Blanchot's The Madness of the Day shows that when we have to make sense of experience, we inevitably distance ourselves from the raw, naïve openness of the event. This is something we all know and it is a process that fiction (as well as a great deal of management literature) implicitly tries to deny by evoking a meaningfulness-in-itself that does not refer to lived processes of relatedness. Based on Blanchot, we go here a step further, claiming that leadership is an iconic exemplar of this process. Like narrative itself, leadership is inherently connected to the glorification of accountability, purposefulness and goal-directed orientations. In so far as this is so, leadership is quite mad.

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... The disconnection between actions and discourses, source of psychological incoherence and ambiguity, would thus participate in a general control strategy, not legitimately claimable as such by the organization, which develop further ambiguous and hypocrite narratives (Chauvey 2010), through which the narcissist leader becomes able to transgress moral boundaries because s/he mistakes the moral order with the extension of her will (Gosling, 2013). The critique points out leaders construct goal-oriented stories: Letiche and Moriceau have stated that "like narrative itself, leadership is inherently connected to the glorification of accountability, purposefulness and goal-directed orientations" (Letiche and Moriceau, 2013), why they question the use of stories as lessons on purpose, goals and coherence and qualify it as the "madness of the day". Social, psychoanalytical, organizational, systemic or power theories are applied to stories as if they were accounts of real experiences by real beings, like in the study of captain Ahab' "sane means and mad motives" (Sievers, 2013). ...

Philippe Mairesse and Stéphane Debenedetti choose to address questions of power surrounding the relationship of instructors and students. Is not the strategy of pretending to have very limited power over what occurs in the classroom, while requiring that students comply to the rules and regulations set by the university as required by the administration, accreditation bodies, etc., the surest way to gain power over the students? Is using film in the classroom really an emancipatory possibility or just a trick? The chapter is based on Lars von Trier's The Boss-of-it-all, in which, by pretending to have no control (the boss above me commands), leaders increase their control over others. Mairesse and Debenedetti wonder whether pretending to abandon the instructor's didactic power by showing films in the classroom, does not, in fact, increase instructor power. They show how film both confirms and reverses common clichés about leadership, and its heroic figuration. By stressing how there is leadership and fiction at all levels, von Trier proposes that leaders are authors, who draw their author-ity from their virtuosity at creating fictitious stories; stories that people love to listen to. But should we go one step further: is it possible that the leaders' power is a fiction? Is increased control over the social, based on the image of a society where everyone is at her/his right place, the ultimate pretense? Why do students love our stories about leadership? Why do we love to fashion such stories? The goal proposed here is to engage students in reflection on control and leadership. And the objective is that they become more aware of multilayered, distributed and invisible aspects of power. A strategy is proposed to achieve a less abstract, but highly normative, debate. And we are obliged to reflect on what we actually do, when we propose alternative teaching modalities.

  • G.R. Gemmill G.R. Gemmill
  • Judith Oakley

The social construct of leadership is viewed as a myth that functions to reinforce existing social beliefs and structures about the necessity of hierarchy and leaders in organizations. The dynamics of the leadership myth in terms of its consequences for alienation characterized by intellectual and emotional deskilling is discussed. A trend toward massive deskilling on a societal scale is viewed as indicated by the current emergence of magical wishes for omnipotent leaders demonstrating a sense of helplessness and despair in being able to personally initiate and create less alienating social forms for the workplace. The types of experimentation required for refraining socially constructed meanings of leadership are explored, with emphasis placed on the role of heightened awareness of covert and undiscussable power and authority dynamics in an organizational context.

  • Martin Wood Martin Wood

The leadership literature typically talks about the discrete "individuality" of its subject and particularly the personal qualities and capabilities of a few key people occupying top positions in a hierarchy. Current leadership research now has begun to generate new knowledge about leadership practice in relations of interpersonal exchange. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need for the ramifications of this insight to be more sufficiently developed. The current discussion explores how a perspective of process studies challenges the dominance of the field by individual social actors and discrete schemes of relations. Its aims are twofold. First, it will show how both of these latter "epistemologies" are lacking and suggest that current leadership research and development activities must rise to the "ontological" challenge of "processes" rather than "things". Second, it looks at some methodological implications of this way of thinking as a productive incitement to future management studies. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005.

  • Jeffrey Pfeffer Jeffrey Pfeffer

Problems with the concept of leadership are addressed: (a) the ambiguity of its definition and measurement, (b) the issue of whether leadership affects organizational performance, and (c) the process of selecting leaders, which frequently emphasizes organizationally-irrelevant criteria. Leadership is a process of attributing causation to individual social actors. Study of leaders as symbols and of the process of attributing leadership might be productive.

  • Robert Cooper

In Niklas Luhmann's social theory, autopoiesis is the repeated work of human self-construction through which social and cultural forms are maintained against a background of their continuous dissolution and disappearance. Autopoiesis in this sense is the production and reproduction of the human world through which the human body constitutes and reconstitutes itself by making the raw material of the world fit the requirements of the body and its organs. Human production thus makes the world present to the human body and its parts such as we see in the examples of the supermarket which brings together the products of the world in one space for our visual and manual convenience and the domestic television set which literally brings home to us the distant happenings of the world. Human systems and institutions can thus be seen as means for making the world's materials fit the human mind and body and for ensuring their continuous presence as meaningful forms. But, significantly, the production of presence depends on absence, disappearance and decay. Absence has to be seen as a major force in human production; it is the missing presence that haunts all human work and which helps us to understand the development of such modern production methods as mass production and information technology.

  • Robert Cooper

Contemporary usage of the concept of organization gives it a formalfunctional emphasis and this is no more evident than in that branch of social science we call organization theory. No doubt this is part of the long drift towards the economism of modem institutions so well described by Polanyi in his analysis of the difference between primitive and modern economies (Polanyi 1969). However, the placing of organization theory within the wider field of social organization gives it a significantly different interpretive context in which rationalinstrumental behaviour is subject to social or interactional forces. In an early paper on organizational analysis, Gou1dner (1959) made a similar distinction in isolating the rational and natural systems of organization. The main purpose of that paper was to criticize the 'natural' mood for overemphasizing the tendency of organizational members to integrate their activities spontaneously and naturally. Against this view, Gouldner argued that system parts act in accordance with a principle of 'functional autonomy'; that is, far from willingly and spontaneously co-operating with others in the organization, sub-systems seek to preserve a degree of distance from other sub-systems. In what is for us a most telling observation, Gouldner writes:, Assuming that the organization's parts, no less than the organization as a whole, operate to maintain their boundaries and to remain in equilibrium, then the parts should be expected to defend their functional autonomy, or at least some measure of it, from encroachment.