Managing between the Sheets: Lifestyle Magazines and the Management of Sexuality in Everyday Life
- 1 February 2004
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Sexualities
- Vol. 7 (1), 81-106
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460704040144
Abstract
Considering the intersection between managerial discourses, sexuality and contemporary cultural resources such as lifestyle magazines, this article reflects critically on the extent to which the discourses and techniques associated with the management of bureaucratic organizations have been incorporated into the (self-)management of sexuality and sexual relations. Locating its concern with sexuality within critical social theory, the article develops a critique of the work of those who emphasize the postmodernization of sexuality and the informalization of management. Drawing on recent research involving an analysis of management texts and lifestyle magazines, as well as a series of semi-structured interviews, it argues that contemporary cultural discourses on sexuality, permeated as they are by references to managerial imperatives such as efficiency and effectiveness, serve to arrest the inter-subjective aspects of eroticism (Bataille, 1962; Rose, 1995) and to reduce sexual relations in the contemporary era to yet another aspect of the ‘reflexive project of self’ (Giddens, 1992).Keywords
This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit:
- Wondering about Critical Management StudiesManagement Communication Quarterly, 1998
- Love and EroticismTheory, Culture & Society, 1998
- On Postmodern Uses of SexTheory, Culture & Society, 1998
- Balancing Sex and Love since the 1960s Sexual RevolutionTheory, Culture & Society, 1998
- Gut Reactions to Matters of the Heart: Reflections on Rationality, Irrationality and SexualitySociological Review, 1997
- Refusing Individuality: How Human Beings Are Made into SubjectsCommunication Theory, 1997
- The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life and the Abduction of Feminism: Signs from Women's Advice BooksTheory, Culture & Society, 1994
- THE CULT[URE] OF THE CUSTOMERJournal of Management Studies, 1992
- 'Constructing women': women's sexuality and social policyCritical Social Policy, 1992
- Constructing Sex as a Domain of Pleasure and Self-expression: Sexual Ideology in the SixtiesTheory, Culture & Society, 1989