This article is concerned to demonstrate that paternalism and strategic management as forms, styles or 'techniques' of managing people and organizations, are both constitutive of and embedded in what we term a 'discourse of masculinism'. Within the context of the UK financial services industry, we examine how this discourse reflects and reproduces management practices, and reconstitutes individuals in accordance with masculinist priorities. This has the effect of privileging men uis-2-vis women, serves to rank some men above others, and maintains as dominant certain forms and practices of masculinity. We identify two of these as 'paternalistic masculinity' and 'competitive masculinity' respectively, regarding them as concrete manifestations of the interplay between historically shifting forms of management and masculinities in operation.

The distinction between male and female and masculinity and femininity continues to polarize relations between the sexes in ways that generally subordinate, marginalize, or undermine women with respect to men. The gender literature has recently challenged the singular and unitary conception of gender identity, arguing that there are a multiplicity of masculinities and femininities that are often fragile, fragmented and fluid. Despite this, the binary relationship between men and women continues to obstruct the development of sexual equality. This article is concerned with focusing critically on this binary and, in particular, its association with hierarchy, where men dominate women and masculinity assigns to femininity a marginal or 'Other' inferior status. It suggests that hierarchy is a condition and consequence of the reification of the binary that is difficult to challenge from within a representational epistemology that continues to dominate even studies of gender, let alone social science more generally. Deconstructing the gender binary is simply to challenge the reification of the terms wherein the divisions between male and female, masculine and feminine or men and women are treated as absolute and unchanging. The article examines conceptions of masculinity and the debate between Foucauldian and anti-Foucauldian feminists as a basis for developing its argument. It then concludes that gender analysis can only deconstruct the hierarchical content of the gender binary by disrupting masculine hegemony at work. One way of facilitating this is temporarily to occupy a space between representations of gender and the conditions of subjectivity and language that make them possible.

This paper seeks to theorize managerial discourses and practices in terms of their effects upon sexuality, intimacy and power in organizations. While accepting the real and immediate gendered material and social inequalities that are reinforced by the recent resurgence of unadulterated `free market' capitalism, the authors focus here on certain limited aspects of femininity and masculinity that are important for an understanding of gender identity and sexuality. Acknowledging the multiplicity of masculinities and femininities, they speak of a predominant form of masculinity that is elevated and privileged in everyday life, not least in organizational settings. This form of masculinity offers many men a secure and `comfortable' identity in generating and sustaining feminine dependence and a sexuality of men that displaces intimacy. By contrast, as a socially privileged yardstick by which women are judged, and judge themselves and one another, the model of what womanhood has come to be is bound up in an image of passivity. Feminine passivity then, may be understood as an often `reluctant collaborator' in what can be seen as a silencing of women's authority and fuller participation in organizations. The authors argue that the idealized conception of passive femininity and this silencing of women's authority has the effect of privileging men over women both materially and socially.

This article is a study of professional identity work, using in-depth interview material from research conducted into the work lives of 10 gay men employed in a UK National Health Service Trust. Using the men's portraits of professional life, we examine the different ways they understand what it means to be a `professional'. The article suggests that while gay men appear to be empowered by forms of agency to self-identify as professionals in `gay-friendly' work contexts, they are by no means unaffected by dominant professional norms and discourses of heteronormativity that treat sexuality and professionalism as polar opposites. Thus how straightforward it might be for the interviewees to self-identify as `professional' and openly gay within an organization that is perceived to be `gay-friendly' is scrutinized in terms of the professional identity dilemmas experienced by the study participants. We conclude that, even within `gayfriendly' organizational settings, fashioning a professional identity is a process marked by negotiation and struggle.

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