This paper examines the relation between culture and organizations in terms of the cultural meaning and contradiction that can be located in the 'products' of the entertainment industry. Specifically, we focus on the meaning of Australian masculinity as it is located in the cultural expression of commercial Australian rock, or OzRock as it is commonly referred to. We explore how the myth of Australian masculinity is fractured by complex and subtle gender relations that make its representation in one of its most successful business forms a failed project of the repression of the feminine. Despite its association with mateship, aggression, physicality, sexual prowess and social dominance, we highlight the instabilities inherent in Australian masculinity through a gendered reading of commercially produced and mass-consumed popular culture.
IntroductionIn this paper, we consider the relationship between culture and organizations in terms of the forms of cultural meaning and contradiction that can be located in the 'products' of the entertainment industry. These cultural products are made available directly on the basis of the organizational opportunities afforded by mass production and distribution technologies and by the communal experience made possible by their widespread availability and popularity. Such commercial culture is often considered vulgar, inauthentic or even manipulative (cf. Rhodes and Westwood 2008). At the heart of hedonistic capitalism, commercialism is thought also to support some of our worst cultural tendencies. This is especially the case in terms of how researchers have considered the effect of commercial popular culture on gender relations and the meaning of gender. Those who research organizations have concluded, for example, that commercial popular culture promulgates repressive gender stereotypes (Coltrane and Adams 1997), reinforces masculinist organizational normativity (Höpfl 2003), portrays hegemonic masculinity (O'Sullivan and Sheridan 2005), and illustrates negative images of women's careerism (Brewis 1998). Such generalized claims demand closer examination, especially in relation to the possibilities for how commercial culture can subvert gendered social practices (Czarniawska 2006;Tyler and Cohen 2008).With this paper, we attend specifically to the commercial music genre known as OzRock -the diminutive that captures mainstream, mass-marketed, identifiably