Intimate, ambivalent and erotic mentoring: Popular culture and mentor–mentee relational processes in Mad Men

Abstract

Mentoring centers on the development of another person through career, psychosocial and role modeling support. As popular cultural portrayals and gendered critiques of mentoring show, not all can be categorized as rational, instrumental and positive. There often are unconscious forces that drive particular mentoring arrangements and offer entrée points into mentorship analyses that contrast with rational approaches. Popular culture images provide an arena to critique dominant mentoring practices. Towards this end, we critically examine the award-winning drama Mad Men (Weiner, 2007) and uncover how non-rational mentoring practices are depicted. We argue that characters engage in intimate, ambivalent and erotic mentoring processes in which loyalties shift and neuroses reflect the nature of workplace social relations. Our critique displays characters' complicity in perpetuating asymmetrical gendered workplace relations through practices that are seemingly non-rational, presumably meritocratic and/or captured by archetypal mentoring relationships.

Tersine Mentorluk Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme: The Intern (Stajyer) Filmi Örneği

“…Bu bağlamda popüler kültür ürünleri örgütleri ve insan ilişkilerini anlamak için yönetim yazınında alternatif bir yöntem olarak kullanılabilmektedir (Alakavuklar & Çakar, 2012: 404). Yabancı yazında; Mad Men (Buzzanell & D'Enbeau, 2014), Solaris (Tirado, 1999), Southpark (Rhodes, 2002), Simpsons (Rhodes, 2001), The Office (Tyler & Cohen, 2008) gibi dizi-film analizleri ile çeşitli roman analizleri (Czarniawska, 2009;Spoelstera, 2009) yapılmıştır. Yerli yazında ise epik filmlerde liderlik (Erkuş, Tabak & Coşkun, 2007), kadınlar ve direnç (Alakavuklar & Çakar, 2012), örgüt, edebiyat ve zaman (Yıldırım, 2007), kurumların ortaya çıkması ve meşrulaşmasının Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü adlı roman üzerinden açıklama (Erdemir, 2010;Taşcı & Erdemir, 2010;Erdemir & Koç, 2015), Koro filmi üzerinden durumsal eğitim modelinin sorgulanması (Tofur, 2018a), Die Welle filmi ile örgüt kültürünü oluşturan unsurların incelenmesi (Tofur, 2018b), İKY ve örgütsel davranış alanlarının yansımalarının sinemada arandığı araştırma (Yıldız, Gündoğmuş, Yener Aydın & Atalay, 2018) Tersine mentorluk çalışmalarında kavramın içeriğini, fonksiyonlarını ve sınırlarını belirleyen Murphy (2012)'nin yaklaşımının benimsendiği çalışmada, filmin kahramanları olan Ben ile Jules arasındaki ilişki incelenmiştir.…”

‘A deeply troubled organization’: Organizational satire in the BBC’s W1A comedy series

“…The various aspects of management represented in the films and TV programmes and studied by researchers include the cultural logic of organizations in The Simpsons (Rhodes, 2001), new public management in The Bill (O'Sullivan and Sheridan, 2005), gender performativity in The Office (Tyler and Cohen, 2008), and macho management in Wall Street (Panayiotou, 2010). More recently researchers studied illegal management practices in The Firm (Panayiotou, 2012), constructions of leadership in Rawhide (Watson, 2013), mentoring in Mad Men (Buzzanell & D'Enbeau, 2014), political correctness (Westwood and Johnston, 2012) and the interface between politics and management in The Wire (Holt and Zundel, 2014;Whiteman, Zundel and Holt, 2017). These analyses are based on the assumption that popular culture teaches practices and offers interpretive templates for management that are at times more influential than the actual practice (Czarniawska and Rhodes, 2006).…”

Impostor syndrome as a way of understanding gender and careers

“…Psychoanalysis brings a relatively comprehensive account of individual subjectivity to organisations and management (Fotaki et al, 2012), as well as an in-depth understanding of careers and career development in terms of counselling, desires, tensions, transitions, relationships, and rationalisations (e.g. Buzzanell and D'Enbeau, 2014;Hoyer and Steyaert, 2015).…”