Based on a case study of managers in a large, international knowledge-intensive company this article suggests a rethinking of leadership, taking the mundane, almost trivial, aspects of what ...managers/leaders actually do seriously. In the study, the managers interviewed emphasized the importance of listening and informal chatting. Managers listening to subordinates are assumed to have various positive effects, e.g. people feel more respected, visible and less anonymous, and included in teamwork. Rather than certain acts being significant in themselves, it is their being done by managers that gives them a special, emotional value beyond their everyday significance. Leadership is conceptualized as the extra-ordinarization of the mundane.
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CEKLJ, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper identifies eight significant shortcomings in leadership studies. The field is large, divergent and fragmented, making it difficult to make broad generalizations, but the majority of all ...research suffer from most of what may be referred to as the Hollywood, Disneyland, closed system, two kinds of people, bees and the honeypot, reification, tautology and hyperreality problems. The paper suggests ways of reducing these problems.
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This article is a follow-up of Alvesson and Kärreman (2011a), which was in itself a follow-up of Alvesson and Kärreman (2000), and a response to a critique of the former by Hardy and Grant (2012). ...The critique is addressed directly and the logic behind it investigated critically. The article also addresses wider concerns regarding the politics of research and publishing and the conditions of critique at the present time. The pressure and eagerness to get published lead to strong subspecialization and an inclination to build research approaches within which authors are inclined to reproduce shared assumptions and be unwelcome to critical explorations. The article points to the risk of assumption-challenging work being marginalized through the anticipation of critique leading to hostile reactions and specialized, politically motivated reviewers blocking the publication of far-reaching critique.
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In this paper we provide a counterpoint to conventional views on integrative reviews in knowledge development, as exemplified by Elsbach and Van Knippenberg (2020). First, we critique their proposed ...integrative review by identifying and problematizing several key assumptions underlying it, particularly their idea that the integrative review can simply build on existing studies and lead the way to knowledge. Second, based on this critique, we propose as an alternative the problematizing review, which is based on the following four core principles: the ideal of reflexivity, reading more broadly but selectively, not accumulating but problematizing, and the concept that ‘less is more’. In contrast to the integrative review, which regards reviews as a ‘building exercise’, the problematizing review regards reviews as an ‘opening up exercise’ that enables researchers to imagine how to rethink existing literature in ways that generate new and ‘better’ ways of thinking about specific phenomena.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper contributes to close up studies of how members in organizations experience and act in relationship to what is broadly and vaguely referred to as institutionalized structures and practices. ...Based on a case study about scorecards, a quality control system, it is illustrated that this practice works poorly, because of inconsistent ideas of purpose and functioning. We introduce the concept of organizational dischronization (OD) to illuminate this. OD indicates a deviation from the ideal of shared or synchronized meanings, and the existence of diverging understandings and lack of clarification of this, in an organization. The paper challenges some core ideas of institutional theory (logics) and sensemaking, suggesting the use of counter concepts such is organizational illogics and nonsensemaking, thus opening up for a broader and less ‘smooth’ understanding of how institutions and sensemaking work than assumed in the literature.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
In the last 40 years, leadership studies (LS) have moved from a condition of near despair, where complaints of slow progress were commonplace, to a situation of self-confidence and self-praise. ...However, during recent years we have seen an upsurge in criticism alongside a contradiction between positive leadership ideas and a working life bearing little imprint of the upbeat messages said to characterize successful leaders. LS primarily produces results where “positive” leadership is correlated with various “positive” outcomes. This is made possible through unusual conventions characterizing LS, which produce a recipe for flawed, but publishable, research and career progress. This paper points at 20 elements of this recipe and argues for a radical rethinking of LS norms and practices to develop more complex and sophisticated knowledge that is intellectually and methodologically sounder, facilitating less ideological and more relevant and insightful studies and research results.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Our academic field of leadership studies is plagued by an unscholarly obsession with fashions and clientelism. We have a pronounced pen-chant to tell our audiences what they like to hear and what ...makes us popular rather than what they need to know. Moreover, much of our work suffers from a chronic illusion that the study of leadership per-tains to natural sciences and is governed by what to us at least appear to be highly elusive laws of causality. These two afflictions together skew the study of the fuzzy social phenomenon we have come to know as leadership, towards understandings of a world that many findintellectually unappealing, ideologically loaded, and practically misleading
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The concept of critical performativity - efforts to make critical research more relevant for groups outside academia and develop and communicate action-relevant critical insights with some potential ...effect - has received considerable interest. Much of this has focused on debates about the core concept and principles. This paper argues for the need to "do" - more than talk about - critical performativity and reports an intervention: a chronicle in a major newspaper about anxiety-driven, rule-bound public organizations and follow-up work in the form of a series of lectures to groups signalling responsiveness to the message. Some lessons and reflections are offered. Arguably critical studies can have a beneficial impact on the practices of managers and other employees, but this calls for researchers being more straightforward, deviating from academics' inclinations of being cautious, mainly addressing colleagues and remote from experiences and concerns of organizational practitioners. Developing and effectively communicating relevant key insights is here crucial.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
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