ABSTRACT
For Giddens (1991), in a somewhat Foucauldian mood, ‘[w]ho says modernity says not just organisations, but organisation-the regularised control of social relations across indefinite time-space distance’ (p. 16). For Foucault, of course, we all of us belong to organizations and all organizations are alike and take the prison as their model, so we are all imprisoned within a field of organizational power, even when we are sitting alone (Burrell, 1998). Who says organization, we could add, also says ‘management’, and who says management also says ‘masculine’. There is a well-established history of equating modernity with masculinity. Modernity is that world-view whose roots can be found in fourteenth and fifteenth century Europe where ‘man’s conception of the world and his place in it’ (Gordon, 1991, p. 17, emphasis added) ushered in an Enlightenment that, in the post-modernist reading, provided the foundations for a modernism which strives after explanation and control. It brought with it the guiding notion that it is only through reason that we can achieve control, with explanation to be sought through a knowledge that is objective and to be striven for through a faculty of reason sharply demarcated from nature. This tight and exclusive view of reality, based within empiricism and rationalism, provides a single standard of rationality against which all actions can be measured. It is a world-view that is profoundly masculine, by which I mean it is imbricated with those attributes that are generally accorded to the male and which serve in the constitution of men’s identities.
