Exploration of masculinities in academic organisations: A tentative typology using career and relationship commitment

Type 1: Careerist masculinity: Strong career and weak relationship commitment

Those in this type have similarities with Collinson and Hearn’s (1996) depiction of the enactment of Careerist Masculinity. Organisations in general and the academy in particular have been depicted as ‘greedy’ organisations (Kvande, 2011; Morley, 2013). Beck (1992: 114) suggested that there was no tension between constructions of masculinity and men’s economic role: ‘In the stereotypical male gender role as “career man”, economic individualisation and masculine behaviour are joined together’. This kind of careerist masculinity can be seen as the most culturally valued in managerialist structures: representing as it does a valorisation of the organisation and the career structures within it. Those in this category were characterised by strong career commitment and a prioritisation of it over relational concerns (with resonances of Thornton’s [2013] ‘Benchmark Man’ and Lynch et al.’s [2012] ‘care-lessness’). Thus, as Danny (male academic) saw it, career opportunities were conditional not only on ability but on a willingness to prioritise career demands such as those related to family geographical mobility: ‘If you have the appetite and the ability and [are] prepared to uproot your family and bring them with you. And take the pain in that sense. Yea there are definitely opportunities.’

In a university context a strong career commitment was seen as necessary to achieve research output. Dale (male academic) claims that a successful academic career requires ‘in my case a … kind of single mindedness, concentration, the [scientist’s] ability to go all OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder] and concentrate on something to the exclusion of everything else’. His career had been characterised by a postgraduate degree, a postdoctoral position outside Ireland and extensive travel: all of which he saw as conducive to moving upwards in the career hierarchy. He had married and had children relatively late in life which he also sees as crucially important in enabling him to prioritise his career (and facilitate his research output, which has been a key element in furthering that career). He demonstrated his success at career planning with a rapid meteoric rise in the career hierarchy: ‘from 2005 to … 2007 was I suppose an acceleration period because I went from being a lecturer to a senior lecturer to a professor in fairly short order’. Even though he is now established in his career, Dale acknowledges that it would be impossible for him to maintain his level of career commitment if parenting was equally shared: ‘I couldn’t do it without the support of my wife … Yea she puts a lot of time and energy into it. So, if we were sharing that more equally for instance it would make a big difference to me.’

This kind of masculinity reflects and reinforces the existence of male networks. Networking in a paid work context tends to be seen in terms of its usefulness as a political strategy for advancement. Thus as part of organisational politics, it is linked ‘to the processes by which any elite group maintains power’ (Mackenzie Davey, 2008: 667), with men tending ‘to help their own sex in an unintentional “matter-of-fact” way’ (van den Brink and Benschop, 2012: 521). Thus, men such as Wayne (male academic) were very comfortable networking, saw it as ‘work’ and saw themselves as having extensive networks. These men were currently in the more senior positions.

There were indirect indications that gender based discrimination was still implicitly accepted by those who endorsed careerist masculinity in these masculinist structures. Thus for example, Wayne (male academic) highlighted the problems created by a postdoctoral researcher who became pregnant less than a year into an industry based project. As he saw it: he ‘had to fight with the agency to get the maternity leave allowed, so they gave us a small extension on the project, but the industry wasn’t happy … the project never recovered’. Furthermore, he suggested that this affected his future hiring intentions: ‘if I have another project, do I go for a woman who is not child bearing? Forty-five and upwards? Or a guy or a girl who’s in the early twenties, single, do you know what I mean?’ It is clear that he will be reluctant to employ younger women who may become pregnant. Although such an attitude does not discriminate against all women, it does effectively discriminate against the majority, since the level and salary attached to early research career positions (such as postdoctoral ones) is such that they are most likely to attract younger people at the start of their careers.

Those in this type were typically at the top of the academic career hierarchy and exemplified a careerist masculinity characterised by strong career commitment at the expense of relationship commitment.

Type 2: Enterprising masculinity: Strong career and strong relationship commitment

Those in this type adopted enterprising practices and refused to accept the form of hegemonic masculinity that required prioritisation of career over relationship commitment. They can be regarded as providing potential new kinds of role models in that they tried to maximise the opportunities and rewards from both. Perhaps more than any other type, these are high in career resilience and see themselves as being willing to take risks (London, 1985). One might expect that only those on the research track, with its absence of clear career paths, might be in this type. Surprisingly, however, those in this category included both them and those from the structured academic context. These men manipulated time to enable them to maintain a high level of career and relationship commitment. They used informal arrangements to enable them to meet their domestic responsibilities without availing of formal work/family policies. Similar processes were evident in studies by Kjeldal et al. (2005) and Padavic et al. (2012).

Troy (male academic) describes his priority as his family. He stressed the flexibility he had in the academic environment which enabled him to be available to collect children or to pick up the slack when they were sick by dropping them round to their grandparents, thus illustrating the limited extent of his actual hands-on commitment. He regards his relational concerns as influencing his career choice: ‘I came from industry and I did a PhD. I’ve a young family. I guess it was actually paradoxically easier to do a PhD because we’d get up early in the morning … I’d do it when we were on holidays.’ Troy also demonstrates a high level of career planning: ‘I have goals in mind for the next … I think I’m going to make one more significant career change.’ He has a high level of career commitment and seeks new challenges every 10 years or so. His commitment is reflected in his day-to-day work schedule:

I think I work too hard at it … About seven days a week but I’m in a lucky position. Because of this career path I can’t distinguish work from pleasure, so I get a lot of pleasure from writing papers and presenting them, so I would do that on a Sunday evening, I would do it on a Friday evening, so I do things like that, that other people would find laborious. (Troy, male academic)

It appears that, like the male academics in Rafnsdóttir and Heijstra’s (2011) study, time flexibility is used to protect his own priorities, reflecting a sense of entitlement which can be seen as a ‘patriarchal dividend’ (Connell, 1995).

Glen (male researcher) also demonstrates an enterprising type of masculinity insofar as he had moved from a highly paid prestigious permanent job in industry to a lower paid contract job in the university to facilitate his greater involvement in the family. Reflecting his career commitment, he used that opportunity to negotiate funding for a business qualification: arguably reflecting a strong sense of entitlement and the limited time horizon he implicitly saw as being involved in prioritising family demands. Nevertheless, by changing his job and thus reducing travel time, he ensured that he spent considerably more time with family and had greater flexibility as regards child care:

… a lot of my work … involved a lot of travel so I was on four flights a week, probably 40 to 50 weeks of the year … One of the driving forces behind why I took this role is basically because of two small … two smallies under two or just about two, … so they’re the centre of the universe now I suppose for me, from my perspective at the moment. (Glen, male researcher).

He is happy to prioritise them by taking a contract position at a lower salary, although this means that his position as breadwinner is precarious. Thus he exemplifies a slight but significant change in ‘doing man’. He had become a parent relatively late in life (at 40 years) and so this may have affected his perception of its importance. He saw his wife as a huge influence in his life and her career was very much on the rise. Thus in terms of the family’s financial well-being it was possible for him to be a risk taker in terms of breadwinning.

Glen’s career, like Troy’s, demonstrates a restless seeking for new challenges, in his case every three to four years, and he expects to continue doing that over the next 10 years: ‘they say that even if you get to the most senior job, you’ve just gotten to the job that you’re slightly under-qualified to do and that’s the job I want to get to’. He recognises that he is currently overqualified for the job he is in but he is making optimum use of the opportunities to enhance his future career prospects: ‘I don’t mean to sound arrogant but that’s basically where I see it, you know I position myself for a better role in industry if I were to go back there’ – demonstrating his high levels of career identity and career planning.

Paradoxically, cases of enterprising masculinity appeared both in the academic and research contexts, despite their very different career paths. In both cases the men had made career choices which reflected high relationship commitment while retaining high levels of career commitment.

Type 3: Pure scientific masculinity: Weak career and weak relationship commitment

Kvande (2011: 17) refers to the duality of knowledge work which can be ‘both seductive and greedy at the same time’. Scientific careers in particular have been depicted as necessitating a lifestyle characterised by total availability and mobility which precludes caring commitments and makes the maintenance of personal relationships extremely difficult. It has been argued that,

Western Science and technology are culturally masculinised. This is not just a question of personnel …The guiding metaphors of scientific research, the impersonality of its discourse, the structures of power and communication in science, the reproduction of its internal culture, all stem from the social position of dominant men in a gendered world. (Connell, 2005: 6)

The men in this type were broadly uninterested in status, with low levels of career planning or concern with positional titles:

I could not care less if I was called dustbin man. It’s just a title. It might help you in forming applications and stuff like that. But as for my own success, your own personal ego or anything it doesn’t have any impact … other than that title was associated with a salary scale, that’s the only impact. (Arthur, male researcher)

Arthur had brought in his own funding for over 10 years and was now effectively in a permanent research position, but without any further possibility of career advancement. For him, the enjoyment of the work itself was critical: ‘I enjoy what I do, I really do, I really enjoy it … I enjoy doing what I am doing.’ He accepts the absence of a career path on the research side because of his enjoyment of his work: ‘It’s just the system, get on with it, if you don’t like it go somewhere else. I would prefer to be doing what I am doing: everything has plus and minus sides’ (Arthur, male researcher). For Bryan (male researcher), the crucial thing is also the enjoyment of the work and he sees career advancement as reducing the actual time available for research and other frontline activities which are what he really enjoys: ‘The higher and higher you get up in science the less, the less research you do. And I enjoy doing the research’ (Bryan, male researcher). In the absence of any interest in moving upwards in the organisation, networking was unimportant and was reflected in an aversion to politicking.

Potentially scientific constructions of masculinity might be well positioned to be culturally valued in a university context since they assert a construction of masculinity whose basis is gender-neutral scientific expertise. However, there were occasional suggestions that the passionate totally committed concept of the (implicitly male) scientist was being replaced by a more bureaucratic managerialist one: ‘Yeah, just tick the boxes, you know, rather than doing good work, tick the boxes and get your promotion … which is something that doesn’t appeal to me … at all, I’d rather do good work’ (Carl, male academic); ‘there’s also groups that are just ticking the box’ (Bryan, male researcher). Bryan rejects the managerialist focus on research output in terms of number of publications. As a scientist he sees quality research as research that: ‘answers a question and raises many more questions … very good research gives you … many, many more questions’ (Bryan, male researcher).

For these men, the key thing was the enjoyment of their scientific work: exemplifying the traditional construction of the academic as preoccupied with their discipline. They demonstrate a breaking of the link between organisational position and masculinity, and are indifferent to managerialist rewards or sanctions. Easy to motivate, they nevertheless constitute a challenge to careerist masculinity in universities. Finally, this group included both those in research positions, with very limited career prospects, as well as those in the academic hierarchy, with its clear career paths.

Type 4: Family oriented breadwinning masculinity: Weak career and strong relationship commitment

Men in this type appear to be similar to Harrington et al.’s (2010) family focused workers and Brannen and Nilsen’s (2006) family men who were the main breadwinners and prioritised the family outside 9–5 p.m. Family constituted an alternative source of meaning and value to these men, albeit that they did not feel ultimately responsible for child care or domestic activities, and none had considered giving up full-time employment or even working part-time for a substantial period of time. They attempted to manage the competing demands of paid work and family by compartmentalisation (as in Reddick et al., 2012).

For Lynch et al. (2012) academia is premised on the care-lessness of those who work there. There is evidence that this has begun to be challenged (see men in management roles: Ford and Collinson, 2011; and early career male academics seeking tenure: Reddick et al., 2012). In this study, those in this category prioritised their family over their career in important decisions and had little career ambition in the sense of wanting to move upwards in the career hierarchy. Nevertheless they continued to work full-time and retained an unproblematic equation between masculinity and paid employment, reflected in their implicit endorsement of full-time breadwinning. However even those men who had a more active commitment to child care saw it very much as an activity usually taking place after working hours, although one which could, in their wife’s absence due to work related commitments, include finishing work early to collect the children. Thus, for example, Victor prioritised family after the working day ended, with any earlier involvement being depicted as activated by a phone call from his wife, thus indicating that implicitly, the responsibility for child care usually rested with her:

I have four kids and I like to spend time with them. I’m home every evening. We eat together. I do the baths. I read them books. I read them stories at night. I do all of that. My wife is an X and she has a very busy [role] so it would be fairly regular that she would phone me and ask me if I would collect the kids so it might mean I’d have to leave around half four. (Victor, male academic)

Men in this category referred to the cost of prioritising career advancement over their family and indicated that this was a price that they were not prepared to pay:

… it’s a sacrifice that I’m not willing to make … I look around at what people have to do around here to get promoted and I don’t want to, because I won’t see my family as much as I want to. That is black and white for me. (Victor, male academic)

Similarly, Danny (male academic) problematised an unthinking commitment to career success at any price: ‘I can go further but do I really want to and give up a certain work/life balance?’ This group included those in permanent academic positions as well as those on research contracts – underlining the fact that the security of their position as a breadwinner was of surprisingly little concern. Thus Walter stresses the overall positive impact of his current lifestyle on his children, despite the precariousness of his employment:

… a lot of our fulfilment comes from the fact that the kids are really well set up, have a fantastic time, lots of friends and you know that’s great and makes us feel settled. In terms of research itself … there’s a finite end … But I’m not desperately concerned about that. (Walter, male researcher)

Relational ties include not only children, but also ageing parents and other relatives. There were occasional references to such ties as effectively inhibiting men’s work options. This was simply presented in a pragmatic way. Thus for example Vincent (male researcher), in a family of all boys, took a temporary year long position when his father was chronically ill ‘in order to be closer to him to help sort that out’. However, it did not involve any consideration of giving up paid employment even for that period. For others, caring had moved entirely into the realm of ‘caring about’ (Tronto, 1993) insofar as their decisions were influenced by their relationships with partners and relatives: people for whom they had no ‘caring for’ responsibilities, but whose options and lifestyles would be affected by their decisions.

Women constitute half of those in professional positions in Ireland and 50% of couples are now dual career couples (Lunn and Fahey, 2011). There were occasional comments by men who indicated that they were aware of the difficulties experienced by women in having a geographically mobile career and accommodating it to their husbands’ career track: ‘Yea. I think it’s more difficult potentially for women because there’s probably a husband who’s got his own career track’ (Vincent, male researcher). In other cases, men expressed relational concerns. For example, Johnny (male academic) and his partner had initially relocated to the UK and this had seriously impacted on his partner’s career: ‘so the choice was to come back to the department role here for her … so certainly yea for family I came back here really’. This implicitly suggests a basic reciprocity in the dyadic relationship rather than a prioritisation of the male breadwinner’s career which has historically and stereotypically been the norm.

Some of those in this type rejected the notion of linear careers or moving up the organisational hierarchy. Thus for example Walter (male researcher) rejected the very idea that he might think in terms of the highest level that he might aspire to in the hierarchy: ‘I reject the question because it talks about levels and I don’t … I’m not interested in position …Yeah, I’m entirely unflustered by having level, it comes with money, but … .’ Similarly Victor (male academic), although he appreciated his current salary, was unimpressed with status: ‘I’ve no interest in career advancement’. For these men, the organisation was perceived in rather instrumental terms as a facilitator of their breadwinner status. Insofar as advancement is not desired, networking becomes an irrelevant activity: with Walter (male researcher) describing himself as ‘allergic to it’ while others saw themselves as ‘no good at it’ (Danny, male academic).

Most of these men worked in male dominated areas. Some noted the existence of patterns that implicitly challenged their own views that gender did not matter or that such differences as existed reflected biological realities such as maternity. Thus, for example, as scientists they recognised that the presence of women in some disciplines varied between sectors, cross-nationally and over time. However as in the case of young Irish adults (O’Connor et al., 2002) they were slow to name discrimination and to do anything about it: ‘it’s hard not to recognise that she’s the only female and she’s the one excluded, you know. For her, I see it as being a really significant issue’ (Victor, male academic). Thus although these men suggest a challenge to hegemonic careerist constructions of masculinity in some ways, they are effectively complicit in other ways.

Family focused masculinity combined strong relationship commitment with a weak level of career commitment. To a considerable extent they avoided the pressures of both domains, while retaining a traditional commitment to breadwinning and to full-time work. They included not only those from the hierarchical academic arena who were relatively indifferent to managerialist rewards; but also those who were indifferent to the uncertainty and instability of careers in the research context.