Bratton
• A classical foundation for today’s leadership theories and practice.
• Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica is often regarded as one of the first prescriptive texts for prospective leaders.
o Was written as an expose of the trick of public speaking – which corrupted Athenians.
• Rhetoric- speaker in the assembly. The art of persuading.
• Although ancient Greek society held oratorical skills in almost as high regard as military prowess, there
was little need to persuade the people of one’s right to leadership when political rule was through naked
force or inherited tradition
• The origins of rhetorical skill appear to lie in Syracuse, a Greek colonial city.
Cervani
Moreover, the leadership field contains a strong moralizing discourse pointing out leaders and leadership as positive,
superior, indispensable and admirable phenomena
which makes it even harder to adhere to basic assumptions whereby this very discourse is seen as immersed in the
processes rather than as a given fact
Central to these values is that our research is a part of an emancipatory process
Shared and collaborative leadership contemporary leadership styles.
❖ shared leadership
❖ collaborative leadership
❖ dispersed and distributed leadership
❖ post heroic leadership: relational, collectivist and non-authoritarian
mainstream leadership sustains heroic, individualist and authoritarian leadership norms.
Toward process and practice and interaction
Problem: literature focus on new arrangements but not question the basic assumptions
Maintains the leader/ follower, subject- object relation.
We redefine the leadership in terms of process and practices organized by people in interaction, we do not focus on
formal leadership.
Leadership is widely dispersed activity.
Focus: process, practice and interaction.
There might be alternative to leadership that might be less sceptical among the scholars, organizing, teamwork.
Standpoints: ontological, epistemological, axiological.
Basic assumption:
The interaction and practice rather than competencies and actions of leaders.
The nature of leadership: toward a process ontology
First and foremost, the study of leadership interactions and practices is based on constructionist ontological and
epistemological assumptions, whereby leadership, leaders, processes are seen as constructed in social interaction
Common leadership literature is based on taken-for-granted individualism, that must be challenged.
leadership as activities with certain outcomes
leadership as practices rather than as competencies held by individual managers.
Ontology of becoming, not static.
The process of symbiosis in the natura environment. Symbiogenesis.
‘relational leadership’, i.e. a perspective on leadership as social processes of relating, processes that are co–
constructed by several interactor
processes are not mechanically reversible and controllable: instead, they are characterized by a social flow of
interacting and connecting whereby organizations, groups, leaders, leadership and so forth are constantly under
construction and re- construction
The ontological challenge is thus how one may remain true to the processual ontology whereby leadership is seen as
a continuous social flow, and at the same time delimit the notion of leadership to discernible practices and
interactions in order to make it possible to study.
Not simplify the complex phenomena when researching.
Likewise, one should constantly be aware that processes, practices and interactions are fully embedded in a complex
social web
Knowing leadership: a constructions epistemology
Axiology: the values by which we judge the quality and relevance of research and what consequences of our research
we can see as acceptable or unacceptable.
Without values the ontological process will be difficult to implement. Because it is aimed to a highly institutionalized
phenomena.
the leadership field contains a strong moralizing discourse pointing out leaders and leadership as positive, superior,
indispensable and admirable phenomena
Central to these values is that our research is a part of an emancipatory process, whereby taken-for-granted notions
of leadership are articulated and challenged — both in theory and in practice.
Emancipatory: giving people social and political freedom and right
In research terms this implies that existing concepts and theories should be judged against the basic assumptions
upon which they are built (rather than only against the validity of their conclusions), and the fact that new concepts
and theories should explicitly be argued for in terms of basic scientific assumptions.
The main reason for this reasoning is that ‘leadership’ is a well-known and institutionalized concept in society, and
that actors often tend to draw upon institutionalized notions of leadership in their daily construction of leadership
activities
In practical terms, the emancipatory ideal is a reaction to the tendency of leadership theories to include some people
and exclude others, to obsess with some and suppress the rest, to emphasize the grandiose and forget about the
mundane, to violently limit what becomes intelligible in terms of leadership. We must avoid the ‘generalization
trap’ into which so many leadership researchers have fallen before us, and instead study leadership practices and
interactions as local-cultural processes, being open to a multitude of voices and interpretations even elusive and
contradictory ones
Critical performativity:
Critical pragmatism:
engage in critical dialogue and to wish to encourage reflection, even on one’s own certainties. Critical interventions —
critiques, concepts, thick descriptions — then are pragmatic
Performativity is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the
effect of change.[1] The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such
as anthropology, social and cultural geography, economics, gender studies (social construction
of gender), law, linguistics, performance studies, history, management studies and philosophy.
Leadership as discourse: performativity and research ideology
An important aspect of studying leadership in terms of processes, interactions and practices — i.e. as socially con-
structed, emergent organizing embedded in sociocultural contexts — is that dominating discourses on the nature and
quality of leadership must be seen as an inevitable and integral aspect of what is studied.
Not surprisingly, ‘leadership’ is a most performative discourse (in the sense provided by Butler, 1999) that may
invade any organizing process in the guise of grandiose and heroic ideals, strong bases of identity and expectations,
principles for hierarchization and segregation, and a myriad of tools and trick
a subversive re-construction of the concept. Performativity is in fact based on repetition, and subversive repetition
is one way of participating in the very practices that one wants to challenge
Delimiting leadership practices and interactions
Gronn (2002) proposes the study of ‘concertive actions’ such as spontaneous collaboration patterns, intuitive
understandings that emerge between colleagues, and institutional arrangements supporting self-managed teams and
other formal practices.
ath et al. (2008) build on much of the literature hitherto discussed in their plea for an ‘integrative ontology’ of
leadership, in which the ‘tripod’ — three basic concrete entities of traditional leadership research: leaders, followers
and shared goals — need to be replaced.
Their alternative ‘DAC ontology’ instead focuses on the outcomes of leadership — Direction, Alignment and
Commitment — as situated in a cultural context, thereby allowing considerable variation in the manifestation of DAC
between different local settings, while, in the traditional ontology:
‘. . . it is the presence of leaders and followers interacting around their shared goals that marks the occurrence of
leadership, with the DAC ontology, it is the presence of direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC) that marks the
occurrence of leadership.’ (Drath et al., 2008: 636)
From our point of view, the contributions by Gronn (2002) and Drath et al. (2008) point to important aspects of what
is to be studied as leadership processes, practices and interactions, such as the co-construction of a sense of
common direction in social interaction. Both contributions offer concrete suggestions on how to discern
leadership from general organizational processes, suggestions that may still fit well with a process ontology, given
that one remains aware of the fallacies of misplaced concreteness.
Direction for us means direction in organizing processes. Agreement on goals might be one sort of constructing
direction, but direction does not need to be ‘one direction’; rather, it is the situated, moment by moment, construction
of direction that becomes interesting
To us, the DAC concepts tend to focus exclusively on converging processes of leadership, thereby emphasizing the
common and the collective. Hence, we propose the concepts of co-orientation (enhanced understandings of
possibly diverging arguments, interpretations and decisions of all involved parties) and action-spacing
(construction of possibilities, potentials, opportunities and limitations for individual and collective action within the
local-cultural organizational context).
direction, co-orientation and action- spacing.
Concepts such as action-spacing and co-orientation are the first steps we have taken.
Dialectic or dialectics (Greek: διαλεκτική, dialektikḗ; related to dialogue; German: Dialektik),
also known as the dialectical method, is at base a discourse between two or more people
holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish
the truth through reasoned methods of argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the
concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and the
modern pejorative sense of rhetoric.[1][2] Dialectic may thus be contrasted with both the eristic,
which refers to argument that aims to successfully dispute another’s argument (rather than
searching for truth), and the didactic method, wherein one side of the conversation teaches the
other. Dialectic is alternatively known as minor logic, as opposed to major logic or critique.
Affirmitive action: kvotering, increasing the representation of several particular groups.
Inequality Regimes
What is studied?
• how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial
relations of inequality
• how to iden- tify barriers to creating equality in work organizations
• the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of
inequalities in work organizations.
Work organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of
complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations.
Most studies of the production of class, gender, and racial inequalities in organizations have
focused on one or another of these categories, rarely attempting to study them as complex,
mutually reinforcing or contradicting processes. But focusing on one category almost inevitably
obscures and oversimplifies other interpenetrating realities.
Feminist scholars of colour have argued for 30 years, with the agreement of most white feminist
scholars, that much feminist scholarship was actually about white middle-class women, ignoring
the reality that the category gender is fundamentally complicated by class, race/ethnicity, and
other differences
Inequality Regimes
All organizations have inequality regimes, defined as loosely interrelated practices, processes,
actions, and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender, and racial inequalities within
particular organizations. The ubiquity of inequality is obvious: Managers, executives, leaders,
and department heads have much more power and higher pay than secretaries, production
workers, students, or even professors. Even organizations that have explicit egalitarian goals
develop inequality regimes over time, as considerable research on egalitarian feminist
organizations has shown
I define inequality in organizations as systematic disparities between participants in power and
control over goals, resources, and outcomes; workplace decisions such as how to organize
work; opportunities for promotion and interesting work; security in employment and benefits;
pay and other monetary rewards; respect; and pleasures in work and work relations.
Equality rarely exists in control over goals and resources, while pay and other monetary rewards
are usually unequal. Other disparities may be less evident, or a high degree of equality might
exist in particular areas, such as employment security and benefits.
Inequality regimes are highly various in other ways; they also tend to be fluid and changing.
These regimes are linked to inequality in the surrounding society, its politics, history, and culture.
What varies? The components of inequality regimes
The bases of inequality
The bases for inequality in organizations vary, although class, gender, and race processes are usually
present.
