Ms representations: women, management and popular culture

Abstract

Popular representations of the workplace have tended to construct women as unsuited to management and leadership roles. In their reflective capacity these popular fictional texts illustrate the workplace. In their capacity to construct popular perceptions of “reality”, the texts offer an important insight into women’s and men’s understandings and expectations of their workplace relationships. In this article we reflect on how popular films, plays and television shows can make visible some manifestations of the kinds of resistance women continue to experience in non‐traditional domains such as management. While these kinds of texts have not been central to the analysis of workplace relations within the management literature, we argue that as social documents they have much to contribute to an understanding of the limited advancement of women.

Citation

O’Sullivan, J. and Sheridan, A. (1999), "Ms representations: women, management and popular culture", Women in Management Review, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 14-20. https://doi.org/10.1108/09649429910255456