ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how the institutions of law, business and finance interact with a range of discourses around masculinities within different settings. Particularly, it investigates how patriarchal power is maintained as well as questioned in hegemonic masculinity discourses in those fields. The first section focuses on the legal profession and contested changes under neoliberalism, including a shift to transnational business masculinities and growing divisions in terms of income, status, size and influence, between elite global transnational corporate firms and “the rest” of legal practice. The second section focuses on men and masculinities in finance organizations and how processes of gendered hegemony that operate globally are shaped locally in particular places, including the geographic power centres of global cities. Neoliberal changes and discourses linked with performance thereby often mask patriarchal processes and inequalities. We focus both on the perpetuation of the hegemony of men and how some men in top positions may question their own entanglements in relations of power and domination and offer avenues to emancipatory change. The chapter aims to contribute to better understand contradictory developments of masculine cultures and discourses, which may have more authoritarian, more emancipatory, paradoxical or perhaps more authoritarian yet disguised as emancipatory or egalitarian outcomes.
