Abstract
Democratizing Leadership is about as far from a standard book on organizational leadership as you can get. And it really is the counter-hegemonic work its sub-title claims it to be. I must admit though that its radicalism took me a bit by surprise. After all, if books about leadership can be said to form an oeuvre, then the leadership oeuvre is rather more notable for its desire to maintain hegemony than to challenge it. We read early on that: The daily life of businesses, schools, and communities is typically marked by domination and control, by hierarchical systems so customary they are seen as commonsense. Democracy in most settings is typically unexpected and often deemed unacceptable. (p. xii)
It is in this context that Klein defines leadership as the dynamics of power operating between individuals – dynamics of power that are required specifically for organizations and communities to become more democratic. Things like ‘authentic voice for all participants, inclusive decision-making with integrity, and responsible collective action that promotes social justice’ (p. 4) don’t just happen. They need, Klein argues, democratizing leadership in order to make their occurrence more likely. Thus leadership ‘must help individuals develop an authentic, personal, political voice while avoiding unintentional coercion or co-optation’ (p. 45). As such, the kind of leadership being commended will ‘typically operate outside of positional authority or as an insurgent force from within (rarely from atop) bureaucratic hierarchy’ (p. 6).
For Klein, nurturing democratizing leadership is, in part, about providing an intellectual basis to underpin it. This is the focus for the first half of the book. But he’s concerned with more than merely intellectual resources; he is fully aware that practical measures will also be required. Through the three detailed case studies provided in the second half of the book, he shows how, if anything resembling democratic participation is to have any chance in our neo-liberal times, it will likely be in the teeth of opposition from elites. Not that elites are the only threat it faces. Democratic ideals are also likely to run into practical difficulties and dilemmas, interpersonal rivalries and squabbles, compromises and setbacks, even among those who are deeply committed to democratization.
Given that they are today’s hegemonic leaders par excellence, it seems doubtful that chief executive officers (CEOs) or other corporate elites will be among Democratizing Leadership’s natural readership. Indeed, Klein argues that such people typically ‘use coercive, nondemocratic decision-making processes … or restrict decision-making to a few elites amongst whom little dissension is tolerated’ (pp. 108–109). Rather, the book is addressed primarily to activists and radical educationalists. In making his arguments, Klein explicitly takes a leaf or two from Paulo Freire’s ([1970] 2017) classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed. His own conceptions of leadership share strong affinities with Freire’s description of ‘revolutionary leaders’ (p. 106); leaders who work alongside those ‘oppressed by the elites’ – as comrades, not as masters – to find voice together, and so also a possibility of liberty.
At the same time, however, there is a good dose of realism taken liberally throughout the book. Klein is clearly aware not only that ‘democratic freedom and organizational efficiency are in dynamic tension with one another’ (p. 108) but also that ‘[d]emocratic forms of leadership are complex and conflicted’ (p. 108). Furthermore, he does not foresee a time when conflict and struggle will disappear.
One of the book’s illustrative case studies is drawn from a standard corporation – a commercial bank (pp. 133–156). The other two are from more self-consciously radical groupings – a theatre that organized an annual May Day parade within a local community (pp. 156–193) and an alliance of delegates from 74 self-identified peace groups (pp. 196–222). All three make intriguing reads, with plenty of telling details provided from Klein’s participation in them. The latter two cases show how, even given the most felicitous of contexts, democratic decision-making tends to proceed at best in a three steps forward, two steps backwards manner. Perhaps, because of my own research interests, however, I found the case of the bank particularly interesting, especially as a bank seems a particularly unlikely place for the emergence of democratic spaces and counter-hegemonic leadership.
So let’s journey back briefly to the beginning of the 1980s and to a US bank at the vanguard of neoliberal globalisation. The president at the bank introduced a Visual Arts Program ‘as a sign of change and as a symbol of the creative response required to succeed’ (p. 134) in the newly deregulated banking system. An art historian was commissioned to buy contemporary art and display it in the bank headquarters (HQ). Her selection criterion was work that she felt was not only of the highest calibre but would also focus employees’ attention on social issues and stimulate dialogue among them. Initially, the program met with resistance, not least because it established a policy that no-one could hang artwork in their private offices – only artwork provided by the program would be allowed. Nevertheless, the collection grew and had an acquisition budget of US$350,000 in 1983, surging to US$500,000 in 1984. During this period, however, it was still widely perceived by employees as an elite, avant-garde operation, and they continued to voice dissent, often through ironic comments placed underneath the artworks. In part as a response to the dissent, the program initiated a series of projects designed to get feedback from employees about the art. This was the move that began a process of innovation and democratization and which turned the art historian who curated the project into something of a democratizing leader.
By 1988, a newly created Employee Art Selection project allowed employees to form teams to select art from the collection for their floors. Employees could decide on site selection criteria and even on the process of selection itself. This was important because, as Klein comments, when a ‘democratic space is opened, that space tends to expand as political literacy leads participants to question less democratic spaces’ (p. 146). For example, feminist artists were commissioned, and their work surfaced tensions within the bank about gender inequities. Soon, many aspects of the corporate culture were being challenged – in ways that the president had presumably not envisaged. In the end (perhaps predictably), the program was shut down by corporate fiat. However, the closure of the program had significant implications. Klein reports that some ‘employees could not return to being voiceless. Once their decisions found respect amongst a collegial community, they could not bind themselves again to a hierarchy of control’ (p. 156) and ended up leaving the bank.
What then does this kind of book contribute to organization studies? It is an interesting question to pose, not least because Klein works in a department of Justice and Peace Studies, and so is likely to bring a rather different set of perspectives to bear on the issue of leadership than someone might whose background is in organization studies. One of the most refreshing things for me in this context is that Democratizing Leadership is a book about leadership which is not (emphatically not) focused on organizational elites. Indeed, the book seeks to create a new hegemony for leadership, a hegemony in which organizational elites, if they appear at all, do so more as the antithesis of genuine leadership than as its apotheosis. This route seems to me to be a more fruitful and progressive way forward for critically orientated leadership studies than any talk of followership might be. Indeed, I am delighted to report that the term ‘follower’ did not appear even once in Democratizing Leadership. An emphasis on the follower might seem to turn the tables on the leader. Arguably, however, calling people followers is more likely to celebrate and reinforce traditional heroic views about executives as leaders (why else would we follow them?) while denigrating ordinary workers into the bargain (because to be a follower implies that your identity is dependent upon an elite).
Democratizing Leadership also makes an interesting contribution to leadership studies in its clear and unequivocal naming of organizations as sites of domination. I can imagine that at least some of the sorts of executives who like to think of themselves as leaders might imagine that they are committed to the democratic ideals that Klein champions. What Klein makes clear is that if they do imagine such things, then they are almost certainly deceiving themselves. Democratizing leadership virtually always has to come from the bottom up – executives are the problem for leadership, not the cure.
Nevertheless, I guess that because it has the word leadership in the title, Democratizing Leadership might be picked up by people like CEOs and other readers who wouldn’t ordinarily read such a radical text. I hope they keep reading beyond the introduction.