TITLE Leadership Development in New Zealand: A Production of Leadership Perspective ABSTRACT The production of leadership perspective draws inspiration from the sociology of culture to explore how leadership concepts and practices are influenced by the social dynamics of their development, promotion, distribution, and consumption. Toward this end, this article maps out the leadership industries, a loosely-coupled network of actors and institutions that dominate the fields of leadership production. Attention to the resources directed toward elevating leadership as a strategic and moral imperative tempers the predominance of social-psychological accounts of leadership and raises questions about industrial organization, historical context, and the links between culture, consciousness and social structure. This approach also invests leadership research with a more reflexive sense of its own role in the production and reproduction of leadership. (Stolen -> Eric Guthey, 2009 Working Paper: The Production of Leadership) Leadership’s current lofty status as a solution to ongoing social an economic problems draws attention to the diverse network of actors and institutions required to elevate and maintain its position as a strategic and moral imperetive. Towards this end, this thesis seeks map out the New Zealand leadership industries creating a cultural and historical context for the production and reproduction of leadership (Guthey, 2009). In particular, analysis of the role of the leadership development industry as one which shapes and influences leadership concepts and practices via a cultural production lens (Peterson, 1974). ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Dora Wan, for her enduring support and patience. Eric Guthey, for guiding me on an intellectual journey with to uncharted territory and inspiring me to go even when others don’t want to. Brad Jackson, for his honest and critical eye to my work and his support and mentoring academically, professionally an personally. Josh & Gemma, for chilling me out and pulling me up when I sound like a douche. You guys have made every day in the lab funny at least once. Brigid Carroll and the team at Excelerator, for tolerating the challenges that having an academic on a leadership development course can bring and for helping me meet those challenges myself. To all those who participated in my research, without your time and experience I wouldn’t have been able to learn anywhere near as much during this project as I did To the rest of the University of Auckland Business school; the executive, the teaching staff, the librarians, everyone in Spark - you mostly took me away from my thesis but you gave me a reason to do it well and made my academic experience a pleasure. PROLOGUE I can’t remember the first time someone told me I could be a leader or that I needed to show leadership. But the idea has permeated my life for as long as I can remember, at least as far back intermediate school I can re-call the adult world telling me about it. They wanted more of it on the basketball court, in the orchestra, in the classroom and the community. I didn’t even notice the ambiguity of the concept, being developed as a leader seemed a totally natural thing. After a while it became addictive, it was both empowering and legitimising for me. Leadership was a defining part of my identity and I had an almost uncontrollable urge both when I was in a group or when any type of leadership role was on offer to be the one in front. As an older high school student I would frantically buy and read any luminaries book with leadership in the title, most of which would discredit my work if I was to disclose them now. Through my undergraduate degree the word began to pop up more and more although the lines between leadership and good management were being blurred as the roles were mixed both on campus and within my workplace. Even so, the leadership development opportunities propagated themselves through my timetable. I was even involved in the Massey University Leadership Programme: a ruse for outsourcing student retention to other students in exchange for development opportunities. When I arrived for postgraduate studies, leadership was there as the answer to my problems. What was I going to study? How was I going to do my research? I knew I was interested in mergers and organisational culture, but even then, the leadership lens was applied all the way through to my dissertation. Despite this in depth examination of the idea, leadership is still utopian to me. I’m even an active participant at the moment in leadership development, participating with Excelerator: The New Zealand Leadership Institute in their ‘Future Leaders’ programme. I first got told I should do this programme when I finished a management paper on leadership in my honours year, one of my lecturers was a facilitator on the programme and thought I should do it. I guess you can display leadership in the classroom after all. I always try to place myself inside my research in some way. I’ve embarked on this journey to make sense of the cultural phenomena called leadership which I grew up surrounded by. It has shaped the decisions I’ve made, the expectations I put on myself, and the role I saw myself playing in the world. The more I think about it the less natural it seems. The stickiest metaphor I’ve picked up through the Future Leaders programme is that doing leadership can be about asking the right questions. The facilitator I mentioned earlier, Brigid Carroll, likened it to a hockey match; you're dribbling, passing, stealing, intercepting, but at some point you just push the ball out into a new empty space. In that moment you create potential, opportunity, tension and energy for something great to happen. I’ve been given a few of those passes this year, and the challenge of doing this thesis was one of them. So now I’m going ask you to put down your reverence for the word leadership, like I’ve had to, and put something out into space for a while so that you can help me answer the question; why and how has leadership played such a big role in my life? CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Talk of leadership permeates nearly all spheres of modern life, it is demanded of us as individuals and we demand it of everyone else; our politicians, our managers, our sports people, our teachers, our students and our gas station pump attendants. More so than ever before leadership has been deemed vital to the success and survival of our businesses, governments, communities and selves. Our societal discourse, particularly that surrounding organisational success, has long since reached a tipping point for attributing leadership to successful outcomes. Organisations have been ‘called to arms’ to pursue with vigour top leadership talent if they are to attain organisational success and longevity (see: Chambers et al. 1998). Talk in the past of leadership development reaching its zenith (Day, 2001) has been outpaced by the rapidity of adoption of leadership development programmes by the wider organisational landscape. For some time, organisations have viewed leadership as a direct source of competitive advantage (McCall, 1998; Vicere & Fulmer, 1998) driving demand for leadership development and coaching. These sentiments have been both elevated and re-inforced by scholarly research and publications as well as popular media. A book search on Amazon turns up over three hundred and sixty thousand titles containing leadership (Amazon, 2009). Furthermore, much of the academic community has embraced this status quo, proliferating an estimated eight hundred approaches to leadership (Jackson & Parry, 2008) including suggestions that leadership is innately human (Bass,1985) and a ‘natural’ bias (Meindl, 1985). Considering the above, it is strange that leadership hasn’t always enjoyed such a pre-eminent and lofty position in society (Fairhurst, 2007). Confounded by scholars notorious inability to agree on a definition and with several questioning the existence of leadership as an observational phenomena at all (Sveningson & Alvesson, 2006), we must begin to question by what means this elevation has occurred. Our current view of leadership is an historically isolated phenomena and despite any observed ‘naturalness’, we must bring into question and how and why this is so. As elaborated by Guthey: “However natural, useful, or crucial to human endeavors leadership may seem, it still requires the efforts of many diverse actors and institutions to maintain its position of cultural, strategic and moral prominence.” (2009: 1) This position of prominence and the way in which leadership has been elevated to has for some time gone unnoticed by both society and the scholarly community. Furthermore, the efforts of this network of actors and institutions that both produce and consume leadership in our society are yet to receive the scrutiny and analysis befitting a multi-billion dollar industry (Grint, 2007; Sinclair, 2007; Jackson & Parry, 2008). One approach that recognises the inherent ‘createdness’ of cultural forms such as leadership is the production of culture perspective (Peterson, 1974). As summarised by Peterson and Anand: “The production of culture perspective focuses on how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved.” (2004: 311) As this rationale has accomplished with other cultural forms from art to music, this thesis will attempt to bring attention to the industrial practices that elevate the value of leadership as a cultural commodity and provide an alternative to the romanticised tendency that proliferate contemporary leadership thought. The following sections will provide a broad overview of this thesis contents and arguments as well as the general and personal significance of the study. It will finish by painting a brief overview of the leadership industries in New Zealand and providing an overview of the thesis structure. GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY This thesis is of general significance as a result of contributions towards literature, use of novel epistemological and methodological approaches, and theoretical and empirical contributions to the production of leadership perspective. This section will elaborate on each of these points of significance. Firstly, by contextualising the contributions to literature within two respective fields; namely leadership and cultural studies. Secoundly, through a brief outline of the novel use of a critical realist perspective as well as the use of tactile and visual tools in the methodological process. Thirdly, a discussion on the theoretical significance as well as empirical contributions to the recently proposed production of leadership perspective and the significance of this approach for both scholars and practitioners. This section will conclude with notes on the means by which the thesis is differentiated and the primary research questions that it will attempt to answer. Traditional perspectives on leadership generally take on a more micro-level approach; whether this be leader-centric, follower-centric or discursive. Although scholars working on follower or social attribution theories have understanding of the individual and group level constructions of leadership, there has been little research into the significance of the greater business dynamics that produce them. With this in mind, we are instead looking to move up from the individual and group in order to examine leadership at the sociological and industrial level. Observations at this level raise questions not only about the inherent createdness of the idea but also give credence to critical scholarship in the leadership field. For example, Alvesson and Sveningsson (2006) speak of leadership as the extraordinisation of the mundane and urge scholars to bring into question the existence of leadership as a visible phenomena. This drastic disconnect between the observations of scholars and the proliferation of leadership products and discourse problematises the current literature. To both counter this and in acknowledgement of the aforementioned ‘createdness’, this thesis proposes that “it is important to understand leadership as a product of the many organizational, promotional, and discursive practices” (Eric Guthey et al., 2009). Embedded in this is the benefit that it will assist in providing a more reflexive sense of the literature’s own role in the process of leadership production. The second field of literature drawn upon in this thesis is the sociology of culture. As opposed to problematising the extant literature as the case is with leadership, this thesis intends to expand and re-apply existing understanding of the cultural industries by applying them to leadership. In particular this thesis will draw upon the production of culture perspective as set out by Peterson (1974). Brings a critical realist lens to leadership work. This is an underused epistemological approach in organisation studies in general. The empirical component of this thesis contributes exploratory evidence to three different levels; the producers of leadership products, the cultural intermediaries that shape the products delivery, and finally a group that consumes these leadership products directly. Despite only being exploratory in nature, the results of the interviews and focus groups provide validation for the perspective and provide grounds for further research with the different groups. In addition to scholarly contributions it is expected that this work will be of both interest to and significant for practitioners for several reasons. Firstly, a cursory glance at the job classifieds would have most believe that we must all possess leadership skills in order to succeed in this job market. Furthermore, given that much of organisational leadership is currently in the hands of the ageing baby boomer generation, there is a burgeoning need to develop the next generation of leaders and organisational demands reflect this. This leadership vacuum, whether natural or created, brings about demand for more and better kinds of leadership; the process by which this occurs is something this thesis hopes to bring to light. Secondly, as long as individuals invoke the leadership concept as a means of attributing personal potency, leadership will remain a field worthy of study (Calder, 1977). Thirdly, leaders embody and perpetuate our societies dialogue over how business and society should be run, therefore scholars and practitioners alike cannot afford to ignore that complex network of voices and interest that influence and contribute to this dialogue. Finally, this thesis creates the opportunity to create more and better kinds of leadership; though this thesis will seek to provide a basis for this rather than a prescriptive means. In addition to points of significance, this thesis seeks to differentiate itself by several means. Firstly, it incorporates theoretical development throughout the literature review and proposes more of an argument for the approach as opposed to an all encompassing review of current thought. Secondly, and reflected in the former, this thesis seeks to synthesise sociological theories into the leadership literature, a field typically dominated by psychologists and organisational behaviourists. Thirdly, the results compliment the text with a visualisation of a cultural industry, something previously not attempted. Finally, this thesis also proceeds with a more reflective understanding of it’s own role in the production and reproduction of leadership knowledge. Given the above points of significance this thesis seeks to achieve, the following research questions have been pursued: Answering these three questions has driven all decisions regarding the content of the thesis; from the structure of the literature review, the research design and methodologies adopted and the directions of the discussion around the results. Now that we have discussed the general significance of the project, the following section will provide a geographically contextualised explanation of the field in which the research was completed. PERSONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY The prologue of this study places me inside the context of this study, but in addition to my personal experiences around societies demand for leadership, this masters culminates in several other considerable points of significance. Desire for understanding Professional development Becoming aware of leadership as an industry makes the world around you suddenly look very different. You begin to see just how romantisised the concept is and how prolific businesses that are built around it are. Going to the business section at borders is like going to the leadership section. LEADERSHIP CONTEXT IN NEW ZEALAND Cultural industries in all forms are traditionally hard to quantify, this problem is exacerbated when large segments of those involved reject the traditional notions of industry or subscribe to any kind of organisational grouping. STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY This thesis begins with the research question, how has the production of leadership in New Zealand developed and changed historically. In illustrating this, this thesis is arranged in 6 chapters accompanied by 6 reflections. This first introductory chapter serves to illustrate the purpose and content of each chapter in addition to providing both personal and general justification for the study. Chapter two seeks to review the current literature that the production of leadership perspective is centered on. To this ends the chapter will be divided into four subsections; the production of culture (Peterson, 1976), the romance of leadership (Meindl, 1985), Discursive leadership (Fairhurst, 2007) and Production of Leadership (Guthey, 2009). The first three sub sections will be used to inform and illustrate the development of the final section on the production of leadership perspective which seeks to draw from all three. It should be noted that this literature review is designed not simply as an all inclusive survey of the published literature but rather an argument for the need of this study With this thesis seeking to incorporate the theoretical development of a new perspective for making sense of leadership, the final section of chapter two will seek more to conceptualise this theory based off the preceding sections in addition to reviewing the scarce existing literature on the topic. Whilst this conceptualisation builds off existing literature, it will also play a critical role in examining those elements that have contributed to its development. Chapter three will outline the research paradigm under which research design decisions were produces. The methodologies and methods used in this research will then be explained and justified. This will be done by first outlining the critical realist paradigm including ontological and epistemological implications followed by the specific design of the research. Each method will then be outlined individually and justified. Chapter Four seeks to outline the results on the research undertaken. The results are divided into two key Theoretical chapters followed by reflective accounts on the production of that knowledge the personal narrative accounts CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW Production of Culture (Peterson), Romance of leadership (Meindl et al), Discursive construction of leadership (Fairhurst), Production of leadership (Guthey) This literature review will, contrary to popular tradition, not only reviews the current literature but also illustrates the theory building of the production of leadership perspective. Leadership Antonakis et al (2004) states that “most leadership scholars would agree, in principle, that leadership can be defined as the nature of the influencing process – and its resultant outcomes – that occurs between a leader and followers and how this influencing process is explained by the leaders’s dispositional characteristics and behaviours, follower perceptions and attributions of the leader, and the context in which the influencing process occurs” (p.5). Critics attack heroic models of leadership but ignore the complex network of producers consumers and intermediaries that go into sustaining such figures. THE SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL TRADITION ATTRIBUTION PERSPECTIVES “Calder (1977), among others, reminded us that leadership as a concept was not invented by social scientists but borrowed by them from the cultural, linguistic vernacular of commonly employed concepts social actors use to make sense of the world around them and to communicate it to others” (Meindl, 1995: 339) “They point out that “the social construction of organizational realities has elevated the concept of leadership to a lofty status and level of significance,” investing the concept with “a brilliance that exceeds the limits of normal scientific inquiry.” (1985: 78) Both observers and participants in organizational life have developed “highly romanticized, heroic views” of leaders and their significance, the authors maintain, constructing in the process an imagery and a mythology that attributes leaders with mysterious and near mystical powers.” (Eric Guthey et al., 2009 citing Meindl 1985) “the romanticized conception of leadership permits us to be more comfortable in associating leaders—by ascribing to them control and responsibility—with events and outcomes to which they can be plausibly linked.” (Meindl,1985: 80) Leaders are over attributed to organisational performance (Calder 1977; Pfeffer 1977; Meindl et al. 1985; Chen and Meindl 1991; Khurana 2002; Hayward et al. 2004; Guthey and Jackson 2005). “What is American is the projection of cultural and organizational accomplishment onto individuals who are then elevated and imbued with the aura and mythology of those accomplishments.” (Jones, 2006) “the follower-centric agenda of romance of leadership seeks to understand the variance of constructions as influenced by social processes that occur among followers and by salient contextual/situational factors, and their implications for behavior.” (Meindl, 1995) It is a t the end a social psychological approach to attribution bias. Richard Barker, SInclaire, Alvesson - have looked at industrial practices of leadership Management fashion perspective - often dismissed Guthey morsing 2006 THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF LEADERSHIP “In a nutshell, leadership psychology has been on a quest to understand the essence of leadership, whether it be found in the individual, the situation, or some combination thereof (Grint, 2000)” (Fairhurst, 2008: ix) “Leadership is exercised when ideas expressed in talk or action are recognized by others as capable of progressing tasks or problems which are important to them” (Robinson, 2001: 93) Studying ‘selves at work’ or employee subjectivities, defi ned as feelings, values, self-perceptions and cognitions (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000), challenges researchers to see people as both subjects and objects, not passive entities fully determined by external forces or structures, nor fully self- controlling agents shaping the world around them (Collinson, 2003) Post-structuralist theorists have considered for some time the question of how identities, subjectivities or ‘selves’ are constructed, monitored, regulated and resisted in the workplace, given discursive practices such as culture change pro- grams, performance evaluation systems and professionalization (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Casey, 1999; Collinson, 2003; Fleming and Sewell, 2002; Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Hodgson, 2005; Townley, 1993) LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT With the rapid rise of leadership as a cultural commodity, it is only natural that there has also been a paralleled growth and legitimization of leadership development as a desirable practice and activity. Despite leadership development being a multi-billion dollar Industry (Grint, 2007), it has so far repelled critical scrutiny or challenge (Sinclair, 2007; Jackson & Parry, 2008) One way in which leadership development programmes have been conceptualized is being in the “business of self-construction” (Fairhurst, 2007: 102) 15-50 billion US dollars (Rockwell, grint 2007) The blind faith in leadership development, mirrored both in academia and in literature (Jackson & Parry 2008) Few calls ((Carroll & Levy, 2008b; Day, 2001; Sinclair, 2007; Jackson & Parry, 2008; Western, 2008; Iles & Preece, 2006). to question what leadership development is. Nor why and what it is for (Sinclaire, 2007) THE PRODUCTION OF CULTURE The primary elements in this chapter are: THE PRODUCTION OF CULTURE “cultural studies is so hard to pin down, consisting as it does of a loosely structured blend of sociology and social theory, political economy and Marxist theory, history, semiotics and literary theory, film and media studies, and cultural anthropology.” (Eric Guthey et al., 2009) “Cultural change, whether it is in the USA, Europe, China or elsewhere, is generally defined by crises, conflict, drama and transformation,and by ongoing attempts to resolve those conflicts through sense-making rituals of various types.” (Jones, 2006: 495) Moreover, the production of culture approach stands as an important, if not in fact necessary, integration of both the more humanistic, literary, textualist and postmodernist strands of cultural analysis on the one hand, and a ‘cultural sociology’ strongly conceived in structuralist and hermeneutical terms on the other (Alexander, 2003). Thus the production of culture perspective stands as a crucial resource for a truly multidimensional social science of cultural processes. (Santoro, 2008) “PofC can be described as an approach or perspective (but not a formal theory) oriented towards the study of culture, which conceptualizes the latter as a (usually incoherent) set of symbolic elements, whose content and form are understood as functions of the social contexts (or milieux) of their creation, manufacture, marketing, use and evaluation. Culture can therefore be explained sociologically through a detailed analysis of these contexts and the various forms they take. This definition sets out the key characteristics of the PofC perspective, namely: a) a focus on formally produced symbols, that is, symbols explicitly produced and used in organizations specifically devoted to them; and b) a priority accorded to structural, organizational, institutional and economic factors, which are external to the creative acts of symbol production.” (Santoro, 2008) Bourdieu, 1971 As Paul DiMaggio has noted, ‘we are all “production-of- culture” theorists now’ (2000: 133) “It is true that ‘production’ as a conceptual category has a strong Marxist aura. But ‘production’ in PofC is more a metaphor than an analytic category – and a metaphor asked to do a lot of work.” (Santoro, 2008) Sociology’s master narrative aimed at understanding its own nature has dramatized cleavages and conflicts, playing down the opportunities of integration among different intellectual streams, and forgetting the very real exchanges among scholars and schools which have influenced their development, both in the USA and in other national fields” (Santoro, 2008) “It was strategic – if not necessary – to package it with a metaphor which could at the same time challenge the mainstream while also being recognizable and legible to it. And we may say that ‘production’ was really a well-suited metaphor on which to build a research programme on culture, not least because it captures the Latin etymological roots of the culture concept which refer to such ‘productive’ processes as building and cultivating (Williams, 1983).” (Santoro, 2008) “Because, according to Bourdieu, remuneration is increasingly provided through salaries rather than profits, this transformation has not only reproduced the previous structure of class relations but fortified it as well, by transforming its basis from inheritance of wealth to possession of cultural and social capital, misrecognized as talent or accomplishment (Bourdieu, Boltanski, and Saint Martin 1973)” (DiMaggio, 1979) “First, the production of culture perspective has been enormously influential, becoming almost instantly hegemonic in the sociology of the arts and media, and representing an imposing, constitutive force for the new sociology of culture.” (DiMaggio, 2000: 108) "The production of culture perspective focuses on how the content of culture is influenced by the milieux in which it is created, dis- tributed, evaluated, taught and preserved" (Peterson, 1994: 165) “The sociology of Ideas a identity” (DiMaggio, 2000: 121) Peterson & Berger (1975) were the first to propose the hypothesis that through industrial competition we create cultural product diversity. The second of these was the rise of social constructionism, which shares with the production perspective an emphasis on agency and a penchant for demystifica- tion (Hacking, 1999). (DiMaggio, 2000:125) “For example, Gottdiener (1985), in one of the most prominently placed critiques, describes the perspective this way: "[T]he best way to analyze cultural processes is to focus on how mass media industries function as complex organizations. [The production perspective] asserts that corporate/bureaucratic decision processes, along with marketing and distribution arrangements, so interpose themselves between the creators and the consumers of mass culture that organizational logic has come progressively to characterize the very nature of mass culture itself." (Gottdiener, 1985: 980) Gottdiener's overall argument is sophisticated and interesting. But his critique of the production perspective is similar to others in four respects. First, the depiction of the production perspective confuses the descriptive account of a specific empirical case (Peterson and Berger, 1975) with the theoretical priors of the perspective itself. Second, in explaining what is wrong with these premises, it lapses into prose so vague ("organizational logic has come progressively to characterize the very nature of mass culture", with "organizational logic", "characterize" and "very nature" left undefined) as to be denotatively empty. Third, the critique ultimately falls back on a much weaker claim (Gottdiener charges that "the relationship between users and producers is relatively unexplored") that can be addressed from within the production perspective itself. Fourth, it takes the production perspective to task for neglecting the interpretation of meaning. This final charge must be taken seriously, but also must be taken in context. Peter- son's work has not attended very systematically to problems of interpretation, but in this it was little different from other work of the 1970s and early 1980s, which were either unsophisticated about meaning or based elaborate claims on unreplicable virtuoso interpretations. Moreover, lack of sophistication in interpreting meaning is only a problem if the primary goal of a piece of research is to explain the content of symbol systems in a nuanced manner. ” (DiMaggio, 2000: 130) BOURDIEU These guys confuse me, I’m not going to lie. There’s a lot of them and no one really knows what it is they do when it comes to leadership, I guess that’s what we’re here to find out. “occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services. These include the various jobs in medical and social assistance … and in cultural production and organization.” (Bourdieu,1984: 359) “Contemporary exercise culture is not about enforced, collective callisthenics at set times during the day, but about enticing people to work out through promises of improved health and appearance (and the chance to look like one’s personal trainer!). This is an indirect mode of authority, which involves the expectation that authority figures must be able to lead themselves in order to lead others (Foucault, 1986); hence, the interest in the personal lives of authority figures. In a sense, the roles of all professionals are becoming more like that of the pedagogical professions: to influence, instruct and motivate, rather than intervene, dictate and punish.” (Maguire, 2008: 220) Subjectivism, or as he calls it ’the phenomenal form of knowledge’, by which he refers to such tendencies as social psychology, ethnomethodology as well as existentialism and phenomenology, focuses upon the individual actor and upon the experiential reality of social action. It is, according to Bourdieu, a characteristic tendency of sociology which studies its own society and within which therefore the observer is himself or herself also a participant. Objectivism on the other hand, by which in particular Bourdieu refers to all types of structuralism and functionalism, but especially to Levi-Strauss and Althusser, goes beyond the immediate experience of the individual actor to identify the ’social facts’, the observable regularities of social action, but in so doing has a tendency to fetishizc the structures, making the agents mere performers of preordained scores or bearers of the structure. This Bourdieu sees as a tendency to which anthropologists are especially prone as observers of societies of which they are not a part. While Subjectivism cannot recognize the social determinants of human action, the Objectivists have a tendency to succumb to that blindness to which intellectuals are particularly prone, indeed it is the ideology specific to wielders of symbolic power, namely the failure to recognize in the idealization of the structure and its logic an expression of their failure to recognize the social conditions of their own practice by failing to recognize the socially and historically specific conditions determining all human practice. (Garnham & Williams, 1980: 212) Bourdieu (1977a (G&W): p. 97) describes his concept habitus as ’the strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever changing situations ... a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks, thanks to the analogical transfer of schemes permitting the solution of similarly shaped problems’. For Bourdieu all societies are characterized by a struggle between groups and/or classes and class fractions to maximize their interests in order to ensure their reproduction. The social formation is seen as a hierarchically organized series of fields within which human agents are engaged in specific struggles to maximize their control over the social resources specific to that field, the intellectual field, the educational field, the economic field etc. and within which the position of a social agent is relational, that is to say a shifting position determined by the totality of the lines of force specific to that field. (Garnham & Williams, 1980: 215) This is why the educational system plays such an important role within Bourdieu’s theory, because historically the development of such a system, as a system of certification, created a market in cultural capital within which certificates acted as money both in terms of a common, abstract socially guaranteed medium of exchange between cultural capitals and, crucially, between cultural capital and the labour market and thus access to economic capital. ((Garnham & Williams, 1980: 217) idea from Bourdieu 1977a (1983-197). one see Since cultural consumption time is differentially available between classes and between fractions of the dominant class, this development steadily reinforces class divisions while legitimizing these divisions by labelling those excluded from the cultural discourse as stupid, philistine, etc. (Garnham & Williams, 1980: 218) PRODUCTION OF CULTURAL FIELDS “Analyses of the formaion and operation of arts institutions clearly demonstrate how culture is implicated in maintaining class hierachies (DiMaggio, 1982; Zolberg, 1986, 1994)” (Battani, 1999: 601) “DiMaggio’s approach to ‘fields’ in which industries operate allows the researcher to examine the meaningful construction of the working definitions that participants in the industry use to define the boundaries of their enterprise.” (Battani, 1999: 603) “Faced with the difficult task of explaining the significance of the photograph - a new cultural form - photographers, relied heavily upon the discourse of the artists’ identity, or role, within institutions of photographic practice and art worlds at large” (Battani, 1999: 604) Baker and Faulkner (1991) spoke of ‘roles as a resource’ describing the vested cultural, social and material resources they provide. Battani (1999) expands in saying that ‘a role provides cultural capital - claims to status within an organisation, social capital - access to influential social networks and material capital - access to the financial capital and tools of production” (p.604). During the development of new roles, actors are in a constant struggle for legitimacy, scarce resources and jurisdiction (Baker & Faulkner, 1991). DiMaggio defines a field as a ‘collective definition of a st of organisations as an “industry,” of formal and informal networks linking such organisations, and of organisations committed to supporting, policing, or setting policy toward the “industry” (DiMaggio, 1991b, 267) “Five structural factors signal the transformation of gastronomy into the gastronomic field. First, new social and cultural conditions stimulated production, sustained broad social participation, and encouraged a general cultural enthusiasm for the product in question. Second, specific sites came to be dedicated to cultural production and consumption. Third, the institution of standards and models of authority ensured an acute critical consciousness that focused and checked yet also legitimated the expressions of cultural excitement. Fourth, subfields generated by continued expansion of the field assured the simultaneous concord and conflict of the parties involved, the consonance and dissonance of new positions and alliances. The resulting interlocking networks of individuals and institutions forged links with adjacent fields, and it is these linkages that were largely responsible for the social prestige of gastronomy.” (Ferguson, 1998: 601) THE PRODUCTION OF LEADERSHIP This literature review is getting better and better isn’t it? I suppose you’d call this the culmination of the previous two topic, also known as ‘the really new stuff’. I’m not going to lie, non of this is my idea but I really wish it was. This thesis was prepared and completed during the writing of Guthey’s (2009) piece: The Production of Leadership as well as subsequent not yet published pieces on the same ideas. As such many of the ideas expressed in this thesis and particularly this section were constructed with him during my supervision, as such many of the ideas here are a representation of co-created knowledge not solely attributable to my own intellectual contribution. “it is important to understand leadership as a product of the many organizational, promotional, and discursive practices that characterize the leadership industries” (Guthey et al., 2009) The design, manufacture, and promotion of leadership products. What exactly is a leadership product -> a book about leadership, the future leaders programme, a mentorship or the behaviors/intrinsic capabilities of a person attributed with being a leader? Who is this promotional entrepreneur? -> The leader themselves, the raving fans, some other more structured promoter “The participation of so many different industries, actors, and end-users means that leadership actually consists of a range of different cultural and symbolic products and services which are difficult to categorize under any unitary definition or theoretical paradigm. Again, this means that it is important for scholars and practitioners to recognize the existence of different “leaderships”— if only the word weren’t so awkward— different forms, theories and practices of leadership which are context-specific and which can either compliment or contradict each other.” (Eric Guthey et al., 2009) ‘Vuja de is ... a sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times’(Tom Kelly, 2005:18) Iles and Preece (2006) make a critical distinction between leader development and leadership development, “They suggest that ‘leader development’implies a focus on individuals and their individual,intra-personal interactions in the context of their work and their development (p. 325). ‘Leadership development’, on the other hand, is a more ‘collective’developmental process, wherein the relationships and ‘social capital’of the interaction dynamic are thought of as being developed together (p.325)” (Jones, 2006) “Whereas the leader-centric perspective favors the rather direct control of followers-by engaging in so-called leadership behaviors-the present approach would emphasize more indirect and less tightly controlled effects on followers. Manipulations of contexts and constructions, rather than of leader behaviors, would, in a sense, constitute the “practice” of leadership.” (Meindl, 1995: 333) ORIGINS IN BUSINESS CELEBRITY & MANAGEMENT FASHIONS Well Eric and Brad did just write a book on it, might as well throw some of this in as an example right? Or am I milking it? “in order to explain how the tendency of journalists to attribute a firm’s actions and outcomes to the volition of its CEO affects such firm.” Their main point is that journalists give too much credit to CEOs and too little credit to broader situational factors when reporting on firm performance, and that CEOs who internalize this romanticized estimation of their own abilities and significance risk acting on hubris and making decisions that may be less beneficial to the firm than to their own inflated sense of self-importance and celebrity. (Eric Guthey et al., 2009 citing Hayward et al., 2004) “To what extent is the quest for authentic or altruistic leadership a reaction to celebrification? Are these ideals of higher purpose leadership themselves doomed to become entangled in celebrification?” (Eric Guthey et al., 2009) LEADERSHIP INDUSTRIES ‘Each of these has its own niche, its own strategic logic, and its own set of organizational dynamics. They are connected in a loosely-coupled network characterized by cooperation, cross-fertilization, and competition’ (Guthey et al., 2009) A partial list of the leadership industries would include: consulting; coaching; leadership training and development; commercial and academic publishing; business media and journalism; leadership education and research in universities and business schools at the undergraduate, masters and executive levels; the guru-oriented leadership seminar and promotional event industry; and the burgeoning leadership institute industry. Internal leadership training and development; leadership training and development as a service consulting coaching leadership institute industry. Publishing; leadership institute industry. consulting leadership education and research in universities guru-oriented leadership seminars Research leadership education and research in universities Institute Speaking guru-oriented leadership seminars A Structural model of the leadership industries consists of a number of groups of stakeholders. One way to look at the relationships between these various stakeholder groups is to think about the transactions that occur between then. As a cultural industry, two types of distinctive transactions can be identified; economic transactions and cultural transactions. THis can be done by cross tabbing the core industries and the external stakeholder groups, this was demonstrated for the visual arts industry in Thorsby (2004) Assessing the impacts of the cultural Industry, A similar analysis of the leadership development industry could be conducted as follows. BUSINESS CULTURE INTERMEDIARIES This is kind of a repeat isn’t it? Maybe just a little, I’ll throw in some ‘insight’ just to keep you happy. “Likewise, the production of leadership in these different contexts, as well as the interaction that occurs across these contexts, involves the active participation of a host of content providers, promotional entrepreneurs, boundary-spanners and gate keepers. These business culture intermediaries include authors, journalists, editors of newspapers, magazines, and academic journals, public relations representatives, agents, photographers, film makers, academics, human relations professionals, coaches, trainers, seminar and conference organizers, consultants, and many others” (Eric Guthey et al., 2009) A sharper and more conceptualised definition of coaching itself - mediating between corporate culture, leadership culture THE CONSUMPTION OF LEADERSHIP Mmmmmm, leadership. High in protein I here. Also I guess it’s a theoretical part about what I was inferring in my prologue, if that went to plan. “The consumption of leadership contributes to the production of leadership. In this book we have stressed that fans, audiences, and media consumers are a crucial component of the process of celebrification. By the same token, leaders do not exist without followers, and the production of leadership cannot function without its own consuming audience made up of organizations, corporations, executives, MBAs, leadership enthusiasts on the street, and aspiring leaders of all sorts. And especially since the products of the leadership industries are discourses of agency and power, it makes little sense to cast the consumers of those products as the passive recipient of a set of pre-packaged goods.” (Eric Guthey et al., 2009) THE PRODUCTION OF LEADERSHIP PERSPECTIVES One of the the key contributions the the production of leadership perspective brings is a more reflective understanding of the role of academic research in the production and reproduction of leadership as a cultural commodity, practice and idea. Just as the production of culture spread to great influence through higher education, aided by ecological factors such as the U.S systems famously decentralised market like character (DiMaggio, 2000) so too has the diffusion of leadership theory created more of a social movement than a school of thought. CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY “Although social phenomena cannot exist independently of actors or subjects, they usually exist independently of the particular individual who who is studying them” (Sayer, 1992: 49) In this chapter we will be outlining the research paradigm under which research design decisions were produces. The methodologies and methods used in this research will then be explained and justified. This will be done by first outlining the critical realist paradigm followed by the specific design of the research. Each method will then be outlined individually and justified. Given our requirement to answer socially determined (constructed) questions in an area that exists above the level of individual interpretation there is an ontological demand to move above and away from the traditional research dichotomies of positivistic against post-modernist perspectives. Critical realism as a perspective on leadership has been suggested by Rowland & Parry (2009) and Fleetwood (2004) that will offer solutions to this ontological demand. As such, the opening section of this chapter will be a recount of the critical realist perspective and it’s application to a more meta-level approach to leadership. Our first research question that proposed to answer what the industrial and social processes are contribute to the production of leadership as a cultural commodity has been addressed during the theoretical development section on the production of leadership included in the literature review. As such this chapter will primarily seek to devise a methodological approach to answering the other two question, namely: Who are the actors and institutions involved in the production of leadership as a cultural commodity? And: Who are the specific actors and institutions involved in the industry surrounding “leadership Institutes” and how do they interpret their industrial practices in the production of leadership? The two questions represent a macro level and micro level approach to essentially the same question, as such the methods used Progressing through Methodology -> Critical Realist Perspective, Archival Analysis, semi-structured interviews CRITICAL REALIST PARADIGM “Any definition of leadership ultimately rests on one’s ontological commitments” (Fairhurst, 2008: 4) Organisational studies, both epistemologically and ontologically, have for some time lacked any form of unification other than vaguely similar subject matter (Ackroyd & Fleetwood, 2000). Much of the research in management (e.g. business economics, management accounting, strategy) has taken the position that their practice is little different from natural sciences and inherently positivistic in nature. Conversely, in other areas (e.g. organisational behavior, marketing) that very rarely espouse positivistic tendencies, with many in fact being characterised by rejecting positivism as a starting point (e.g. Morgan, 1986, Alvesson, 1987). Similarly, the field of leadership research is similarly dichotomised, with some researchers approaching leadership as a quantifiable phenomena (e.g. Avolio, 1992) and others taking a post-modernist turn towards more interpretive (e.g. Meindl et al., 1985, Grint, 2000) or discursive approaches (e.g. Fairhurst, 2007). Given this, it is common to arrive at the assumption that there are two basic perspectives for understanding the world, organisations and leadership; either reality is objectively available and knowable through empirical methods or it is not accessible objectively and only available for interpretation as a product of discourse (Parker, 1992). However, historically there have been many social scientists who have rejected both the tenants of positivism as well as postmodernist interpretations, particularly as identified with relativism, included would be Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Bourdieu. One such tradition, and the perspective I wish to elaborate on and adhere to, is that of critical realism (Bhasker, 1989). This has been outlined as the third possibility outside of positivist and interpretivist perspectives (Ackroyd & Fleetwood, 2000: 5) and formally articulated as applicable in the social sciences (Sayer, 2000). Though the explicit adoption of a realism as a research paradigm has been rare in organisational studies, its character is present in in much of the work associated with institutional theory (e.g. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) and is present in more recent work as well (e.g Kipping & Kirkpatrick, 2009). A critical realist essentially asserts that social entities such as class relations, gender or social rules exist independently of our investigation of them and though may not be directly observable, does not rule them out for consideration (Ackroyd & Fleetwood, 2000). The inability to quantify or directly observe these inherently real phenomena is what separates realist from positivist-oriented perspectives. In addition, that these entities exist independently from our interpretations separates realism from postmodernist interpretive paradigms. Within the critical realist paradigm are vested ontological and epistemological assumptions; ontology, questions into the nature of being and existence, is brought to the forefront of our attention by a realist perspective. Critical realism presumes the capacity to illustrate and make claims about the social world, and thereby encompassing of both the natural world and social world. This form of social ontology can be understood as follows: “Whilst the social world is a product of human action, it is not necessarily the product of human design, conceptualisation or discourse. That is, whilst phenomena such as class relations exist only in and through human (practical and discursive) activity, there is no necessity that the human beings involved are conscious of the part they play in reproducing these relations” (Ackroyd & Fleetwood, 2000: 11) Therefore, critical realism stipulates that social phenomena can exist independently of our identification of them. This separates realism from many post-modernist ontologies such as the view that social world is constructed entirely of discursive entities, revoking a capacity to investigate the existence of non-discursive practices. Furthermore, it rejects the notion of causality as mere regularity as inherent in positivistic approaches. This then leaves the critical realist open to pursue underlying causal mechanisms. Ackroyd & Fleetwood (2000) suggest a structured ontological approach as follows Domain Entity Empirical Experiences Actual Events and actions Deep Structures, mechanisms, powers, relations (Ackroyd & Fleetwood, 2000: 13) This sort of stratified approach is useful for illuminating and explaining the structures and generative mechanisms that govern human behaviour and perception and hence provide the soundest ontological position for understanding the production of leadership. To synthesize the above paradigm, we can look at the phenomena of leadership as an example; a critical realist perspective on leadership would acknowledge the socially constructed nature of the phenomena but not make the mistake of presuming that leadership is merely socially constructed, this is a non sequitur. Leadership is social in the sense that practical and discursive activity by human agents is required to produce the phenomena. We could claim that leadership is socially constructed as it is dependent on the agents concepts of there action and mediated through their discourse. But importantly, the same engagement can be produced by agents with no knowledge of such concepts or who even explicitly deny them. This illustrates that with leadership there exists at least an objective element that exists independently to its identification, and though are reproduced in part through discourse, it is not irreducible solely to discourse. What follows is an outline of the research methodologies and methods that will be used under this paradigm. RESEARCH DESIGN “Mintzberg (1982) urged his colleagues to get rid of their constructs before they collected data, throw away their questionaired and 7-point scales, stop pretending the world was devided into dependent and independent variables, and do away with ‘articicial rigor, rigor not for insight, but for its own sake (p.254)” (Fairhurst, 2008: 2) This research will be in the form of an historical meta-case study. It proposes to historically and contextually map the loosely coupled network of institutions and actors in New Zealand that collectively elevate and produce leadership products through competition, cooperation and cross-fertilisation ARCHIVAL ANALYSIS Is that what we’re going to call this, I think Brad has had enough of the whole Fantasy Theme analysis piece, it seems all his friends like the dramtisation stuff as well, maybe it’s contagious? SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS The purpose of these semi-structured is to generate illustrations of the production phenomena as opposed to understanding the individuals construction of leadership. “Questioning was responsive and open-ended, focusing on participants’ experiences and opinions of their program and its various elements, including… I began in every case by asking about the person’s background, profession, job, education, places lived, nationality and previous employment. “ DATA COLLECTION Okay, how am I going to actually get the business done of getting all this information. No seriously, how? DATA ANALYSIS So what did I do with all of those interviews? Guess we’ll find out when we get there. The fi eldwork resulted in several hundreds of pages of transcripts, memos and case notes for each fi rm, project group and participant. Data gathering and analysis coincided, following the tenets of grounded theory building (Locke, 2001). The latter included interrogating the fi eldwork materials through several readings while iteratively returning to the literature in areas of emerging themes. I used a phased coding process beginning with fi rst-order or open coding and then moving to mid-level themes. Several analytic notions emerged at this stage, for example, I was then able to follow up on such themes, structuring questioning in subsequent interviews and re-interrogating the data for further insight into participants’ meanings and the signifi cance of the phenomena under study. CHAPTER FOUR: RESULTS Probably some tables, maybe some categories and some themes, if you’re lucky I’ll throw in some revolutionary insight but I’ll probably try and save that for later. I’m going to need it. LEADERSHIP INDUSTRIES IN NEW ZEALAND LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE INDUSTRY IN NEW ZEALAND CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION PROFESSIONALISATION OF LEADERSHIP DEVELOPERS In many ways the evolution of the leadership development profession shares parallels with that of 19th century photographers. As discussed by Battani (1999) the photographic process, following its inception in 1839, became increasingly commonplace between the 1840s and 1860s. These early photographers LEADERSHIP AND CULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP There is something very significant about the DiMaggio’s (1982) analysis of cultural entrepreneurs in the 19th century boston to that I can’t quite get my hand on. There’s some striking parallels that help you look at the leadership development industry, something significant about the seemingly ‘not for profit’ nature of a leadership institute vs. The more traditional entrepreneurial behaviour of the consulting companies. Its like leadership for leaderships sake just like the high art movement was art for art’s sake. CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION CONTRIBUTION To synthesize the above paradigm, we can look at the phenomena of leadership as an example; a critical realist perspective on leadership would acknowledge the socially constructed nature of the phenomena but not make the mistake of presuming that leadership is merely socially constructed, this is a non sequitur. Leadership is social in the sense that practical and discursive activity by human agents is required to produce the phenomena. We could claim that leadership is socially constructed as it is dependent on the agents concepts of there action and mediated through their discourse. But importantly, the same engagement can be produced by agents with no knowledge of such concepts or who even explicitly deny them. This illustrates that with leadership there exists at least an objective element that exists independently to its identification, and though are reproduced in part through discourse, it is not irreducible solely to discourse. LIMITATIONS This thesis has made helpful inroads in establishing a basis for a production of leadership perspective. A majority of the results however can only be viewed as preliminary due to both the early stages of theoretical production and a lack of comparable empirical studies FUTURE RESEARCH This section is also known as the ‘I want to do a PhD somewhere flash’ section. So I might embellish a bit here but forgive me. It’s all for the greater good. Nearly done by the way. EPILOGUE This is meant to be a reflection on experience in an institution that produces leadership and known as the New Zealand Leadership institute also known as Excelerator. But I might be being over optimistic on this front. REFERENCES Rowland, P., & Parry, K., Consensual commitment: A grounded theory of the meso-level influence of organizational design on leadership and decision-making, The Leadership Quarterly (2009), doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.04.004 Fleetwood, S. (2004). The ontology of organization and management studies. In S. Fleetwood & S. Ackroyd (Eds.), Realism in action in management and organization studies London: Routledge. APPENDICES Mostly ethics stuff and maybe some transcript references. You really should have stopped reading by now. Purpose: To become an expert in the production of leadership perspective and to develop the academic capabilities of writing, interviewing and researching. Vision: To Produce a 35,000 word thesis that attains an A+ by the 28th February 2009.