We're Way Past Glass Ceilings
On Management and Masculinity
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I am now a manager. Of course, they don’t call me that. They call what I do “teaching.” But what they call “teaching” is, these days, just relaying information between departments in ridiculous games of telephone and solving problems created by people with more power than me. Welcome to higher education in the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
The story of how I got here is long and boring, but the point is that I did not choose to be a manager. I have been conscripted into a massive multi-campus machine called “the core curriculum,” which claims to exist for the purpose of “education” but, as far as I can tell, is really a machine for recreating academic faculty in the image of administration.
In protest against the conditions that led to our conscription, Fidus Achates and I lodged a (no doubt fruitless) dispute with the university. It is also boring. It involves a large number of policy documents, all designated by frustratingly similar acronyms: ACP, RWA, AWP, EA, but basically, at least as I see things, the university is violating its own policies. In all likelihood, this will not matter to anyone.
The point is that, lately, I have gotten more up-close-and-personal with management structures than I ever wanted to be. While annoying, this has led me to a discovery that allows me to use one of my all-time favourite words: isomorphic, meaning “to have the same shape.”
My discovery is this: the current dominant form of masculinity and current forms of management are isomorphic. In other words, the moves used by individual men to control women and the moves used by institutions to control employees work in the same way.
Managerial Control, Domestic Control
Managerial culture, at least when compared with so much of what we locate under the heading “toxic masculinity”, seems innocuous: suit jackets and clean fingernails; fiscal responsibility; calm elocution. But this image is a key part of its violence.
An institution may declare, for example, its commitment to “clarity, consistency, fairness, and transparency,” and so present a particular image of itself. If that same institution takes actions that are inconsistent with its declared commitments, any attempts to address the institutional failure or inconsistency are blocked, exposing that the institution does not in fact care about embodying those values, but is actually interested in maintaining the image that it is committed to those values so that it may pursue increased control of its employees without obstruction.
For evidence of this, see Sara Ahmed’s book Complaint!, which details cases in which the process of lodging a complaint, even, or, especially, when the complaint appeals to the institution’s own policies, brings a person into close contact with that institution’s violence.
Ahmed’s description of the extreme difficulty, time, and emotional work involved in trying to get an institution to take action against an injustice sounds quite a lot like the endless work that women do trying to get male partners to share responsibility for their households and families (see Zawn Villines on this). The strategies of control are similar: change the subject, nod your head and then take no action, gaslight the complainer about what occurred, imply she’s threatening her relationship to the individual or the institution by being too demanding or uncollegial.
The effect in both cases is the same: the difficulty of the fight forces the complainer to accept her condition, to do the work that benefits the man or the institution without him/it having to redress the injustice or change conditions.
Getting others to accept conditions is a key part of what management does.
Strategic Management as Competitive Masculinity
There is an intimate relationship between styles of management and concepts of masculinity.
According to feminist journalist, Susan Faludi, managerial logic has infiltrated all areas of American society since the mid twentieth century: not only workplaces, but religion, sports, war, family, social networks. It is now inescapably the social context in relation to which men forge an identity.1
Academic research undertaken by Deborah Kerfoot and David Knights describes a similar shift in the UK in financial institutions at around the same time, a shift that they describe as a change from a “paternalistic” management style, which was concerned with the wellbeing of employees (for better or worse), to a “strategic” management style, which “involves quantifying, examining and grading both people and events, whereupon they are brought readily within the disciplinary gaze...”2
An important part of this shift is the application of the techniques of power outside an organisation’s own boundaries such that problems with “the market” come to “displace problems of internal production and administration,”3 which is why image becomes so important. Image is an institution’s key tool of intervention beyond its own boundaries.
When management style changed, so did the requirements for attaining masculinity. Whereas, according to Faludi, masculinity may have previously been defined by things like service to a common good and loyalty to one’s brothers (e.g. the WWII battlefield) or the pride that comes from the mastery of a craft, which results, through collaboration, in the construction of something of high quality (e.g. the shipyard), success under this new style of management requires individuals to competitively pursue power through image. The image that wins is the image that defines reality.
Kerfoot and Knights call this “competitive masculinity,” which “serves to rank individuals in terms of their capacity to display attributes of control over the definition of the reality of events, and so to secure the compliance of others with regard to that definition.”4
Notice, again, the role of image here. Individuals compete with one another to define reality by establishing an image and getting other people to make that image real through their compliance.
Whether we’re talking about a president who declares that immigrants are eating dogs and cats, or a university (or a man) claiming to uphold “fairness, transparency, consistency, and clarity” while demonstrably acting against those principles, the objective is the same: if you can get people to comply with your image (willingly or otherwise), even, perhaps especially, if it’s demonstrably untrue, you have the power to shape reality.
A bifurcation opens up between the manager and the managed which “resembles the relationship between a controlling, remote husband and his alternately cosseted and corseted wife.”5
But there’s a catch…
This type of masculinity depends on constant affirmation, constant buy-in from others, making it inherently precarious, leading to “ever more intensified and spiralling efforts to secure that control. In turn this demands a degree of self-discipline, self-repression and self-control in the continuous pursuit of success, where the world presents itself as a never-ending series of challenges and conquests.”6
Faludi shows that, over and over again, when men lose this competition, they typically refuse to blame those who set up the conditions of masculinity that betrayed them (bosses, fathers, etc.). Instead, she says, they are like scorned lovers who continue to believe that if they remain loyal and devoted, if they continue striving, top management will take them back.7
Have you seen those short video clips floating around the internet pointing out how odd it is that men attempt to become “alphas” precisely by following rules for such alpha-hood prescribed by another man? Isn’t that definition of being a “beta”? But this is the 21st century version of what Faludi is pointing to.
The model of masculinity to which men are told to aspire is that of the 1,000-foot-high leadership position, the manager (or influencer) who is untouchable, far above everyone else. But that position is actually dependent on the recognition of others, first and foremost of other men who choose you, who elevate you to that position, which is not so different from the woman who waits to be chosen.
Competitive masculinity is really just an image of independence hiding its opposite: a dependence and powerlessness so deep that breaking free is almost impossible because doing so would require admitting the dependence.
When the promises of competitive masculinity are broken by the institutions on which men depend, they do not register the betrayal because this would require registering their powerlessness. They simply find a new arena in which to undertake conquest, hoping maybe this time they’ll succeed. Maybe this time they’ll be seen and chosen.
Often, women are this compensatory arena. The woman has “an essential role at the end of the food chain of dependencies: her magnified helplessness was a crucial counterweight to her husband’s helplessness on the job. She returned to him the manhood he lost at the office….”8 If, in the wake of a job loss, she refuses this role of the dependent - if she left him or even took a job herself - it is she, rather than his corporate manager, who is considered the traitor.9 Her refusal to be dependent denies him the control on which his identity depends.
It’s easier to blame the one beneath you in the hierarchy than the one above you. It’s easier to blame the one who refuses to give you the conditions by which to fulfil your mandate than the one who issued the mandate in the first place. But this choice is what keeps you dependent.
I don’t Want Your Glass Ceiling
When Faludi, Kerfoot, and Knights were writing in the 1990s, academia still looked like a haven, an exception. Don’t get me wrong, gender discrimination and sexual harassment were alive and well, but I entered academia assuming it was something like the shipyard: that here, one could gain authority and self-respect by mastering the execution of a particular set of highly specific skills that would contribute to a whole (albeit a curriculum rather than a ship). It was exciting to be admitted to this world as a woman. I expected it to be harder for me, but I didn’t expect the playing field to change altogether.
But managerial logic seems to have found its way here at roughly the same time I did, and I have no desire to find out what life is like on the other side of that glass ceiling, no desire to become the kind of person who could be elevated above it.
The challenge facing me feels more like the one facing the community in Women Talking: stay and fight, leave, or do nothing.
I think about the widening ideological gap between gen z men and women, and I wonder about how much this gap has to do with the fact that women may no longer be seeking admission into the world of men because we recognise its abusive logic. I worry about the men around me, that they have opted to do nothing because they cannot see that they are in an abusive relationship. They may complain about individuals, but at the end of the day they comply with the terms because it’s the only avenue available for securing and performing a masculine identity. I worry about what this means for the women in their lives. And I worry about what becomes of those of us who cannot comply with the image.
Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999).
Deborah Kerfoot and David Knights, “Management, Masculinity and Manipulation: From Paternalism to Corporate Strategy in Financial Services in Britain,” Journal of Management Studies 30 4 (1993): 668.
Kerfoot and Knights, “Management, Masculinity and Manipulation,” 668.
Kerfoot and Knights, “Management, Masculinity and Manipulation,” 672.
Faludi, Stiffed, 82.
Kerfoot and Knights, “Management, Masculinity and Manipulation,” 672.
Faludi, Stiffed, 87.
Faludi, Stiffed, 85.
Faludi, Stiffed, 88.
Omg this is gold. The 3 paragraphs from “When the promises of competitive masculinity are broken….” WOW. More on this please - it nails the dynamic - and love isomorphic - I’ve been talking about mapping / revealing the contours of these invisible mountains / shapes for ages. Isomorphic even more evocative. Keep going!