The King is Dead, Long Live the King: Tall Tales of New Men and New Management in The Bill

Abstract

This article argues that the new styles of management and new styles of masculinity promoted in the discourse of new public management (NPM) are not offering anything new at all. Through a semiotic analysis of the characters and behaviour depicted in the British television police drama, The Bill, we are able to make this explicit. The visual aspects and the time constraints of television communication produce a condensed representation of larger and more covert social phenomena. The episodes we have selected depict a moment of rapid organizational change within the workplace and offer a rich site to explore the implementation of a new policing order and the related repackaging of hegemonic masculinity. In this respect, gender and genre are an inextricable mix and display a remarkableresistance to change.