Beverley Hawkins

Managing the monsters of doubt: Liminality, threshold concepts and leadership learning

In this article, we argue that management and business undergraduate students who are engaged in learning about leadership occupy a liminal space or state of between-ness. Drawing on anthropological conceptualisations of liminality in which those undergoing liminal rituals must grapple with symbolic monsters, we point to the experience of doubt and uncertainty as ‘monsters’ with which students must come to terms. We link this to scholarship that characterises dealing with uncertainty as a central element of leadership practice. Drawing on notions of ‘threshold concepts’, we suggest that students experience the monster of doubt as they progress in their learning experience and that there are a number of potential ways students might ‘think like a leadership scholar’. We set out some opportunities for leadership educators to engage students with threshold concepts as they seek to become familiar with ‘doubt’ as central to the study and practice of leadership. Applying a liminality framework to the understanding of threshold concepts helps identify threshold concepts as crucial to learning, infused with cultural assumptions and situated within an understanding of the student experience.

Leadership and branding in business schools: a Bourdieusian analysis

This paper explores the growth of corporate branding in higher education (HE) and its use by academic and professional managers as a mechanism for not only enhancing institutional reputation but also for facilitating internal culture change. It uses Bourdieus framework of field, capital and habitus to analyse case studies of branding in two English business schools from the perspectives of academics, management and professional staff and students. The findings reveal a number of tensions and inconsistencies between the experiences of these groups that highlight the contested nature of branding in HE. In an era of rankings, metrics and student fees, it is suggested that branding has become an important means through which HE leaders and managers (re)negotiate the perceived value of different forms of capital and their relative positions within the field. Whilst branding operates at a largely ideological level it has a material effect on the allocation of power and resources within institutions. This is an important development in a sector that has typically privileged scientific capital and contributes towards an understanding of the ways in which leadership is ‘distributed’ within universities.

Ship-shape: Materializing leadership in the British Royal Navy

In this article, I contribute to posthumanist, actor-network influenced theories of leadership, drawing empirically on qualitative data collected at a Royal Navy shore establishment in Great Britain. I demonstrate how a fluid network of hybridized relationships between people and things affords shifting and multiple possibilities for making leadership matter. As configurations of actants evolve these affordances are altered, and the blackboxing processes hiding the material actants co-generating leadership effects are uncovered. A detailed explication of the politicized affordances within actor networks contributes to knowledge about how hybridized relationships co-enable possibilities for action that bring to life, reinforce and call into question the human-centred, gendered, colonialist web of assumptions and practices through which Royal Naval personnel understand and enact leadership.

London calling: selection as pre‐emptive strategy for cultural control

Purpose – This article seeks to explore forms of selection practice, focusing on role‐play techniques, which have been introduced in many organizations in an attempt to “objectivize” the selection process by offering a means of assessing task‐specific aptitudes.Design/methodology/approach – This article draws upon an ethnographic study of a call centre in which the researcher underwent the recruitment and selection process to secure work as a precursor to conducting fieldwork within the organization. Whilst there is little precedent for the employment of ethnographic techniques in researching recruitment and selection, we argue such techniques are appropriate to explore the social processes involved in practices such as role‐play. The discussion draws upon fieldwork which was conducted at “CallCentreCo”, who continuously recruit customer service representatives (CSRs) to work in their call centre. CallCentreCo uses role‐playing exercises extensively in the selection of all grades of staff and are argued b...

Boundary objects, power and learning : the matter of developing sustainable practice in organizations

This article develops an understanding of the agential role of boundary objects in generating and politicizing learning in organizations, as it emerges from the entangled actions of humans and non-humans. We offer two empirical vignettes in which middle managers seek to develop more sustainable ways of working. Informed by Foucault’s writing on power, our work highlights how power relations enable and foreclose the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with boundary objects. Our data demonstrate how this impacts the learning that emerges as boundary objects are configured and unraveled over time. In so doing, we illustrate how boundary objects are not fixed entities, but are mutable, relational, and politicized in nature. Connecting boundary objects to affordances within a Foucauldian perspective on power offers a more nuanced understanding of how ‘the material’ plays an agential role in consolidating and disrupting understandings in the accomplishment of learning.

Facing the monsters: Embracing liminality in leadership development

This chapter draws on our experiences of the liminal nature of learning about leadership. Liminality is often referred to as a moment of ‘being on a threshold’, or ‘betwixt-and-between’, where new worldviews can be developed and new identities can be tried out. Here, we illustrate why the literature on liminality has such rich insights for both learners and educators of leadership. Drawing on our own experiences of teaching leadership, we suggest ways that leadership development practitioners can harness the liminal character of learning experiences, to facilitate the development of leadership skills. This chapter emphasises the lack of a ‘one size fits all’ liminal experience, pointing out that liminal spaces are not immune to power, and that they can be spaces where processes of inclusion and exclusion are enacted and reinforced.

Bringing the ugly back: A dialogic exploration of ethics in leadership through an ethno-narrative re-reading of the Enron Case

In this article, we adopt a dialogic approach to examining narratives on ethics in leadership. We do this through an ethno-narrative re-reading of writing on the Enron case informed by Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogue. Employing concepts such as beautyism, aesthetic craving and recent writing around disgust and abjection in organizations helps us to develop a deeper relational interpretation of written accounts of leadership and ethics in organizations. We identify two underlying and interrelated social tensions exemplified in existing narratives on this popular example of ‘unethical’ leadership practice. Both tensions, we conclude, are linked to denigrating the ugly in favour of the beautiful, and we have labelled them ‘suppressing the ugly’ and a fetish for ‘looking good’. We go on to suggest that these two tensions then combine in the stories about this case to ultimately beautify a toxic masculinized persona. We suggest therefore that our dialogic perspective on ethical leadership narratives helps to uncover how accounts about Enron are developed through an intricate interplay between seeking to ‘look good’ and the suppression of moral judgment by leaders of the organization.

The Silhouette of Leadership: James Bond and Miss Moneypenny

This chapter reflects on the way images of heroic leaders from popular culture can be used within organisations. I link my ethnographic data to some extracts from Ian Fleming’s ‘007’ novels to suggest why Bond’s heroic style of action-focused leadership acts as a template for organisational heroics. I also highlight the implications of Miss Moneypenny’s role as the heroic leader’s ‘trusty sidekick’ (Maccoby, 2000). I suggest that figures from popular culture, like Bond and Moneypenny, can act as ‘leadership silhouettes’, resurrecting heroic models of leadership within post-heroic workplace structures.