Research into "corporate masculinity" suggests that executive men position their difference, status and power through discourses which involve the strategies of "identification with some men and differentiation from others, including women". While these processes apparently place women in an antithetical relationship to power, women are increasingly achieving executive leadership. This paper examines the career representations of 30 senior women executives. Drawing on a social constructionist approach to gender and identity, examines women's positioning of self within the discourse and discusses how they deal with the apparent paradoxes or contradictions of female identity within a world dominated by corporate masculinity. Our findings suggest that women engage in processes of identification and differentiation comparable to those of men. Perhaps unexpectedly, these processes often involve an assertion and celebration of female difference that includes distinctions between "the wo-men and the boys". They also involve a more tentative process of differentiation from corporate masculinity through the construction of an emerging new culture, the culture of women in business.

Official organisational myths and storytelling constitute a powerful, persuasive force in both the public representation and the internal shaping of executive identity. Leaders of corporate culture, with some help from management gurus and consultants, are aligned with legendary heroes such as Ulysses, Zeus, or even Superman, to promote images of``the senior manager as an heroic, transformative leader'' (Clark and Salaman, 1998, p. 137). This process plays upon subconscious images, beliefs and expectations to reinforce the concept of leadership as archetype.The construct of leadership as archetype situates stories of the executive as hero within the wider cultural and discursive history of social narrative. Sinclair (1998, pp. 30-1) emphasises the collaborative, social constructionist dimensions of such stories:Consistent with Jung's use of the term, archetype is defined as a powerful image or understanding, which exists in the collective unconscious of groups of people. An archetype of leadership is not a style, which is a reflection of an individual personality, but a social construction. Abrams (1988, p. 201) describes archetype as`n arrative designs, character types, or images'', which occur within a wide diversity of phenomena from works of literature to modes of social behaviour:The archetypal similarities within these diverse phenomena are held to reflect a set of universal, primitive and elemental patterns, whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response in the reader.Understanding leadership as archetype reveals the power of narrative to contain images and patterns within the representations of a particular character, which seem to be elemental and universal to the nature of leaders, but which are instead collaborative, social constructions.Certainly, within the corporate context, the harnessing of cultural archetypes of leadership has transformed the public image of the senior manager from the distanced bureaucratic nonentity of 30 or so years ago, to celebrity leading their followers through economic and social globalization to a promised future of self-development and fulfillment:In opposition to the personally detached, bureaucratic manager . . .

Organisational myths and stories are vehicles of communication management, which shore up official goal, values and role models while they provide agents for instruction and change management (Kaye, 1995). Corporate sagas, for instance, form part of a company's official rhetoric, reflecting corporate ideals and values. Salzer-Morling (1998) describes the entrepreneurial rise of the IKEA furniture corporation from one man in a village to an international company. The IKEA saga combines creation story with rags-to-riches and David and Goliath-type triumph that aspires to unite IKEA workers into a family infused with the spirit of IKEA enterprise.In like manner, executive culture has traditionally offered definitions of successful masculine identity linked to a heroic archetype of leadership (Sinclair, 1974). More recently, and with some help from management gurus (Clark and Salaman, 1998;Kaye, 1996), depictions of``the senior manager as an heroic and transformational leader'' (Clark and Salaman, 1998, p. 137) have drawn on subconscious images of leadership by aligning executives with specific archetypal heroes. These include Ulysses and his epic quest, Theseus killing the Minotaur, Mercury the winged messenger, and even the American Superman myth (Sinclair, 1994: Kaye, 1996. In a study of ten male Australian executives, Sinclair (1994) reveals the ongoing adherence to a heroic archetype by comparing the executives' representations of their leadership quest to the epic journey of Ulysses. In a subsequent work, Sinclair suggests elements of self-interest sustain the continuing force of heroic masculinism:The unspoken intertwining of ideologies of leadership and masculinity serve the important purposes of maintaining the status quo, the privilege of an elite, and of perpetuating assumed assessments of who looks like``leadership material'' (Sinclair, 1998, pp. 50-1).Both myths and stories reflect``the cultural and political realities of an organization's life'' (Kaye and Jacobson, 1999). Underlying the official role models, however, is the``myth of meritocracy'' with its concepts of equity and of the level playing field (Maier, 1997). The hidden message here is that all people have equal opportunities to succeed if they are talented and work hard enough and that theThe author

There are significantly more New Zealand women in senior management positions in the public sector than in private businesses. This study draws on the experiences and perceptions of 30 women executives who have considerable managerial experience in either sector. Success factors for the individual women are outlined before the cultures of the public and private sectors are described. Through the eyes of respondents, the public and private sectors have distinguishable organizational cultures; both of which provide parallel but different sites for advancement. The private sector businesses have a focus on competition and the public sector has a strong ethos of service, in spite of restructuring. The findings are discussed in the context of a country that has strong women leadership in the political sphere.

Executive leadership is constituted as a predominantly male domain, placing women in an antithetical position to executive power. In theorising this situation, a social constructionist model of gender suggests that in the corporate world, as elsewhere, perceptions of the behaviour of men and women are “automatically filtered through a gendered lens” and reconstituted within a more general discourse on gender difference, tapping into subconscious images of leadership to reinforce a masculinist construction of executive power. Yet today women are increasingly in executive roles. This study explores the relationship between a social constructionist model of gender and executive discourse by drawing on interviews with ten male and ten female New Zealand executives. Given that these executives hold comparable organisational status and power, the study examines whether or not a gendered lens still operates in their representations of one another, and if there are indications of gender and social change in the discourse.