This article works with the visual narrative of several popular films to critically analyse how masculinity is constructed in the cinematic workplace, focusing on the representations of managers and the interplay between the practice of management and the practice of gender. Using a performative-practice approach, the article focuses on the ‘saying and doing’ of gender in the films chosen and shows that organizations in film are a testing ground for competing forms of masculinity; in fact, one type—the ‘organizational hero’—may offer a type of resistance to prevailing cultural paradigms, so that Hollywood films present both a propagation of dominant patriarchal discourses and a space for challenging these discourses.
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