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Gender, management and leadership
Edited by Olivia Kyriakidou
The world of management is strongly dominated by men - and leadership is, or at least used to be, conventionally constructed mainly in masculine terms (e.g. [8] Kumra and Vinnicombe, 2008; [13] Vinkenburg et al. , 2011). This relegates everything socially perceived as "non-masculine" to the marginal, and places it primarily outside the organisation - and also makes it harder for women (with family responsibilities for young children) to be recruited to, and function in, managerial jobs. This Special Issue unpacks some of the ongoing research in the field of gender, management and leadership. It arose following the success of a stream on Gender, Management and Leadership held at the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Conference, and generated 22 full-paper submissions for consideration for the Special Issue from conference participants and from responses to the call. We sincerely thank all the contributors to the stream, the submissions to the Special Issue and the extensive group of reviewers who gave their time and expertise to review for us. The papers covered many themes and incorporated a range of different methodologies. Ultimately, six were selected to be included in this Special Issue. Reflecting the high quality of the submissions, others have been accepted for a regular issue of the journal.
Organisations are often characterised as sites of constraint as well as opportunity, forums of continuous activity where gender often passes unnoticed or denied partly because it is "done" routinely and automatically, concealing its precariousness and performativity. Consequently, the manager and leadership in organisations have conventionally been constructed, historically and even today, in masculine terms. [5] Collinson and Hearn (1996) identify five masculinities that men enact at work - one of these is the "macho" management style 'emphasizing qualities of struggle and battle, a willingness to be ruthless and brutal, a rebellious nature and an aggressive, rugged individualism' (p. 3). According to these authors, "'man'-agement came to be defined in terms of the ability to control people, events, companies, environments, trade unions and new technology", something that continued well into the 1990s where management and the shop floor seemed equally preoccupied with the "masculinist concern [for] personal power and the ability to control others and self". What we show in this...