Conclusions: Towards Emancipatory Leadership?

Jackie Ford, Nancy Harding and Mark Learmonth

Chapter 8 in Leadership as Identity, 2008, pp 167-184 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The concerns about leadership that led us to write this book were the following: 1. There is a huge body of literature on leadership and yet the vast proportion of it is located within one narrow theoretical perspective designed to improve profitability, efficiency and effectiveness in organisations. 2. Research into leadership is often fragmented, poorly conducted, at times trivial and frequently based on management/guru academics and practitioners, who have a vested interest as they are keen to promulgate their latest solutions to the ‘dilemmas of leadership’ (Collinson and Grint, 2005, 5). 3. There is no consensus on how to define leadership so it would be easy to dismiss it out of hand, but it has become such an authoritative discourse in both academic and organisational settings that it is too important to ignore (Collinson and Grint, 2005; Ford, 2007; Sinclair, 2005). 4. Leadership theory constructs a model of ‘the leader’ that is impossible to achieve. It represents the leader as a singular subject, a ‘monad’, who is objective, rational and secure unto himself/herself. Managers and leaders are, however, people (not robots) and so they have complex identities.

Keywords: Ethical Leadership; Standard Account; Leadership Development; Leadership Theory; Dialogical Interaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-58418-1_8

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230584181_8

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