the ways in which organisations can be saturated with masculinities that subordinate women. There are many different kinds of workplaces, occupations, industries and sectors that may constitute important sites for the reproduction of multiple forms of masculinity.
Class and status inequalities constitute important factors cutting across relations between men and sustaining different masculine workplace cultures. By no means the only difference or inequality between men, class nevertheless remains important as a medium of gendered power and identity within contemporary organisations. For example, the institutionalised distinction in Western societies between mental and manual work frequently results in some men enjoying unequal access to various workplace rewards such as pensions, holidays, job security and company stocks and shares as well as experiencing very different levels of danger at work.
Many of the most illuminating studies of men and masculinity in organisations focus on working-class masculinities. Cockburn’s (1983) study of UK printers reveals how the ‘hotmetal’ manual skills of linotype compositors have historically been protected as the exclusive province of men. Willis (1977) describes how working-class lads construct a highly masculine school counter-culture through which they resist authority and ‘celebrate’ the so-called ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ of manual work. Their valorisation of workingclass masculinity leads ‘the lads’ directly into manual labour. Only later do they realise the reality of class subordination after reaching the factory with no educational qualifications and little chance of escape.
Collinson (1992) shows how men manual workers are often treated as ‘second-class citizens’ and how they consequently redefine their sense of masculine dignity and respect through shop-floor counter-cultures. He found that workers elevated themselves (and negated others) through specifically masculine values of being a family breadwinner, ‘practical’, ‘productive’, ‘having common-sense’ and being ‘able to swear when you like’ and ‘give and take a joke like a man’. The informal shopfloor interaction between men manual workers was often highly aggressive, sexist and derogatory, humorous yet insulting, playful but degrading. New members were teased incessantly and their masculinity tested to see whether they were ‘man enough’ to take the insults couched in the humour of ‘piss taking’ and the embarrassment of highly explicit sexual references.
These studies reveal how masculine working-class cultures often symbolically invert the values and meanings of class society, but in ways that unintentionally reinforce the status quo. They illustrate how counter-cultures typically emphasise workers’ perceived ‘honesty’, ‘independence’ and ‘authenticity’ as confirmation of manhood and opposition to management. In many cases rejecting even the very idea of promotion because it would compromise their sense of masculine ‘freedom’, men manual workers often insist that this would require them to become conforming ‘yes men’.
Other studies suggest that ‘white-collar’ occupations may also be shaped by masculine values, albeit ones that are typically less aggressive and sexual than those found in shop-floor settings. Research reveals that middle-class, male-dominated professions like doctors, academics and computer specialists can all be characterised by such masculine cultures. For example, Pearce (1995) graphically describes US attorneys’ ‘Rambo litigator’ style of courtroom intimidation. Until the late nineteenth century, clerical employment tended to be the preserve of men. With the expansion of bureaucracies and the introduction of typewriters, much clerical employment became ‘sex-typed’ as ‘women’s work’. Feminisation led to clerical work being downgraded and undervalued, associated with ‘homemaker’ tasks within the workplace. By contrast, male white-collar workers are typically employed in well-paid positions with higher levels of discretion and remuneration, often reflecting their status as ‘organizational breadwinners’ (Collinson et al. 1990).
Particular masculinities can also pervade senior leadership and managerial positions. Only relatively recently has men’s numerical and cultural domination of leadership and management become a serious topic of concern. Yet a closer analysis reveals innumerable ways in which management and leadership implicate ‘men’ and ‘masculinities’ (Roper 1993). This applies in the construction of dominant models of leadership and management, in leadership styles and practices, in the language of management and leadership, in management cultures and so on (Collinson and Hearn 1996).
An early analysis by Kanter (1977) argued that scientific management, with its emphasis on rationality and efficiency, is infused with an irreducibly ‘masculine ethic’. She also suggested that Human Relations theory still rests on the image of the rational/masculine manager as ‘the man who could control his emotions whereas workers could not’ (ibid.: 24). Certainly there is a strong link between management’s concern with control over labour and men’s preoccupation with control over women. This preoccupation can be expressed and reproduced through various masculine discourses such as: authoritarianism; paternalism; entrepreneurialism; informalism and careerism (Collinson and Hearn 1994).
By no means completely cohesive, leadership and management in organisations can also be characterised by highly competitive processes and internal struggles over power, career and interfunctional rivalries, all of which can take highly masculine forms. For example, the division between line and personnel managers is often reinforced by stereotyped assumptions of the line manager as ‘producer’, ‘provider’ and ‘breadwinner’ for the organisation and the HRM/personnel manager as dependent, domestic and organisational ‘welfare worker’.
This focus on multiple masculinities facilitates the development of a more nuanced conception of patriarchy which acknowledges the differentiated nature of workplace masculinities, the variation between different types of organisations and the shifting ways in which these may be perceived and experienced. Recent poststructuralist perspectives develop this approach by exploring the additional importance of ‘identity work’ for understanding the reproduction of masculine workplace cultures. They suggest that gendered subjectivity is a specific, historical product, embedded in prevailing power relations that is ambiguous, fragmentary, discontinuous, multiple, sometimes fundamentally nonrational and frequently contradictory (Collinson 2003).
Research in this area highlights the way in which men often seem preoccupied with the maintenance of various masculine selves. Men workers frequently engage in identity work as part of their desire to secure respect and dignity in conditions of its erosion (Barrett 1996). Their search to sustain coherent identities often draws upon a whole variety of organisational resources and appears to be an ongoing, never-ending project. Typically, it seems, men’s gender identities are constructed, compared and evaluated by self and others according to a whole variety of criteria within the workplace. Like all identities, masculine selves constantly have to be negotiated and reconstructed in routine social interaction both in the workplace and elsewhere, typically through simultaneous processes of identification and differentiation.
On the one hand, men often seem to collaborate, cooperate and identify with one another in ways that reinforce a shared unity between them; but on the other hand, these same masculinities can simultaneously be characterised by conflict, competition and selfdifferentiation in ways that intensify the differences and divisions between men. Given these deep-seated tensions, ambiguities and contradictions, the unities that exist between men should not be overstated. They are often more precarious than superficial appearances suggest. Indeed, this tendency to become preoccupied with seeking to secure clearly defined and coherent masculine selves may in itself be inherently paradoxical, likely to reinforce, rather than resolve, men’s deep-seated sense of insecurity.
Conclusion
Organisations constitute an important site for the reproduction of men’s patriarchal power and status. Men’s power can be reproduced through multiple masculinities and masculine selves within patriarchal workplace dynamics. By highlighting the diversity of men’s workplace power and status, analyses can begin to make sense of the multiple, shifting but tenacious nature of gendered power regimes as they are embedded in diverse workplace structures, cultures and practices. They can begin to examine the dynamic, shifting and often contradictory organisational relations through which men’s differences and similarities are reproduced in particular practices and power asymmetries. The possibility of a challenge to men’s taken-for-granted dominant masculinities could facilitate the emergence of less coercive and less divisive organisational structures, cultures and practices, a fundamental rethinking of the social organisation of the domestic division of labour and a transformation of ‘men’ at ‘work’.
Several issues require further work. The conceptualisation of ‘masculinity/ies’ needs clarification. How do the ideological, discursive and symbolic features of masculinities interrelate with economic, material and physical aspects? The ways in which masculinities interact with other elements of power, culture and subjectivity in organisations needs greater consideration. In what ways and with what consequences are multiple masculinities embedded in other workplace practices, such as control, consent, compliance and resistance? We need to know more about how other inequalities and differences (e.g. ethnicity, race, nationality, religion and age) are intertwined with those of masculinity, work and organisation. This in turn raises important questions about the gendered nature of globalisation, global restructuring, transnational corporations (Kimmel et al. 2005) and about international cultural differences between men and masculinities, particularly in non-Western contexts (Pease and Pringle 2001). Finally, while recognising a multiplicity of possible masculinities and workplace sites, analyses also need to retain a focus upon the asymmetrical nature of gendered power relations and subjectivities. This emphasis upon men and masculinities should not become a new means of forgetting, excluding or subordinating women.
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