Abstract
Leadership studies is a research and education field frequently characterized as in crisis, including by the author of this book (see Spoelstra, Butler, & Delaney, 2016). Alongside that, some senior scholars in the United States and Europe grumpily assert that leadership studies is now characterized by baseless unscientific unevidenced ‘bullshit’ (Pfeffer, 2015), and empty grandiosity built on numerous methodological and theoretical shortcomings (Alvesson, 2017). Faced with this, Sverre Spoelstra has chosen a different route, and written a highly critical book that might, paradoxically, revive leadership studies.
While the book still expresses a lot of unhappiness with the research and education provided under the flag of leadership studies, it is constructive in tone throughout, ultimately optimistic about leadership studies, and perhaps also about leadership itself. The book does exactly what the title says – it provides a detailed introduction to some of the philosophically informed ways we can think about leadership, leaders and leading. This is not novel, as the author notes in the introduction, either in leadership studies or in other social science fields. Novelty is not the purpose in the sense of creating a new space. Instead, Spoelstra wants to be clear that he is re-introducing philosophical perspectives in order to encourage thought and action in a particular direction (as I explain in the next section), rather than ‘just’ following philosophical ideas as a means of analysing leadership. This might seem like a technical distinction, but it is not. It is central to the content and tone of the book, and will frame how it influences the field in the future.
Specifically, this book ‘seeks to address leadership philosophically through affiliated concepts that have been explicit in philosophical debates’ (pp. 1–2), such as authority, authenticity, or performativity. There is an implicit hierarchy of thought here, but the book works with it subtly and effectively, referring to social science concepts when needed. There is a slightly discomfiting acceptance of the internal hierarchy of philosophy as a discipline (very crudely: Ancient Greek best, contemporary European second, all others, especially feminist, distant third), but the principle of engaging with what many see as the centre of all research remains a very good one.
Fortunately, the book is much more than a list of pet philosophical preoccupations. All chapters are concerned to a greater or lesser extent with one particular understanding of leadership and the leader, the charismatic. Spoelstra is open about the disciplinary choices he has made to include and exclude. Less clear is why those choices to include and exclude have been made. In that, we have to place a lot of trust in the authorial guide and his map of the territory.
The reason for this philosophical approach seems to be, again implicitly, analysis of leadership as a social and cultural phenomenon. This is distinguished from other books, including other philosophical introductions, that address how to lead as their central problematic. Again, this is well summarized in the introduction: ‘The aim of this book is to learn more about how leadership is thought about’ (p. 6), using philosophical (not social science) method to ask questions of what it is that we know (or think we know). This is key to how the author wishes the entire book to be read, in the broadest sense in its overarching arguments and in the narrowest sense in its specific knowledge claims.
This is not a comfortable or easy book. The engagement with philosophy is testing, and challenging, and the narrative is demanding throughout. I have faith that an enthusiastic undergraduate or keen taught postgraduate student could read, follow and find it useful. The book is certainly crucial for any PhD student taking leadership, leaders or leading as objects of analysis. It should also become important to the research field as it is practised, because the argument proposes a way of seeing leadership that is under-represented in published research and, I suspect, in education.
Within all this positive, there is one very surprising silence in this book, related to feminist research, and feminist writing on leadership specifically. This is not a way of saying ‘this is the book the author should have written….’ Rather, the intention is to note a curious silence. Feminist research is cited, for sure, especially the ideas developed by Amanda Sinclair, Jackie Ford and Nancy Harding – sometimes only in the footnotes, but nonetheless it is acknowledged. There is a substantive gap, though, manifest as an absence in just one individual example: what of Heather Höpfl’s (2007) account of the gendered nature of leaderly identity formation, especially men’s tendency to enlarge and extend access to power? Or her (1992) narrative analysis of charismatic leadership’s contribution to ‘the making of the corporate acolyte’? Or Höpfl and Matilal’s (2007) exploration of the expectation that women leaders demonstrate male characteristics (usually ‘balls’) in order to be seen as successful?
This silence, perhaps inadvertent neglect, is a shame, because the book is wonderful in every other respect. The most interesting and productive argument presented centres on the relationship between those we most often think of as leaders (the people at the pinnacle of an organizational hierarchy), and their relationship to the organization they notionally belong to. Perhaps Spoelstra’s finest action is to focus on how leaders are constructed as simultaneously central to ‘their’ organization, and necessarily separate from it – and crucially, to explore this paradox as inevitable and integral. Leaders are, or are expected to be, transcendent, hovering above the mundane everyday and pointing the way towards ‘higher spheres of being’ (p. 5) – while simultaneously being omnipresent and practically influential. Although the first part of this a commonplace observation, the work Spoelstra makes it do conceptually is unique.
Practically, the table of contents looks like this. First, the very insightful and thoughtful introduction. Seven substantive chapters follow, gradually building towards a very short conclusion. Chapter 1 considers the status an influence of charisma and the figure of the charismatic leader, focusing on the adoption and negation of the term and concept in leadership studies over the last 50 years. This chapter exists largely to support the contention that charisma continues as the key resource for thinking leadership, despite an increased polyvocality in leadership studies and greater recognition of relationality in particular, and an espoused denial of charisma by many researchers. The chapter is, as Spoelstra notes, the least philosophical in terms of dealing directly with ideas, but it is profoundly shaped by the philosophical method described in the introduction. In practice, this means the chapter questions, questions and questions again. It is a wonderful read; a careful reader exits with a range of new ways of thinking about the oldest theme in leadership studies.
Chapter 2 centres on a detailed discussion of an often neglected aspect of charisma, its role as a form of authority employed as a means of legitimating domination in social relations. The main analytic here is discussion of why most of us think of leadership as occupying a contested middle ground between force and argument. This is, according to Spoelstra’s narrative, a deep paradox. The third chapter teases out another strand of charisma, and again one that is easily overlooked, religion. Spoelstra chooses to approach religion in two ways: as a metaphor that helps understand how we think about leadership, and then as an analytic that helps analyse why leadership is constructed as a mediator between the extraordinary divine and the secular everyday.
Chapter 4 pulls at a different thread, ‘leadership speech’. There are two conceptual bases here, the increasingly familiar notion of performativity and Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek term παρρησία/parrhesia (usually translated as ‘fearless speech’ or ‘speaking frankly’). This chapter asks more questions of the relationship between how we think leadership and authority. For the first time, the narrative also speaks directly to the concept of power, and, also for the first time, provides two extended ‘case studies’ of Great Men. However, it maintains the conceptual focus on authority, which is gradually emerging here as the centre, for me, of a very decentred book. The next chapter mostly places charisma to one side, to examine a competing way of describing leaderly activity, namely, authenticity. As Spoelstra demonstrates, the notion of authenticity relies on us bringing associated terms such as sincerity, honesty and transparency to it, in order to provide meaningful connotations. This part of the narrative is a fun exploration, in part because contemporary exhortations for authenticity are contextualized with reference to Machiavelli’s political theory, a much more credible, grounded and longer established way of talking about leadership.
The last two chapters, 6 and 7, form a natural pair. They both deal with ways in which leadership is shown and seen. The philosophical methods used here centre on how leaders and leadership come to acquire an image, and the effects of that image in generating imitation (or followership). There are two very important arguments being made here about leadership studies as a field of research: first, that researchers and educators are important participants in the production of leadership talk and image, and second, that the responsibility for creating followers in this endeavour cannot be denied.
The short conclusion returns to the still-dominant paradigm of the charismatic, to ask how we can challenge it. Again, the wider context of Weber’s work is invoked to help in this, in the form of the notion of economy. Spoelstra’s narrative concludes with a beautifully written flourish, as he suggests that those in positions of power and authority, especially business leaders, be reminded of their responsibility in shaping the material conditions of so many lives.
Some of the conceptual themes in this wonderful book could be categorized as ‘old’, in that they (charisma, authority, language, image) bring with them substantial research heritages in organization studies. Even though leadership studies is a notoriously recent stand-alone thing in the social science order, and a very poor relation to its rich organization studies cousin, there are many analyses of leadership and concepts such as these that also carry promise for understanding organizations. In the end, this is a book that accomplishes two important tasks. First, it brings new ways of seeing to leadership as an aspect of organization, mainly through the consistency of its philosophical perspective and adherence to philosophical method. Second, key concepts in philosophy are newly exposed, again, to leadership in the context of organization. Spoelstra clearly believes that leadership cannot be thought or spoken without either philosophy or organization, and his book is an ideal articulation of how and why that is both so and inevitable.