Mervyn Conroy

Leadership as purpose: Exploring the role of purpose in leadership practice

This article initiates a long overdue discussion regarding purpose within leadership, an integral yet often taken-for-granted and subsumed function of leadership. Specifically, the article problematicizes the manifestation of purpose in everyday organizational leadership practices through the work of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. The article argues that purpose requires greater attention if it is to become manifest in both the corporate and the societal orientations of leaders in organizations. In support of this argument we identify the implications of singularly focusing upon corporate purpose to the exclusion of societal purpose against the backdrop of the credit crunch aftermath. The article develops a theoretical argument that, when conceptualized as a process of sensemaking, leadership can provide an opportunity for notions of societal purpose to come to the fore in countervailing balance with corporate purposes. We conclude by suggesting a research agenda centred on further explicating and developing the idea of leadership as purpose.

Towards an Empirically Informed Account of Phronesis in Medicine

In the field of medical virtue ethics, the concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, plays a crucial role. In recent years a number of important theoretical questions have been identified in this regard: (1) is phronesis more akin to thinking or theorizing, or to feeling and intuiting? (2) can phronesis be communicated and explained, or is it individual and personal? and (3) is phronesis needed in all decision-making in medicine, or only in the making of decisions that are ethically fraught? In this paper we argue that, while these questions have received attention on the theoretical level, empirical investigation has the potential to shed light on these questions from the perspective of medical practice in the real world. Indeed, because virtue ethics insists that virtuous action can only be understood properly in the context of real decisions (and not in the abstract), there are good grounds for thinking that understanding phronesis must involve attention to real-world particulars. Empirical investigation, involving in-depth narrative interviewing and analysis, has the potential to shed light on these theoretical questions relating to phronesis.

A place To: ‘Soul-centred’ leadership courses are helping nurses cope with pressure, writes Mervyn Conroy

The final article in our leadership series reveals how a learning disability forensic trust made spirituality a core element of a leadership programme for ward managers.

Stories: Epic, Tragic, Comic and Romantic

This chapter is the first step in answering the primary research question: What does it mean to managers to be implementing government-driven reforms to mental health services? The purpose is to convey the range of localised stories, the polyphony, offered by managers in the midst of implementing change. It explores the nature of the enacted conflicts and how this relates to current narrative-change theory. It illustrates the power of stories and narrative analysis in developing a deeper understanding of the multiple meanings to managers in the midst of implementing change. The chapter therefore has both a methodological and a theoretical purpose.

Organisational Change and Healthcare

There are many ways of conceiving of organisational change. Two broad conceptions emerge: the structural functionalist approach (Burrell & Morgan 1979) and the social constructionist approach (Berger & Luckmann 1967). This brief review attempts to piece together a story that begins in the generic structural functionalist paradigm and moves to the context of healthcare and alternative conceptions of narratives and social constructionist theory, highlighting a gap in research literature.

Turning to Narrative

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it will examine the period leading up to the ‘narrative turn’1 and the debates which have emerged in the context of organisational change following the uptake of narrative as a device for studying organisations. Second, through an examination of the narrative-based virtue ethics concepts of MacIntyre it will identify areas where this study can make a contribution. In Chapter 3, we saw how there has been some exploration of organisational change using narrative and that this methodology has revealed that narrative and stories construct meaning and social reality to participants. There is also an acceptance that a multiplicity of stories, polyphony, is observed when narrative approaches are employed. When change is happening further stories are enacted which offer insight into what change means to organisational actors. The nature of those stories with regard to what they construct into the unfolding and changing social reality has been viewed from dramatic (Czarniawska 1997) and emotional and interpretational (Downing 1997) perspectives but as yet the moral perspective of narrative-organisational change has received little if any attention. Even a recent upsurge of interest in studying the morality of the management of organisations from Weberian (e.g. Watson 2003; Dyck & Weber 2006) and MacIntyrian (e.g. Moore & Beadle 2006) perspectives has only made passing reference to organisational change.

Serial: Community Mental Health Team Formation

The primary purpose of this chapter is to answer the question ‘Do managers construct reform as working for them and service users?’ and to do that by looking at one specific reform, that of the community mental health teams (CMHT) formation. After the localised stories of change I turn to a specific serial of change. The analogy of the serial in the context of public-sector change, according to Czarniawska (1997), can be viewed as changes that are being freshly introduced and in this way we can observe the characters and themes evolving just as in a TV soap opera. A serial does not have any plot, it consists of related episodes (instalments) that both vary and are repeated. A serial does not contain any solution — the point is that it can continue forever. Organisational change of various kinds can be regarded as serials of this type. Public Sector change could especially be seen to follow the serial mode, with apparently unsolvable and paradoxical problems providing endless material for fresh episodes! (Czarniawska 1997: 78).

The Healthcare Sector and the Modernising Agenda

The aim of this chapter are threefold: first, to provide contextual information about the UK National Health Service (NHS) including some history of change; second, to describe the policy changes that the participants are attempting to translate into practice; and third, to position this study with respect to the debates and critiques relating to the modernisation agenda.

Leadership of Change Narratives: An Alternative Voice

Public sector reform initiatives have had a chequered history with probably more black squares than white. The private sector has not fared much better. According to some researchers the failure rate of change initiatives across the board is 60–80% (Kallio et al. 2002). This suggests that current conceptualisations of change and their applications are missing something significant in their understanding of what organisational change means. The research summarised sets out to discover what is missing by drawing directly on the accounts of managers in the midst of leading the latest round of reforms to the NHS in England.