Helena Liu

When Leaders Fail: A Typology of Failures and Framing Strategies

In an era characterized by the widespread availability and accessibility of information and growing concerns over ethical and “authentic” leadership, business leaders are increasingly required to answer to public concerns about their past and present failures. Failure in the existing scholarly literature is largely confined to quantifiable measures of poor performance of a leader’s direct actions.This article offers a more elaborate typology of leaders’ failures and the framing strategies regularly employed by leaders, based on a discourse analysis of media texts. The author presents a framework through which the ways in which leaders actively construct and negotiate images of leadership style, effectiveness, and authenticity can be systematically explored.

White Knights: leadership as the heroicisation of whiteness

This article draws on critical race theory to interrogate whiteness in dominant discourses of leadership. We conducted a discourse analysis of the media representations of 12 business leaders engaged in philanthropy in Australia to demonstrate how white practices of normalisation, solipsism and ontological expansiveness underpin the construction of white leaders as speaking for society, mastering all environments and self-sacrificing for the greater good. Our analysis suggests that ‘doing leadership’ is inextricably linked to ‘doing whiteness’, while the invisible presence of whiteness in leadership discourses sustains white power and privilege. By ‘naming’ whiteness and its practices, we aspire to unhinge it from its location as transparent, dominant and ordinary, and begin theorising leadership in ways that are conducive to the goals of racial equality.

Human resources and expatriate evacuation: a conceptual model

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a conceptual model that integrates multi-disciplinary research in relation to crisis management, and to consider its application for international human resource managers in preventing and managing the evacuation of expatriate staff during crises. Design/methodology/approach - – The paper critically reviews and distils research into crisis and evacuation management, and examines its relevance to a generic framework of international human resource roles. The paper evaluates this body of literature and suggests potential research avenues from an international human resource perspective. Findings - – The review reveals a dearth of research on emergency evacuation of expatriates from a human resources perspective. The paper articulates a framework that delineates what role human resource managers could, or should, play during crisis preparation and response. This framework aims to establish a basic “roadmap” for use by practitioners and researchers. Originality/value - – Focusing on the human (rather than business) implications of crises, the paper links crisis management literature to the role of international human resource managers in supporting the health, safety, and security of international assignees during crises. A framework is presented which enables managers to map their current (and potential) contributions to preventing and managing expatriate evacuation. From this, several avenues of future research are drawn.

Reimagining ethical leadership as a relational, contextual and political practice

Interest in ethical leadership has been spurred by the widespread reporting of corporate malfeasance and corruption in the last decade. Although ethical leadership theories have highlighted the importance of ethical considerations in leadership, the dominant discourses of this field tend to treat ethical leadership as individualised, decontextualised and power-neutral. The purpose of this article is to address these limitations of the mainstream literature through a reimagination of ethical leadership research, development and practice grounded in a feminist, communitarian and corporeal ethic. This approach, I propose, has the potential to reorient leadership as a collective ethico-political project exercised towards the goals of equality, justice and emancipation.

Staying quiet or rocking the boat? An autoethnography of organisational visual white supremacy

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reflect on critical race theory’s application in organisational visuals research with a focus on forms of visual white supremacy in the workplace. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the authors’ personal experiences as racialised “Others” with organisational white supremacy, this paper employs reflective autoethnography to elucidate how whiteness is positioned in the academic workplace through the use of visual imagery. The university, departments and colleagues appearing in this study have been de-identified to ensure their anonymity and protect their privacy. Findings – The authors’ autoethnographic accounts discuss how people of colour are appropriated, commodified and subordinated in the ongoing practice of whiteness. Research limitations/implications – Illuminating the subtle ways through which white supremacy is embedded in the visual and aesthetic dimensions of the organisation provides a more critical awareness of workplace racism. Originality/value ...

Constructing the GFC: Australian banking leaders during the financial ‘crisis’

Mainstream accounts of the global financial crisis (GFC) have treated the ‘crisis’ as fixed and given with the role of leadership as paramount. Through the intertextual reading of media texts and interviews with banking leaders, this article in contrast demonstrates the dynamic, discursively constructed nature of leadership during the GFC. Despite the relative buoyancy of the local economy and strong performance of the major banks in Australia, the findings show how some banking chief executive officers were able to exploit the GFC by co-constructing with the media vivid, compelling narratives of their leadership in delivering their banks from ‘crisis’. Although banking leaders conveyed via interviews an intractable, unpredictable view of the crisis and their adoption of more reactive approaches to the GFC, this study suggests that the media played a powerful role in enforcing a separation between ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ leadership performances. The article concludes that the vivid metaphors of crisis leadership lauded in the media served to reinforce the romance of leadership and potentially elide considerations of banking reform in the aftermath of the GFC.

Beneath the white gaze: Strategic self-Orientalism among Chinese Australians

This article analyses the ethno-cultural identities of Chinese Australian professionals through a postcolonial lens. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 21 participants, it explores how they engaged in self-Orientalism; casting themselves as exotic commodities for the benefit of white people and institutions. In particular, they enacted Chinese stereotypes through ‘mythtapping’ and ‘mythkeeping’ in order to secure recognition under the white gaze. As mythtappers, professionals presented themselves as custodians of an ancient and mysterious culture that offered organizational wisdoms for ‘the West.’ As mythkeepers, the professionals allayed white anxieties by surrendering themselves to white Australians as pathways into their communities. However, the professionals’ Orientalized identities are not passively determined, but are in some cases tactically and strategically resisted through ‘mythbusting.’ The article contributes to postcolonial theorizing by demonstrating how imperialist ideologies constrain the lives of people beyond the colonizer/colonized dichotomy and by illuminating the potential for their resistance against Orientalization.

Authentic leadership in context: An analysis of banking CEO narratives during the global financial crisis

The concept of authentic leadership rose to prominence through its idealization as an inherently moral and universally desirable trait. We problematize this romantic notion by exploring how the ‘authenticity’ of the CEOs of four major Australian banks was discursively constructed before and during the global financial crisis (GFC). Using multimodal discourse analysis of media texts, we show how what it meant to be an ‘authentic leader’ was co-constructed differently by the CEOs and the media. We also highlight the dynamic nature of context, where the GFC was variously framed by and for each of the CEOs. Our study challenges the acontextual notion of authentic leadership by showing how a discursively constructed context can reinforce or undermine leaders’ narratives of authenticity.

Redeeming difference in CMS through anti-racist feminisms

Abstract I propose in this chapter that the dominant practice of critical management studies (CMS) is characterised by white masculinity, where theorising tends to assume a white universal norm while commodifying difference. This approach treats diversity as something CMS has, rather than is. In order to disrupt the prevailing practice, I explore how anti-racist feminisms (a term I use here to refer to the diverse movements of postcolonial feminism and feminisms of colour) may shape CMS towards a more reflexive and meaningful engagement with difference. In reflecting on my own performance of white masculinity as an aspiring critical management scholar, I suggest that an anti-racist feminist approach bears the potential to challenge relations of domination within CMS and reinvigorate our pursuits for emancipation. It is my hope that the anti-racist feminist perspective advanced in this chapter may offer an opportunity for critical management scholars to ‘do’ critique differently through a radical inclusion of previously marginalised perspectives.

Instruments of white supremacy: people of colour resisting white domination in higher education

Abstract This article extends the critical race literature in education by theorising the ways through which white power passes through the bodies of people of colour in higher education institutions. Using autoethnographic inquiry of our experiences as non-white academic and professional staff in two Australian universities, we examine the ways we became co-opted into reinforcing white privilege while subordinating or marginalising students of colour. Rather than complying with the white supremacist ideologies and practices of our institutions, we explore the potentials for resistance against the institutionalised racial order, recognising that writing and publishing our experiences is one approach to speaking out against white supremacy at our universities.