ABSTRACT
Within the context of management and organization studies (MOS), a critical approach to the study of masculinities can offer insights into the oft-rendered invisible ways in which gender assumptions and expectations are embedded in managerial perspectives and practices. Given the global nature of businesses in contemporary economies today, understanding how masculinities shape the gendering of organizational life is quite relevant to addressing inequities of various kinds. This chapter engages with transnational and decolonial perspectives to examine the geographically relational, gender fluid and non-binary ways in which masculinities take shape including in the context of work and organizational life. Doing so provides epistemological complexity around the concept of masculinities in line with calls to make explicit the male-centric focus of much management research, including more recent engagements as elaborated in the Handbook. At the same time, the chapter contributes to a growing body of writing on critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM) that expands beyond extant frameworks to the study of masculinities including those arriving from non-Western traditions. Altogether, the chapter provides insights arriving from transnational and decolonial traditions to expand the repertoire of research focus, epistemologies and methods available to understand, study and even challenge masculinities within certain contexts.
