Leadership Varieties

The Role of Economic Change and the New Masculinity

Alexander Styhre, Thomas Johansson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138940840
• eBook ISBN: 9781317377986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In all periods of time, there is a perceived shortage of qualified, credible, and robust leadership skills. At the same time, what is regarded as skilled leadership is contingent on economic, political, institutional, and cultural conditions specific for a period of time or a local setting. Leadership in the era of managerial capitalism was focused on planning and administration, and was seated in large-scale, divisionalized corporations. In the 1970s, this economic model started to wane and leadership was advanced as the solution to a series of economic and social concerns, now being a matter of meaning-making in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. With the expansion of the finance industry and the deregulation of finance markets in the 1990s and in the new millennium, yet another leadership model increasingly prioritized economic value creation. In parallel to the economic, political and institutional changes, the idea of leadership has been strongly informed by new ideas about individualism and masculinity, adding to the understanding of leadership as what is anchored in widespread social beliefs about for example healthy life styles, the virtues of physical exercise, and novel gender relations.

Aimed at scholars, researchers, students and policy makers in the fields of Leadership, Management History and Organizational Theory; Leadership Varieties examines predominant ideas about the qualities and virtues of leadership in a historical and cultural perspective.

1
Introduction

On the Question of the Primacy of Leadership

Introduction

Leadership has been the subject of an extraordinary amount of dogmatically stated nonsense.

Chester Barnard (1938: 81. Cited in Pye, 2005: 32)

I’ve learned over the past ten years about what it means to be the boss of people. In most cases, being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way … Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting ‘I am the boss! I am the boss!’

Tina Fey (2011: 5)

One of the lingering concerns in the contemporary period, characterized by a highly differentiated economy embedded in an equally complex social organization, is why the question of leadership continues to engage so many practitioners, consultants, pundits, researchers, and policy makers. One would easily predict that in a society that strongly emphasizes self-discipline, entrepreneurialism, and the capacity to self-monitor one’s career choices and progress would gradually render the issue of leadership work if not obsolete, at least a less central concern. One intuitive response to such questions would be that over the last one and half centuries, the period of increased differentiation of the capitalist economy and its triumph over all other economic systems in terms of short-term efficiency (the long-term sustainability of this economic system can be ignored for the moment) is that the leadership industry that has prospered during this period is represented by actors that have a dear interest in maintaining the idea that leadership is of utmost importance for the contemporary economy. There are leadership training experts in human resource management functions in major corporations, management consultants, business and executive coaches, business school professors, and a variety of other professional groups that explore, examine, criticize, and further develop leadership work and the skills and competencies of leaders.

In addition to the sheer economic interests, another explanation may be found in more evolutionary biology factors, suggesting that the human species, descending from primates and other advanced biological organisms, is an inherently social being whose evolution is closely bound up with the capacity to organize societies that effectively structure the activities needed to secure reproduction and to further develop the species. In short, centrality of leadership in human societies is ultimately a matter of primordial biological needs. Furthermore, these biologically grounded needs are in many ways translated into cultural forms and genres and not the least popular culture abounds with stories about how leaders rise to prominence, overcome difficult challenges, or fly too close to the sun so that their downfall cannot be prevented. Countless biographies, plays, and Hollywood movies examine the anatomy of leadership, ranging from the work of William Shakespeare to “biopics” of still living American presidents and business leaders. In many cases, such narratives contain elements of morals to be learned for the audience: Being a leader is never easy, it is hard to avoid getting one’s hands dirty, there are some beliefs and norms that must not be compromised; it is complicated to oversee the full scope of the situation amidst the fog of war, and so forth.

According to Panayiotou (2010) masculinity in Hollywood films is often played out and enacted in organizations. Being a man and being a manager are often synonymous. The discourse on the organizational hero is, however, complex and filled with contradictory images. In popular films, the manager is often constructed in a straightforward manner as heterosexual, dominant, and in control of himself and his surroundings. These men work many hours, can go without food for many hours, and satisfy their sexual desire and lust for power constantly. Obviously, what is represented is a quite stereotypical image of masculinity. In these portraits of managers, celebrated traits and skills such as empathy, social competence, and emotional intelligence are totally absent. However, looking closer at the plot and narrative of many of these films—such as Wall Street, The Firm, The Insider, etc.—we find that the storyline is much more complex. Successively, the stereotypical masculinity portrayed cracks and dissolves. The individual has to break loose from the corporation and face his fears, standing up for his own ideals and convictions. While there is only one way to become a successful manager—through competiveness and control—there is also only one way of being a “real” man. When the protagonist in these films dismisses his needs to manage, control, and exert power, he also starts to explore his true self and consequently gains virtue and a heroic status. In this way, Hollywood films can contribute to alternative ways of approaching masculinity and leadership. Under all conditions, leadership is something that engages humans and that influences, more or less directly, everyday working life.

The research and the accompanying literature on leadership work are massive and growing by the minute. Trying to summarize it is a far from trivial pursuit and one may certainly question the additional marginal utility of yet another book on leadership. However, as academic research work is increasingly focused on promoting expertise and novel contributions, also highly practical and outward-oriented disciplines such as organization and management studies are increasingly addressing theoretical issues that are of limited relevance for practicing managers. In this striving towards making unique contributions to increasingly specialized fields, it is easy to overlook what representatives of the Annales School of history, such as Fernand Braudel (1980), speak of as La longue durée, the slower and more deep-seated changes in the mentalité of a population and shift in the social organization. Rather than unfolding as series of events and activities, planned as well as seemingly randomly occurring (who could really predict the swift collapse of the Soviet-style regime of communism in the late 1980s or more specific events such as the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001?), history needs to be understood as the “long waves” of change. In economic history research, waves with the duration of about 50 years (so-called Kondratieff cycles or waves) have been proposed as a period of time that is characterized by the dominance of certain technological systems and accompanying organization forms and political regulation and control. Such a historical view of leadership is recognized by Trethewey and Goodall (2007), arguing that theories of leadership need to be situated within specific historical and institutional contexts:

Theories of leadership provide a story that is largely ahistorical. Divorced from the social and cultural discourses that shaped them. Disconnected from the political and economic realities that surround their making, and seemingly immaculate in their conception of ideas, these free-floating signifiers we call theories of leadership therefore are the bastard children of all that has been omitted from their lineage.

(Trethewey and Goodall, 2007: 457)

In this volume, leadership work is basically understood as being contingent on surrounding socio-economic and regulatory changes in the post–World War II period, beginning with the mass production and mass consumption regime and the Keynesian welfare state dominance in the 1945–1970 period. By the mid-1960s, the profit rate started to decline in American industry and propelled by the soaring energy costs in the 1970s when OPEC decided to cut down on oil production as a response to the wars in 1967 and 1973 in the Middle East region, the mass production regime ceased to function as smoothly as it had in the post-war years. In this narrative, the 1970s was a transition period, not the least in the U.S., characterized by declining profit levels in industry, a stock market losing much of its value, political turmoil caused by the Watergate scandal, and a shift from the post–World War II era consensus to a more confrontational relationship between the business community and the labour movement.

In this volume, we discuss the changes in leadership, as what is essentially the management of mass production facilities operating in markets characterized by a predictable growing demand and increased economic equality opening up new markets, which turned to a situation in the 1980s and 1990s wherein leadership suddenly shifted gears to recognize more “soft variables” such as “charisma” and “creativity.” As the 1990s progressed into the new millennium, an additional tendency strongly influenced leadership work and the leadership ideologies, namely the shift from what is called managerial capitalism to what Conard (1988) and eventually Useem (1996) refer to as investor capitalism. The concept of financialization has been proposed as a term that embodies a variety of changes derived from the prominence of the finance industry and the “finance theory gaze” taken on firms and corporations from the mid-1980s (Epstein, 2005; Krippner, 2005; Lazonick, 2010; Tomaskovic-Devey and Lin, 2011; Palley, 2013).

In this new regime of investor capitalism, firms are increasingly treated as bundles of financial resources managed to generate and extract economic values. In the era of managerial capitalism, leadership work is essentially the management of different physical resources and the securing of a steady supply of input materials to the production process and the activity to distribute the goods (and only to a minor extent services) to the mass markets. In investor capitalism, leadership work is no longer simply the monitoring of physical flows of materials and commodities, but here the firm is closely bound up with the abstract systems of the money and capital markets, and leadership work essentially becomes the process of creating abstract economic value (closely bound up with calculative practices and accounting procedures, more or less widespread and legitimate) and deciding who should be the beneficiaries of such capital buildup. In the longue durée of the shift from managerial capitalism to investor capitalism, we include a more general social shift in terms of how gender relations and masculinity more specifically have been altered in the period from 1970s to the second decade of the new millennium.

These transformational processes and long waves of change in gender regimes, identities, and subjectivities show strong affinities and connections to parallel developments in leadership ideals and constructs, but what is most interesting is that there is also a movement from an almost perfect match between masculinity ideals and ideals of leadership in the 1950s to more contradictory and contingent relations between contemporary gender regimes and leadership ideals. Our ambition is to investigate these changes and transformations and to analyse the longue durées in leadership and masculinity discourses.

While this focus on masculinity ideals and shifting attitudes in this domain may appear as an antiquated view of the leader as a stereotypical man, such critique ignores the fact that more men than women are still today leaders, especially in top-tier executive positions, and that women entrenched in such prestigious executive roles are not capable of operating in isolation from inherited leadership ideals and scripts thoroughly shaped by generations of male leaders and managers, nor from the masculinity ideals and scripts that shaped previous leadership practices. This idea of male leaders serves as the benchmark, an indication of the masculine ideal of managerialism, which has a long tradition in management studies and the literature is diverse. There are several studies of how workplaces and professions are gendered (Collinson, 1992; Collinson and Hearn, 1996; Hodgson, 2003; Ashcraft, 2005), including studies of how, e.g., female professionals (Martin, 2001) and entrepreneurs (Lewis, 2006) feel underappreciated, questioned, and misplaced in environments dominated by men and masculine ideals. Kerfoot and Knights (1998) argue that the very idea of management as a social practice and discourse is rooted in a masculinity ideology that shapes and informs everyday activities in the workplace. At the same time, Kerfoot and Knights (1998: 84) say, “Like all identities, masculinity is to be conceived of as multi-layered, fluid, and always in process.” In addition, Kerfoot and Knights (1998: 86) add, “the definition of masculinity, of what counts as masculine or ‘manly’… at any given moment, is itself diverse and in flux.”

Ashcraft’s (2005) study of commercial airline pilots reveals that this archetypically masculine and high-status profession was under the threat of losing in the status game, and pilots saw many worrying tendencies in their industry and society challenging their prerogative, including, e.g., automation, “decreasing discipline and hierarchy,” and the captains’ “eroding power” (Ashcraft, 2005: 77). In this case, traditional male authority came under the pressure to adapt to new social norms and beliefs. In addition to management being gendered and adhering to a masculine ideology, Ross-Smith and Kornberger (2004) claim that the underlying rationality ideal in Western culture is “masculine” in character, overemphasizing a series of qualities and virtues commonly associated with stereotypical masculinity ideals. In summary, this volume aims to write a history of leadership work that takes into account both macroeconomic and political changes that have shaped the development of the present regime of the competitive capitalist economy and the more socio-cultural and behavioural changes that have taken place regarding masculinity ideals.

Defining Leadership and Masculinity

As the very definition of leadership is integral to situated theories of leadership, it is complicated to define the term once and finally, as every new era brings its own leadership theories par préférence, including slightly modified definitions. Still, there is a need for pinning down a few basic elements of the object of study being able to survive the transitions between phases and theoretical frameworks. Most of this volume addresses the post–World War II period and more specifically the change brought by the shift from managerial capitalism to investor capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, citing earlier and interwar period theories of leadership may be a fruitful starting point for a more systematic analysis of leadership. In one of the earliest systematic accounts of leadership, Mumford’s (1906a, b) two papers published in the American Journal of Sociology address leadership as a primary social function appearing in any human society: “Leadership is a function to all the different stages of the social process, from its simplest and most primitive to its most complex and highly developed manifestations” (Mumford, 1906a: 218). In Mumford’s (1906a: 218) view, leadership “rises wherever there are interactions of individuals or groups, no matter what may be the purpose of these interactions,” and consequently leadership is a generic social phenomenon that deserves scholarly attention: Leadership should therefore “be classified among the most general and essential modal social tendencies or forces, since it is intimately concerned in the expression of all the docile propensities,” Mumford (1906a: 219) argues. While Mumford offers no formal definition of the term but rather encircles it to render it sociologically significant, Murphy’s (1941: 677. Emphasis in the original) paper published in the American Sociological Review defines leadership in quite precise terms: “Leadership may be defined as that element in a group situation which, when made conscious and controlling, brings about a new situation that is more satisfying in the group as a whole.” This function-alist definition assumes that leadership is a group phenomenon and that leadership occurs as an approach to balance the interests and objectives of all members of that group. Therefore, Murphy (1941: 674) recognizes that leadership “does not reside in one person” but is a “function of the whole situation.” This view is generally referred to as a situated view of leadership, wherein leaders become leaders, as they are capable of operating within a specific situation that calls for coordination and the reconciliation of heterogeneous interests. Tannenbaum and Massarik (1957: 3) refer to what they call the “situationist approach,” and define leadership as follows:

We define leadership as interpersonal influence exercised in situation and directed, through the communication process, toward the attainment of a specific goal or goals. Leadership always involves attempts on part of a leader (influencer) to affect (influence) the behavior of the follower (influence) or followers in a situation.

(Tannenbaum and Massarik, 1957: 3. Emphasis in the original)

These two definitions of leadership provided by Murphy (1941) and Tannenbaum and Massarik (1957) have been complemented by countless additional definitions (whereof some will be introduced in, e.g., Chapter Two), but the aforementioned definitions stressing leadership as a collective, social practice are sufficiently in harmony with predominant contemporary views of leadership to enable a shared understanding of what leadership is roughly all about. That is, seeing leadership as what is group-based and dependent on situated factors is a practically useful and generalized model of leadership practice.

There are several concepts involved in the academic discourse on men and masculinity. When we talk about men, we refer to persons categorized on the basis of their bio-bodies. Manhood is used to talk about what is read into the biological body of men. Masculinity is a theoretical concept used to analyse the social construction of men and manhood. The concepts of manhood and masculinity are, of course, close allies. In this book, we will, however, mainly use the concept of masculinity, and we will also sometimes discuss the relation between men and masculinity. We will adhere to Connell’s sociological approach to masculinity.

Rather than attempting to define masculinity as an object (a natural character type, a behavioural average, a norm), we need to focus on the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. ‘Masculinity’, to the extent the term can be briefly defined at all, is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture.

(Connell, 1995: 71)

Thus we will use masculinity as a dynamic and relational concept in order to try to capture the relation between leadership discourses and historical transformations of how men are portrayed and represented in terms of bodies, emotions, personalities, and social and cultural forms.

Epistemological Assumptions and Theoretical Frameworks

Fourcade and Khurana (2013: 123) propose the term linked ecologies to denote how seemingly isolated or separated social changes in fact are co-evolutionary or co-produced, and while the connections between novel leadership practices and masculinity ideals may appear to be sprung from the same underlying social conditions, it could be helpful to imbricate these two social changes operating on different levels. Institutional theory, both its sociological and neoclassic economic theory branches, pays allegiance to the longue durée of historical changes inasmuch as social and organizational change is the effect of the slower and more gradual seismic shifts in underlying institutional fields. Douglass North (1991: 97), an economic historian and Nobel laureate, defines institutions a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: On the Question of the Primacy of Leadership
• 2 The Ancien Régime Leader: The Corporate Manager
• 3 The Decline of Collectivism and the New Masculinity Discourse
• 4 The New Generation of Leaders: The Charismatic Leader
• 5 Leadership Work in the New Millennium: The Financialized Leader
• 6 What Is the Future of Leadership?
• Bibliography
• Index