This thesis aims to investigate how the ideal Swedish managers have been expressed in job listings (in newspapers from 1988 and on the Internet in 2013), and whether those expressions exemplify the developments as argued by notable researchers within the field of management discourse.
Discourse analysis considers the context within which people talk and write about different phenomena, which affects the way people look at this phenomena. In this case, the phenomena is the method by which the "ideal manager" is expressed in job listings. Hence, the study is based on a content analysis combined with a critical discourse analysis. It is critical in the way that it aims to reveal what discourses are dominant and what discourses are hidden within the job listings. The study concludes that the ideal manager attributes do not differ substantially between 1988 and 2013, contrary to what researchers argue is supposed to be the case. Some manager styles may still be associated with either male or female attributes and this could be a barrier for new manager ideals to breakthrough because of peoples preconceptions of some manager styles connected to a specific gender.