Work in Progress
Leadership and Authority in a Crises-constructing World: towards a synthesisand clarification.
Dermot O’Reilly, Eleni Lamprou, Claire Leitch and Richard Harrison
Corresponding author:
Paper presented at the XII International Studying Leadership Conference, Rome, 2013.
Introduction
Much of the leadership literature makes reference to the potential of crises for new orders. Many early accounts in the ‘great men’ tradition stressed the importance of times of ‘unbelief, distress, perplexity’ as being like ‘dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force directly out of God's hand, is the lightning’(Carlyle, 1966)(p. 13). Similarly, Weber (1978)believed that times of great distress were the opportunity for charisma (one of his ideal-typical forms of authority) to act as a revolutionary force. Padilla et. al (2007) too, identify instability and perceived threat as two of the key elements of environments that are conducive to toxic leadership (which is also identified as charismatic). Similarly, Schein (1985) identifies the way in which leaders react to critical incidents and organizational crises as one of the primary mechanisms through which leaders embed culture in organizations – in particular the learning of new norms and behaviours. These relations of crisis to leadership all point to a reading of crises as ‘dangerous opportunity’ (Neumann, 1995), reflected in Rahm Emanuel’s (Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff) comment in relation to the Global Financial Crisis: ‘You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is that] it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before’. These positive evaluations of crises as ‘windows of opportunity’ for leadership see crises as an opportunity for new or extended legitimate domination – and, tellingly, they tend to be leader-centric in orientation. Crises, however, are also potentially disruptive of embedded power and leadership relations – not least because the emergence of a crisis can provoke a questioning of the legitimacy of those in power and leadership positions – crises are not simply tests for leaders; they are tests of power and leadership systems, which entail a closer examination of the relational and processual aspects of leadership and authority relations. As Grint (2005b) pointed out, much leadership literature assumes that crises enable, authorise or favour particular modes of leadership or authority, which he counters with the argument that the relationship is often the other way around – it is the successful use of modes of leadership and authority that construct the crises and thus authorize their own reproduction.
In response to these crucial interlinkages between these phenomena, where crises are a crucible for the authorization of leadership, this paper undertakes to contribute some theoretical groundwork by presenting a conceptual map of the inter-relations between the concepts of leadership, authority, and crisis through reviewing, synthesizing and adding to their respective literatures.In particular, a number of underlying inter-relationships between these concepts are developed and explored. Firstly, we explore the importance of the processes of social construal (the semiotic representation of a state of affairs) and social construction (the actualisation of a social construal into a social fact) (Sayer, 2000) – which is crucial to all three concepts and explicable via the lens of critical realism. Secondly, we examine the role of leadership in establishing, enacting, supporting or resisting modes of authority, in particular, in the construal or construction of crises (Grint, 2005b). Thirdly, we highlight the importance of crises as potential turning points in the unfolding of social processes is highlighted - that is their potentiality for change and revolution (Harvey, 2010), or conversely, as a means for legitimating extended domination (Wright Mills, 1956, Kerr, 2008). Fourthly we explore the role of the parsimony of theoretical representations of crises as itself being potentially implicated in the reproduction of modes of authority and leadership
The paper begins with an outline of the methodology and philosophy of science informing our theoretical synthesis, given the crucial role of critical realism as enabling a theorization of both semiotic and material aspects in social structuration, which is important in explicating the roles of construal and construction in the processes and forms of authority, leadership and crisis. This is followed by sections detailing and discussing the processes and forms of each of these focal concepts. The discussion focuses on the inter-relationships among authority, leadership and crisis, and we finish with an outline of a future research agenda.
Methodology and philosophy of science
The methodology of the paper is ideal-typical (Weber, 1978, Hekman, 1983, Parkin, 1982) in form and content, by extrapolating and abstracting the core conceptual components of the phenomena in order to better understand their nature (O'Reilly and Reed, 2011) without reifying analytical categories to an ontological status. The ideal-typical approach is augmented by adopting a ‘natural language’ and ‘forms of life’ sensibility (Wittgenstein, 2001). That is, the purpose of identifying ideal-types is not to arrive at essentialist a-temporal definitions, but to point to the contextual and specific variability of language-games and forms of life and the relations within them, while at the same time abstracting the generic aspects of these relations and identifying their continuous and discontinuous aspects. What this means in practice is that instead of attempting to define leadership, authority and crisis and the inter-relationships among them we instead develop a cartography of the different meanings of these terms and their inter-relationships, as well as of the different situations in which these meanings have purchase.These ideal-typical typologies are developed by synthesizing a range of academic literatures including philosophy, politics, sociology, organizational studies, crisis management, anthropology, and leadership.
This methodology is employed within a critical-realist philosophy of science(Archer, 1995, 2000, Sayer, 2000)informed by cultural political economy (Jessop, 2007, 2010, 2013). The relevant aspects of critical realism for our theoretical groundwork includethe ontological notion of the world/ phenomena as being composed of a series of unfolding generative and dynamic powers and processes that underlie the actual (all that has taken place) and the empirical (what one experiences). These dynamic powers are composed of mechanisms at various levels (genetic, psychological, social etc). These combine, re-combine and inter-relate at various emergent strata, which are themselves inter-related but open systems. Powers/mechanisms tend, therefore, to produce causal tendencies (including double or multiple tendencies), but not causal laws. These powers/mechanisms result in actual and empirical phenomena and forces which undergo various stages/processes of generation and variation, selection, and retention (Jessop, 2013). The social sciences are different from the natural sciences in that all social phenomena are comprised of inter-relations between semiotic elements and processes (where semiosis is understood as the social production of intersubjective meaning(Jessop, 2013)) and material elements and processes. Imaginaries are a subset of semiotic elements, involving an ensemble of relatively durable but not exhaustive meanings, perceptions and guides; they are symbolic reservoirs through which individuals and communities imagine and construct the world (McNally, 2012, Gosling and Case, 2013, Wright et al., 2013, Halsall, 2013)(Gosling and Case, 2013; Wright, Nyberg, De Cock and Whiteman, 2013; Halsall, 2013).Taylor(2004)describes them as‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together and how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations" (p. 23). Imaginaries enable action in so far as they reduce the complexity of experience and perception and enable ensuing planning and activity.Construal, then, can be understood as a largely semiotic process, in that particular imaginaries are developed, deployed and/or promoted to interpret particular events. Some of these construed imaginaries will be selected (and others not), and if retained sufficiently over time they will be constructed into new sedimented institutional, social and political arrangements and processes (and imaginaries), which will be partly semiotic, but even moreso, material in their nature. Selection and retention of particular imaginaries over others – the movement from construal to construction – is affected both by semiotic features:for example, which imaginaries have resonance, or which help account for the variability of the particular event; and material features: for example, which imaginaries are supported by ‘legitimate’ sources of knowledge, or which actors are able to generate and disseminate their imaginaries and ignore others’. Agency is thus enabled by sedimented structures, but is also constrained by them; the mutual interventions taking place over time – generating new, or regenerating old, structures – what Archer refers to as morphogenesis (Archer, 1995).
Having outlined the key critical realist concepts that we will employ in our analyses, we move on to consider each of our three focal concepts.
The processes and forms of authority
“Of authority it may be said in the most general way that it is an attempt to interpret the conditions of power, to give the conditions of control and influence a meaning by defining an image of strength” (Sennett, 1980). What Sennett is articulating here is that authority, in the most general sense, is the right to direct, the licence or prerogative to order or enjoin socio-material phenomena. This ‘right’, ‘licence’ or ‘prerogative’ may be assumed or granted for multifarious different reasons – owing to beliefs in individual sovereignty, expertise, the nature of the universe or force of personality, but in each case there is the presumption, or granting of, a right to power.
Weber(1978), arguably the most influential thinker on authority, also regarded authority as being related to right, or in his terms, legitimacy. Weber, however, explicitly excluded the consideration of modes of mundane personal authority from his works as he regarded them as amorphous and intermittent, whereas he was primarily concerned with persistent association or ‘social order’, hence his focus on ‘organizations’ where he regards organizations as ordered social groupings with an administrative cadre.
Such organizational authority is conceived by Weber as a type of domination, because some superordinate party, parties, or system, through an ‘administrative cadre’ enforces a prescribed purpose on other subordinate parties in a regular pattern. It is considered legitimate because the subordination is achieved through the consent of those subordinated parties, as if the purpose were their own maxim for conduct (1978)(p.946) (even if there are also motives of expediency, habit or self-interest in their acceptance of subordination). Legitimate domination is thus effected without the recourse to force, even if the threat of force is present[1]. Legitimate domination, moreover, is guaranteed not simply by the accession of the subordinated to the mode of domination employed by the superordinate, it is buttressed by the belief, by the subordinate, in the legitimacy of the mode of domination[2]. Beetham (1991) extends Weber’s insights by pointing to the justifications that are held, by both the superordinate and the subordinate, to support the moral obligation imposed by legitimacy, and the consent provided by subordinates through their actions.
Grint (2005b) can be interpreted as extending Weber’s insight about authority as legitimate domination (although Grint un-explainedly reproduces Weber’s phrase as legitimate power, whereas Weber appears to regard these phenomena as being different) in that he develops three modes in which this authority can be carried out – command, management and leadership. Grint (2005b) presents these three modes of authority in terms of their inter-relationships with problems (critical, tame, wicked) and power (coercive, calculative, normative), where the construal and construction of processes and events as crises tends to favour a move away from either normative leadership or calculative management to coercive command (although the three modes of authority are not mutually exclusive). Grint’s explication of leadership as a mode of authority and its distinctions from management and command are useful to consider in relation to the forms of leadership, developed below.
In summary, we have identified two polar types of authority, understood as the right to direct:(a) the various modes of personal or informal authority, and (b) regular and administered authority that involves (i) administering and legitimizing the will of a superordinate party, parties or system, (ii) the content of the beliefs shared by both dominant and subordinate, and (iii) producing the active consent of the subordinated party or parties. In turn, we pointed to Grint’s development of three modes of regular and administered authority as types of command, management and leadership, which in turn leads on to a fuller consideration of the forms of leadership
The processes and forms of leadership
Leadership is an amorphous concept, in that its form and meaning is dependent on its context[3]. The amorphous nature of leadership underlies both the well-documented definitional problem (Stogdill, 1974), and the related contested nature of the concept of leadership itself(Gallie, 1956, Grint, 2005a). Particular versions of what leadership is conceived to be are used to judge or help influence how leadership should be put into action, that is, leadership is an ‘appraisive’ or evaluative (and hence, political) concept, not simply a descriptive-analytical one.
Despite the amorphous and contested nature of the concept of leadership, the notion of leadership invariably involves some mode or process of relational direction-giving (which is related to the etymological root of ‘lead’ as ‘to cause to go with one’) or direction-finding(O'Reilly and Reed, 2010). Most ‘heroic’ notions of leadership stress direction-giving, mostly in terms of anasymmetric influence process (e.g. Hollander, 1978, House et al., 1999), whether it is through arousing motivation (e.g. Burns, 1978), meaning-management (e.g. Smircich and Morgan, 1982) or initiative(e.g. Stogdill, 1974). Other versions of leadership, however, can be read as allowing for a direction-finding aspect of leadership. For example, Yukl (2009)defines leadership as ‘the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives’ which could entail either asymmetricdirection-giving or collective direction-finding, whereas Grint (2005b) and Raelin(2013) explicitly argue that leadership involves (or should involve) asking questions or inquiry, and seeking collaboration.
Critical commentators, however, have noted that this preponderance to argue for versions of purportedlyprogressive or distributedmodes of leadership can sometimes obscure the fact that leadership, as often practiced as asymmetric direction-giving, involves the use of force, whether physical, psychological or semiotic (Gordon, 2002, Kamoche and Pinnington, 2012, Tomlinson et al., 2013), or that leadership as a mode of regular and administered authority, even if it is inquiry- and collaboration-based, is itself often predicated upon, or enabled by, positional power (whether formal or informal in nature, and recognizing that formal power often generates a shadow informal power of influence). Leadership, therefore, is often (normally) fused with hierarchy. The amorphous character of leadership, however, means that even if leadership is normally mixed with, or expressive of, hierarchy, this need not always be the case. Considering resistance leadership, however, is salutary in considering the difficulty in disambiguating or disaggregating hierarchy and leadership. While resistance leadership is a particular form of leadership, the benefit of examining it is that it points to the nascent, emergent, fragile and brokering qualities of leadership that are often overlooked in mainstream leadership literature, and thus adds to a fuller analysis of the processes and forms of leadership, and in particular, is useful in considering the relationship between leadership and hierarchy.
Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) point to a number of dialectical tensions and processes at play in the leading of resistance which they use to inform conceptualisations of leadership (in particular, they look at resistance that aims at changing structural arrangements rather than simply individual, covert or discrete acts of resistance). They identify a number ofprocesses that are instructive to this discussion. Their work is also useful in that it fills out Gramsci’s (1971)evocative notion of ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ – which he identifies as the mode and means of creative and constitutive uses of power, in contrast to restrictive or coercive uses of power.
Firstly, Zoller and Fairhurst (2007) consider how leadership relationships develop among resisters. They point to a number of dynamics that can be important – the pre-existence of perceived injustice or ‘hidden transcripts’ of injustice (that is, drawing on Scott, 1990, private discussions and views of the powerful by the powerless); the emotions that are evoked or provoked in particular instances; the ‘handling’ or ‘scaffolding’ (Tronick et al., 1998)of such emotions; the infusion of emotional talk with ‘rational’ or instrumental arguments; the differential positions of agents in relation to such phenomena as rhetorical ability, group identity, networks, knowledge, organizational power, or status; the self-attributions of resisters and attributions by others; as well as acknowledging the potential role of explanatory variables from the mainstream leader-centric literature such as charisma or ‘crucibles’ of experience. They note also the importance of happenstance in sometimes sparking a situation where these processes collide and solidify, while being careful to acknowledge that often instances of resistance leadership are temporary and do not necessarily result in stable relationships.
Secondly, they discuss the sources of power that resistance leadership draws upon or develops (interestingly, they slide into discussion of resistance leaders in this section rather than keeping open the possibility of leadership not being located in particular leaders). Zoller and Fairhurst (2007)acknowledge the interplay between sources of power and the development of leadership relations, and also note previous identifications of sources of power – such as formal power, critical resources, network links, social relationships, discursive legitimacy (Hardy and Phillips, 2004), information, money, reward power and expertise (Zald and Berger, 1978), and self-, group- and collective identities and subjectivities. Zoller and Fairhurst’s contribution, however, is their identification of the crucial activity of creatingor identifying resources of resistance. In particular, they note the role of communication in the creation of resources of resistance – especially in creating meanings, symbols, and/or narratives, that build legitimacy (whether internal or external) and create alliances. In relation to previous theorizations about such discursive power they note the tension between conceptualizations that focus on macro- or societal- discourses (or formalized aspects of imaginaries), and approaches that focus upon micro-interactions and language use (incipient imaginary work). Zoller and Fairhurst argue, rather, for the need to recognize that both larger systems of meaning and micro- language interactions are both involved in structuring reality. Indeed, Zoller and Fairhurst read Foucault’s work on power as implying that it is possible to critique particular Discourses (formalized aspects of imaginaries), but that it is only possible to do so by manoeuvring between Discourses through the use of micro-language interactions. These sources of power have both moral and intellectual aspects – moral, in that leadership involves the evocation or invocation of a moral order – the creation or exhortation of a mode of communality or shared ground (even if there are also distinctions or stratifications within the moral order); intellectual in that leadership involves capturing and extending the imagination of agents (rationally and/or emotionally or affectively), and through developing this, directs action.