Leadership in the British civil service: an interpretation

This article is essentially a polemic. The argument is that when politicians and officials now talk of ‘leadership’ in the British civil service they do not use that word in the way in which it was previously used. In the past leading civil servants, acting in partnership with ministers and within constitutional constraints, exercised leadership in the sense of setting example, inspiring confidence and encouraging loyalty. The loosening of traditional constitutional patterns, the marginalization of senior officials in the policy process and the emergence of business methods as the preferred model for public ­administration have led to a political and administrative environment in which leadership in the British civil service is now about encouraging patterns of behaviour which fit in with these changes. Leadership skills are now about ‘delivery’; they are not about motivation. It is time for politicians, officials and scholars to be open about this

Introduction

This introductory chapter examines the intersections between embodiment, material culture, and Charlotte Brontë’s life and writing. It charts the evolution of Brontë studies following the rise of New Historicism and seminal scholarship from the 1990s and early 2000s by critics and biographers such as Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, Juliet Barker, Lucasta Miller, Sally Shuttleworth, and Margaret Smith. The chapter goes on to discuss how the “material turn” and recent theories of embodiment inform twenty-first -century approaches to the presentation and reception of Brontë’s art, life, and legacy. Focusing on the interdisciplinary conversations that comprise the volume, the editors discuss how book history, cultural heritage, the history of dress, literary criticism, and museum curation prove vital to understanding the ways in which readers have responded to Brontë’s work from its original publication to the present day