The good night kiss: fatherhood among corporate managers and the reconfiguration of hegemonic masculinity in Chile

ABSTRACT

The empirical research on corporate managers has rarely focused on the situation in Latin America, and it has rarely addressed managers’ intimate lives. Based on life-history interviews with young corporate managers (aged 30-45), and some of their wives, this paper examines the changes and continuities in the patterns of fatherhood in the Chilean ruling class, and their relation to hegemonic masculinity. The tensions that these men face are discussed, exploring how they navigate between the simultaneous pressure for having a successful career and for embodying an involved fatherhood. Findings suggest changes in the way managers practice their fatherhood, and also, variations in the way these practices are deployed. These variations are expressed in two patterns of fatherhood in the managerial sector as response to this tension, being related to organisational and family dynamics. The biographical material suggests that these changes and variations are not necessarily related to more equitable gender relations, but to a reconfiguration of hegemonic masculinity.

KEYWORDS:

• Fatherhood
• managers
• elites
• hegemonic masculinity
• Chile

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Francisca Sallato, Raimundo Frei, Francisco Aguayo, María Elena Peralta and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on early versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Sebastián Madrid is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Catholic University of Chile, and Research Coordinator of the Democratic Governance Program at UNDP in Santiago, Chile. His research and teaching interests are in the intersection of gender, social class and biographies, with a particular focus on power and privilege. His most recent publication is ‘The formation of hegemonic masculinities among the ruling class. The case of sexuality in Chilean elite private schools’ in Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad – Revista Latinoamericana, 2016.

ORCID

Sebastián Madrid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7165-7443

Notes

1 It refers to the Gross Domestic Product converted to international dollars using purchasing power parity (PPP) rates and divided by total population. An international dollar has the same purchasing power over GDP as a US dollar has in the USA. In Chile, in 1990, the GDP (PPP) per capita was USD4407. It increased to USD23,336 in 2015. Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD.

2 It measures the deviation of the distribution of income within a country. A value of 0 represents absolute equality, a value of 100 absolute inequality. In 2015, Chile had a Gini index of 47.6. The riches 5% gets the 52% of the total income (UNDP, 2017).

3 This was a larger qualitative study that examined the emerging masculinities in the Chilean ruling class, and the roles of elite private schools and women in this process (Madrid, 2013a).

4 It was not possible to include the wives of the other five managers since they did not want me to interview them (Madrid, 2013b).

5 All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chilean National Council of Science and Technology (CONICYT [Beca Doctorado Australia]) under the Bicentennial Scholarship Program for conducting doctoral studies in Australia (2009–2012).