‘Show us your frilly,pink underbelly’: Men administrative assistants doing masculinities and femininity

Research on men tokens (or numerical minorities) at work has focused on the processes by which men try to claim hegemonic masculine identities for themselves and how workplace interactants support or reject these attempts. In contrast to masculinity studies, token theory has paid less attention to non‐hegemonic masculinities. Using interviews with men administrative assistants, I develop a more comprehensive understanding of men tokens' gender performances and their significance for gender inequality. I present a four‐part typology: hegemonic masculinity, alternative masculinity, critical masculinity and male femininity. The categories are differentiated along two axes: support for hegemonic masculinity and support for hierarchical, binary gender.     

‘Being called sisters’: Masculinities and black male nurses in South Africa

This study contributes to an understanding of the geographies of masculinities, by demonstrating how black South African male nurses negotiate hegemonic masculinity through citing masculine gendered acts. The research draws on qualitative data gathered from interviews with 15 black male nurses aged between 26 and 50 years who have worked in the paediatric, trauma, orthopaedic, oncology and midwifery fields for a period of not less than two years. It is argued that the colonially imposed hierarchies of race, gender and occupation merge with culturally specific pre‐existing African masculinities, and that this informed how the black male nurses experienced their gender identity in the occupation. The study demonstrates how, because of their career choice, the gender identities of the male nurses were positioned as marginalized and subordinate to the modes of a hegemonic masculinity, a gender identity only available to them momentarily. In this context, it was found that the modes of gender performativity in which the nurses negotiated and subverted their subordinate and marginal status was with the complicity of patients and other healthcare workers. This upheld the more generally assumed hegemony of masculinity in the hospital workplace. The study traces these experiences to the discourses of black masculinities during South Africa's pre‐colonial, colonial and apartheid eras and in the present day. In doing so, this study contributes to an understanding of the geographies of masculinities by demonstrating the locally specific modes of masculine performativity through which black male nurses negotiate their gender in South Africa.     

‘In the Company of Men’: A Reflexive Tale of Cultural Organizing in a Small Organization

A tale of fieldwork in a small organization is discussed in this article with a view to highlighting how social processes, cultural understandings and expressions of gender are produced during fieldwork interaction. The tale is told reflexively and retrospectively, recording an ongoing conversation about fieldwork experience. Central to the tale is discussion of how the researcher is drawn into ‘culture–making’ within the organization and the ways in which fieldwork interaction creates a ‘space’ through which organizational members engage with, work through and realize work–place values. In this article there are multiple levels of reflection. At one level it is examined how the organizational–researcher role of ‘emotional nurturer’ was constructed during fieldwork. At the same time some cultural insights drawn from ethnographic inquiry and intensive interviewing within the small organization are presented. The analysis is also shaped by a further layer of post–fieldwork reflection and interpretation which draws in emotional issues and expressions of gender. It is argued that a close scrutiny of fieldwork roles is important to organizational research in that it makes explicit how the researcher–‘native’ interaction is central to the theorizing process and how the researcher can become a participant in organizational culture–making.     

‘There Oughtta Be a Law Against Bitches’: Masculinity Lessons in Police Academy Training

This article draws on participant observation in a law enforcement academy to demonstrate how a hidden curriculum encourages aspects of hegemonic masculinity among recruits. Academy training teaches female and male recruits that masculinity is an essential requirement for the practice of policing and that women do not belong. By watching and learning from instructors and each other, male students developed a form of masculinity that (1) excluded women students and exaggerated differences between them and men; and (2) denigrated women in general. Thus, the masculinity that is characteristic of police forces and is partly responsible for women’s low representation on them is not produced exclusively on the job, but is taught in police academies as a subtext of professional socialization.     

The ‘new industrial man’ as unhero: Doing postfeminist masculinities in an Italian pharmacological research centre

Recent work has documented the need to engage with how men construct masculinities within postfeminist discourses in the workplace. Postfeminism has sparked debates concerning the changing ideals of masculinities, highlighting the tensions between traditional forms of patriarchy and ‘new’ ways of being a man (e.g., emotional, a ‘new father’, in crisis). Men have been depicted as being in search of a new identity, opposed to the ever‐growing confidence and empowerment of women. In mobilizing postfeminism as a discourse, this article illustrates how men working in an Italian pharmacological research centre (managed by men but dominated by women) assume subject positions that contradictorily fluctuate between tradition and fluid modernity, to reveal a masculinity which we identify with the ‘new industrial man’. The postfeminist masculinities exposed in the analysis mesh pro‐ and anti‐feminist ideas by appealing to un/heroic and romanticized subjectivities. The analysis also shows how un/heroic masculinities and men's appeal to biological differences to reinforce social ones and devalue the feminine obfuscate organizational gender inequalities. The article advances masculinity theory by offering a nuanced analysis of how masculinities and men are affected by paradoxical contemporary pressures for more egalitarian gender relations and a renewed emphasis on patriarchal traditions, which continue to support the gendering of the workplace.     

‘I’m a migrant,but I’m the right sort of migrant’: Hegemonic masculinity,whiteness, and intersectional privilege and (dis)advantage in migratory academic careers

Comparatively little attention has been paid to the international careers of many academics, with gender and ethnicity frequently ignored in discussions of migrant academics. Through the lenses of intersectionality, hegemonic masculinity and whiteness, this study explores experiences of migrant academics in Australia and New Zealand, understanding how gender and ethnicity intersect to shape experiences of relative privilege and disadvantage. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 30 academics at various stages of their careers in both Australia and New Zealand. The data reveals the complex patterns of (dis)advantage which characterize the experiences of migrant academics. While some migrant academics may experience disadvantage, for Anglo white male senior academics, considerable privilege is (re)produced through the migration experience. As such, this article suggests migratory experiences can be better understood through the intersectionality of hegemonic masculinity and whiteness to reveal how privilege is maintained.     

‘I Can't Put a Smiley Face On’: Working‐Class Masculinity,Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy’

The growth of the ‘service economy’ has coincided with the large‐scale detachment from the labour market of low‐skilled men. Yet little research has explored exactly what it is about service work that is leading such men to drop out of the labour market during periods of sustained service sector employment growth. Based on interviews with 35 unemployed low‐skilled men, this article explores the men's attitudes to entry‐level service work and suggests that such work requires skills, dispositions and demeanours that are antithetical to the masculine working‐class habitus. This antipathy is manifest in a reluctance to engage in emotional labour and appear deferential in the service encounter and in the rejection of many forms of low‐skilled service work as a future source of employment.     

‘I Just Couldn’t Fit It In’: Gender and Unequal Outcomes in Academic Careers

This article reports on the findings of two pieces of research that were designed to test and challenge widely accepted theories about the causes of gender inequity in academic employment at the national level, and subsequently in a more detailed case study of one of Australia's largest and most prestigious universities. Both research projects used large‐scale surveys to capture information about levels of human capital, family responsibilities, career preferences, workloads and objective experiences of appointment and promotion. The case study, conducted in 2002, also utilized focus group discussions with particular groups of women who seemed, from the survey data, to be located just under the glass ceiling. The case study research confirmed the earlier national survey research which concluded that discrimination or bias in appointments, promotions and workloads were not significant in explaining men's domination of the senior levels. It also confirmed the significant gender differences in some kinds of human capital (particularly possession of a Ph.D.). But it also pointed to a quite particular explanation for the failure of women to progress to Level D (associate professor/reader) which involved other more general demographic changes — particularly, high rates of separation and divorce, far higher rates of partnering among men than women and the impact of older children's needs.     

A multi‐faceted power analysis of men's violence to known women: from hegemonic masculinity to the hegemony of men

This article presents a multi‐faceted power analysis of men's violence to known women, by way of assessing two main perspectives on research in men and masculinities: first, that founded on hegemonic masculinity, and, second, that based on the hegemony of men. Each perspective is interrogated in terms of understandings of men's violence to known women. These approaches are articulated in relation to empirical research, and conceptual and theoretical analysis. Thus this article addresses to what extent hegemonic masculinity and the hegemony of men, respectively, are useful concepts for explaining and engaging with men's violence to known women? The article concludes with discussion of more general implications of this analysis.     

‘A Blinding Lack of Progress’: Management Rhetoric and Affirmative Action

In this study we explore how versions of organizational reality and gender are constructed in management discourse and whether such patterns change over time. Specifically, we examine management explanations and accounts of the gendered nature of their organizations through their commentaries on their affirmative action programmes. In Australia private sector organizations with 100 or more employees are required to report to government on their affirmative action programmes for women. In these documents, management representatives outline objectives for the coming year and report on their progress in reducing employment‐related barriers for women. In doing so they account for the ‘problem’ of gender‐based discrimination that affirmative action is designed to address, justify their actions (or lack of action) and reproduce versions of gendered identity. Thus we use affirmative action reporting as cases of management rhetoric to explore how aspects of gender and organization are constructed, taken for granted, challenged or problematized. Comparing reports from the hospitality sector over a 14‐year period, we explore whether there is any evidence of discursive change in management accounts of the gendered nature of their organizations.     

Agency and clientship in public encounters: co‐constructing ‘neediness’ and ‘worthiness’ in shelter placement meetings

This article seeks to develop our understanding of the agency of vulnerable groups who at first sight may not seem to have much agency in their lives. It explores the co‐constructed nature of agency in three Danish homeless shelters. Unlike earlier interview‐based studies, our research is based on naturalistic data drawn from 23 video‐recorded placement meetings. Using concepts from Goffman, we examine how versions of the neediness and worthiness of homeless people are negotiated verbally and bodily between staff and clients. We find that homeless people have to juggle two partly contradictory roles when they are given or take the roles of either a (active) citizen or a (passive) client. Clientship is actively negotiated by both parties and demonstrates the agency of homeless people: they can collaborate with (as clients) or challenge (as citizens) the staff’s attempts to formulate solutions to their troubles. We further examine how the professional ideology of client centredness affects the meeting between the two parties. However, we show that, like any discourse, client centredness has no intrinsic meaning and is played out by actors in very different ways. In work with the homeless, the discourse of client centredness is related to discourses of ‘neediness’, ‘worthiness’ and ‘value for money’ that define agency in different ways and make three different client positions available: the resolute client, the acquiescent client and the passive client.     

‘Live to Work’ or ‘Work to Live’? A Qualitative Study of Gender and Work–life Balance among Men and Women in Mid‐life

Many contemporary studies of ‘work–life balance’ either ignore gender or take it for granted. We conducted semi‐structured interviews with men and women in mid‐life (aged 50 to 52 years) in order to compare their experiences of work–life balance. Our data suggest that gender remains embedded in the ways that respondents negotiate home and work life. The women discussed their current problems juggling a variety of roles (despite having no young children at home), while men confined their discussion of such conflicts to the past, when their children were young. However, diversity among men (some of whom ‘worked to live’ while others ‘lived to work’) and women (some of whom constructed themselves in relation to their families, while others positioned themselves as ‘independent women’) was apparent, as were some commonalities between men and women (both men and women constructed themselves as ‘pragmatic workers’). We suggest ways in which gender‐neutral theories of work–life balance may be extended.     

Beyond ‘Gender Differences’: A Canadian Study of Women's and Men's Careers in Engineering

This article explores the relationship between gender and career paths for a group of women and men who graduated as engineers during a period of labour market turbulence in western Canada during the 1980s. Using a model adapted from Brown (1982 ), the article uses ‘career path’ as a device to organize data drawn primarily from telephone and face‐to‐face interviews with 317 graduates. Three career paths provide the focus for the study: the ‘organizational’, characterized by stable employment with one employer; the ‘occupational’, characterized by mobility between employers; and the entrepreneurial, characterized by self‐employment. The use of the career path framework moves the study beyond global comparisons (of the dichotomized ‘gender differences’ kind) between ‘the women’ and ‘the men’. As well as allowing for comparison between the paths, it allows more refined and contextualized comparisons within each path. Such comparisons produce patterns of similarity and difference that sometimes transcend gender.     

‘How to be a rural man’: Young men's performances and negotiations of rural masculinities

This paper is concerned with young rural men and how they ‘do’ identity politics living in a rural area of Norway. Focusing on how masculinity and rurality are constructed and interrelated in young men's narratives of living in a remote community, it is identified that young rural men reproduce, negotiate and transform local discourses of rural masculinity. First, the article shows that young men living in rural areas believe it is important to express rural masculinity through hunting and outdoor life as well as by exhibiting skills as handymen. Second, it reveals that it is important for young rural men to communicate a particular stance in the ongoing and controversial Norwegian debate over snowmobiles and carnivores, as these topics are related to rural men's sense of loyalty to place. Third, the article shows how rural men negotiate ‘the tough man’ images related to hunting, motors and handyman skills by constructing new and alternative masculinities. The analysis reveals that young rural men enact alternative masculinities, expressed in relation to new working life opportunities in the service sector, through emotional openness and caring, and in relation to traditional ‘masculine spaces’ such as hunting and snowmobiling. It is concluded that, little by little, rural communities are opening up for more flexible masculinities.     

‘Taking it Like a Man’: Masculinity,Subjection and Resistance in the Selling of Life Assurance

This article examines the operation of mechanisms of control and modes of resistance within work organizations and interrogates the role of subjectivity in such mechanisms. Specifically, I mean to examine how forms of resistance are influenced by the masculine ‘mystique’ ( Collinson, 1988 ) of given occupations, focusing on that which pervades the field of Sales. Theoretically, the work of Foucault on ‘the self’ is adopeted (1985, 1986) to examine how control at work is attempted and occasionally effected through the construction of a specifically gendered identity of ‘the salesman’. With material from an 18‐month study of a UK life assurance institution, Lifelong Assurance ( Hodgson, 2000 ), I describe the operation of a bureaucratic technology of surveillance within the Sales division. In particular, I focus on the way in which employees’ responses to this system were structured by the specific masculine identities promoted and reproduced within sales, centring on an ideal of autonomy and self‐reliance. While the masculine discourse of autonomy frequently resulted in resistance to technocratic systems of surveillance, it was also clear that such discourses left employees isolated and vulnerable to more profound mechanisms of control through their engineered dependence upon their managers for security and the affirmation of their identity.     

‘Caring/Sharing’: Gender and Horizontal Co‐ordination in the Workplace

Classical organizational theory assumes a hierarchical structure and the vertical co‐ordination of work. Horizontal co‐ordination between organizational participants is currently recognized only at upper and middle organizational levels. This qualitative study of workers at the lowest rungs of the organizational hierarchy finds that they do engage in horizontal co‐ordination by working together in ways that are invisible. This study also finds differences between same‐sex work groups in how they perceive working together. The caring/sharing phenomenon describes the sharing of work, and the implementation of horizontal co‐ordination, undertaken in the context of caring relationships among work colleagues, all of whom were women. Women and men working in same‐sex work groups differ in their conceptions of how those work groups form and how they function. The findings from this study indicate that common conceptions of teams and teamwork may in fact be male norms of horizontal co‐ordination.     

‘Pure’ Farsi and political sensitivities: Language and ideologies in Farsi complementary language classrooms in Denmark

This paper presents an insight into two Farsi complementary language classrooms in Copenhagen, Denmark, characterised by political sensitivities. We illustrate a number of characteristic features of the classrooms concerning language use, pedagogical methods and cultural phenomena, which were related to key adults’ preferences, and we consider possible interpretations of them as indexical signs. In particular, we emphasise ideological interpretations (e.g. the monolingualism norm and language purism) and we relate the classroom characteristics to the contemporary state of Iran as well as to the time and place in which the classes occurred. We analyse both explicit metapragmatic messages and implicit ways of indicating ideologies, and see both types as characterised by avoidance of particular referents, that is, by unmentionables.     

‘You Can Stand on Your Head and Still End Up with Lower Pay’: Gliding Segregation and Gendered Work Practices in Danish ‘Family‐friendly’ Workplaces

This article explores the process of gliding segregation in two Danish workplaces. We address the questions of how and why women and men at the same workplace, with the same levels of education, often end up doing different work tasks. Drawing on a gendered organization perspective and sense of entitlement theory we illustrate the processes whereby structural and cultural expectations place women in predictable and routine work, and men in more developmental work. We also show that the level of education makes a difference to women's sense of entitlement to developmental work, but that the discourse of family friendliness disadvantages women in the allocation of interesting and valued work tasks. The findings illustrate the resilience of gendered work practices and the importance of focusing on workplace interactions to explain this.     

‘They are just good people…generally good people’: perspectives of young men on relationships with social care workers in the UK

The perspectives of marginalised young men on what they value in relationships with social care workers are under‐researched and have not received adequate attention within policy and practice literatures. Moreover, problematic assumptions about gender pervade much political and cultural commentary. Research findings from a study of 50 young men, aged between 16 and 25, attending a range of social care services, are highly significant in this context. They highlight young men's investment in a language of care and respect and their rejection of categorical presumptions. However, the services were steeped in practices and understandings of their marginalisation and offered important opportunities for recognition.     

‘I Know It Sounds Nasty and Stereotyped’: Searching for the Competent Domestic Worker

The recent upsurge of commercial companies in the market of domestic services has drawn attention in various countries. However, little is known about the operation of these companies and the extent to which their endeavours to industrialize paid domestic work reproduce or break away from historical patterns of gender inequality. In this article, the theoretical debate is informed by empirical data collected in the city area of Lisbon, in Portugal. In particular, open‐ended interviews with the managers of 15 companies provide a privileged view over the practices of recruitment and selection. Multiple sources of segmentation are associated with gendered understandings of class and ethnicity. Far from a paradigm in which stimuli toward industrialization and professionalization would overthrow the traditional centrality of trust and personal bonds in domestic service relationships, managers seek to gain a competitive advantage over rival companies and the informal economy precisely by mastering the trade of trust and personal bonds.