The Inclusive Leader, the Smart Strategist and the Forced Altruist: Subject Positions for Men as Gender Equality Partners

• Date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Elisabeth K. Kelan
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12372

The Inclusive Leader, the Smart Strategist and

the Forced Altruist: Subject Positions for Men

as Gender Equality Partners

ELISABETH K. KELAN PROFESSOR OF LEADERSHIP AND ORGANISATION

Essex Business School, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, Essex, UK

This articleexplores how men are conceptualised as partners in genderequality processesin organisations against

the backdrop of a postfeminist sensibility. Drawing on interviews that formed part of organisational ethnographies,

the article highlights three subject positions that men are encouraged to adopt: the inclusive leader, the smart

strategist, andthe forced altruist. All threesubject positions entail the construction of men as disadvantaged through

a focus on women. While theorists of postfeminism have shown how women are made responsible for their own

success and failure with structural gender inequalities being disavowed, the opposite logic seems to operate for

men; if men do not succeed, it is due to unequal gender structures that favour women. Alternative subject positions

could focus on making men’s privilege visible or on that men who support gender equality might accelerate their

careers.The article also shows that genderequality is still seen as a women’s issuerather than an issue that concerns

both women and men.

Keywords: Discourse; feminism; gender; men; postfeminism

Introduction

Men are increasingly called to action in regard to gender

equality. The Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

called himself a feminist (UN News Centre, 2016), the

Financial Times (FT) (Hoyos andRigby, 2015) published

a list of the top ten male feminists, and Esquire magazine

(Esquire, 2016) dedicated a special issue to men and

feminism. However so far little is known about how

men are conceptualised as partners in gender equality

processes and how this relates to the current postfeminist

common sense (O’Neill, 2015; Rumens, 2017). Scholars

of postfeminism have pointed out how current discourses

of gender equality are characterised by strong

individualisation, where individuals are expected to

improve theirown value and if they fail to do so, they have

only themselves to blame (Gill et al., 2017; Baker and

Kelan, 2018; Lewis et al., 2018; Adamson and Kelan,

2019). Postfeminism can best be understood as an

analytical device, a sensibility or a discursive formation

to understandthe current patterning of culture (Gill,2016)

or in other words, how a ‘common sense’on gender

equality (Gill et al., 2017) is created. With the recent

popularisationof a specific kind of feminism (Rottenberg,

2014), postfeminism can be used as an analytical tool to

understand the shifting and changing landscape of how

gender inequality is being talked about. The question of

how men are conceptualised as partners in organisational

gender equality processes against the backdrop of

postfeminism is thus an important one.

The article traces which subject positionsare offered to

men as partners in gender equality processes. A subject

position draws on the idea that individuals are

interpellated or ‘hailed’by specific discourses (Althusser,

1971). Subject positions thus invite individuals to adopt a

certain worldview and construct their identities in line

with those worldviews (Davies and Harré, 1990; Edley,

2001a). Individuals are not free to take any subject

position because cultural histories and power dynamics

determine which positions can be adopted (Edley,

2001a). Discourses open a variety of subject positions,

which might be taken on, rejected or negotiated by

individuals. In this article, the focus is on which subject

positions are opened in discourse and how they attempt

to interpellate subjects, but not how individuals relate to

these subjectpositions. In other words, the articleexplores

how men are con ceptualised as partners i n gender equality

Correspondence: Professor Elisabeth K. Kelan, Professor of Leadership

and Organisation, Essex Business School, University of Essex,Wivenhoe

Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, Essex, United Kingdom. E-mail elisabeth.

kelan@essex.ac.uk

European Management Review, Vol. 17, 603–613, (2020)

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12372

©2019 European Academy of Management