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This paper aims to share the author’s thoughts and reflections on teaching leadership in “pandemic times”. The author has been teaching leadership for nearly 20 years, both to undergraduate and graduate students, always stressing the importance of humility and compassion, traits that were often doubted and questioned vis-à-vis more traditional, masculine, perceptions of leadership. Yet, local and international leadership during the pandemic brought to surface the need and effectiveness of such characteristics, or what the author calls “the need for a feminist ethics of care” in leadership.

This paper is a thought piece stemming from the author’s experiences and reflections.

The paper discusses the fact that the most successful handling of the pandemic was largely carried out by female leaders, while also asking “why did so many male leaders do badly?”

With this thought piece, the author hopes to not only engage the readers in a discussion about effective leadership but also on how to teach leadership in today’s schools of management.

The paper hopes to serve as a springboard for opening the discussion around traditional masculinist modes of leadership that have proven to be detrimental in managing the COVID-19 pandemic while also proposing that feminist leadership embedded in an ethics of care is what the world needs today.

This article aims to explore how mainstream popular cinema, usually a vehicle of effortless and accessible entertainment, produces or reproduces prevailing discursive constructs about managers, management and corporate firms and provides a cultural reading of organizations. Using a post-structuralist framework, it seeks to deconstruct the representations of managers in several popular films. It aims to propose that the analysis of this representation allows complex questions about the nature of power in organizations and the “opportunity costs” of resistance to be addressed.

This article focuses on the discursive formation of managers and employees in popular films. The films were chosen using a popularity measure on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) and treated as “visual narratives”. A variation of Rose ' s discourse analysis method was used. To critically view the films, a post-structuralist perspective was adopted, in which questions of power, gender and sexuality are seen as fundamental. Gender is a discursive practice that becomes material through the power and resistance subjectified by the human body while “truth” is referenced through specific words and images – so constructed by the “reality” of popular culture.

The analysis reveals two seemingly competing discourses surrounding the representations of managers that encompass both a description of power and the resistance to this power. In this sense, although popular films position subjects – managers and those managed – in very specific ways, at the same time their construct of power is highly contextual and open to change. This finding leads to, first, a Foucauldian understanding of power and, second, a reconceptualization of power and resistance as one and the same construct, power/resistance, that may help address the “where”, “who”, and “why” of resistance that has previously been ignored.

The article brings popular culture to center stage in organization studies and argues that by not paying attention to its power to inform, society is cut off from valuable knowledge about how management is “done”. The article also reveals that although on surface the representations of managers in films seem to reinforce the dominant discourse of the “macho” manager, at the same time, a second representation – the bright, eager, usually working-class employee who wants to emulate the boss but then “sees the light” and becomes a “hero” – is offering a critique of this construct, making popular culture potentially subversive.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue which presents cutting-edge research in the field of gender, management, and leadership.

The special issue arose following the success of a stream on gender, management and leadership held at the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Conference, and generated 22 full-paper submissions for consideration from conference participants and from responses to the call. The papers covered many themes and incorporated a range of different methodologies. Ultimately, six were selected to be included in this special issue.

All studies of this special isue reveal gender performativity, as the “taken for granted” practice of gender. They show, exactly as suggested by Butler, that gender categories are brought into being performatively, so that “naming” of a subject creates the preconditions for certain categories which then become invested with meaning.

All of the studies included in this special issue show that studying gender, management and leadership in organisations is significant: we do not really leave gender at the door when entering our organisational work lives; rather, we “do” gender in specific ways, some reflexive but most perhaps not.

The paper shows that the special issue highlights the fact that management jobs have traditionally been understood as being constructed according to male norms and thus creating difficulties for women. These include the material part of their work as well as the stereotypical expectations and perceptions and reactions from others. The taken-for-granted point of departure is that women and men are essentially different, as shown by the ascribed congruency between men and management jobs. The studies reported in this special issue, however, try to challenge such conceptions and call for more sophisticated ways to interpret women ' s and men ' s experiences in management positions to enhance the understanding of the complexity of everyday organisational processes.