Make me authentic, but not here: Reflexive struggles with academic identity and authentic leadership

This article presents a reflexive auto-ethnography of the experience of teaching authentic leadership to MBA students. It traces parallels between the challenges of authentic leadership and the challenges of academic identity work, grounded specifically in the experience of having to teach something one does not fully endorse. Both authentic leadership and academic identity work emerge as struggle – riddled with false starts, best intentions and self-deception, and entwined in the politics of pragmatism, idealism, ambition and survival. The subject position of the mature entrant to academia who is also an ‘early career scholar’ is likened to an awkward adolescent, experimenting with shades of independence/dependence, resistance/compliance and voice/silence. Based on these reflections, having authentic leadership on the curriculum involves a particular kind of identity regulation for students and academics alike, running counter to philosophical notions of authenticity as striving for one’s own way in the world. Authentic leadership will only flourish in the business school if academics muster the courage to acknowledge its relevance for our own role as teacher-leaders, rather than simply teaching or writing to its abstract, ideological appeal

Old wine in a new bottle: Revisiting organisational conceptions of leadership to understand what place leaders ‘actually’ do to make things happen

Place Leadership, as ‘a specific form of leadership at the urban and regional scale’ is considered central to urban and regional growth because it brings together actors from different backgrounds, operating at different scales and with differing levels of power and authority, to work in partnership with others, who may not share their ideological views or business interests. But despite knowing much about what leaders do in organisations and where matters of governance might sit, we’ve never fully understood ‘what it is that place leaders actually do to make things happen at the sub-national scale’. In this chapter, I return to the Organisation Studies literature to see how leadership is ‘actually conceptualised’ and use this to analyse ‘actually existing’ case of place leadership, to show how these specific talents, need to differ, in different contexts, in order to get the job done. What this shows, is that, in keeping with Critical Management, it is only through discursive analysis of place leaders’ accounts of their practice, that we are able to reveal how these attributes and processes ‘actually come together’. This is in keeping with the observations of Beer (2015) that only by acknowledging that regions are construed both materially and discursively through a myriad of processes (Lagendijk 2007) will we succeed in better aligning policy to the specificity of place

Discourses of knowledge across global networks: what can be learnt about knowledge leadership from the ATLAS collaboration?

Writing on knowledge management (KM) and leadership studies tends to take place in parallel; both fields are prolific yet they rarely inform each other. A KM view tends to take a positional view of leaders and a functionalist view of firms: so it regards those with the ascription or status of leaders as pivotal, and knowledge as a commodity to be leveraged with the help of leaders to improve firm performance. But as the global reach of organizations in the knowledge-based economy become more stretched, as their operations become more networked and as their workforces become more mobile, the task of deploying and deriving value from knowledge becomes ever more challenging and calls for a qualitatively different approach which is termed knowledge leadership. In contrast to the instrumentalist approach of KM we offer some alternative discourses of knowledge and explore the implications of these for knowledge leadership. We then use interpretive discourse to examine the way knowledge activists enact and experience the exchange of knowledge in the ATLAS collaboration, part of the largest scientific experiment in the world at the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva. We find this apparently democratic and homogeneous global network to be populated by quite different perceptions concerning the way knowledge is viewed, the way knowledge leadership is exercised and the impact of this on the global collaboration. We discuss the wider significance of these findings for knowledge leadership in other international knowledge-based enterprises and R&D businesses

Beyond the Berlin Wall? Investigating joint commissioning and its various meanings using a Q methodology approach

Joint commissioning has been extensively alluded to in English health and social care policy as a way of improving services and outcomes. Yet there is a lack of specificity pertaining to what joint commissioning actually is and what success would look like. In this paper we adopt a Q methodology approach to understand the different meanings of joint commissioning that those involved in these arrangements hold. In doing so we get beyond the more orthodox interpretations of joint commissioning found in the literature although the appeal of joint commissioning as a ‘good thing’ is still prominent across these accounts

Making sense of variety in place leadership: the case of England’s smart cities

Making sense of variety in place leadership: the case of England’s smart cities. Regional Studies. There is rising interest in cities becoming ‘smart’ knowledge-oriented economies by prioritizing more digitally enabled modes of production and service delivery. Whilst the prevalence of these new organizational forms is well understood, the way that leadership agency is exercised (i.e., the actors involved and their modalities of action) is not. Drawing on new empirical data and sense-making methodology, the paper reveals discursive patterns in how public agencies, private firms and communities ‘see’ and ‘do’ leadership within these place-based contexts, and concludes that success in exploiting the social and spatial dynamics of ‘smart’ development lies in understanding actors’ assumptions about commercial and social gain

Making sense of joint commissioning: three discourses of prevention, empowerment and efficiency

Background: In recent years joint commissioning has assumed an important place in the policy and practice of English health and social care. Yet, despite much being claimed for this way of working there is a lack of evidence to demonstrate the outcomes of joint commissioning. This paper examines the types of impacts that have been claimed for joint commissioning within the literature. Method: The paper reviews the extant literature concerning joint commissioning employing an interpretive schema to examine the different meanings afforded to this concept. The paper reviews over 100 documents that discuss joint commissioning, adopting an interpretive approach which sought to identify a series of discourses, each of which view the processes and outcomes of joint commissioning differently. Results: This paper finds that although much has been written about joint commissioning there is little evidence to link it to changes in outcomes. Much of the evidence base focuses on the processes of joint commissioning and few studies have systematically studied the outcomes of this way of working. Further, there does not appear to be one single definition of joint commissioning and it is used in a variety of different ways across health and social care. The paper identifies three dominant discourses of joint commissioning – prevention, empowerment and efficiency. Each of these offers a different way of seeing joint commissioning and suggests that it should achieve different aims. Conclusions: There is a lack of clarity not only in terms of what joint commissioning has been demonstrated to achieve but even in terms of what it should achieve. Joint commissioning is far from a clear concept with a number of different potential meanings. Although this ambiguity can be helpful in some ways in the sense that it can bring together disparate groups, for example, if joint commissioning is to be delivered at a local level then more specificity may be required in terms of what they are being asked to deliver

Building capacity for regeneration: making sense of ambiguity in urban policy outcomes

UK regeneration exists amid a ‘burgeoning’ literature which states the ongoing desire to improve the outcomes of urban policy. However, concern about the symbolic nature of regeneration policy and its re-production in the form of ‘linguistic debates’, can latterly be witnessed in the context of more ‘discursive’ concerns rooted in shifting patterns of governance. Drawing empirically from research with fifty UK regeneration professionals and Laclau & Mouffe’s (2001) theory of socialist hegemony to explore reasons for the persistence of such ambiguity, three rival discourses emerge in the form of ‘Building City Regions’; ‘Narrowing the Gap’; and ‘Building Community Capacity’. What a critical analysis suggests is that by ‘deconstructing’ rather than ‘deciphering’ the goals of regeneration policy, a temporary ‘discursive’ form of regeneration emerges in which the contradictions and tensions within the discourse are represented in the form of ‘nodal points and floating signifiers’ and articulated through the notion of lack. This can be linked to the bureaucratic struggles which emerge as a result of a ‘new right’ hegemony, which commodifies all aspects of work and social life to bring market-informed ways of seeing and doing to every aspect of regeneration practice. Actors seek to manage such complexity through emotional investment