his study analyzes constructions of an ideal gendered manager and employee in a mediated cultural setting. Our contemporary culture is mediated in many ways: Media is strongly embedded in our lives and has a possibility to select what issues become visible and how those issues are represented. In that way, media shapes our understandings of the world and how we make sense of it. 

In this interdisciplinary work, the theoretical framework is built upon the doing gender perspective, which understands gender as something we do and as something dynamic. By adopting a poststructuralist view on gender, I understand it as socially and culturally constructed. In such an approach, the focus of the study expands from the individual level into contexts, social and cultural structures, and settings. Thus, the interest of the study is not on individual women or men as such, but rather on how they are represented and how they and their meanings are constructed (Ahl 2007; Henry et al. 2016) in different media texts. 

This dissertation provides an alternative way to study constructions of gender in business studies by focusing on media texts and combining several empirical document materials with diverse analytical methods. The empirical materials comprise academic peer-reviewed journal articles, face value articles from The Economist newspaper, and job advertisements published online in Finland and Estonia. I employ methods stemming from cultural studies, such as close reading and visual analysis, which are only seldom used in business studies, and discourse analytical methods. 

The compilation thesis consists of a synthesis part and four independent studies, the latter of which complete the aim by exposing the studied phenomenon from different viewpoints. The first study explores the research methods scholars have used when empirically studying doing gender thinking, and argues for the relevance of document materials. The second study examines how femininity and gendered power are enacted in The Economist, and shows that the representations of global top women managers are still relatively traditional and done in a way that does not disturb the masculine discourse of management. The third study focuses on the constructions of ideal prospective employees in job advertisements published in Finland and Estonia, and depicts how the coding of gender varies culturally. The fourth independent study discovers how the gendering of expert work takes place in job advertisements by rendering subtly gendered articulations while allowing for interpretative repertoires to appear. 

I argue that the constructions of an ideal manager and employee are gendered, and that the gendering processes are complex and multifaceted, and they depend on cultural settings and prevailing social orders. Interestingly, gendering seems to happen at different levels of working life, as I have studied employees and managers in both global and local contexts. This study provides theoretical contributions by anchoring the doing gender perspective more deeply into business studies and by showing the ubiquitous and fluid nature of gender. At the societal level, this study is relevant not only in its timeliness but also in the sense that media representations and constructions of ideals have an impact on individuals and their real lives in many ways. The current thesis provides re-readings of culture and gender and offers methodologically new ways of empirically studying constructions of gender in the business context. Future studies would benefit from using doing gender as an approach and studying it empirically with more creative methods than what has been done so far.