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To provide a critical review of existing contributions to gender and change management and in doing so highlight how organizational change needs to be read more readily from a gendered perspective.

This paper argues that gender has received little attention regarding the change management side of managerial practice and reviews recent contributions to gender and change to demonstrate this. The paper then questions how men and women both cope with and drive change and whether the identified differences are more than superficial. The concept of gender is then read into management theory in order to understand how gender affects the way managers think and act, and the gendering of management is discussed. The paper concludes by outlining future research areas – change agents, entrepreneurs, female innovators, psychoanalytic treatments of change and gender experiences.

The paper finds that traditional and dominant conceptions of masculine and feminine values that rely on static conceptions of gender to argue that more attention to be paid to the dynamic and the genderful approaches.

The paper concludes by outlining future research areas – change agents, entrepreneurs, female innovators, psychoanalytic treatments of change and gender experiences.

Draws much needed attention to the neglect of gender in change theory and practice and suggests some ways forward.

Offers a unique introduction to an important but complex literature that needs to be integrated into change management practice.

To underline that viewing entrepreneurship in the context of shifting career roles and professional identities, gendered organizational life and in the current societal context regarding working life (ageing, gender discrimination) provides us with new lenses and enables us to perceive the entrepreneurial identity as fluid and emergent.

A female entrepreneur's life‐story collected through a narrative interview is applied in the study. In this paper identities, organizations and societies in change form the basis for entrepreneurship. Treating entrepreneurship as a social process constrained by time and place allows it to gain new meanings and understandings of security, reliability, risk‐moderation that it has not previously seen to possess.

The paper presents the connections of time and place for entrepreneurship; first, by demonstrating how entrepreneurship as a phenomenon reflects the time and place of investigation; second, how time and place are applied as important elements in the individual story presented in the paper, and, third, how readings of time and narrative are applied to make sense of entrepreneurship in the story.

The paper suggests that the social context (different times, places as well as, e.g. different roles, social identities and careers) should more frequently be studied within entrepreneurship research.

By portraying entrepreneurship from the non‐economic and non‐heroic standpoint, and reflecting the social changes that surround it, entrepreneurship is potentially made more accessible for a larger number of people.

The paper refuses the research of entrepreneurs as a general overriding, economic category and the quest for the “Theory of Entrepreneurship”.

To challenge dualistic concepts of masculinity and femininity via a case for understanding gender as a verb.

Using Deleuzian and feminist frameworks, the paper appraises six plateaus of desire and intensity through which gendered identities are assembled and re‐assembled in binary terms. The case study approach highlights the positioning and repositioning of a woman whose leadership of a leading academic institution involves breaking new ground in a male‐defined occupation, at a time when higher education is undergoing radical restructure.

The paper shows how masculinised and feminised identity positions are effected through attempts to affix certainty to indistinct and multiple dimensions of being and becoming.

Suggests that if we wish to understand gender in non‐dualistic terms we should think through the body to see both corporeality and identity as ambiguous and always unfinished assemblage

This paper seeks to utilize the concept of testicularity put forward by Flannigan‐Saint‐Aubin to explain a shift in the hegemonic masculinities in two organizations which were unusual in being successful in realizing their aims for improvement.

The methodological approach taken is broadly social constructionism. The two organizations featured in the paper are drawn from a more extensive study of 22 organizations studied in the UK and the Netherlands. The first phase of the research consisted of extended interview visits. The visits, lasting two or three days, consisted of a mix of formal interviews and observation of the sites and less formal discussion and observation, frequently during meal breaks.

The organizations instigated change processes, which created opportunities for women employees, sometimes at the expense of men. Previous work has discussed whether organization change can represent a feminizing of the workplace, but this did not fully encapsulate the present findings – the men remained in charge – and this led the authors to investigate further masculinities. Flannigan‐Saint‐Aubin's concept is rare in that it argues for positive aspects of masculinities in a growing literature which has a tendency to focus on the negative.

The paper argues that shifts in gender performance are a useful way of exploring organization change.

To present an account of changes in the behaviour of male bank managers who were engaged in action learning groups whose focus was on improving service quality and leadership development.

Qualitative study of the development of group process, and the changes in behaviours of the managers whose values and norms were dominated by discourses of traditional hegemonic masculinity. It is also an autobiographical account of the authors' experience of facilitating action learning groups.

Analysis of the groups' processes revealed a connection between the development of the groups in relation to authority and the changes in the managers' behaviour over a period of 12 months during which they began to behave in ways typically characterised as feminine.

Has implications for management development especially the development of male managers and their capacity to work in more feminine ways. Significant factors in developing men's management and leadership capabilities are peer learning, and engagement with authority in ways that are not dissimilar to the experiences of the adolescent and young adult in relation to peers and parents. There are also implications for facilitators and trainers engaged in management development processes.

Offers a theoretical contribution to the concept of the “Authority Cycle”, and theories on masculinity. It is also useful for management development practitioners.

This paper aims to explore the gendered narratives of change management at Marks and Spencer (M&S) and uses them as a lens to consider the gendered nature of the change process itself.

Two extant stories: Sleeping Beauty and the Trojan War are taken, along with the cultural archetype of the American West gunslinger to explore the gender aspects of change. The Marks and Spencer case is analysed using the corollary patriarchal narrative of Sleeping Beauty, a story whose organising logic is revealed as one of concern for patriarchal lineage, and legitimate succession. The paper, draws on the Marks and Spencer principals' memoirs and biographies.

Sleeping Beauty is shown as a narrative saturated in misogyny, aggression and violence. This violence, which is shown to characterise the Marks and Spencer case, is amplified in the second narrative, the Trojan War, in the highly personalised battles of the über‐warriors of The Iliad. The paper concludes that violent, hyper‐masculine behaviour creates and maintains a destructive cycle of leadership lionisation and failure at the company which precludes a more feminine and possibly more effective construction of change management.

Demonstrates how M&S, gendered from its birth, its development through the golden years, the crisis, its changes in leadership and its recent change management has attempted to respond to its changing environment.

To consider Simone De Beauvoir's account of woman as Other, and particularly the appropriation of sexual difference, with reference to the gendered bifurcation and hierarchical organization of change management.

Through a review of relevant managerial texts, as well as a discussion of De Beauvoir's The Second Sex and related scholarship, the paper explores some of the ways in which men and women are “situated” within change management discourse.

Argues that within managerial discourse men are constructed as “effective” managers of change, whereas women are relegated to an “affective” support function, and that this can be understood as an appropriation of women's ascribed Otherness.

The paper contributes to the ongoing development of a critical, feminist approach to the study of management. While acknowledging the many limitations of her work, it makes the case for a reappraisal of De Beauvoir's thinking in this respect.

To introduce the special issue.

A brief description of the Gender and Management track at the European Academy of Management Conference and an outline of the papers in the issue.

The track examined various issues and the papers chosen from the track for the special issue are closest to the central concerns of the journal.

Provides a summary of the perspectives considered.

This paper offers a reanalysis or “re‐view” of a celebrated tale of corporate transformation – the turnaround of Sears, Roebuck and Company – which was discussed in the Harvard Business Review. Noting that “contextual” and “processual” attempts to revise the tale of Sears and its transformation would tend to exchange one monological rendering for another, albeit more critical account, the paper “re‐views” the case in an attempt to make space for perspectives and narratives normally edited out of narratives of change management.

Building upon a critical review of the literature concerned with organizational storytelling the paper “re‐views” the Harvard rendering of the Sears case as an epic tale. The paper then supplements this epic rendering of the Sears case with another two accounts of the case, which recast and review the tale first as a tragedy and then as a comedy.

The paper reveals the polysemic nature of organization and change and suggests the need for approaches to the narration of change that can give voice to perspectives denied by both celebratory and critical accounts of change management.

The paper offers an innovative “re‐view” of a celebrated account of change management and invites the reader to make room for voices and perspectives normally lost within narratives of change.