Reluctant leaders : an analysis of middle managers' perceptions of leadership in further education in England

The research that forms the basis for this article draws attention to a group of middle managers who are reluctant to become leaders because they seek more space and autonomy to stay in touch with their subject, their students, and their own pedagogic values and identities, family commitments and the balance between work and life. This reluctance is reinforced by their scepticism that leadership in Further Education (FE) is becoming less hierarchical and more participative. In a sector that has had more than its fair share of reformist intervention, there is some scepticism of the latest fad of distributed and transformative leadership as a new panacea to cure all the accumulated 'ills' of Further Education in England. Although focused primarily on this one sector in an English context, the article draws some inferences where there are parallels with wider sectors of public sector reform and where the uneasy (and incomplete) transitions from 'old' to 'new' public management have been underpinned by invasive audit, inspection and performance cultures

Challenging dualism : public professionalism in ‘troubled’ times

In recent decades neo-liberal reform has significantly impacted on public sector professionals. Sociological interest in such impact has tended to focus on professionals as subjects of such reform: as either de-professionalized ‘victims’ who feel oppressed by the structures of control or strategic operators seeking to contest the spaces and contradictions of market, managerial and audit cultures. Such a dualism is reflective of wider separations of agency and structure that have plagued sociology down the years. Our approach challenges modernizing agendas which seek to re-professionalize or empower professionals without examining the changing conditions of their work or the neo-liberal conditions which frame their practice. It also questions the policy outcomes of reconciling the dualism between agency and structure through a ‘third way’ politics that purports to remove the tensions and conflicts between professions and various stakeholders, the private and the public, and markets and civic society

Passing the Time in Pastimes, Professionalism and Politics

This article may be seen as in search of time but with no ‘real’ prospect of finding it since it is believed that time reflects and reinforces the relations in which it is embedded. The article will focus on pastimes, professionalism, and politics, arguing that while these diverse activities would appear to have no more than their alliteration in common, they share a similar orientation to time that is informed by a phenomenological consciousness of intentionality. This involves a linear sense of time as representing the gap that can only be bridged by intentions being realized instrumentally in specific results through means-end chains. Time then becomes filled up with activities that leave little space for reflection. This raises some issues regarding time that, outside of philosophy and even there only occasionally, would not ordinarily be aired. Some of these issues will be ethical, epistemological and methodological. The ethics will be drawn through an examination of Levinas’s misgivings about the phenomenology of Heidegger, the epistemology and methodology from some deliberations on time in relation to Foucault’s discourse on epistemic regimes, and methodology as one possible implication of those deliberations

Challenging humanist leadership: Towards an embodied, ethical, and effective neo-humanist, enlightenment approach

It can be argued that a humanistic enlightenment approach to leadership emerged as a counter to the historical prevalence of totalitarian elitism where leaders were often autocratic and authoritarian, demanding obedience through command and control. Although beginning with the ancient Greeks, this kind of leadership has continued through classical periods from early medieval times up until the industrial revolution, and also into our modern era. Since the 18th century, philosophies of enlightened humanism have been the face of leadership thinking if not always what might be seen as its embodied practice. Beneath the surface, there lurks a controlling and demanding imposition of self-discipline that can be seen as equally if not more, repressive than the elitism it replaces. This article is concerned to challenge such repression by developing a neo-humanist enlightenment approach to leadership and its development. It departs from those studies that reflect and thereby reproduce individualized preoccupations with, and attachments to, identity on the part of leaders and the so-called followers. The focus, instead, is on an embodied leadership that encourages an ethical engagement with the community, institutions, organizations, and society

The Killing Fields of Identity Politics

The obsession with securing recognition through identity pervades organisational, institutional, political and everyday life. As academics, our culpability in promulgating this fascination, or idée fixee is indisputable, for as a collective body we are responsible for a proliferation of articles, books and conference streams on identity. However, apart from a few exceptions, the majority of texts fail to interrogate the concept to uncover its dangers, but instead reproduce the everyday common-sense fascination, indeed addictive, preoccupation with seeking order, stability and security through identity. In this chapter, we expose this neglect within the organization studies literature and argue that it contributes to, rather than challenges, some of the major social ills surrounding identity – discrimination and prejudice, aggressive masculine competition, conquest and control and the growing identity politics of nationalist, if not xenophobic and racist, constructions of boundaries and borders

Time, Self and Reified Artefacts

Discursive accounts of time tend to focus on a deconstruction of taken-for-granted notions of clock time, restricted to linear measurable units. By contrast the present article examines some of the discourses and practices deployed by managers in their attempts to control time; in the final instance, it shows how time can be a mystery that escapes such managerial pursuits and preoccupations. More specifically, we draw on Levinas’s ideas on time and the ‘Other’, and use two managerial discourses to illustrate how reification (through the use of technological and institutional artefacts) as attempts to control time tend to result in a proliferation of participation but, equally, an insistence on participation may invoke an intensification of control through reification. Reified relationships invariably result in a perpetual return to the Other, or what we have called participation. However, to varying degrees, our participatory mode is not possible without reification. Yet ‘relationships’ cannot be completely delegated to rationally calculating devices, formal institutions, or markets. Cooperation has its source not in reified forms of rationality (nor of irrationality), but in the human encounter with the Other. The organizational, social order is based on personal relations and personal responsibilities

Living on the edge? Professional anxieties at work in academia and veterinary practice

Through empirical research on academics and veterinary surgeons, this article focuses on identity and how it is reflected in, and reproduced by, anxiety and insecurity at work. Three analytical themes – perfection, performativity and commodified service – each of which generates anxiety indicates a loss of autonomy as academics and vets are subjected to competitive market forces as well as an intensification of masculine managerial controls of assessment, audit and accountability. We see these pressures and their effects as reflecting a commodification of service provision where the consumer (student or client) begins to redefine the relationship between those offering some expertise and those who are its recipients, partly achieved through the performative gaze of constant and visible rating mechanisms. Our empirical research also identifies sources of anxiety concerns in their attempts to achieve perfection against this background of uncertain knowledge and precarious contexts of the performative nature of professional expertise

Organizing male infertility:Masculinities and fertility treatment

This paper explores how organizations within the fertility treatment sector in the UK discursively construct (cis) male infertility and whether, in so doing, they reinforce or reproduce prevailing institutionalized discourses and practices of masculinity. We seek to address the gender disparity in contemporary understandings of reproductive health in Organization Studies (OS) where women's experience of infertility and its impact is well researched, but only occasionally does this extend to issues of male infertility. Specifically, we build on existing literature in the social sciences and OS on male infertility and expand it by investigating the organizations that treat fertility issues. We examine and discuss how they may inadvertently contribute to this neglect, by reflecting and reproducing the masculine norms that surround male infertility. We employ a thematic analysis to examine texts produced by organizations involved in the fertility sector and find that male infertility is discussed and presented through three intersecting lenses: (a) a hegemonic masculinization of infertility; (b) male infertility as an othering experience; and (c) disembodied masculinity. We highlight how these gendered organizational narratives (re)produce prevailing norms and practices of masculinity, and how an organizational shift within the sector needs to take place if substantial changes toward more caring, relational, and collective approaches to gender and reproductive health are to be achieved

Gendered practices in veterinary organisations

As a result of scandals concerning sexual harassment in Hollywood and in the media, as well as questions regarding the size of the gender pay gap, considerable attention has recently been paid to questions of gender diversity and discrimination in organisations. Gender issues would appear particularly salient within the veterinary profession, not least because women are beginning to outnumber men as practitioners. While this research on veterinary surgeons was not initially focused on gender, as the study progressed gender became an issue of such importance that it could not be ignored. Although ‘feminized in numerical terms’, the veterinary profession and ‘its professional structure and culture remains gendered masculine’. Translated into practice, this means that although 76 per cent of vet school graduates are currently female, disproportionately few have risen or are rising through the hierarchy. On the surface it is easy to rationalise this away partly by simply stating how many female vets appear to sacrifice career for family, but the authors’ aim is to go beyond merely repeating and reinforcing the common sense view of female reproduction and parenting as the sole explanation for gender inequality within this and other professions

Disrupting masculinities within leadership: Problems of embodiment, ethics, identity, and power

This study provides a concise summary of the book Leadership, Gender and Ethics: Embodied Reason in challenging Masculinities, New York and London: Routledge, 2021. 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 marginalise the body and feelings and often has the effect of sanctioning unethical behaviour. In exploring this thesis, the book 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