Amanda Sinclair

The chameleon of accountability: Forms and discourses

Abstract Accountability is a cherished concept, sought after but elusive. New models of administrative reform promise to provide heightened accountability through managerial controls. Interviews with 15 Chief Executives of Australian public sector organisations reveal the chameleon quality of accountability. Accountability is subjectively constructed and changes with context Five forms of accountability identified in the interviews are explored: political, public, managerial, professional and personal Two discourses of accountability are also identified: a structural and a personal discourse. CEOs experience an accountability which encompasses multiple and conflicting meanings. The paper argues for a new conception of accountability and new approaches to enhancing it. Imposing managerial controls is less likely to be effective than informing the process by which administrators construct and enact a sense of being accountable.

Approaches to organisational culture and ethics

This paper assesses the potential of organisational culture as a means for improving ethics in organisations. Organisational culture is recognised as one determinant of how people behave, more or less ethically, in organisations. It is also incresingly understood as an attribute that management can and should influence to improve organisational performance. When things go wrong in organisations, managers look to the culture as both the source of problems and the basis for solutions. Two models of organisational culture and ethical behaviour are evaluated. They rest on different understandings of organisational culture and the processes by which ethics are enhanced. Firstly, the prevailing approach holds that creating a unitary cohesive culture around core moral values is the solution to enhancing ethical behaviour. Both the feasibility and desirability of this approach, in terms of ethical outcomes, is questioned. The second model queries the existence of organisational culture at all, arguing that organisations are nothing more than shifting coalitions of subcultures. In this second model, the very porousness of the subcultures provides a catalyst for the scrutiny and critique of norms and practices. Such diversity and debate is construed as potentially a better safeguard for ethical behaviour than the uniformity promised by the unitary, strong culture model.

The Tyranny of a Team Ideology

People at work have been tyrannized by a team ideology based on the use of work groups as a key to effective organizational performance. The hegemony of this ideology has created an obsession with teams in workplaces governed by oppress ive stereotypes of what teams should be like and how they should behave. This paper examines four elements of the prevailing team ideology — the way work in groups is defined, links between individual motivation and organizational per formance, views of leadership, and the effects of power, conflict and emotion in work groups. Some alternative perspectives on team behaviour elucidate the ways in which the prevailing paradigm ultimately hinders groups and tyrannizes the individual team member — by camouflaging coercion and conflict with the appearance of consultation and cohesion. Examination of the limits and effects of the ideology provide the basis for an alternative understanding of the strengths, constraints and complexities of group work.

Body Possibilities in Leadership

Bodies and bodily performances – including physical stature, features, stance, gestures and voice – are central, yet ignored, elements in the accomplishment of leadership. In this article I offer some reasons for this neglect and attempt to redress it. My focus here is the bodily practices of two Australian leaders – the Victorian Chief Commissioner of Police, Christine Nixon and Chris Sarra, a school principal who was ‘Queenslander of the year’in 2004. In these two ‘profiles’I explore the way their bodies and body performances in leadership were important dimensions in bringing about radical change in moribund systems. Their ‘different’ body performances – a woman police commissioner and a high-profile Aboriginal principal – were also subject to regulation by the wider systems of which they are a part. This exploration reveals bodies as powerful sites in the construction of subversive leadership and new leadership knowledge.

Women within diversity: risks and possibilities

In Australia, interest in women in organisations has been overtaken by a focus on “managing diversity”. The first part of this paper describes this trend and the accompanying diversity discourse before reviewing the arguments for and against subsuming women as one category within a diversity framework. The second part draws on three examples to explore how working within a managing diversity brief allows and advances analyses of gender. The paper concludes by arguing the possibilities of working critically with diversity, including being reflective about one’s purposes and using the power that diversity offers for, hopefully, transformational ends.

Indigenous Human Resource Practices in Australian Mining Companies: Towards an Ethical Model

Mining companies in Australia are increasingly required to interact with Indigenous groups as stakeholders following Native Title legislation in the early 1990s. A study of five mining companies in Australia reveals that they now undertake a range of programs involving Indigenous communities, to assist with access to land, and to enhance their public profile. However, most of these initiatives emanate from carefully quarantined sections of mining companies. Drawing upon cross-cultural and diversity research in particular, this paper contends that only initiatives that strive towards power sharing with Indigenous groups and strategies for broadening the organizational interface with Indigenous groups, will contribute to more ethical practices in mining and other companies.

Journey around Leadership

Ideas about leadership in education, as in other areas of professional practice, increasingly borrow from management and business thinking. In this article I provide a commentary and critique of contemporary leadership in the form of a narrative of my own experience as an educator in a business school. My experience as a woman teacher of largely male, adult management students has underscored my learning about and critique of leadership theory and my own aspirations as teacher and leader. Personal experience is interwoven with theoretical commentary to highlight the limitations of leadership discourses—too often disembodied, de‐gendered and de‐sexualized. By inserting my responses and feelings I also seek to subvert, or at least to add some different dimensions to, intellectualized and inert critiques of leadership. Learning about leadership, including engagement, reaction and contestation, is not just a cerebral undertaking, but emotion laden and thoroughly embodied. I sought to reflect these qualities in this article.Ideas about leadership in education, as in other areas of professional practice, increasingly borrow from management and business thinking. In this article I provide a commentary and critique of contemporary leadership in the form of a narrative of my own experience as an educator in a business school. My experience as a woman teacher of largely male, adult management students has underscored my learning about and critique of leadership theory and my own aspirations as teacher and leader. Personal experience is interwoven with theoretical commentary to highlight the limitations of leadership discourses—too often disembodied, de‐gendered and de‐sexualized. By inserting my responses and feelings I also seek to subvert, or at least to add some different dimensions to, intellectualized and inert critiques of leadership. Learning about leadership, including engagement, reaction and contestation, is not just a cerebral undertaking, but emotion laden and thoroughly embodied. I sought to reflect these qualities i...

Reclaiming eroticism in the academy

In this article we address the question ‘what are we to do with ourselves?’ by arguing for the reclamation of the erotic in higher education. By defining the erotic in a way which encompasses the pursuit of pleasure and love, we seek to re-differentiate the collapsed categories of sex and eros. Universities have always been environments where a love of learning and pleasure in pedagogy is possible. Yet a range of cultural and societal factors have rendered academic life on the one hand disembodied, and on the other, commodified and sexualized, especially for women. Our suggestion is that these effects strip out the opportunities to love and enjoy academic life. We therefore pursue the possibility of reclaiming eroticism and the erotic in ways which refuse commodified sexualized norms. Drawing on the work of feminist theorists, we make three proposals for reclaiming eros in the academy: by exploring the relationship between bodies and knowledge; recognizing love in learning and wisdom; and cultivating the pleasure and nurturance that arise in collegial and pedagogic relations. Our view is that exploring broader notions of eros and eroticism in the university will invite a more meaningful understanding of academic work as embodied practice, involving pleasure and love.

Placing self: How might we place ourselves in leadership studies differently?

In this contribution to ‘Leading Questions’, I explore ‘place’ in leadership studies experimenting with a bifurcated textual presentation. I suggest that our writing about leadership comes from a mixture of internal and external, personal and geographic, places: ‘real’ and current as well as remembered and reconstructed. Making these places more explicit, I argue, is a form of identity work, facilitating reflexivity in leadership writing. It prompts us to ask questions. ‘Why am I interested in these aspects of leadership?’ ‘How do the places I have been inform and limit what I argue for?’ While the ‘top’ story/text in this piece makes these arguments in a formal academic discourse, the ‘bottom’ story seeks to enact it. The two stories come from different places (in me) and bring with them different voices. In their co-existence I seek to experiment with writing leadership differently, to reveal the dualities and duplicities in discourses, as well as the power and vulnerabilities that may be in play or repressed when we write about leadership.

Developing Managers: Reexamining Ten Myths about MBAs and Managers

A survey of MBA graduates of the University of Melbourne suggests the need to re‐examine myths about MBAs ‐ who they are, why they undertake an MBA, what sort of careers they pursue and what capabilities they need. In improving the quality of management education, effort needs to be directed to matching programmes to a better understanding of the management school′s customers ‐existing students, the future profession, the business and wider communities – and to expanding the “management consciousness” of potential students, particularly those under‐represented in management schools such as women and ethnic minorities.