Rewriting Power and Gender Into the Management of Meaning and the Meaning of Management

Gowler and Legge’s work does not claim to address identity as such, but it examines public claims which managers make about what management is, and conditions where that might seem to be contested or threatened. Their self-definitions then are part of their experienced identity, and intervene in a discourse to which managers are held to be subject. However, Gowler and Legge’s investigation is not one which explores the conditions of subjectivity, or subject formation, as it does not focus on specific managers (as subjects) or specific contexts. In this section Gowler and Legge’s framework is analyzed by drawing on Foucault’s concepts of power/knowledge, to explore how relational forms of power shape managers’ discursive subject positions. Power is at the core of Foucault’s writings since it highlights how privileged and privileging discourses of the subject determine the creation of selves. Foucault recognizes the “other” in determining subjectivities and therefore a Foucauldian analysis of power that challenges forms of hegemonic domination in society in the pursuit to re-gender management.