Keith Grint

Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of ‘leadership’:

The invasion of Iraq was premised upon accounts of the situation that have proved unsustainable, but that has not generated a change in the strategy of the coalition forces. Conventional contingency accounts of leadership suggest that accurate accounts of the context are a critical element of the decision-making apparatus but such accounts appear incapable of explaining the decisions of those engaged. An alternative model is developed that adapts the Tame and Wicked problem analysis of Rittell and Webber, in association with Etzioni’s typology of compliance, to propose an alternative analysis that is rooted in social constructivist approaches. This is then applied to three asymmetric case studies which suggest that decision-makers are much more active in the constitution of the context than conventional contingency theories allow, and that a persuasive rendition of the context then legitimizes a particular form of action that often relates to the decision-maker’s preferred mode of engagement, rather than what ‘the situation’ apparently demands. In effect, the context is reconstructed as a political arena not a scientific laboratory.

The Sacred in Leadership: Separation, Sacrifice and Silence

In attempting to escape from the clutches of heroic leadership we now seem enthralled by its apparent opposite—distributed leadership: in this post-heroic era we will all be leaders so that none are. This essay suggests that we need to reconsider the nature of leadership if we are to assess alternatives and a critical aspect is its relationship to the sacred. I suggest that the sacred nature of leadership is not so much the elephant in the room but the room itself—the space that allows leadership to work. Leadership embodies three elements of the sacred: the separation between leaders and followers, the sacrifice of leaders and followers, and the way leaders silence the anxiety and resistance of followers. The essay concludes that non-sacred governance systems are plausible but that the effort and responsibility required would politicize the private sphere and render radical alternatives—non-sacred leadership—only viable for short-term, small scale organizations. We need therefore to find ways of engaging with, rather than seeking to avoid, the sacred nature of leadership.

The Violent Rhetoric of Re-engineering: Management Consultancy on the Offensive

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) was a leading form of organizational restructuring from the late 1980s until the late 1990s. This paper seeks to contextualize its development and account for its particularly bellicose language by reflecting on its historical antecedents in the west and its contemporary competitors in the east. We suggest that one way of reading BPR is as a form of ‘inverse colonization’ in which US managerial discourse both assimilated and revolted against the growing domination of Japanese thinking and practice. We conclude with some speculative comments on related causes of the rise of violent managerial rhetoric.

Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: The Role of Leadership

Much of the writing in the field of leadership research is grounded in a typology that distinguishes between Leadership and Management as different forms of authority — that is legitimate power in Weber’s conception — with leadership tending to embody longer time periods, a more strategic perspective, and a requirement to resolve novel problems (Bratton et al. 2004). Another way to put this is that the division is rooted partly in the context: management is the equivalent of deja vu (seen this before), whereas leadership is the equivalent of vu daje (never seen this before) (Weick 1973). If this is valid then the manager is required to engage the requisite process to resolve the problem the last time it emerged. In contrast, the leader is required to facilitate the construction of an innovative response to the novel problem, rather than rolling out a known process to a previously experienced problem.

American Indian Ways of Leading and Knowing

Having drawn some brief historical lines for our research, we suggest that significant differences exist between American Indian and western approaches to, and perspectives on, leadership, and we illustrate some of these differences drawing particularly upon Indian educational leadership. American Indian leadership was often interpreted by non-indigenous observers as an inability to lead rather than a different ability to lead. Western models are often rooted in positional approaches, despite their assertions to the contrary, whereas Indian models are more concerned with persuasive techniques, and while western approaches are almost always individual in form, American Indian models are more concerned with how different forms of leadership in different circumstances can serve the community rather than enhance the reward and reputation of their individual embodiment. We illustrate this with a model of American Indian leadership that exposes the differences by concentrating upon the methods through which persuasion works, especially the different deployment of the written or spoken word.

TQM, BPR, JIT, BSCs and TLAs: managerial waves or drownings?

Suggests that the progress made towards the acquisition of quality through TQM, ISO 9000, BPR, BSCs (balanced score cards) and all the other related TLAs (three letter acronyms) and techniques is in danger of consuming itself through a process in which the goal is displaced by the means: quality by measurement. This form of development, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, failure constructed from precisely those features that generated success in the first place, has a long and distinguished career whose theoretical origins we can trace at least as far back as Hegel.

Black self‐organization in trade unions

This paper considers the significance of self-organization for black and minority workers in trade unions. It embodies a review of the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of black self-organization within unions; that is, a strategy of relative autonomy rather than separatism or submersion within a race-blind union. The theoretical support is derived from arguments concerning identity, participation and power. Much of the empirical material is based upon interviews with black and white lay members and shop stewards from three branches (‘Helthten’, Shaften’ and ‘Mounten’) of the National and Local Government Officers union (NALGO) and with NALGO national officials between 1989 and 1990.

Business Process Reengineering Reappraised: The Politics and Technology of Forgetting

In this paper, we reappraise the phenomenon of business process reengineering through our own recent case study and survey findings, and through developing an interpretivist account of its appeal and content. A preliminary assessment questions what is actually being achieved under the label of BPR and the efficacy of the methodologies and tools available. We then argue that its claims to radicalism and novelty are exaggerated, provide an externalist account for part of its appeal, together with locating BPR as a form of utopian thought applied to work organizations. We then deepen the analysis by suggesting how its essentially political origins, aims and characteristics link inextricably with the high importance management commentators give to the role of information technology as a catalyst and consolidator of radical change in how work is organized and performed. A key concept throughout is that of deracination — the rooting out of the past. In the view that we develop, a significant impetus within BPR is toward a technology-supported deracination that requires a collective forgetting. This forms both an essential part of its appeal, but also creates a number of major difficulties for BPR as a set of actioned organizational practices.

Leading questions : if 'total place', 'big society' and local leadership are the answers : what's the question?

This paper concerns the apparent decentralization of decision-making in the UK that has accompanied the new coalition government. In particular, we are interested in the rise of Prime Minister Cameron’s public services initiative: ‘Big Society’, and one of its antecedents, ‘Total Place’. We suggest that while these remain sites of political contest, they provide an opportunity for rethinking why the leadership of change might be linked to a change of leadership. In effect, if these approaches are the answer to the problem of providing public services in an age of austerity, then we need to start the analysis by asking what the questions to these answers are. To unravel this point we briefly explain the background to these developments and then consider six questions that might help explain why the local nature of leadership matters. These questions are: what kind of problem are we looking at? What is the purpose of this organization? How does power operate in this place? Why is the local nature of knowledge critical? Is time a problem or an opportunity? And, finally, what kind of local space is this? We conclude by suggesting that the nature of local leadership matters because it constitutes similar problems differently.

Determining the indeterminacies of change leadership

A considerable amount of research supports the contention that between two thirds and three quarters of all change programmes fail in their own terms. In this paper I suggest that our inability to determine the future runs contrary to many assumptions about change management and that an amalgam of three particular theories of indeterminacy (constructivism, indeterminacy and complexity theory) ‐ which I call subjunctivism ‐ may help understand the problem.