Thinking Differently about Leadership

Wilson, Suze

doi:10.4337/9781784716790

Cited by 62 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…Dissenting from the James McGregor Burnsian proposition that power and leadership are separable and even contradictory forces (Burns, 1978), I would insist that leadership simply cannot exist without the exercise of power (see, also, French and Snyder, 1959; Kellerman, 2012; Tourish, 2013; Wilson, 2016). Leaders augment their already existing hierarchical authority when the intended audience for the claim believes in that claim.…”

Section: The Power Of Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-truth claims and the wishing away of brute facts

Spector

2020

Leadership

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Post-truth claims making has, since 2016, emerged as a defining cultural and political phenomenon. It involves an assertion, made from a position of power, based on an inaccurate description of objective facts. It is a lie, to be sure, but not one intended to be taken literally. Rather, it is meant to be taken as faithful to and reflective of some deeper perceived truth. In this essay, I advance the argument that post-truth claims making is not some pernicious outgrowth of post-modernist/social constructionist theorizing, and not simply a new term for lying. Rather, it involves a particular kind of pact between claims maker and intended audience in which the leader lies by asserting inaccurate claims, expecting the intended audience to put aside that acknowledged inaccuracy in support of a belief in some shared goal. Reliance on post-truth claims helped fuel the rise of mid-20th century authoritarians, and is now a tool of authoritarian political leaders posing as populists.

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Section: The Power Of Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-truth claims and the wishing away of brute facts

Spector

2020

Leadership

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“…We may use different information sources and formats for this, but I do not see this as a fundamental difference in the logic of our arguments. Indeed, if we want to move past formulaic ‘gap-spotting’ as justification for research (Sandberg and Alvesson, 2011), we might benefit from adopting more of a ‘practitioner’ mindset here, and develop more critical awareness of the politics of the construction of these ‘gaps’ in leadership theorising (Wilson, 2016). 4 Our literature reviews may pretend that we are librarians, painstakingly cataloguing the previous literature on a topic.…”

Section: Mind the Gap!mentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost in Translation, Recovered in Conversation? Introducing Leadership's Social Media Profile

Tomkins

2020

Leadership

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‘Twitter is not a technology, it’s a conversation. And it’s happening with or without you.’ 1 As Leadership takes its first steps into the realm of social media, we should think about why we are doing this and what we might hope to achieve. Far from being merely a decision about which platforms and tools to use to advertise our work, the establishment of a social media presence is a spur to reflect on the qualities of our relationships both within and beyond our community of authors, readers, reviewers and editors. In this essay, I link our approach to social media to broader concerns about the state of our discipline, our alienation from practice, and our responsibilities as both scholars and practitioners of leadership. Although framed in relation to social media, I hope these reflections have resonance for our involvement in social, political and institutional commentary more generally, even amongst those who have no interest in Twitter per se!

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“…From this point of view, it is arguable that when we call one person a leader and another person a manager , we are not just naming them differently. While managers might often be imagined as bureaucrats, leaders can be seen as admired by their followers, shareholders and market analysts alike; imagined too, as being able to transform organizations and those who work for them as they pursue their visionary strategies (Wilson, 2016).…”

Section: The Wider Socio-political Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

FromadministratortoCEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing

Mautner

Learmonth

2019

Discourse & Communication

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We explore the lexical choices made by authors published in Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ), a major academic journal in business and management studies. We do so via a corpus constructed from all the articles published in ASQ from its first publication in 1956 up until the end of 2018. Specifically, our focus is on lexical items that represent social actors. Our findings suggest that, compared with earlier work, recent articles typically ascribe greater status and prestige to organizational elites. Relatively contemporary papers are also more likely to use language that obfuscates or ignores unpalatable aspects of organizational life, such as power asymmetries, hierarchy and control through identity regulation. We suggest that these changes in word choices can be understood to reflect a wider trend towards neo-liberal rhetoric – a rhetoric increasingly pervading contemporary social life more generally.

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Thinking Differently about Leadership

Cited by 62 publications

References 0 publications

Post-truth claims and the wishing away of brute facts

Post-truth claims and the wishing away of brute facts

Lost in Translation, Recovered in Conversation? Introducing Leadership's Social Media Profile

FromadministratortoCEO: Exploring changing representations of hierarchy and prestige in a diachronic corpus of academic management writing

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