Ship-shape: Materializing leadership in the British Royal Navy

Hawkins, Beverley

doi:10.1177/0018726714563810

Cited by 44 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Fairhurst and Cooren (2009) for example explore how the leader is constituted through the inter-actions of a plethora of actants, including followers. In Hawkins' (2015) study of the materialization of leadership in the British Royal Navy the actants include ship, water and history. Her study illustrates how non-sentient actors both limit and make possible various leadership practices that may be unique to such configurations as a 'Royal' Navy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming the Leader: Leadership as Material Presence

Ford

Harding

Gilmore

et al. 2017

Organization Studies

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This paper seeks to understand leaders as material presences. Leadership theory has traditionally explored leaders as sites of disembodied traits, characteristics and abilities. Our qualitative, mixed method study suggests that managers charged with the tasks of leadership operate within a very different understanding. Their endogenous or lay theory understands leadership as physical, corporeal and visible, and as something made manifest through leaders' material presence. This theory-inpractice holds that leadership qualities are signified by the leader's physical appearance: the good leader must look the part. Actors consequently work on their own appearance to present an image of themselves as leader. They thus offer a fundamental challenge to dominant exogenous, or academic, theories of leadership.To understand the unspoken assumptions that underpin the lay theory of leadership as material presence, we interrogate it using the new materialist theory of Karen Barad and the object relations theory of Christopher Bollas. This illuminates the lay theory's complexities and sophisticated insights. In academic terms it offers a theory of how sentient and non-sentient actors intra-act and performatively constitute leadership 2 through complex entanglements that enact and circulate organizational and leadership norms. The paper's contribution is thus a theory of leadership micro-dynamics in which the leader is materialised through practices of working on a corporeal self for presentation to both self and others.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming the Leader: Leadership as Material Presence

Ford

Harding

Gilmore

et al. 2017

Organization Studies

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“…According to Callon (2009), the so-called non-humans actively participate in the collective action by influencing it, internally redefining it and changing its direction and trajectories. In other words, the action can only be assessed in the specific context where it is inserted because its limits are not defined by attributes, but by the relationship in question (Hawkins, 2015). Thus, the action cannot be explained, in a reductionist manner, as a definite consequence of any previous action (Callon & Law, 1997), because any actor (human or non-human) has the potential to act, and the action is the result of a continuous process of translation, association and negotiation (Latour, 1999).…”

Section: Actor-network Theory and The Perspective Of Translationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on historical data, Bruce & Nyland (2011) used the translation perspective to explain how Elton Mayo and the Human Relations School were able to translate the prevailing context and in so doing created a forum in which powerful actors came to agree that the Human Relations school was an innovation worth building and defending. Hawkins (2015) detailed in a study on the Royal Navy establishment in Great Britain how hybridized relationships co-enable possibilities for action that bring to Waldorff (2013) studied the way the organizational actors translated meaning into the development of a new healthcare centre on a municipality in Denmark; she concluded that decision making in the public sector might in practice be less strategic and intentional, so the translation of discourse could also be explained by how successfully the related practices can be developed. In this vein, Villar et al (2019), in a case study of a Brazilian social enterprise, explored the practices of opening up the strategy supporting a translation process, thus minimizing the tensions of organizational hybridism.…”

Section: Actor-network Theory and The Perspective Of Translationmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Trans)Formative Trajectories of Decisions: An Analysis from The Translation Perspective

Villar

Róglio

Rese

2020

BASE

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Motivated by an agenda for empirical research on decisions, we seek to understand how an issue or idea is labelled as a "decision". Based on the relational ontology, we used the Actor-Network Theory as a theoretical frame, and particularly the translation perspective. In order to understand the "process of formation and stabilization of decisions" focused on what makes actors act, we conducted an ethnographic study in a social enterprise for 30 months. Through narrative analysis, we propose the (trans)formative trajectories of decisions in which we describe the trajectory of these hybrid entities achieving the status of relative fixity labelled as "the decision". We understand the trajectory as an ongoing translation journey; thus, we tracked decisions in their trajectories of translation, packaging and legitimation. The elements of the organizational decision-making are re-signified as performative texts, which enter the network of relations. Therefore, decisions are (trans)formed on a journey of mediation among multiple actants. When objectified as crystallized texts, the decisions become performative, because they start to organize and participate in the constitution of the ongoing reality. This theoretical framework allowed us to extend the processual understanding of decision-making aligned with the relational ontology and the time-process perspective.

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“…Hawkins (2015) acknowledged the lack of "thing-ness" in leadership research and studied various material aspects of leadership in the British Royal Navy shore establishment. Ropo et al (2013;2015) and Ropo and Salovaara (2018) have undertaken a stream of research to study how physical spaces shape and construct leadership in workplace settings.…”

Section: Leadership In Human-materials Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, leadership is considered to occur, not only in relations between people, but also in human-material relations (Hawkins, 2015;Ropo and Salovaara, 2018;Ropo et al, 2013). The increasing materiality in organisations-such as IT-technology, infrastructure, office space, and documents-has been shown to affect organising and leadership (Carlile et al, 2013;Oborn et al, 2013;Orlikowski and Scott, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online company blogs as narrations of plural leadership

Ropo

Mäkinen

Seppä

2019

JOCM

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how companies that characterise their leadership style as plural, shared or distributed narrate their actions and practices in online blog texts. Design/methodology/approach The data consist of online blog texts published by seven Finnish IT companies. The analytical strategy draws on both thematic and structural approach to narrative analysis. The blog texts were analysed thematically to uncover different aspects of plural leadership. The analysis revealed a narrative pattern consisting of three categories that explain why and how companies implemented plural leadership. Findings The first category in the narrative pattern describes the motivation for engaging in plural leadership. The second category explains how the companies broke down existing hierarchies in order to create new flexible work roles. The third category describes how the organisations sought to create a communal culture and a strong sense of trust using symbols, material objects and spaces. Research limitations/implications The study contributes to leadership research that emphasises post-heroic leadership conceptualisations. The narrative pattern provides future empirical studies a framework for analysing plural leadership practices in different organisational settings. Whereas this study sheds light on the ways in which organisations and their leadership practices can be investigated using online data, traditional organisational ethnographies can make a further contribution to this line of research. Practical implications Implementing plural leadership in organisations can lead to informal power plays. Attention should be paid on to how plural leadership evolves in flat hierarchies and promotes community building. Originality/value Company webpages have rich information on how companies operate and perceive themselves. They provide yet another window for observing organisational activities. This study makes a novel contribution to how plural leadership is practiced and conceptualised in online blog texts.

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Ship-shape: Materializing leadership in the British Royal Navy

Cited by 44 publications

References 61 publications

Becoming the Leader: Leadership as Material Presence

Becoming the Leader: Leadership as Material Presence

(Trans)Formative Trajectories of Decisions: An Analysis from The Translation Perspective

Online company blogs as narrations of plural leadership

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