Leadership, Gender and Ethics

Embodied Reason in Challenging Masculinities

David Knights

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351030328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Etica aziendale
• Index: Business

This book has a clear concern to offer a distinctive way of studying leadership so that it might be practiced differently. It is distinctive in focusing on contemporary concerns about gender and ethics. More precisely, it examines the masculinity of leadership and how, through an embodied form of reasoning, it might be challenged or disrupted. A central argument of the book is that masculine leadership elevates rationality in ways that marginalize the body and feelings and often has the effect of sanctioning unethical behavior.

In exploring this thesis, Leadership, Gender and Ethics: Embodied Reason in Challenging Masculinities provides an analysis of the comparatively neglected issues of identity/anxiety, power/resistance, diversity/gender, and the body/masculinities surrounding the concept and practice of leadership. It also illustrates the arguments of the book by examining leadership through an empirical examination of academic life, organization change and innovation, and the global financial crisis of 2008. In a postscript, it analyses some examples of masculine leadership in the global pandemic of 2020.

This book will be of interest generally to researchers, academics and students in the field of leadership and management and will be of special interest to those who seek to understand the intersections between leadership and gender, ethics and embodied approaches. It will also appeal to those who seek to develop new ways of thinking and theorizing about leadership in terms of identities and insecurities, power and masculinity, ethics and the body. Its insights might not only change studies but also practices of leadership.

Part I

Leadership: An Overview

In this part, I articulate an overview of the field of leadership studies. First, in Chapter 1, I examine the ontological and epistemological foundations of leadership narratives before showing how they reflect and reinforce a philosophy of humanism. In Chapter 2, I engage with a genealogical history of the field of leadership studies that culminates in contemplating a post- or neo-humanist alternative.

1 Reflecting on Leadership Studies

Introduction

At the point of writing between 2018 and 2020, the world has witnessed some of the most horrific events in its recent history concerning the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen as well as at least another 18 military conflicts. For example, there was ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, resulting in more than 600,000 Rohingya people having to flee as refugees to Bangladesh. There was also terrorism throughout the western hemisphere, and mass shootings in France, the UK, the US and New Zealand, often perpetrated by lone men with the direct intention of harming civilians. Without intention, although often a result of human contributions to global warming, natural disasters have also hit many parts of the world, including bush fires in Australia; drought in North Korea, Southern Africa, and East Africa; earthquakes in Guatemala, Japan, Mexico and the Philippines; floods in Columbia, Guinea, Nigeria, South African Republic, Togo, South Sudan and the UK, and hurricane storms in the Caribbean and Japan. The Grenfell 24-storey tower block fire that killed over 70 residents in London can be more directly attributed to human failure to clad the building with fire-resistant materials. However, all these natural disasters pale into insignificance in the face of the Coronavirus global pandemic. For, at the beginning of 2020, there was the most dramatic lockdown and devastation of the world’s social and economic life, perhaps matching that of the holocaust and the second world war. Despite a history of disappointment or failed expectations, there is still always an appeal to leadership to manage the fallout in almost all of these tragedies.

In the case of the Grenfell fire, the overwhelming outcry from the media, the public, and the surviving victims was an expectation that leadership could perform a shamanic ritual that would instantly heal the wounds. No matter who were the incumbents, the leaders were duly sacrificed at the altar of human expectation that far exceeded any potential endeavour in relieving the suffering. No better sign of this reversion to seeing leadership as salvation was when the UK Prime Minister was admitted into a hospital, and then intensive care, with COVID-19 during the Coronavirus pandemic. At this point, the media displaced virtually all other news to discuss endlessly a potentially leaderless country, as if this was even more devastating than the pandemic itself.¹ Seemingly the numerous mistakes he and his government made were set aside in the frenzy of presuming the leader is of supreme importance. For shortly before announcing a lockdown of the whole nation, Boris Johnson had celebrated shaking hands with everyone and, more importantly, he constantly claimed that the Health Service was in perfect shape to manage the crisis when this was far from the case. Given the extent of these errors of judgement, should the media just have been wishing him well during his hospitalisation with a serious case of the virus but not displaying hysteria about his absence from the government? Moreover, on his recovery, he was then romanticised and heroized further as a great fighter who pulled through against all the odds. I return to this in the final chapter in discussing white masculine populist leaders in the context of the COVID pandemic.

While no one can blame the victims of tragedy for seeking solace from those in closest proximity who have adorned the trappings of power, this deification of leaders is also something of a tragedy that neither the media nor academic research seeks to alleviate. Indeed, for the large part, discourses surrounding leadership fuel false expectations by celebrating and romanticising leaders as heroes and heroines.

The social sciences are replete with concepts and phenomena that rise and fall with even greater regularity and timescales than that of great empires. Leadership in the business and management field can be seen as one such concept. Currently, it is seemingly on an upward trajectory for it has proliferated in the last few years as the pendulum has swung once again away from technology, toward human solutions to organisational problems. Dominated by psychology and prescriptive interventions in its early 20th century beginnings, the applied science of leadership went through numerous renewals, each believing it to represent ‘progress’ but none of which offered practitioners the golden bullet in terms of solutions to practical problems. Over recent time, a more critical approach has gained ground where there has been a challenge to the individualistic, often heroic, masculine and prescriptive approach of mainstream leadership studies.² This has partly taken the path, as here, of examining actual practices of, rather than imposing theoretical ideas, on leadership. However, it is acknowledged that theory and practice are difficult if not impossible to separate since a theory is itself a practice. Slightly paraphrasing what the philosophers Deleuze and Foucault have suggested, it may be argued that our theory is not a means of expressing, translating, or in search of an application to, practice: ‘it is practice’.³ Far from universalising or totalising what is theorised, it ‘multiplies potentialities’ (Hand, 1986: xlii). Inevitably, this is a statement with political intent because, despite experiencing the contrary, much theory seeks to place a specific closure around a field rather than ‘open’ it up to unknown multiple potentialities. Then, separating theory from practice is a political act of reproducing the status quo since wherever it challenges specific practices, it can be dismissed as mere theory (just academic) but when it is no more than (apparently) descriptive, it is self-validating.⁴ Yet once we collapse the distinction between theory and practice, it is almost impossible to effect closures because we immediately see that all action is grounded in theoretical assumptions. What academics call theory is then only a more sophisticated or deeply thought out version of such theory/practice.

Alongside these concerns is a growing interest in ethics that has been stimulated by the multiplicity and magnitude of corporate and political scandals culminating in the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008. As most advanced Western countries continue to struggle with the aftermath of the crisis through programmes of austerity, the political fallout has manifested itself in a growing far-right politics. This has been expressed in nationalism if not xenophobia, political isolation and economic protectionism, and a general rejection of the liberal established elite that is seen to have orchestrated the chaos. Although the global political turmoil cannot be wholly attributed to the proliferation of scandals, there has been a renewal of concerns about business ethics that now seemingly is extending beyond mere corporate social responsibility and/or the business case for ethics.⁵ Also, it is clear that despite considerable rhetoric about the need for more ethical behaviour in business and politics,⁶ routinely the response to misdemeanours is more regulation, not ethics.

While discourses of masculinity may not be quite as prolific as those on leadership, they can be seen as part of a wider literature on gender that also relates to issues of identity, diversity and inequality and these are topics of extensive concern throughout the social sciences.⁷ However, much less of the literature links questions of masculinity and identity to matters of ethics and leadership that is a major focus of this book.⁸

The book draws upon a range of literature within leadership studies paying particular emphasis to ethics and gender where there has been a challenge to the various binaries that derive from the separation of mind from body and the domination of cognitive, linguistic and symbolic discourses over concerns with embodied and other material relations. Often described as a ‘new spirituality’, posthumanist researchers trace the neglect of the body to masculine modes of power and offer insights into the ambiguity, doubt and insecurity that befall us when the myth of certainty surrounding ‘scientific’ approaches to leadership is exposed. It also rejects prescriptive rule and norm-based approaches to focus on embodied engagement as part of what it means to practice ethical leadership. It is this recent concern with the body and gender identity that is endorsed here as part of an attempt to renew and revitalise leadership matters in the direction of serious concern with ethics.

This has resulted in a growing demand to focus more on the body and embodied ways of conducting research,⁹ as well as to give attention to other material objects that are significant in human affairs. After several medical investigations, my attention to the body came about as the result of a very personal and painful experience of finding myself infertile. Despite writing about gender and masculinities at the time, my familiarity with the topic made me believe that I had managed the tragedy when I had only rationalised it at a cognitive rather than embodied level, and this eventually led to a brief nervous breakdown.¹⁰ When our bodies are simultaneously subject and object of the same action, we are reflexive bodies for there is no living subject, reflexive or otherwise, without a body,¹¹ Consequently, there can be no human activity, and least of all any concerned with leadership practice, where the body is absent. Indeed, much of the mainstream literature, and especially that concerned with transformational, distributional and leaderly forms of leadership,¹² have seen charisma, inspiration and empathy as significantly embodied. For as humans, we relate not just verbally or cognitively but also with emotions and feelings expressed through our bodies. Indeed, our first encounter with anyone is embodied, and sexual attraction is experienced through the body usually before mental factors and reasoning come into play. Leadership is a corporeal activity in the sense of seeking to inspire and enthuse the corporate body as well as relating to bodies as individual subjects. Paradoxically it is only when leadership becomes a topic of analysis and investigation that disembodied conceptions of its everyday practice predominate. This is because of a subscription to cognitive and mentalist or linguistic and symbolic discourse that esch...