Recent social science research has made important changes in our understanding of masculinities and men's gender practices, emphasizing the plurality and hierarchy of masculinities, and their collective and dynamic character. These gains have been achieved mainly by close-focus research methods. But in a globalizing world, we must pay attention also to very large scale structures. An understanding of the world gender order is a necessary basis for thinking about men and masculinities globally. We can trace the emergence of globalizing masculinities at different stages of the history of the world gender order. Hegemony in the contemporary gender order is connected with patterns of trade, investment, and communication dominated by the North. A transnational business masculinity, institutionally based in multinational corporations and global finance markets, is arguably the emerging dominant form on a world scale.

Masculinities and Globalization

Accounting history has a long tradition, but in recent years it has expanded its interests and approaches. Early literature of accounting history that sought to glorify the practice of accounting and the status of accountants has been supplemented first by a more utilitarian approach viewing the past as a “database” for enhancing understanding of contemporary practice and for identifying past accounting solutions that might be relevant to current problems, and then by a more critical approach, which seeks to understand accounting’s past through the perspective of a range of social and political theories. A tension has developed between those historians whose first loyalty is to the archive and those who look primarily to theory to inform their historical investigations. As accounting history matures, open debate between practitioners of different modes of history making can only be beneficial, not only to the development of the discipline, but also towards our own self‐understandings as accountants, including the impact we have on organizational and social functioning. Suggests that accounting history without a firm archival base is likely to lose direction, but that our notion of what constitutes the archive, and our ways of communicating, explicating and interpreting the archive, should not be taken as fixed. To illustrate this, examines a number of approaches to the writing of accounting history where recent research has begun to demonstrate a critical and interpretive tendency, and suggests directions in which this research might develop as accounting and its history enters the twenty‐first century.

Critical and interpretive histories: insights into accounting’s present and future through its past

Southern African historiography has become increasingly gender‐sensitive in the last decade. Primarily as a result of the impact of feminism in the world of work and in universities, research on women has burgeoned. The inclusion of women in the study of the past and the recognition of their agency has filled an important lacuna but also has made evident the corresponding gap in knowledge about men. The dominance of men in the public record has obscured the fact that little is known about masculinity. Men have generally been treated in essentialist terms. The socially constructed nature of masculinity is widely acknowledged and it is this insight that needs to be applied to a study of the region's history. This article introduces readers to the inter‐disciplinary work on masculinity, reviews how research on gender in South Africa has handled issues of men and masculinity and then suggests how insights taken from Men's Studies might help to broaden gender analysis and enrich the study of the South African ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2637466.pdf

Of boys and men: masculinity and gender in Southern African studies

In this paper we examine the construction of masculine identities within a real-life social situation. Using data from an extensive series of interviews with small groups of sixth-form (17-18-year-old) students attending a UK-based, single-sex independent school, the analysis looks at the action orientation of different constructions of identity. More specifically, it focuses upon how the identity talk of one particular group of students were oriented towards managing their subordinate status within the school. In a number of instances the identity of the `new man' was adopted as a strategy of resistance. However, it was found that the more common strategy involved buying back into values embodied within a more traditional definition of masculinity.

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Jockeying for position: The construction of masculine identities

I develop a conceptual approach to changes in masculinity that emphasizes the dynamics of the gender order as a whole. Homosexual masculinity is an important locus of these dynamics. After a critique of conventional discourses of masculinity I develop a theorized lifehistory method for researching gender. Analysis of eight life histories from an Australian gay communityfinds (1) initial engagement with hegemonic masculinity, (2) sexuality as the key site of difference, and (3) gradual closure based on relationships or on bodily experience that eroticizes similarity. Conventional masculinity is an aspect of the object of desire, yet is subverted by this object-choice; a contradictory masculinity is produced. Though the men in this study do not directly contest the gender order, the reification of "gayness" provides a social basis for sexual freedom, and the stabilization of a dissident sexuality opens possibilities for change in the social structure of gender. Recent media attention to masculinity and male initiation, fueled in the United States by enormous sales of Iron John: A Book About Men (Bly 1990), does not represent a sudden discovery. Over the last 20 years, in the wake of the new feminism, debates on men's position in sexual politics have taken place in most Western countries, including Britain (Tolson 1977), Germany (Brzoska and Hafner 1990), Sweden (Bengtsson and Frykman 1987) and Australia (Lewis 1983). These debates have given rise to a body of descriptive research, termed "male sex role" or "masculinity" research in the United States (Kimmel 1987; Brod 1987). Within this literature, change in men's character or in the "male role" have most often been explained by the psychological discomfort of the individual or by generalized processes of modernization and technological change. I argue that we must focus on the social dynamics generated within gender relations. The gender order itself is the site of relations of dominance and subordina

A very straight gay: Masculinity, homosexual experience, and the dynamics of gender.

List of images. Preface to the Sixth Edition. Acknowledgements. 1. Historical awareness 2. The uses of history 3. Mapping the field 4. The raw materials 5. Using the sources 6. Writing and interpretation 7. The limits of historical knowledge 8. History and social theory 9. Cultural evidence and the cultural turn 10. Gender history and postcolonial history 11. Memory and the spoken word 12. History beyond academia. Conclusion. Index.

The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History

Book synopsis: Domesticity is generally treated as an aspect of women’s history. In this fascinating study of the nineteenth-century middle class, John Tosh shows how profoundly men’s lives were conditioned by the Victorian ideal and how they negotiated its many contradictions.
Tosh begins by looking at the experience of boyhood, married life, sex, and fatherhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century—illustrated by case studies representing a variety of backgrounds—and then contrasts this with the lives of the late Victorian generation. He finds that the first group of men placed a new value on the home as a reaction to the disorienting experience of urbanization and as a response to the teachings of Evangelical Christianity. Domesticity still proved problematic in practice, however, because most men were likely to be absent from home for most of the day, and the role of father began to acquire its modern indeterminacy. By the 1870s, men were becoming less enchanted with the pleasures of home. Once the rights of wives were extended by law and society, marriage seemed less attractive, and the bachelor world of clubland flourished as never before.
The Victorians declared that to be fully human and fully masculine, men must be active participants in domestic life. In exposing the contradictions in this ideal, they defined the climate for gender politics in the next century.

A man's place : masculinity and the middle-class home in Victorian England

John Tosh's book is a signal event. It celebrates the full coming of age of the history of masculinity as a recognised academic sub-discipline. If Davidoff and Hall laid the foundations in this respect, Tosh finally establishes and opens up the field. The book will be of great interest to all serious students of Victorian England; it will also appeal to those with an interest in modern gender studies, since, as the publishers roundly and convincingly assert, in exposing the contradictions in their own ideal of masculinity, the Victorians defined the climate for gender politics in the next century. The book represents a considerable research effort. Tosh has read widely in the family records of the period and in its advice literature. His account is much enlivened by seven carefully chosen case studies. The men concerned include an attorney, an exciseman, a doctor, a mill owner, a banker and a headmaster. The structure is explicit and persuasive as a framework for a telling argument: in Toshs scheme of things Victorian Domesticity had preconditions, a climax between c.1830 and 1880, and a period when it fell under strain in the last thirty years of the century. The plan is neat; the book is very well written; in broad terms the analysis is faultless. It has to be said that in the end it is an argument about the rise and fall of an ideology more than a fully chartered way of life. The focus is on middle-class men and the basis in primary material is too narrow to sustain a comprehensive account of fatherhood and lived masculinity in the period. But that would be an enormous project and this book, as it stands, is genuinely pioneering. Where it digs into personal experience it is always illuminating and the constant sense of interplay between the experience and prescriptive material is always in the authors mind.

John Tosh

Papers

The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History

A man's place : masculinity and the middle-class home in Victorian England

A Man's Place. Masculinity and the Middle Class Home in Victorian England

What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain

The pursuit of history