The Social Development of Leadership and Knowledge

A Reflexive Inquiry into Research and Practice

R. Warwick, D. Board

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137005502
• eBook ISBN: 9781137005519
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In an increasingly complex and interconnected world, the authors make a case rich in theory and narrative for a new reflexive approach to real life situations. This approach (immersed reflexivity) draws on Pierre Bourdieu's logic of practice and the complexity sciences.

Part I

Experiencing Curiosity

We take curiosity to be the beginning of knowledge. We are curious about leadership and knowledge. Curiosity does not attach itself to neat questions that articulate what is to be studied and how. Curiosity is a guiding hand that begins early in life. Curiosity does not discriminate in favour of accepted ways of doing things either in theory or in practice. That said, if any insights it yields are to be of value particularly to others, issues such as methodology, how such insights are located within the wider body of literature and practice and their validity and so on, all have to be adequately addressed.

Part I has two chapters, travelling in opposite directions on the same path, that of the interaction between research and practice. We use examples of academic research because they are vivid expressions of curiosity. We do not suggest that those who seek to explore their own experience seriously, and in doing so contribute to knowledge and leadership in their worlds, must do it academically.

The chapters explore first-hand experience. The experience is visceral. Those involved have a lot at stake in what is going on. In both cases the emotional and the logical are entwined with each other such that those involved edge forward even in uncertain situations.

In Chapter 1, Sudhir Venkatesh, at the time a graduate sociology student, travels the road from being an academic to a practitioner; in this case being a gang leader. In Chapter 2, the first author, Rob, travels in the direction of practice to academia. Both travellers develop awareness of different games at play and become involved increasingly in them. Both travellers make decisions but the specific forms of their journeys emerge through complex, in part accidental, local interactions. As an aside, we use the word ‘game’ in a specific way and will return to this at various times. For the moment we mean how a person comes to enter a community, develops an awareness of the interactions and the rules at play, how they develop abilities to ‘play’ and then become increasingly confident of those rules and norms. And in doing so loses awareness of them.

1

Two Cities – Journeying between Research and Practice

The two metaphorical cities of this chapter are the cities of knowledge and of practice. The chapter is about a journey from research to practice.

The Asian-American sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh describes in his book ‘Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Crosses the Line’ (2008) how his graduate studies took him into the lives of the residents of a sprawling, squalid, Chicago housing complex, the Robert Taylor Homes. Venkatesh’s story begins with trying to conduct research in the Lake Park projects, a housing development a short walk from the university but in the middle of a turf run by gangs whose livelihood was selling crack cocaine. Having ventured into the estate with his clipboard, Venkatesh starts to ask his academically approved questions:

How does it feel to be black and poor?…Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good.

Venkatesh (2008, p. 14)

and gets mugged by a gang, the Black Kings.

Venkatesh’s research and his relationship with the Black Kings develop together to the point where, nearly three years later, Venkatesh spends a day walking in the shoes of gang leader J. T. The story of ‘Gang Leader for a Day’ spans many years. The two small incidents that follow are not supposed to do justice to Venkatesh’s wealth of insight into both urban deprivation and social research, but will serve our needs.

On one occasion Venkatesh follows one of the Robert Taylor estates’ informal leaders, Ms Bailey, to the apartment of a 21-year-old mother, known to the gang, who had been beaten up. Blood was gurgling in her mouth. Some of the gang set off after the suspect, Bee-Bee. Venkatesh follows.

Then, from above, I heard some distant footsteps turning into a rumble. Someone was running down the stairs, breathing heavily. I found myself grabbing onto the back of C-Note’s jacket. Charlie and Blue were crouched just in front of us. I made out what was in Blue’s hand: brass knuckles.

Just as the footsteps reached the fourth floor, Charlie jumped up and swung the crowbar, waist high. He struck Bee-Bee full on, bowling him over.

‘Yeah, nigger!’ Blue shouted, then jumped over and started pounding Bee-Bee in the side. His head hit the wall of the stairwell and snapped back. ‘Leave that bitch alone, you hear me?’ Blue shouted, punching him repeatedly in the gut. ‘You better leave her alone, nigger!’

Bee-Bee was tall and strong, and he threw Charlie off him. He stood up and began shouting, but Blue tackled him, smashing Bee-Bee into the wall. The two of them started tumbling down the stairs. Charlie grabbed Bee-Bee’s leg, so he, too, fell down the stairs.

‘Grab his other leg!’ Charlie yelled in our direction. C-Note jumped down the stairs and made a grab. Blue, meanwhile, was struggling to get out from under Bee-Bee, who had Blue’s head in a choke hold. I could see that Blue was struggling to breathe; he looked like he might pass out, or worse. I felt as if I had to do something. Running over to them, I kicked Bee-Bee in the stomach, which made him relax his grip on Blue. The other men smothered him, and I could hear his muffled words, ‘Okay, okay. All right, enough.’

Venkatesh (2008, pp. 169–170)

The other incident took place in Venkatesh’s other world, of academia. Bill Wilson was an eminent authority on urban poverty and a leading black sociologist.

After nearly three years of hanging out with J. T., I began talking to several of my professors about my dissertation topic. As it happened, they weren’t as enthusiastic as I was about an in-depth study of the Black Kings crack gang and its compelling leader. They were more interested in the standard sociological issues in the community: entrenched poverty, domestic violence, the prevalence of guns, residents’ charged relations with the government – and, to a lesser extent, how the community dealt with the gang.

If I explored these subjects well, my professors said, I could explain how the Robert Taylor tenants really behaved, rather than simply arguing that they didn’t act like middle-class people.

Venkatesh (2008, pp. 113–114)

He went on to explore the developing sense of immersion, both by himself and others around him:

He also said he’d started worrying about my safety in the projects. By this point I had taken up golf as a way to spend more time with Wilson, an avid golfer. ‘I’m having nightmares, Sudhir,’ he said once in the middle of the fairway, staring out blankly. ‘You’re worrying me, and I really want you to think about spending some time with others.’…

I knew he had my best interests in mind, but it still came as a shock to me that I would have to widen my focus if I still planned to base my dissertation on this community. It meant that J. T. wouldn’t be the sole target of my attention, and perhaps not even the primary target. A few of my professors were seasoned ethnographers, experts in the methodology of first-hand observation. They were insistent that I avoid getting so close to any one source that I would be beholden to him.

Easier said than done. I hadn’t forgotten how agitated J. T. became when he saw me branching out into the community. I really didn’t feel I could tell him that my project was moving away from a focus on his leadership. By now J. T. wasn’t my only access to the community, but he was certainly my best access. He was the one who had brought me in, and he was the one who could open – or shut – any door.

Venkatesh (2008, pp. 113–114)

The purpose of this book

This book is an offer to consider new ways of researching organisations; not as a separate methodology, but as a way of thinking about what we are doing with others. Our experience is of travelling in the opposite direction to Venkatesh; in other words, we write as practitioner researchers. Both worlds matter to us. Leaving aside the ways in which the organisational settings, in which we grew up as managers, do or do not resemble those of the Black Kings, we want to contribute to knowledge as well as to practice. From our experience we want to offer those who study organisations, as well as those who work in them, some new insights and values. If this is also your hope, the first purpose of this book is to help you explore, both theoretically and in your research, what your offer might be.

To make a fully recognised contribution to knowledge, we must address academics concerned with the study of organisations and what they consider knowledge to be. That is complex. Some, like Venkatesh, have ventured far towards the practice they study and in doing so have crossed various lines. Those ‘lines’ are part of the discourse of method. Others have developed new insights on safer grounds. Yet the differences between these academic approaches are not the most important thing: recognition between them, even where lines are transgressed, is as important. It mattered a lot to Venkatesh to defend his doctoral dissertation successfully. It matters to him that he offers his book as Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Columbia University, rather than as a bishop of a schismatic epistemological church. As for him, so also for us and for the practitioner researchers for whom we write.

To this academic community we owe an extensive debt. We locate what we shall describe as immersed reflexivity among, and stand on the achievements of, those who pioneered and developed action research, complex responsive processes of relating, ethnomethodology, grounded theory, participant-observation, phenomenology, practice, reflexivity in different forms, sensemaking and soft systems methodology and so on. In this discussion we will argue that the predominant ways in which practitioner researchers are invited to research their practice cuts them off (more exactly, attempts to cut them off) from experience. The attempt fails, but has consequences. Those consequences include missed research opportunities and the neutering of dangerous questions, including whether the most common academic suppositions about the relationship between our two cities – between theory and practice – stand up.

The contribution of this book

Specifically, then we argue that research into organisations and management currently suffers from two exclusions. First, there is the cutting off from lived, in-the-minute experience, messy and emotional, a vivid example of which Venkatesh has just described. Researchers like Venkatesh who stray into practice are expected to distance themselves from a substantial part of what they encounter; practitioner researchers may have to split themselves down the middle. Second, deriving from science or science-envy, the dominant research orientation is towards external observation, measurement and sample size, which leaves important tracts of organisational life barely explored. Crack dens are not the only places to which research access is difficult: so are boardrooms (particularly during periods of difficult decision or acute tension). Confidentiality and political sensitivity erect high walls which are costly or impossible for the outsider to climb. If climbed, they may yield only one perspective on one case; how much can the researcher do with that?

For example, imagine the difficulty of obtaining anywhere near complete access for research purposes – and so for publication in some form – to all the informal conversations, formal presentations and emails between board members, staff and advisers which would represent one large firm deciding to make a bid to buy another: a subject of wide social and economic interest. To catch the informal exchanges the research would need to be contemporaneous or nearly so. Imagine the hugely compounded difficulty if the same access were sought to the decision-making of the target firm, or of other bidders. Small slips with raw information, let alone emergent conclusions, would expose practitioners and researchers alike to severe censure and possible criminal proceedings.

Consequently such processes tend to remain black boxes, studied from the outside only. Such external research can be valuable: for example, it has been sufficiently well established over many years that ‘mergers do not seem to benefit acquirers’ (and thus make a questionable sense for the bidder’s shareholders) for them to qualify as ‘facts’ (Andrade, Mitchell, & Stafford, 2001, p. 118). Nevertheless, bids continue apace, investment banks continue to promote deals and company directors make decisions about them with little prospect of management research illuminating the interiority of the processes in which they are caught up.

We hope to expand the possibilities for research into such fraught senior management situations. We will develop in Chapter 10 the sensitive and confidential example of appointing individuals to senior roles. We hope to encourage some of the practitioners already behind closed doors to contribute to published research and knowledge, by showing how they can do research while continuing to play their business role vigorously. The role of professional advisers in these situations is particularly significant. They are likely to work for many clients over many years, and will have some possibilities of publishing while preserving client confidentiality. This is not open, for example, to the board member of a client, whose career may only include two or three easily identifiable boards. Professional advisers also have the motive to hone their skills and gain fresh insights into their practice.

In fact the problem is more significant than we have so far suggested. Boardrooms and crack dens sound exciting, and inaccessibility may enhance the appeal, but large tracts of organisational life, everyday operational delivery, lie open to study. There isn’t a serious problem in accessing the everyday actions and incidents (is there?) through which decisions are reached in boardrooms or elsewhere, affecting (and being affected by) large numbers of staff and customers. But there is something important in this territory of management that is not usually open to researchers, and we illustrate this in Chapter 2 from our experience in translating into practice national policy-making in healthcare. Here confidentiality (for example, patient confidentiality) is important but may not place insuperable constraints on research. Rather the external researcher’s difficulty is catching between their fingers the uncontrolled spilling out of incidents and routines, hard to capture because of their everydayness and apparent triviality (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2003). The practitioner researcher’s difficulty is different, since she has the perspective of an able practitioner in what is and what is not important. However, this knowing both helps and hinders research: seeing the ‘evident’ importance of things that can disguise as well as disclose.

A question for practitioner research, conducted by any method, is: how does the practitioner’s expertise – what they notice (and what they do not), what they take for granted (and what they do not) and their fluency within their social field, both enable and constrain their research inquiry? This is a reflexive question about experience which applies equally to any research in the social sciences. However, the Methods section of a conventional PhD dissertation often sidesteps it in favour of a series of philosophical and procedural incantations, which may impress but actually serves to divert the reader’s attention from the nonpractitioner researcher’s modest experience of the activity into which they have inquired.

One connection between leadership and knowledge, which may be imagined but we do not propose, is that research into senior places is intrinsically more valuable or difficult than elsewhere in the organisation. One form of organisational life does not exist without the other, and any illumination of one is likely to impact the other. If, as we have suggested, the research process will bring into question the practitioner’s own sense of professional worth, that requires courage from the middling executive and the ‘big cheese’ alike.

Starting our task, the relationship of leadership and knowledge

The focus of the rest of this chapter, with Venkatesh’s help, is briefly to preview the association between leadership and knowledge, which this book will explore.

This is a journey into the no-man’s-land between the cities of practice and knowledge. We start by exploring the relevant part of the city of knowledge, namely that concerned with knowledge of organisational life. We start in that city because it is less familiar to practitioners, and it is the city whose representatives will need to recognise our work if what we offer is to be accepted as research.

Second, we will discuss how leadership is understood in that city. In academic terms that is an unusual jump. Suffice for the moment to say that leadership is something whose presence or absence practitioners encounter a lot, highlighted by the vigorous appetite for leadership books and development programmes created by practitioners and academics alike. At the outset leadership will simply be an example of a practice of which we all have some experience. By the end of the book we hope to have re-drawn th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Cover Picture
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Experiencing Curiosity
• Part II: A Visit to the Library
• Part III: Creating Knowledge
• Part IV: Inviting Engagement
• Part V: Making an ‘Ending’ and Offering a ‘Beginning’
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index to Narratives
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index