We argue that the healthy, fit and athletic body plays an essential role in the waycontemporary managerial identities are construed. Drawing on insights from JudithButler, we study these bodily identities as a form of regulation in organizations. Weidentify the cultural basis of regulation, show how it operates through specific norms,and detail how it implies gender. Based on an empirical study of men and womenin management who are passionate about their healthy and fit bodies and athleticlifestyles, we demonstrate how norms set by managerial athleticism – understood asa particular regulative regime – operate through three discursive practices: perfectingthe body, advocating against non-fit bodies, and becoming a role model. We showhow the norms operate in both explicit and abject fashion and how they are implied inmasculine language and materialized in physical (athletic) bodies. We offer new insightson how bodily identity regulation occurs and elucidate the gendered complexity andcontradictions inscribed in managerial athleticism

Keywordsbody, fitness, gender, health, identity, management, managerial athleticism, regulation,sportsCorresponding

This article explores how ethical agency, as other-oriented caring, emerged from feelings of being different in a cultural organization by drawing on feminist ethics of care. By analyzing interview material from an ethnographic study, we centralize the relationship between feelings of being different, vulnerability and the development of sensibilities, practices and imaginaries of care. We elaborate on how vulnerability serves as a ground for caring with rather than for others, and illustrate how it allowed individuals to challenge both organizational, normative diversity discourses and essentialization of differences. We contribute to the literature on critical diversity management by furthering problematizations of instrumental diversity management from the perspective of care, and to the organizational literature on feminist care ethics by empirically exploring how ethical agency emerges from tensions related to feeling different. While previous studies have shown how marginalized individuals use their sense of otherness to negotiate, conform to and resist organizational norms, practices and discourses, we provide further insights on how it also can drive concern and care for others, and thus serve as possible ground for ethical change initiatives within organizations.