This thesis is a critical history of managerial and professional men in post-Second World War Australia. The attention that I have given managerial and professional men has been determined by my own political desire to problematise the continued accomplishment of hegemony. As subjects, these men and their discursive practices enable scrutiny of the regenerative labour necessary to sustain power and necessary to realise the material results that accrue to those performing such work. My thesis examines the practices of particular groups of managerial and professional men within four discrete social settings or terrain during the post-war period. I interrogate the operations of managerial and professional men in personnel management (the terrain of work), in market research (the terrain of the market), in parenting and marriage guidance (the terrain of the family) and in the service club Rotary (the terrain of the civic). In each of these terrains I find managerial and professional men framing problems and enacting solutions. A process or intervention that makes natural the connections of interest (of advantage or disadvantage) being constantly recreated; an intervention that expresses a comfort with the mechanics and entailments of hegemony. To enable my critical history I apply, in each terrain, a framework comprising three core elements. I historicize the accomplishment of hegemony; testing the emergence of government and positive expressions of power during post-war modernisation in the local contexts of managerial and professional men�s interventions. I people hegemony; identifying the practices of managerial and professional men as resources for doing social relations (in particular the relations of gender and class) and crucial to the operation of hegemony. And, thirdly, I demonstrate the interventions of these men to be interested; unravelling the possessive investments managerial and professional men make through their interventions. My scrutiny of managerial and profession men and their practices, my choice of terrains in which to study them, my analysis of the process enacted in these terrain and the sources that I have utilised are not intended to assemble a biography of men�s experiences or ideal masculinities. Rather, my thesis provides a biography of interventions in order to disassemble that which appears not to be anything in particular: the ordinary regeneration of hegemony by ordinary men doing ordinary things.

This thesis is a critical history of managerial and professional men in post-Second World War Australia. The attention that I have given managerial and professional men has been determined by my own political desire to problematise the continued accomplishment of hegemony. As subjects, these men and their discursive practices enable scrutiny of the regenerative labour necessary to sustain power and necessary to realise the material results that accrue to those performing such work. My thesis examines the practices of particular groups of managerial and professional men within four discrete social settings or terrain during the post-war period. I interrogate the operations of managerial and professional men in personnel management (the terrain of work), in market research (the terrain of the market), in parenting and marriage guidance (the terrain of the family) and in the service club Rotary (the terrain of the civic). In each of these terrains I find managerial and professional men framing problems and enacting solutions. A process or intervention that makes natural the connections of interest (of advantage or disadvantage) being constantly recreated; an intervention that expresses a comfort with the mechanics and entailments of hegemony. To enable my critical history I apply, in each terrain, a framework comprising three core elements. I historicize the accomplishment of hegemony; testing the emergence of government and positive expressions of power during post-war modernisation in the local contexts of managerial and professional men�s interventions. I people hegemony; identifying the practices of managerial and professional men as resources for doing social relations (in particular the relations of gender and class) and crucial to the operation of hegemony. And, thirdly, I demonstrate the interventions of these men to be interested; unravelling the possessive investments managerial and professional men make through their interventions. My scrutiny of managerial and profession men and their practices, my choice of terrains in which to study them, my analysis of the process enacted in these terrain and the sources that I have utilised are not intended to assemble a biography of men�s experiences or ideal masculinities. Rather, my thesis provides a biography of interventions in order to disassemble that which appears not to be anything in particular: the ordinary regeneration of hegemony by ordinary men doing ordinary things.

Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-142).

Ebenso alt wie das Reden über Männlichkeit dürfte das Phänomen der medial ausgerufenen Krise der Männlichkeit sein, einer zutiefst nostalgischen Litanei, die von diversen Mitspielern produziert und regelmäßig wiederbelebt wird. Sie trägt verschiedene Gesichter in den Medien und reicht vom Entfesselungsaufruf, wie ihn Männerzeitschriften kultivieren, wenn sie ihre Verweichlichungshysterie mit Bildern bärtiger Großstädter am Holzkohlegrill oder am Steuer eines Geländewagens zu besänftigen suchen, bis hin zur rechten Polemik eines Akif Pirinçci, der in seinem Skandalbuch Deutschland von Sinnen (2014) dem „zur Memme transformierten deutschen Mann“ nachtrauert, der sich unter der vermeintlichen Knute von Feminismus, Political-Correctness-Zeitgeist und dem Diktat „abnormale[r] Sexualität“ selbst abhandengekommen sein soll. Derlei kontroverse Einlassungen stehen durchaus symptomatisch (wenn auch besonders zugespitzt) für die andauernden publizistischen Erfolge von Titeln wie Männerbeben (2007), Was vom Manne übrigblieb (2008), So wird der Mann ein Mann! (2010), Das entehrte Geschlecht (2012) und Der ungezähmte Mann (2018) – Manifeste, die regelmäßig auf den Bestsellerlisten auftauchen und immer dann den ,Krisenmann‘ heraufbeschwören, wenn Debatten über Gewalt im großstädtischen Raum oder männliche ,Bildungsversager‘ geführt werden.

The shifting topography of contemporary Japanese society is engendering a significant reorientation of men’s family relations. However, exactly how Japanese men are adapting to these broad-based trends, including parent-child relations, demographics, marriage norms, care provision, residential choices, and gender roles, as well as in the decline of Confucian worldviews, remains relatively obscure. In this dissertation, I explore men’s everyday practices underpinning their family relations as husbands, fathers, sons-in-law, and grandfathers. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the summers of 2013 and 2014 in Hyogo, through narrative interviews and participant-observation. I find husbands’ view of their wives transitioning from having a culturally prescribed duty to perform domestic matters to simply having responsibility for domestic matters. This opens up space for negotiation within married couples, with my informants providing what I refer to as additional help, which offers new insight into charting the evolution of hegemonic masculinity. I evidence relatedness founded on exchange as an approach to understand relations across the extended family, which importantly involves additional help, financial resources, and intimacy. I underscore how men selectively seek intimacy in some family relations, notably as fathers and grandfathers. Provision of additional help and seeking of intimacy lead to men’s (re)construction of masculinities differing across family relations, with an important reason for men to select their practices so as to craft their family relations is to address their sense of well-being. Further, the pattern of men’s family relations reveals the emergence of substantially novel sons-in-law relations, as compared to that found in ie patriarchal norms. This evidence suggests a fundamental shift from a vertically-dominated set of family relations, as in the ie household, to a more horizontal, fluid set of relations across the extended family.