Gender and Management: New Directions in Research and Continuing Patterns in Practice

Management and managing are characteristically gendered in many respects. Over the last 30 years there has been a major international growth of studies on gender relations in organizations in general and in management in particular. This applies in both empirical research and more general theoretical analyses. The area of gender, organizations and management is now recognized in at least some quarters outside of itself as a legitimate, even an important, area. This is to be seen in the current market in publications, in the activities of mainstream international publishers, in journals,1 in courses within degree programmes, and in research groups, networks, and conferences and conference streams. Nevertheless, the field of activity is still somewhat precarious, in some ways very precarious. The vast majority of mainstream work on organizations and management has no gender analysis whatsoever or if it has it is very simple and crude. In business schools and university departments the position of genderexplicit work is very far from established. Even critical management studies, which may be concerned with, for example, power, class, labour process, resistance, discourse, deconstruction, does not necessarily take gender into account