Abstract
Leadership has long been studied in business schools, but until a generation or so ago, it was studied on a fairly small scale. Today however, virtually every school has a thriving department of leadership, and ‘making leaders’ or some such slogan is included in the mission statements of business schools across the globe. At the same time, people in the real world have also fallen in love with a certain contemporary version of leadership. Those who formerly were mere managers are now called leaders – leaders who apparently have remarkable abilities to effect change while simultaneously being authentic supporters of their so-called followers’ own aspirations to become leaders.
How come such a leadership phenomenon has occurred, and in so short a time? This is the central question of Suze Wilson’s book.
Most leadership scholars, if they think about these sorts of issues at all, would probably say that leadership has come to prominence because the empirical conditions have changed. Organizations, so the mainstream story goes, used to face relatively stable conditions and so only needed management to survive and prosper. In the last few decades, however, they have been faced with increasingly wicked, unmanageable problems – their only hope therefore is leadership. It might seem a natural enough explanation, but it is an explanation which Wilson inverts, and to my mind addresses rather more originally, interestingly – and plausibly.
For Wilson, in Foucault-inflected mode, it’s not that the truth about leadership has constantly been out there, only coming in handy when the world changed. Rather, throughout history, dominant beliefs about leadership have been constantly changing in response to shifts in society. Leadership in her account is ‘an unstable social invention, morphing in form, function and effect in response to changing norms, values and circumstances’ (p. 10). Starting with classical Greece, through medieval times and the enlightenment, she shows how notions of (what we might today call) leadership have changed radically according to wider currents in society. A persistent theme throughout the ages, however, is that beliefs about leadership have been moulded and crafted (deliberately or not) in order to serve the interests of elites: Whether leadership discourse has functioned to support or reform the existing social system … it has repeatedly offered an account which serves elite, anti-democratic interests. The combination of a positioning of order as a critical social good with followers rendered deficient and leaders as superior beings constitutes the three key enduring elements of the Western tradition. (pp. 183–184)
Very different ideas about leadership were propounded in classical Greece, for example, but they still served to legitimate elites – in this particular case, the absolute despotic power of philosopher kings. Similarly, Thomas Carlyle’s famous series of 1840 lectures On Heroes advocated the admiration of supposedly heroic figures as a means to reinvigorate traditional forms of aristocratic authority in society – a society he saw as increasingly immoral, lacking in cohesion and damaged by the recent American and French revolutions.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the ideas many of us have about leadership today serve the interests of contemporary market capitalism. In creating an image of the leader-manager – someone admired by employees, shareholders and market analysts alike, and who transforms the organization and those who work for it as the leader pursues a visionary strategy – ‘leadership scholars have crafted a mirror into which these persons can look and take pleasure in what they see glittering back at them’ (p. 168). At the same time, these same scholars have also created an image of mere followers as docile bodies who will carry out their leaders’ visionary strategies.
If this account is correct, why then has this version of leadership only recently emerged and become fashionable and popular? Wilson’s answer, in part, is that it is little surprise if leadership was treated with suspicion by those generations for whom World War II occurred in living memory. Little surprise too, that the last of this generation were retiring as the current leadership discourses started to take off.
Another point about the changing nature of the current leadership discourse emerged for me from Wilson’s historical analysis – one that she did not particularly highlight. Today, if you buy any book about leadership (even a critical book), it will almost certainly be primarily about organizational leadership – a focus that is never justified or defended, merely assumed and taken for granted (though the odd exemplary political, military or religious leader might be included in order to make flattering comparisons with executives). Such an organizational focus, however, is a very new phenomenon. The kinds of people Plato, Carlyle and so on had in mind as leaders were arguably very different – kings and top politicians, or religious or intellectual or military figures – figures who Weber also argued would be the leaders in his analysis of charismatic authority. Indeed, as Wilson discusses, in an influential review of the leadership literature published in 1948, Stodgill hardly mentioned organizational leaders – he was much more interested in small group processes, including those observed among children.
It is perhaps a measure of the current taken-for-granted prestige of the corporate world (and, no doubt, its wealth in terms of the research funding it makes available) that the focus of leadership scholarship has shifted so decisively – yet in an almost unnoticed way – towards organizations. A shift that further serves to undermine the sorts of claims that Wilson so effectively deconstructs – that leadership can be thought of as a single, more or less coherent, natural and obvious phenomenon that is simply out there in the world, waiting for scholars to further unearth.
You may have already gathered that I like this book a lot. It certainly has an impressive range of scholarship and an original, well-argued take on leadership that is also an engaging read. Where I would be critical of it, however, is in some of the discussions of the implications of its analysis. Understandably, perhaps, Wilson still seems to want to say something positive about leadership, so she makes suggestions like the following: Reconceptualizing leadership as fundamentally a facilitative function reorients attention away from the person of the leader. By removing an idealized and prescribed identity script from our conception of leadership, this approach opens up a space for all persons to consider their leadership contribution in terms of how they can support their colleagues. (p. 215)
She is, of course, aware that ‘calling this facilitative work “leadership” risks dragging in these extant conceptualizations which were clearly intended to deal with different needs and priorities and reflect different values’ (p. 216). In my view, given the elitist, corporatist and managerialist resonances, the term has attracted over the centuries, to make any suggestion that might be taken to imply we can do ‘leadership’ that is in some way better is inherently dangerous. However, some of the critical acclaim on the book’s web page does say that it offers to help us do leadership better – an unfortunate tagline for the book – as Wilson herself shows, talk of leadership inherently serves the interests of elites, and always has.
It is for similar reasons that I remain deeply suspicious of the trend to normalize leadership by making terms like ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ unnoticed default terms in organizational analysis – something that is becoming common even in certain critical circles. I am pleased to say, however, that taken as a whole, Wilson’s book gives us many more reasons than we had before to stand against this kind of normalization. I hope it gets widely read.